HLW-chap Reference draft 060810.doc rev Aug 12David Cole

REFERENCE

1. IntroductionReference seems fundamental in semanticsTwo aspects: speech act (pragmatic) and semantics

History background, Mill’s theory

2. Frege distinguishes sense and reference4 arguments for ‘sense’ as a component of meaning

3. Description theories and Causal TheoriesRussell, Kripke

4. Defense of Mill’s Account of Names replies to each of the 4 arguments for ‘sense’(5. The Qua problem – solution in natural info processing of wholes)6. How reference works

Sentence primaryconventional means of indicating – namesdescriptions (misdescription)

7. The Roots of ReferenceObjects and their statesinstrumentation as a model for reference: gauges, lights, and labels

8. Acts of Reference and ConventionsSpeech acts governed by normsepistemic functions

9. Reference as Second-Order10. Conclusion

1. Introduction

Discussion of reference has been the main focus of much of philosophy of language in the 20th century. This is not surprising – on the face of it, reference is what connects language to the world. “What are you talking about?” is the basic question.

In such questions we tacitly attribute reference to a person – the speaker refers, the speaker talks about this and that. Referring here is a speech act. But we also attribute reference to individual words and expressions – “I think ’Panel A’ in the instructions refers to the piece you are holding.” Thus there are two aspects to reference, speech act (pragmatics) and as a property of expressions (semantics).

Let us begin with the simplest referring expressions, names. Perhaps the most natural view is that names are like labels – a view sometimes disparagingly called the “museum model” of reference, or the ‘“Fido”-Fido’ theory. Things have names; we use the names to talk about the things they name. The names stand for, designate, denote, refer to the things. “Stand for” suggests the name is a surrogate for the thing, an idea developed in some behaviorist theories we considered in the first chapter, where the name

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elicits the same response as the thing would. A problem that emerges quickly with this view is that labels are literally physically attached to objects; names are not. Names are not labels or barcodes physically attached to the objects they designate – a good thing too, since they whole point of uttering a name is to enable remote reference – reference that does not require direct current physical contact with the object named. Reference allows us to talk about things behind their backs, as it were.

So what connects names to the things they name? That is, since when I use the name “Ludwig Wittgenstein” it is not actually attached to that person – its most direct physical connection is to me, the sign producer - how can the noise I make succeed in referring? Reflection shows the museum model does not explain how reference works. It leaves unanswered the fundamental question: what makes a name name what it names?There are several basic approaches to reference. One is to regard it as the basis of sentence meaning. Names, e.g., refer to things in the world, and then predicates ascribe properties to them. If the referent has the property ascribed by the sentence, then the sentence is true. This is certainly an elegant and intuitive approach.

Problems emerge quickly. For one thing, a given sentence, such as "John is tall", might be true or false depending on who is the referent of "John". We can regard it as an imperfection of natural language that it is unfortunately not the case that each thing in the world has a unique proper name. We are left however with explaining how names do refer. One approach, borrowed from logic and sometimes used in Formal Semantics, is to take reference as a primitive. A name is assigned to an object. This leaves reference mysterious.

Perhaps the most important tradition flowing from Frege sees reference as determined by another meaning component of names and other referring expressions. Frege called this component "sense" - a name has both a sense and a reference. The sense determines the reference. Russell follows Frege and develops a description theory of sense. The sense of a referring expression is a description that uniquely applies to the referent. Thus the sense of the name Aristotle might be "the author of the Nicomachean Ethics". A virtue of this approach is that it provides a basis for reference rather than treating it as primitive. Furthermore, it helps explain how speakers can know what they are talking about - they can pick out the referent by properties that it uniquely has, the properties ascribed in the description.

In the 1970s, dissatisfaction with this approach surfaced, especially in well-received arguments pressed by Saul Kripke. Kripke noted that the description approach had implausible implications for certain modal sentences - it seems clearly true that Aristotle might not have written the Nicomachean Ethics. So the sense of Aristotle can't be "the author of the Nicomachean Ethics", because that implies Aristotle would not exist in those worlds in which he, Aristotle, failed to write the NE. Kripke separated the reference of a term from epistemic considerations - a speaker need not be able to pick out the referent of a term, and may not associate correct descriptions with a name.

Two lines of approach emerged from these considerations. One is the general consideration that it seems that the determinants of reference and perhaps meaning more generally are external to the speakers mind. Another was a specific externalist approach to meaning, a causal theory of names (e.g. Michael Devitt) and natural kind terms (e.g. Hilary Putnam). Devitt held that names, e.g., did have sense in additional to reference, for Frege's reasons, but differed from Frege in holding that the sense was provided by a

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causal link between names and their referents. Other approaches to reference stem from Wittgenstein's later writings and

subsequent "Speech Act" theory (e.g. J.L Austin). On this view, reference is an act, something that speakers do, and they use a variety of tools to perform the act. Suppose I look at a man at a party and say "Jim has had bourbon tonight". On a causal theory, "Jim" refers to a person who was dubbed "Jim" at some point, and to whom I bear a causal link via others who have used the name. If the fellow I am looking at is not named Jim and is perforce not causally connected with my use of the name Jim, then I nevertheless refer to Jim by my use of this name. On a speech act approach, I might refer (perhaps mis-refer, but still refer) to the fellow I am looking at. Speaker intention or some other component of the situation determines reference, not the historical causal connection between my use of the name "Jim" and its usual referent. Thus the theories might provide different accounts of how reference works.

In the following, I will begin with very briefly recapping some historically interesting theories of reference. I will then focus on four important arguments in favor of the view that in addition to reference, names must have a sense. These arguments in part motivate the over 100 year old tradition from Frege to Devitt that holds that names must have a sense, with different members of that tradition holding different accounts of sense. I will reject these arguments. Then I will develop a positive account congruent with the theory of meaning developed earlier - sentence tokens are primary bearers of meaning. Speakers refer, using noun phrases. I will incorporate a causal component, but as a link between sentences and things in the world rather than names and the things in the world. I will also note the parallel importance of conventional meaning - norms to use refering expressions in certain standard ways, ways that have an epistemic dimension. Standard referring expressions let auditors know what speakers are talking about. The result, I hope, brings together several important aspects of reference: speech act, conventional uses, epistemic aspects, and causal links between language and the world.

Plato, in The Cratylus, discusses the possibility that names somehow naturally fit their referents. Perhaps some people think their name “suits” them and others do not, but most of us have come to accept that names are arbitrary and conventional. That is not to say that they do not have etymologies. But any proper name or noun could had a different referent – Saussure’s emphasis on the “arbitrariness of the sign.” So names are conventional, not “natural” – but while this rules out one type of connection, a non-conventional natural one, it does not yet tell us how names mean.

In the middle of the 19th Century, John Stuart Mill set out an account of names in which the meaning of a name is just the thing it refers to. “David Cole” means me, David Cole. This is close to a label theory. Books have ISBN numbers. The numbers allow us to designate particular books. Each number designates a unique book, unlike ordinary proper names which may be the name of more than one individual (for example, there were two David Cole’s in most of my classes in High School). In the reformist mood that pervaded much of early 20th century philosophy, philosophers inspired by new developments in symbolic logic dreamt of logically perfect languages in which the names were like ISBN numbers – each name designating something, and each designating a unique individual. No empty names, no ambiguity.

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Mill’s simple account was abandoned for most of the century that followed its proposal. For one thing, it may be that a name is used to pick something out, but we need not hold that the thing picked out is the meaning of the name. Consider pointing – the act of pointing picks something out (as does throwing a rock at it, or shining a spotlight on it), but we would not say that the act of pointing means the thing pointed at, or that the pointing has “a meaning” at all. It is just something we do as part of indicating something about the world. The label “A” on a piece of knock down furniture helps us to identify that part, but that does not mean that the “A” means the thing it labels. Thinking that a name must have a meaning may be motivated by the “bad” version of compositionality.

But these considerations were not the historically important bases for the demise of Mill’s theory. In retrospect, it is possible to discern the work of a familiar phenomenon in philosophy – the intrusion of epistemology where it arguably does not belong. Oft told is the sad Frankenstein tale of the evolution of empiricist views: from but a part within Hobbes’ overall account of the world as matter in motion, to finally calling into question not only the entire world but the coherence of even supposing there is a world beyond our experience – the skeptical phenomenalism of Hume and the idealisms that came after. It took some strong wills to get epistemology back into its cage. In semantics, this same tendency of epistemic considerations to cloud vision and generate erroneous theories is very prominent, as we shall see.

We have seen that perhaps the most common view in thinking about names has been the Lockean view that words stand for ideas. This view appealed to the empiricists because of their epistemic projects of building all knowledge out of ideas – the Way of Ideas. The empiricist criterion of meaningfulness for language required that each word – each substantive, in any case – apply to an idea that could in turn be traced back to an antecedent experience. Mill’s account of names was a departure from that project, in that he held that names meant things in the real world. This realism was not to last long.

2. FREGE DISTINGUISHES SENSE AND REFERENCE

German philosopher-logician Gottlob Frege is often regarded as the father of modern philosophy of language. Frege was interested in the foundations of mathematics, and the development of symbolic logic to make precise the thoughts and inferences in mathematical reasoning. Frege’s work in logic had much more general application than mathematics; it promised to make precise the meanings of any sort of indicative sentence, not just ones about quantity. Frege’s project was taken up by Bertrand Russell. Russell influenced many Anglo-American philosophers, and this approach set the problems for much of 20th Century philosophy of language.

Mill held that the meaning of a name is just the referent of the name:

“proper names are not connotative: they denote the individuals who are called by them; but they do not indicate or imply any attributes as belonging to those individuals.” (Mill 1961, p. 20)

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Frege and his successors discerned four main problems with Mill’s view of names. Foremost among them was a problem that emerges in considering identity statements.One of the most famous arguments in the history of philosophy of language, and semantics generally, is Frege’s argument in “On Sense and Reference” against Mill’s view. Frege argues that in addition to denotation, or reference, names must have an additional meaning component or aspect that he calls “sense”. Michael Devitt and Kim Sterelny, in their 1984 text Language and Reality, agree with Frege, though they have a different (causal) account of what sense is than anything suggested by Frege. Devitt and Sterelny rehearse Frege’s argument along with three other reasonably well-known arguments against Mill's theory. They conclude that we should follow Frege and postulate senses; as the only other alternative is to follow Meinong and Lewis and inflate ontology. Devitt and Sterelny add to their arguments in the second edition of their text (1997). Let us begin with the Frege argument, and then consider the other arguments against Mill’s view.

a. Identity statements:

Let us begin with Frege’s argument based on identity statements. The identity statements of interest here are those that assert the sameness of a thing referred to by one or two names. Thus the following are identity statements:

“Everest is Everest”and "Everest is Gaurisanker".

The first uses the same name twice, the second uses different names to refer to the object, a mountain in this case. “Everest” and “Gaurisanker” are names of the same mountain.Now if Mill were correct, Devitt and Sterelny argue, following Devitt, and detonation or reference exhausted the meaning of the name, then these two statements would have exactly the same meaning. But clearly, they say, these sentences differ in meaning. We can see that because the first is not informative, whereas the second is. Since the only difference between the two sentences is the occurrence of “Gaurisanker” in one where there is “Everest” in the other, and those names have the same reference, it follows that there must be some other contribution to the meaning of the whole being made by the names to explain the difference in meaning of the sentences. Frege called this additional component the “sense” of the name.

b. The second objection to Mill concerns negative existence statements, statements of the form of “N does not exist”, where “N” is a name. One way of putting this objection is this: if Mill's view were correct, then if the sentence

James Bond does not exist.

were true, which it is, it would have a subject term which lacked a referent. And so, on Mill's theory, the subject term would lack all meaning, since on Mill’s account of names,

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the referent is all there is to the meaning of a name. But then the sentence as a whole would be meaningless and so not true.

c. The third problem for Mill is the Empty Names objection. The following is true:

James Bond is a disgustingly successful spy.

But on Mill's account it couldn't be true, because the subject term does not denote. So it would be meaningless, and that would make the sentence also meaningless, and so not true.

And Devitt and Sterelny rightly argue that it is not plausible to suppose that in this context alone the name refers to a) a fictional character (those things don’t really exist) or b) suddenly the name, unlike other names, refers to an idea. For one thing, the idea is not what is being claimed to be a disgustingly successful spy.

d. Opacity

The last problem raised for Mill’s account is more serious than the previous two, in my estimation. I'll set this one out as an explicit contradiction:

Falwell believes Bob Dylan corrupted America.Falwell does not believe Robert Zimmerman corrupted America.

These are both true (just ask Falwell). But on Mill's theory, since Bob Dylan and Robert Zimmerman are the same person, and reference exhausts meaning, the two names mean the same thing. So the sentences mean the same thing (compositionality), except that the second is negated. But then the theory has the consequence that two true sentences are contradictory.

Frege’s solution to the problems with Mill’s account is to develop a two-component semantics for names and other referring expressions. On the one hand, names have referents. But the do so in virtue of a less obvious semantic component – names have a sense. The sense of a name is a description of set of properties that uniquely applies to the referent, and thus picks it out.

Let us see briefly how Frege’s move solves the four problems. Identity states can be meaningful because they link terms with different meaning – namely, different senses. Negative existence statements and statements about fictional characters – empty names – have meaning, contra Mill, for they have senses. The treatment of opaque contexts is more complex, but we can say that co-referring expressions can differ in meaning in that they differ in sense. We can think of expressions in opaque contexts as referring totheir sense instead of their ordinary referent. While this avoids the immediate problem that apparently faces Mill’s account, there are residual problems and alternative approaches, as we shall see. And we may well wonder what form of existence these hypothesized senses have, and how we come to know about them. Much philosophy of language since Frege has attempted to find solutions to the puzzles of reference that don’t go beyond the natural world to a realm of senses.

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3. Description theories and Causal Theories

[THEORIES OF REFERENCE.doc-last part of Word Meaning and Reference.doc, which includes mill_name]

This discussion of whether or not reference or denotation exhausts the meaning of a noun has presupposed that we understood reference. The issue we have looked at so far was only if reference needed to be supplemented. But let us look more closely at reference itself. What is reference?

The classical theory of reference developed in the 20th century by Frege, Russell and others was a description theory. Let us look at how the theory works for names. Each name is equivalent in meaning to a description. “Everest”, for example, might be equivalent to “The tallest mountain in Nepal” [?] Such a description, beginning with a definite article such as the English word The, and having a singular noun (“mountain”, rather than “mountains”) was called a Definite Description. It implies that the description applies to one and only one item. The Definite Description “the tallest mountain in Nepal” applies to or picks out a single mountain. That is what “Everest” refers to. The description that is the “sense” of the name determines the reference of the name.

There is an obvious problem with this account as a complete account of reference. The terms in the definite description themselves have meaning – they appear to refer to Nepal, and also to mountains generally, and to the property of being tallest. Since descriptions are just more words, how can a noncircular account of meaning be given that merely provides more words to account for the meaning of some words (proper names, in this case)?

This is a general worry about the adequacy of descriptivist approaches to meaning. But many specific problems were noted by critics. If different speakers have different descriptions in mind, then names become ambiguous. You may not know Everest is the tallest mountain, but know that it is the mountain you saw on a plane flight over India. So when you use the name Everest, you mean “the mountain I saw from a plane on March 23, 2002.” Note this description is also full of names and nouns that refer. But here the point is just that the name has one description as meaning for one speaker, and another for another speaker. Let us call this the problem of (unwanted Ambiguity). A second problem is that of dignifying one description as the meaning of a name. If I believe that Everest was scaled by Hilary, is the tallest mountain in Nepal, was the mountain I saw from my plane on March 23, 2002, and previously on another flight in 1999, and was the mountain discussed in sundry semantics books, and so forth – on what principled basis can we say that one of these descriptions is the meaning, the description that determines reference?

One attempt to respond to this problem was a revision of the theory. The Cluster Description Theory holds that names are backed by a group of descriptions. The referent is the thing that most apply to. Wittgenstein suggests this approach [reference to Phil Investigations], and it has been defended by John Searle. The theory came under attack in the 1970s, most notably by Saul Kripke. Kripke had been working on modal logic, and forcefully pressed points that involved considerations of possibility and necessity that created problems for descriptions theories. In particular, it seems implausible to hold that

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“Aristotle”, say, means “the author of Nicomachean Ethics” – because if it meant that, then “Aristotle might have never have been the author of Nicomachean Ethics” would be self-contradictory, but it is clearly meaningful. Aristotle could have chosen to never have done any work in ethics. So “Aristotle” can’t mean that, and other obvious candidate descriptions fail for like reasons, as do clusters of descriptions.

Causal Theories of Reference

Starting in the 1970s, various attempts were made to provide causal theories of reference. The referent of a name or natural kind term (“tiger”) was the thing that was historically connected to the term by a certain causal chain. There was an initial dubbing of a thing with a name. The dubber was causally connected with the dubbee by vision or other causal connections. The others “picked up” the use of the name by contact with the dubber – “reference borrowing”. Later users of the referring expression were causally connected to earlier users, forming a chain that can link a name like “Aristotle” across thousands of years to an ancient Greek philosopher. But, of course, names, like all words, are abstract – only actual inscriptions and utterings of words – tokenings – are concrete. What could causally connect to something as abstract as a word (think of words as like numbers - things do not cause numbers to do anything)?

Rather, at best a tokening of a word might be causally connected to a thing in the world. But how might this work? It is surely implausible to hold that the occurrence of say light reliably causes people to token "light"! In fact, we very rarely token "light" in the presence of light. And it is a Good Thing that people do _not_ token "light" when there is light, or else all daylight hours would ring with our chants.

One attempt to solve this problem is to take an ideational approach to meaning. Let the primary bearers of meaning be in the mind of the speaker, ideas, or concepts. These can be tokened without babble (at least, most of us can suppress speech). Then let linguistic meaning derive from the mental states that linguistic production expresses.

Wittgenstein famously calls this approach into question in Philosopical Investigations. While much of both Wittgenstein’s earlier and later philosophy is colored by a preoccupation with verification, he presses an important point about meaning. Ideas in the head are irrelevant to meaning. It simply does not matter for meaning what is in my head, what ideas, what images, what "concepts", when I say There is a beer in the fridge. All that matters is what that says about real non-mental beer and the real non-mental fridge. If I think beer is literally nectar of the Gods, and fridges are temples - if my ideas and concepts are nonstandard, rich, and bizarre - none of this matters. In any case, at this point, we can rest content with noting that the retreat to ideas to save a causal theory of word meaning is not unproblematic.

Earlier I underscored the important of distinguishing meaning from meaning-to-someone (the subjective interpretation, reaction to, and associations with words), we can save the common intuition that words mean different things to different people. If we don't conflate this with meaning itself, but understand it solely as an aspect of the interpretation of meaning, it is clearly true. No semantic relativism or subjectivism follows – interpretation is not part of semantics any more than Freshman interpretations of chemical equations are part of chemistry. Meaning is a feature of signal sources; the diverse things that a signal may call up in a sign consumer are not part of meaning at all.

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I may be reminded of anything by a remark you make, depending on past associations. As long as I do not confuse these with the meaning of your remark, they are important parts of the appreciation of signs. You say "there is a beer in the fridge", it reminds me of an evening last summer. This is all good. Of course, I do not take you to have said anything about that evening. Your remark about the beer in the fridge reminded me about something else. Wittgenstein presses related points in his discussions of understanding and reading.

But there are additional problems for causal theories. Another trouble for a causal theory concerns reference to future events. I may refer to my next birthday. I may wonder what I will do on _that day_. It is impossible that a future day is causing my current tokening.

Another problem is reference to abstract entities. I can refer to justice or the number 7, yet these entities do not seem to be causally efficacious. Yet another problem is reference to non-existent entities. I may mention possibilities. Now to be sure there are metaphysics (David Lewis) in which possible worlds are treated as real, but this ontological extravagance is difficult to defend. I can also refer to fictional characters, such as Santa Claus, Luke Skywalker or Frodo Baggins. In mentioning Luke Skywalker, I am not mentioning the actor who played him. Luke Skywalker is fictional; he does not exist. There are no such beings, and so no causal connection between the referent and my tokening of the term.

Causal theories of reference link language to the world. That is a great virtue. The real problem with reference lies in supposing that words have conventional meaning that takes precedence over sentence meaning. This is a natural position to take. Children learn language first as isolated words. We add to language a word at a time. Dictionaries have entries for words. We ask each other for the meaning of a word. And as we have seen, reference seems an important part of meaning, and indeed in naive semantics is taken to be the only form of meaning.

We have encountered the influential form of the position that word meaning has priority over sentence meaning in the Principle of Compositionality. This is a Tinkertoy theory. On this view each part of a sentence e”has a meaning” and the meaning of the whole is built up out of the meanings of these parts. But as I have noted, we can make this trip with less baggage by merely supposing that the parts affect the meaning of the whole, without supposing that they themselves have a meaning in any sense other than this affect. The meaning of the whole is a function of the parts, simpliciter.

So let us suppose that the meaning of a word is just the contribution it makes to sentences in which it may appear. That contribution is systematic. What then is reference? Consider a noun such as "Istanbul". Sentences in which "Istanbul" appears unquoted and certain positions should carry information about the Turkish city we call "Istanbul". Now they can do that only if their tokenings are causally connected with states of the referent. "Istanbul is in Turkey" is supposed to be tokened only if a particular city is in Turkey.

One problem that this approach to reference faces is the problem of ambiguity. We have tried to look at word meaning as the contribution the word makes to the meaning of the sentence - its conventional information carrying function. How can this approach handle ambiguity? Intuitively, ambiguity is the phenomenon of a word having

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more than one meaning. For example, "bridge" refers to structures that span rivers and gorges, as well as a card game, a dental device, a part of a violin, and many other things. A common given name such as "Tom" can be used to refer to perhaps a million people.

But we can see that what this multiplicity of reference comes down to is the use of this term in sentences that are about - are sensitive to the states of - different things. Another way of putting this is to say that the word can contribute in more than one way to the meaning of the whole sentence - although this still embodies the view that the word by itself seems to carry a meaning. Consider the lowly decimal point. "It means" quite different things, depending on where it appears in a numeral string. Its meaning depends on its position, as it were. In the case of a name like "Tom", the meaning depends on the assertion conditions for the sentence, although the dependence appears to be in the reverse order. This may be because an auditor naturally focuses on the name as the source of the ambiguity.

But this again is a problem of interpretation. An auditor may not know which of two meanings to assign to a sentence - "Tom is a terrorist" might mean that this fellow is a terrorist, or it might mean that the guy over there is a terrorist - both are named "Tom". The actual tokening, if it follows conventions, means that one of them is a terrorist. But which convention? The convention of relaying information about _him_ using "Tom"? Or the convention of relaying info about this other fellow? It could make an important difference, and this important difference cannot be made out by examining the sign itself. Thus where there is more than one convention governing the use of a sign, we may say the sign is ambiguous. More than one convention could have resulted in the signs tokened. "Tom saw the bridge" is multiply ambiguous.

Ambiguity is thus an objective feature of the sign, reflecting conventions in a community. Disambiguating is a process that the sign consumer undertakes. Contextual features maybe important then - not for meaning, but for disambiguating. [?]

We began by looking at the meaning of two groups of words. The first included words such as “Istanbul”, “green”, “surf” and “plummet” – names, nouns, adjectives and verbs. I have argued that the associations with these words, whether in the mind of the sign producer, or in the mind of the sign consumer, are irrelevant to the meaning of the words themselves. I noted that this should not bother us, if we carefully distinguish semantic meaning from interpretation. Further I have argued that there are problems with all theories of reference, if these are meant to provide an account of word meaning. The solution is to give up the view that words are meaningful in isolation. And that means giving up the standard form of the principle of Compositionality.

To see how we can provide a positive account of word meaning, let us consider the second group of words with which we began. That group included “and”, of", "a", and "unless". An ideational approach to accounting for the meaning of such words never was very attractive. Rather it is clear that the meaning of these words is the contribution they make to sentences. Logicians have shown how words such as “and” and “unless” work. In one common use, these work as “sentence connectives” – they form larger sentences from shorter ones. We can be very precise about their meaning. It is the particular way they contribute to the assertion conditions of the sentences they form. For example, a sentence formed by connecting two sentences with “and” should be tokened only if it is semantically permissible to token both of the subsentences. Thus “John

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brought a gun and Tom brought ammo” is assertible only if “John brought a gun” and “Tom brought ammo” are. The compound sentence carries the information of both of the subsentences.

The other words, prepositions such as “of” and articles such as “a” also have meaning insofar as they contribute to the meaning of the sentences in which they appear. The preposition “of” is used as part of sentences that convey information about a host of relationships, including kinship, possession, attributes, and many others (the father of, the estate of, the color of). “Color of toast” does not by itself convey any information, but it has a systematic effect on sentences in which it appears. “Of” makes an important contribution to the meaning of the sentences in which it appears. That contribution is its meaning – not anything that it has in isolation.

“Color” and “toast” also contribute to the meaning of sentences in which they appear. So does “Everest”. Now if we abandon compositionality, and distinguish between the associations we have with “Everest” and the meaning of “Everest”, we can treat Everest on the same lines as sentence connectives and prepositions, seeing the meaning as the contribution the word makes to the whole.

This is generally done by causal connections. What makes my use of “Everest” to form sentences sensitive to facts about that the mountain we call “Everest” is that I reference borrow – I follow the practice of others in making my assertion reflect the state of that mountain. One way I do this is by simply paraphrasing what others have said – for example that Everest is the tallest mountain in Nepal. Another way I do that is by making my claims about what I saw from an airplane reflect the established use – I use “Everest” in those reports because I understand that that is the name we use to report sightings of that particular mountain.

Thus “Everest” can make a sentence be about a particular mountain – that is its function. Further, that is its only function – reference exhausts the semantic contribution made by “Everest”, in referring contexts. The referential function is just to link the tokening conditions of a sentence to particular objects in the world. Which is exactly what we want, for language to be meaningful.

4. Defense of Mill’s account of names

Let us return then to consider the four alleged problems with Mills’ account of names that got the whole descriptivist ball rolling through the 20th century. Bear in mind the suspicion that a main motivation for the descriptivists was epistemology, which they let dictate possible semantics. This is particularly clear in the first objection to Mill’s theory, based on the informativeness of identity statements.

a. Identity statements:

"Everest is Everest" is not informative, whereas "Everest is Gaurisanker" is informative.

Reply: This objection to Mill's theory turns on epistemic considerations that are irrelevant to the semantics of names. The objection conflates meaning with our knowledge of meaning. Since this is a leit-motif of Twentieth Century semantics, it is worth dwelling on it. The only evidence that is offered for the claim that the two sentences differ in

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_meaning_ is to cite that the one could be informative when the other is not – namely to one who doesn’t know the meaning of one of the names.

Note in particular how we know the statement “Everest is Everest” is true: there is a (contingent?) rule that each occurrence in a single context of a name has the same referent as every other (not true in decently encrypted messages!). But that only tells us apriori that the first is true, not what it means. Might be about a dog, a game, a mountain. Mill could agree that the two differ in that we can know that the first is true but not know that about the second, but that doesn't show that we know what either means, nor do these epistemic considerations show that the meaning of "Everest" is anything more than a particular mountain.

Consider the meta-statements:

"Everest" and "Everest" co-refer.

"Everest" and "Gaurisanker" co-refer.

Clearly if Mill's theory is correct, the first is not informative but the second may be an important discovery. The discovery is a discovery about the meaning of "Everest" and "Gaurisanker", namely that they have the same meaning. Since Mill's theory has the consequence that the former sentence is trivial but the latter can be an important discovery, this difference can hardly be cited against Mill's theory.

In any case, the identity argument fails for kind terms. Consider two terms that are simply equivalent in meaning, interchangeable. In my dialect, two such terms are “sofa” and “couch”. These terms don’t differ in reference or in associated description or in any other empirically discernible aspect of meaning. Yet there can be a difference in informativeness between

“A sofa is a sofa”and

“A sofa is a couch”.

The latter can be used to tell someone what sofas are, someone who knows them as couches, whereas the former cannot. But ex hypothesis, the terms do not differ in meaning, so this type of consideration of informativeness cannot show that there is a difference in meaning.

So Frege's puzzle does not show that non-informative identity statements do not have the same meaning as informative ones. We can think of these as predications rather than identities. Any x is F iff that x is G presumably can be informative, whereas any x is F iff x is F is not. Yet suppose F and G are synonymous, like sofa and couch.

So what is the difference in Frege's puzzle, if not a difference in "sense", a form of meaning? Frege very briefly considers and rejects an explanation that an identity statement is about what things are called. Fair enough, it isn't. But it doesn't follow that the difference between the two is not accounted for by facts about what things are called. It is one thing for a sentence to be about names and meaning, and another for expressions and meaning to explain differences in informativeness. A's are A's is not informative

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where A's are B's can be, even though "A" and "B" may be synonymous. The reason is that one can know that "A" is synonymous with "A" even if one doesn't know what property "A" picks out, that is, even without knowing what "A" means.

Consider "Archibald Leach is Cary Grant". This is not about what things are called. But what can make it informative is that Archibald Leach is called "Cary Grant". If he, A. Leach, were not called "Cary Grant" (say if someone else was called "Cary Grant", say Randolph Scott), the sentence would not be true. Thus reference in general – whether using names or with “my son” “my older son” etc. – provides ancillary information. Different sentences can vary in this information even if they represent the same facts.

There are other examples that illustrate the distinction between meaning and informativeness. We can use synonymous terms from different languages: “Casas are houses”. That I have the name I have, that is, that David Cole is called "David Cole", is quite contingent, and that I am called “David Cole” is something that one might well find informative. Yet to be told “David Cole is called ‘David Cole’” is not informative. Hence it is clear meaning is one thing, and informativeness another, and they are conflated in this important argument.

b. Negative existence statements: “James Bond does not exist” lacks a meaningful subject term if James Bond doesn’t exist. So it would be meaningless if it were true, a paradox.

Reply: I don’t believe we need to take surface grammar as decisive here. There are reasonable paraphrases of the dramatic “James Bond does not exist” that do not pose a problem for the denial of sense for names. The sentence should be understood as saying: The "James Bond"-stories are fictional. That is, as used in the stories, "James Bond" does not refer. – we practice “semantic ascent”, and talk about expressions, similarly to the way we treat the "nobody" constructions in the King's confusions in Alice in Wonderland. What appears to be in a referential position does not occupy that position in the paraphrases that capture the truth conditions. This approach is also useful in the third argument that we saw advanced against Mill’s view of names.

c. The Empty Names objection. The following is true:

James Bond is disgustingly successful.

But on Mill's account it couldn't be, because the subject term does not denote. So it would be meaningless, and that would make the sentence also meaningless, not true.

Reply: These are peculiar constructions on which to rest a refutation of a theory. Anyone who did not know the Fleming stories who heard this sentence asserted, would suppose there was a real person (or maybe a product) named "James Bond". In so supposing, they would be misled. So on the face of it, these constructions are misleading. But we sophisticates do talk this way sometimes. We use expressions that don’t refer – they are borrowed from a fictional account, with “no resemblance to persons living or dead” – as if they referred.

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Now consider the truth conditions for such talk. It seems plausible to hold the truth conditions are close to those given by David Lewis in "Truth in Fiction":

If what Fleming wrote were true, James Bond would be disgustingly successful.

This seems to nicely capture what we are doing in making claims like the above (and with "Hamlet was neurotic", etc.). We enter into a little make-believe pretense, talking as-if the stories were true.

But so understood, there is no incompatibility with Mill's theory. If "James Bond" denoted a person with the biography set forth by Fleming, that person would be disgustingly successful. In the original sentence, we aren't trying to refer by uttering "James Bond", we are making a claim about the representations made in the novels. Fleming writes as if “James Bond” referred to someone. We consider what would be the case if the novels had been true, in which case “James Bond” would refer to someone, and that person would be disgustingly successful. Nothing about this requires that the name James Bond have an aspect of meaning beyond possible reference to a person.

d. OpacityWe were faced with a contradiction – both of the following appear to be true based on what Falwell will assent to:

Falwell believes Bob Dylan corrupted America.Falwell does not believe Robert Zimmerman corrupted America.

On Mill's theory, since Bob Dylan and Robert Zimmerman are the same person, the two names mean the same thing, so the sentences mean the same thing (compositionality), except that the second is negated. So Mill’s theory has the consequence that two true sentences are contradictory.

Reply: This is well trod turf. The basic idea of the reply I prefer is that in the relevant de dicto readings of the displayed sentences, we are not actually using "Bob Dylan" or "Robert Zimmerman" to refer. We are mentioning them. The embedded sentences after the verbs “believe” and “believes” characterize a certain mental representation that Falwell has or, in the second sentence, doesn’t have. He may well have the Dylan representation without the Zimmerman representation. But this is consistent with Mill's view that the two distinct representations have the same meaning. In de dicto belief attribution the attributer is not using the terms in the attribution.

For example, an atheist does not contradict himself in saying "Falwell believes God will punish Bob Dylan". On de dicto readings of belief attribution, there is mention of terms which may or may not refer, but there is not referring use of the terms. Consider a parallel argument to this objection to Mill, which does not turn on Mill's theory but rather on ordinary synonymy:

Falwell believes telling lies is immoral.Falwell does not believe mendacity is immoral.

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(just ask him!). But "mendacity" and "telling lies" mean the same thing -- see dictionary. So the sentences are contradictory (again by compositionality), yet both true -- which is impossible.

Again, all is solved if we don't take the opaque contexts as use, but as mention, as describing someone's representation of reality. Two expressions that mean the same thing might appear in otherwise identical de dicto belief attributions, yet the one be true and the other false. So there is nothing surprising if this happens with names, and is consistent with Mill's theory.

Of course, there is also no problem with the paradigm case of opacity, direct quotation:

Falwell said "Bob Dylan is corrupting America". Falwell did not say "Robert Zimmerman is corrupting America".

These are both true, and this is completely compatible with Mill's theory. Mill would say the two names mean they same thing, namely their shared referent, but saying the one sentence is not saying the other, assenting to the one is not assenting to the other, and believing the one is not believing the other (de dicto).

5. The Qua Problem

In Language and Reality, Michael Devitt and Kim Sterelny discuss what they call the qua problem. This problem appears to be similar to a problem discussed by Quine much earlier and in another context. The qua problem concerns dubbings, and applies to both names and natural kind terms. Suppose we dub a ship “Bobber”. The dubbing is a ceremony in which the word is used in the presence of the ship. The dubbers are there, see the ship, and so are causally connected with the ship. But what makes the name “Bobber” apply to the whole ship? Couldn’t it apply to the shape of the ship? It’s color? A time-slice of the ship? The visible side of the ship? (This is similar to a problem Quine pointed out about translating terms from other languages, determining exactly what they refer to.)

Devitt and Sterelny conclude that when we dub, we must have in mind a description of the kind of dubbing we are doing, and so some residual element of a description account remains. We dub this thing “Bobber” qua ship, not qua color, shape or time slice. The same with natural kinds – we dub the kind Tiger of which this specimen before us is an example as a kind of animal, not qua physical object, living thing, or feline generally (indeed, that is the part many novice language users get wrong in quickly coming to call all mid-sized animals “doggy”).

How much do we need to suppose is in the mind of the dubber? When Devitt and Sterelny consider linguistic competence, they distance themselves from the view of Chomsky and others that in order to explain linguistic competence we must suppose that rules of language are explicitly represented in the brains of language users. They use analogies with other cognitive processes (Kingfishers calculating angles at which to dive for a fish seen from above water, in such a way as to correct for the refraction of light). But for no apparent reason they do not pursue this option when it comes to dubbing.

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Here is how it might go. Consider a machine analogy: because of way vending machine is built, it only dispenses drink if entire coin goes through, not just front one tenth, or one semi-circular half. This is not to say that the machine cannot be "fooled"; it is just to say that in normal circumstances, it goes into vending mode only in response to entire coins. Yet there need be no internal linguistic representation "respond only to entire coins".

A cat responds similarly to a variety of glimpses of a mouse. An infant soon learns to say "Mama" if it sees any part of mama. Mama does not need to step back so that she is entirely in view, and then turn around to show all sides. There is a natural perception by animals and humans of whole objects.

Thus while something in a dubbing of, say, an animal, may pick out the entire animal, say Devitt's cat, and not its paws or tail or visible side, there is no need to suppose that it is something linguistic, and in particular, a description in a mental language. There is a point in the perceptual neural network of the dubbers brain that represents the cat as a while, and that point, and not some point representing the cats feet only, becomes linked with the name “Nana”. Hence we do not need to suppose explicit propoisitonal representations to explain this semantic competence in dubbing any more than we must posit such linguistic representations to explain syntactic competence.

There is another possible solution to the Qua Problem, one that is based on minimizing the role of the dubber. Could it be the case that the reference is determined by subsequent use rather than at first use? Perhaps the first dog anyone encounters is called “Dog”, as a name, and when other dogs show up, they are called “Dog” also, as a natural extension (remember Nietzsche on our tendency to “metaphor” – generalization to similar cases). The actual subsequent use of a term will surely trump whatever was in the head of the initial dubber. So how does that use work?

[back to Reference and instruments.doc – last sections are on Qua prob]Qua problem: Suppose I glance at a cat and say “that’s Nana”. What makes it the

case that I did not dub the cat’s tail, or a 1 second time slice. We might suppose that I have a description in mind. But we might suppose that I just go on to use the name is certain reports that only make sense if it was the enduring entire cat that was dubbed. If I go on to say “Nana was the second cat I looked at yesterday at the animal shelter” it is clear that Nana names a cat. It is not clear, however, that we need to suppose that I have an explicit description in my head when I dub Nana. And it is certainly not clear that any of the meaning is given by natural language – someone without use of common nouns might name a cat “Nana”, or use “Nana” as name of a cat.

There is an analogy to the qua problem involving naming boilers in an industrial plant: We might let an installer name the boilers. Suppose there are three boilers, and

three pressure gauges in the control room. We let him put a sign on each boiler and then label the gauge in the control room. This person must get the labels to correspond to the connections between gauges and boilers (gauge bearing label “Boiler 1” reports pressure in boiler labeled “boiler 1”). But it is not clear that the person doing the naming (labeling) needs to know what a boiler is. Rather this “dubber” just sets up the possibility of future reference, perhaps by others with more knowledge.

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It also possible for reference to change over time – the name of an island becomes the name of a town that grows up on the island – or vice versa. Metonymy might be a process of reference change. Dubber’s knowledge may be limited: “I dub this land “America” – what is dubbed? A beach on an island off the coast of an indeterminate expanse of land? The island? A continent? A hemisphere? Dubber’s intention is not sacred, nor is future use limited by dubber’s ignorance or intentions.

Hence there can be American Indians who are not Indians

6. How Reference Works[reference and metaphysics.doc]

Reference has its basis in the very general – metaphysical – character of the world and language. The universe consists of various objects. These clump to form larger objects. The constitutent objects causally interact, and tend to share a fate (as molecules constituting crystals constituting a rock tend to move together under conditions that support human life), and this shared fate is the result of the interactions – the constituent interactions explain and allow one to predict the behavior of the larger system.

Thus reports of the state of objects are useful in predicting the future, and predicting counterfactually, as in planning.

When multiple systems can be tracked, there are options as to how reports are to be constructed. We could track just 3 states of the universe. Then only 3 possible reports are necessary – say one for temp in my room over 65, one for lion in my closet, one for someone cured cancer. We might represent these by 3 digits or other symbols. The tokening of these symbols would be constrained by the occurrence of the reportable states (“1” may be tokened only if the temp in my room is over 65, etc.)

In fact, the world being such as it is, it is useful to track many more states. The efficient way to do this is to have a set of state descriptors, and a set of object specifiers – referring expressions. Referring expressions can be names, or they can be descriptions. A name stands for an object purely by convention, as a particular symbol on a road map marks rest areas.. A description stands for an object by specifying properties that (more or less) uniquely apply to an object – “my oldest son.”

Both do this independently of epistemic considerations. I can tell you that Aristotle wrote a book on ethics, and neither you nor I may have any additional knowledge of who Aristotle was, including say the ability to pick him our of a philosophical police line-up, or to recognize his name as uttered by his ancient Greek mother. And I can tell you that the discoverer of General Relativity once worked in a patent office, without your being able to recognize the theory of General Relativity from its equations or non-mathematical text, nor need you be able to pick the discover out of a line-up, etc. Now it is the case that descriptions afford a potential avenue for identifying – an epistemic function – for one might know how to determine whether a thing has the properties mentioned in the description. But this epistemic usefulness is not part of the meaning of a description, any more than epistemic usefulness is part of the meaning of a name. If one knows who Tom is, then “Tom” can help one identify. If not, one can understand what is being said (“Tom used to be a Mormon”) without knowing who Tom is, nor really being much closer to identifying him (the claim about Tom may be mistaken about Tom’s religious history).

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Reference is traditionally taken to be where language connects with the world. Reference connects a sentence to a particular object, as in "Tom is tall", or "Johnny Depp starred in Edward Scissorhands". Thus on this view reference is essential for language to get off the ground.

As we have seen, philosophers have approached reference in three main ways. Some have taken reference to be a direct relation between words, names, for example, and things. Thus a name such as "Ronald Reagan" stands for a certain man. This view reflects the way we often talk about reference - this word refers to that, this word stands for that - and has intuitive appeal. It has been the view of many, especially those with a strong interest in logic, from John Stuart Mill to contemporary Formal Semantics. But despite the intuitive appeal, working this direct reference view out is problematic. For one thing, what makes the name "stand for" for one thing rather than another? A word itself is an abstraction, a syntactic classe or type of mark or sound. What does the linking of an abstract entity to the referent? And just what is it for a name to "stand for" something? Don’t many individuals share the same name? So something more must be required for reference to be to one rather than another. And then there are epistemic questions: when one uses a name, how do the name-user and the auditor know what it stands for, and hence what the speaker means in using the name?

In addition to these general worries, as we have seen this direct reference view of names met with the four nearly (but not quite!) specific fatal objections discussed above, especially informative identity statements, empty names, and opacity. It was largely replaced by mid 20th Century by a view of names in which they were intimately associated with something like a description of the bearer of the name. Thus reference was regarded as indirect, via the "sense" of the name, sometimes thought of as a description. The sense might be something not part of the natural world that is "grasped" by a name user, or it might be a linguistic description inside the user's head, or it might be an historical causal connection between name and bearer (Devitt).

Finally, philosophers influenced by the later Wittgenstein (1953) and the subsequent rise of speech act theory often saw reference as primarily something speakers do. Thus speakers use names to refer; reference is not somehow an independent semantic property of words. Thus this important aspect of semantics was seen to be ultimately based upon pragmatics. I will try to develop an account of reference that does justice to both formal and pragmatic elements. The main consideration I bear in mind as I work this out is that it is the sentence that is primary. Referring is indeed something that is done by language users (pragmatics). However, there are conventional means used to do this and these serve epistemic purposes by letting auditors know what things the tokening of the sentence is intended to report on. Speakers use conventional, as well as idiosyncratic means, to accomplish this epistemic end. Among these means are names and descriptions. A Millian account of names is adequate – names need not be supposed to have any semantic component other than a use in sentences about one thing rather than others. The causal connection between sentence tokens and objects is what connects names to their bearers.

We have seen in earlier chapters that language is governed by norms that allow it to represent states of the world. It works by the imposition of systematic restrictions on tokening – restrictions that are reflected in the form of the token itself. The world is a big

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place, full of people, things, events, sub-places. We often need information about particular people, things, places. To be useful, the form of indicative sentences must be able to indicate what particular sub-part of the world the sentence token is about – that is, the entity the state of which the tokening of the sentence is to carry information. Only one of my sons is in Indiana. There are several ways in which I can produce sentence to indicate that he is in Indiana. I can token “Chris is in Indiana” or “My older son is in Indiana” or “The son you met last Thursday is in Indiana”. The first uses a proper name, the last two use a “definite description”, to let an auditor know whose whereabouts is represented by my tokening a sentence.

These all are indicators of the same fact, the location of one of my sons. They use different means to let the auditor know who it is that is in Indiana. Additional information is gleenable from each – from the first, that someone named “Chris” is in Indiana, from the second, that I (likely) have two sons, and from the third that you met one of my sons last Thursday. They carry subordinate information as well, to serve their primary semantic function of indicating the location of a particular person.

[------- reference.doc – skipping first short paragraph]So far we have seen that it is the tokening of the sentence that is the primary

bearer of meaning. We have also seen that parts of the sentence, in particular the referring expression, serves an epistemic function. What is crucial to note is that language involves a three-way correlation. The one that is essential for semantics is the correlation between tokens and the world. It is by this means that one event - a linguistic one - can signify, indicate, or carry information about the state of the world. This is the domain of semantics. The other correlation is between state of the world and syntax - the physical form of the signal. This serves to link a type of event - a tokening of such and such form - with the world. That in turn serves an epistemic purpose - a sign-consumer can know from the form of the sign what is, or is supposed to be, indicated by the sign token.

It would be nice, one supposes in one’s idealistic youth, if there were a one-one correspondence between sign structure and structure of the represented state of the world. At least, some philosophers have thought this would be nice (Frege, Russell, early Wittgenstein). But as usual the real world is messier than that. Names, the paradigm of uniquely referring expressions, are semantically promiscuous. There is almost never a one to one correspondence between a syntactic type, a proper name, and an object in the world. I am referred to by my name, “David”. But so are countless others.

And so it came to pass that romantic logically minded semanticists pined for monogamous names, and envisioned a semantically ideal world in which each name uniquely referred to an object. There was a reaction to this - marked, say, by the move from Witt I to Witt II - and philosophers in the second half of the last century began to focus on language in the real world. Reference in the real world turned out to be hard to figure out. Philosophers noted a causal link between names and other referring expressions and the world. But trying to see this as unique flies in the face of the messy real-world facts.

I think the solution to this is to keep sight of the importance of whole sentences as bearers of information. The link between syntactic structure and that information can be quite relaxed. In the world of animals, including featherless bipeds, a grunt can be

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meaningful. More articulate signs can be less ambiguous, but for practical purposes they only need to be as unambiguous as is needed for conversational purposes.

Thus the nature of reference, the subpart of the sentence that serves to indicate what item in the world is having its state reported, is highly contextually and pragmatically determined. I may be referred to as "he", "David", or "David Cole", or "the David Cole I know", respectively, as the potential for ambiguity increases. The sentences beginning with these expressions might all end "teaches". All these sentences could be used to indicate the same state of the world, namely that I teach. The choice of referring expression used to indicate that fact about me would be partly a pragmatic issue, in order to facilitate the auditor's appreciation of the information being conveyed, and partly a matter of convention uses of names – I am conventionally “known as” ‘David’. But the info is the same.

So in that sense, tokenings of various different sentences might mean the same thing - indicate the same fact - and in accord with the same tokening rule. Given that I am the guy holding a martini, your tokening of "the guy with a martini teaches" will do the same work as "David Cole teaches" or "He teaches". Of course, there are differences. To the first, you might respond "Oh, I didn't know he drank martinis" or, perhaps, "Aha, there are martinis to be had". But that is, we might say, collateral information revealed by the referring expression.

The moral I draw again is that differences in informativeness is not a reliable indicator of differences in meaning. This is not surprising: informativeness is epistemic, meaning is semantic, and these are not the same thing.

7. The Roots of Reference

[-------- Reference –foundations djc.txt]

Language answers our needs for information. Consider a minimal information need: what other creatures are doing. One of the most central conversation topics of humans is humans. Who is doing what to whom.

This requires ways of representing specific individuals - reference. A name or descriptive phrase "stands for" a specific individual: "Arnold"; "the governor". Individuals can be in many states, can be related in many ways to others, can do many things. The same things can be done by others. To satisfy our interest in knowing who is doing what (to whom), we refer and we predicate.

We can see reference work in minimal models of language - e.g. instrumentation (wireless thermometer with 3 remote sensors), my course gradebook. These are not quite as simple as some of the "language games" Wittgenstein discusses ("Slab!"), but they are close, and more accurately reflect conversation, the news, gossip, and in all of these, the importance of indicative sentences as opposed to Wittgenstein's distorting focus on commands and on language as a "tool" to control the behavior of others. We need information before we can know what to do - or to tell others what to do. And we need a system for representing how the world is before we can counterfactually represent how we with the world to be.

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[------- Reference and instruments.doc 060108]

Consider a boiler control panel. A numerical gauge on the panel might have the face label "psi". Below the gauge might be the label "Boiler 1".

This combination is capable of indications semantically equivalent to the tokening of sentences. The gauge itself corresponds to the predicate "_____ is at N psi" (where “N” is replaced by the numerical reading of the pressure gauge). The label below the gauge corresponds to the sentence subject "boiler 1". Together they might indicate "Boiler 1 is at 75 psi". That is, the state of the labeled gauge has a meaning, and is semantically equivalent to tokening that sentence.

It is interesting to note that it is the measuring instrument – the element that corresponds to the predicate of a sentence -- that is causally connected to the real world boiler. The measuring instrument must track the state of some remote system, and so it must be causally connected to the remote system. The name, "Boiler 1", is only indirectly causally connected to a remote system, in virtue of the larger indicator system of which it is a subpart.

The name serves to tell us what system the tokening of the sentence indicates, and hence tells us what the sentence token is causally connected with. It indicates something about what the sentence indicates. This gives it something like a second-order role. I’ll explore this idea in a short section at the end of this chapter.

When it is clear what system is being tracked, we can drop subjects. A spotter can report the location of enemy aircraft in an incoming stream: “1 o’clock” “4 o’clock”. “10 o’clock, coming in fast”. An excited boiler gauge monitor might similarly announce “75 pounds. 90 pounds! 100 pounds and rising!” Even if the gauge label is occluded or long ago worn off, the semantic content of the gauge reading is unchanged. We have lost some epistemic help, information about the meaning of the gauge reading, but we have not lost semantic content of the gauge reading.

The information that a sentence actually carries, akin to natural meaning, is a function of its connection with the world, not its components. The semantic meaning of a sentence, the rule that governs how it should be tokened, is a function of the components. This is true also of an instrumentation panel. When the panel is operating correctly, the gauge labeled “boiler 1” should indicate the pressure of a particular boiler – not just any boiler, or a non-boiler. In a plant, the boiler itself might bear a prominent label (a label physically mounted on the boiler): Boiler 1. There might also be labels on the flowcharts for the plant.

What then is the basis of the name, “boiler 1”? It is in part epistemic, but only in the role of an aid for understanding. The gauges will mean what they mean whether they are labeled or not. The name is used to make it clear what each gauge, flowchart, etc. indicates. But a user of the gauge need not know which large structure out in the plant is boiler 1 – a plant operator might just know that each boiler should be kept within a certain pressure, and when the gauge for boiler 1 is nearing the acceptable operating limit, perhaps a control valve bearing the label “boiler 1 fuel” should be adjusted. Similarly a plant operator could be fully capable of reporting “the pressure in boiler 1 is high” without being in a position to identify boiler one out in the plant. Indeed, the plant might be remote, or even inaccessible, on an unmanned space state awash in lethal radiation.

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Causal theorists of names have focused on a causal link between a name and the bearer of the name. A name is a type, and not the sort of thing that can bear causal relations. Tokens of a name in a sentence can be causally connected with some thing. We can, if we wish, think of this as a “use” of a name. The “use” is to appear in events, tokenings of sentences, that are (supposed to be) causally connected with the states of some object.

[next 2 paragraphs from HLW reference 040802.doc]We bear in mind that the bearer of information about the world - and hence the

ultimate locus of meaning - is the tokening of a sentence. Now information can be about this or that. Suppose we have a large building, with multiple remote thermometers. At a central control room there are readouts connected to the temperature sensors. The readouts might be labeled "Location A", "Location B", etc. respectively. Can we think of these labels as elliptical for "The temperature in Location A is ______", where the blank is filled by the number on the readout? Suppose so. Then "Location A" refers to a place. What makes it refer to one place rather than another?

Clearly it is the connection between sensor and readout. If the sensor connected to the display labeled "Location A" is in the cafeteria, then that display indicates ("reports") the temp of the cafeteria, much as a person - a temp crier - who called out periodically "The temperature in the cafeteria is 72 degrees".

[Reference 050727]

Many measuring instruments are implicitly indexical. An old time glass tube thermometer displays a temperature - the temperature of whatever surrounds the bulb of the thermometer. A pilot light on an appliance standardly indicates whether that very appliance is powered up.

Remote reading dedicated instruments will require something that performs the function of reference, usually in the form of a label. In a twin engine aircraft or boat, there may well be a tachometer for each engine. Then each tachometer face might be labeled "rpm x 1000", with the changing position of the tachometer needle indicating the current multiplier reading. The instrument panel might carry the legend "Engine 1" below one of the tachometers. At a particular moment, then, this part of the instrument system might report something equivalent to the sentence "Engine number one is turning at 2500 rpm".

The same considerations here drive this division of labor in instrumentation labels as we have seen earlier (Chapter 2) in considering the advantages of having separate subjects and predicates in natural language. The instrument maker can make a single model of tachometer - with an identical faceplate for all engines. The only change needed in multi-engine applications is the instrument panel legend that reflects how the tachometer is connected - which engine it reports on. The alternative would be to require different faceplates (or say color or shape coded tachometers) for each engine. It is much cheaper to separate out the object label and have a single tach - a predicate. If each engine has instrumentation in addition to the tachometer - say oil pressure and coolant temp gauges - we can take additional advantage of this economy. A part of the

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instrument panel bears the "Engine 1" legend, and a cluster of instruments provides predicates.

We have seen this same efficiency in natural language. While some sort of being could have single word sentences only, we benefit greatly with our linguistic division of labor. Relatively small inventories of subjects and predicates can be combined to produce a large variety of sentences. Each time one adds a single new proper name to a language with just say 1000 transitive verbs, one adds 2000 possible simple sentences.

In sum, we have seen that predicates indicate the state of something, and the referring expression indicates the something. We talk about things. Sentence tokens represent facts, and facts are facts about something. Referring expressions serve an epistemic function, like labels on instruments.

8. Acts of Reference and Conventions

[Reference as an act.doc Aug 2005]

Referring is something people do. We use various conventional means to refer. But the act of referring itself is something we do.

There is an influential tradition in Philosophy of language (and linguistics) that sees Proper names as semi-magically connected with objects in the world by a metaphysical semantic relation called "reference" or "denotation". This view reflects the close connection of several influential philosophers with work in symbolic logic (Frege, Montagu). In logic, we get to just stipulate a magical relation of reference. This paints a neat and pretty picture in which objects correspond (by stipulation) to parts of language. Neat and idealized it is, but we are after something closer to photorealism.

In real life, people can and do refer to any given object in myriad ways - standard names, idiosyncratic nicknames, and various phrases, from "She who must be obeyed" to "Dingbat" or simply "That man" (used, my mother tells me, by my grandmother and others to refer to U.S. President FDR). We also point, nod, and roll our eyes at the things and people we talk about. This flowering of reference devices may seem messy, but it is not. The function of indicative sentences is to convey information, and reference provides useful linguistic info about what language is about. It works quite well. It is a device for auditors, like pointing and nodding.

The logico-philosophical picture is pretty on the surface but as soon as it was developed it became more complex than at first appeared. For one thing, any real human proper name like "Jim" is the name of umpteen people. Philosophers of language always worked with examples that were some tiny subset of real use, in which a name was taken to have a unique referent.

Second, the traditional view distinguished sharply between three or four different types of referring expressions. Proper Names were taken to have a single unique referent to which they were connected directly somehow. Since Kripke's work starting in the 1970s, various causal accounts have been proposed to explain the connection between name and referent. These theories typically distinguished original dubbings from subsequent uses. (The reality is that I can introduce a name for anything at any time.) In an idealized dubbing there is perceptual (causal) connection between dubber and dubbed. (In reality, we may dub children before they are conceived, and apparently we dub

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hypothesized objects - BigFoot, Phlogiston - that may or may not exist.) Subsequent use is somehow causally connected with that original use. But how does "use" of a referring expression causally connect with what seems to be a quite different "use" - the details are difficult to work out.

Proper names were distinguished from a completely different kind of referring expression: "Definite descriptions". These referred uniquely by specifying a supposedly unique set of properties of the referrent - e.g. The man who corrupted Hadleyburg. Of course, there are closely related descriptions that apply to more than one individual - "the first men on the Moon" - but philosopher generally ignored those. Also generally ignored were "indefinite descriptions", such as in "There was an old woman who swallowed a fly". [Quine noted that proper names can be dispensed with, using unique properties - instead of referring to Plato using the name "Plato", we can invoke the unique property of being that particular man: "the guy who Platos"]

Finally names and descriptions were distinquished from demonstratives (this, that, those, etc.), which do not timelessly refer uniquely (like proper names were supposed to do), nor do they refer by listing properties. It was clear that these demonstratives were bound to context. Linguists, at least when doing syntax, treated these all as NPs.

The problem is that definite descriptions only sometimes uniquely refer, names hardly ever have unique bearers, and the largely ignored indefinite descriptions are very popular as referring expressions. Further, the idea that a name just refers, apart from some speaker using it, doesn't fit reality very well. If a token of "Tom" just appears on a rock, or in the clouds, there is nothing that could make it the case that it referred to some person. Suppose the token of Tom is caused to appear by a painter spilling paint. Then the painter is the cause of the tokening. Does it then refer to him, as "Tom"?

If, on the other hand, I use "Tom" in a sentence, you can ask to whom I am referring, and can expect there to be an answer. I do the referring, using "Tom".

[Reference – conventional devices –Aug 2005 – includes reference borrowing]

In that sense, referring is primarily something that speakers do. Speakers talk about this and that.

That said, there are conventional devices for referring. And as with all conventional devices, one can use them properly or improperly, in accord with the conventions or not. While I may refer to Bill as “Jim” throughout the evening, to do so is really not very helpful, as we might say. And Bill may take offense. Maybe Jim also. Nevertheless, this is still how we would ordinarily describe it: I referred to Bill as “Jim”. After a bit, all (except perhaps me) catch on, and communication can succeed, if in an off-putting fashion.

The conventional devices for referring are several: given names, nicknames, demonstratives, pronouns, definite descriptions, indefinite descriptions. Combinations: “This guy comes up to me as I am walking down the street.” And we point and nod and look at the things and people we talk about. The conventions are very fluid and vary with context and social group – we use pet names here “Bubba” “Babe”, formal expressions there: “My distinguished colleague”, “The Honorable Member from Vermont”.

We borrow referring expressions as we “borrow” all of language. You use “Aristotle” to indicate something about a long dead philosopher I had not heard of. I

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then can perform the same feat of reference in conversation later (“He told me about Aristotle, a long-dead philosopher”).

We do the same borrowing with adjectives and predicates: “We talked about post-modern philosophy.” “What does ‘post-modern’ mean”? “I am not sure exactly”. “I want to march in the procession.” “I heard you have to have matriculated to do that” “What is ‘matriculated’? “I don’t know, but I am pretty you haven’t done it.”“You have to know how to extract a square root.” “What is that?” “I don’t know, but you better learn how to do it.”

Thus we use conventional referring expressions without knowing what they mean, just as an industrial plant operator could successfully keep boiler 1 under control without even known what a boiler is. Semantics and epistemology are connected, but logically independent. In order for linguistic representation to serve the epistemic functions that motivate its use, there must be conventional uses of referring expressions, and language users generally choose expressions in accord with conventions likely to be known by their auditors.

[Reference - two aspects summary.rtf DJC 060112.]

Thus reference has two aspects. One is speech act. In this sense, reference is something speakers do: speakers use expressions to refer to things. This reference can serve as an epistemic help to auditors. These referring expressions function as meta-signs, signs about how the sentences of which they are a part are connected to the world (analogous to labels on instrument panels). Thus in this way reference is akin to: "it is fat" is predicated of Fido. This is in both with the way remote-reading instrument labels function, and also with the structure of quantifier logic, where the quantifier is a sentence operator that indicates of how many things the predicates are being asserted to hold. I’ll discuss this second-order character of reference below.

The second aspect of reference is the conventional uses that each referring expression may have. While a speaker can use just about any expression to refer to just about anything, the epistemic function of helping auditors can only be served when one adheres to conventional ways of referring. Thus people are given names that are reasonably unique in the circumstances in which they are addressed and talked about. These names are used as conventional means of referring to the people. One can also refer using reasonably unique descriptions of the things to which one refers.

But reference does not require unique descriptions. I can say "I ran into a former student today. He is working as a chemist. His employer makes rocket fuel." Here I refer to a person, a student. But not uniquely - there are many former students, and I may have run into more than one today. I also refer to the student's employer, though he may have more than one employer. Thus I refer in no way that must be unique. Again, the point of reference is to help auditors know something about what it is that the sentence carries information about, and unique reference is not necessary for that to work. If you want more specificity, you can ask, "which student?"

Nevertheless, given the conventional referring uses of expression, the conventional tokening rule for a sentence as a whole is a function of the conventional use of the referring expression along with the use of the predicate expression. Thus "John is

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sick" should be used to indicate that the fellow conventionally referred to as "John" is sick. To say that his fellow is conventionally referred to as "John" is just to say that "John" is the expression conventionally used in tokening sentences that carry information about him, in calling him and addressing him, and in asking for information about him. These can come apart: someone might be called "his holiness" by those close to him when not being addressed, but addressed as "your holiness", and might be called "the pope" by those more remote.

[Reference 050729]We began our discussion by noting that there is a traditional conception of

reference in which it is primary. We refer, and only then can say something about the referent. Perhaps in the background is an intuition that we learn nouns first: "mama" "ball". Perhaps we think that referring is like pointing, and pointing precedes speech.

But the instrumentation analogy suggests this is not necessarily the logical order of things. Many instruments and pilot lights work quite well without labels. To be sure, to be useful one must know what the instruments are causally linked with - but this consideration, what is useful for sign consumers, is pragmatic.. Similarly for some uses of language: if you are a looking for something in a game, I may say "cold, cold, warm, hot" in response to your heading in various directions. The subject (you) is understood - you are cold, getting warmer, finally close ("hot").

We have seen that the function of labels on instruments is pretty clear. They serve an epistemic function, letting us know what has the indicated property (temp, rpm, etc.) It is not essential to a language that there be explicit reference. The dance of the bees can be viewed as a series of predicates. Component bee dance moves indicate location and richness of nectar finds. And, as I have noted, there could be a communication system with a unique sign for each expressible state of the world (at one time some computer error messages were something like this - "error5784", etc.) So there are two potential ways in which reference is dispensible in a representation system: one "word" indicators of states of the world, or subjects understood contextually (bee dances, some human speech).

However, as with labels on moderately complex instrumentation, reference is very useful. It lets us know what is being talked about. But we should note that we can talk about things whether or not we provide the necessary information for decoding the message. I can mutter "such a jerk" without it being clear who provokes the remark. I have said something nonetheless.

Reference is governed by conventions. "How shall I refer to you?" is often a reasonable question. Many objects have single conventional "handles" - names. Other objects can be referred to by identifying properties. These may partially identify "a horse ran by" or uniquely identify "The horse Ann just bought ran by". Logically, there is no qualitative difference between saying "something ran by" and "a horse ran by" - it is just more information about what happened. Logicians in effect paraphrase the latter as "something is a horse and ran by" - two predicates. As Russell famously argued, the "The" expressions suggest uniqueness - that there is one and only one horse that Ann just bought. This suggests that at least some referring expressions function like quantifiers.

9. Reference as second-order

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Reference – names as second-order operators.doc 060810Let us briefly explore the ways in which referring expressions function as second

order, as expressions about other expressions, namely predicates. Frege treated quantifers as second-order operators on predicates. He regarded predicates as functions that mapped names onto truth-values. A universal quantifier in effect claims that the function maps onto TRUE for all values in the domain of the variable bound by the quantifier. Thus it is analogous to a Pi (product) operator in math – the logical product of the value of the function for each argument is TRUE. The existential quantifier is analogous to a Sigma function, taking the value of the logical product of the predicate it binds as the variable takes the value of each of the items in the domain.

Thus, a quantifier in effect says: “For any (some) value of x, “Fx” is true”. It is difficult to avoid a substitutional reading of this, as long as the quantifier is regarded as second order. For it mentions a variable, and expression occurring in the object predicate string.

Supposing we treat quantifiers as second order, making claims about the truth value of predicates as they take different values. Then it seems we can regard reference in general as second order. If I say “Tom is American”, we can think of this as saying that “For x=tom, Fx”. The traditional quantifiers invoke all or some values of the variable, this “reference quantifier” invokes a single value, but otherwise behaves much the same as the quantifiers. It can bind multiple variables in an expression. Let us write it:(x=a)Fx or, suggestive of a substitutional interpretation, (x/a)FxThen we have the inference rules:(x)Fx -> (x/a)Fx and (x/a)Fx -> (Ex)Fx

We have seen there is an analogy between predicates and instruments, and instrument labels and referring expressions. The instrument changes state to track the state of some system, possibly remote. The label serves an epistemic function, telling a user what system is being reported on – meta-information.

Similarly, a library catalog entry might begin with the name of a book, and then in the body of the entry provide information about the book: who wrote it, when and where it was published, how many pages, etc. Each of these is equivalent to a sentence. The name that heads the card tells us what book the data is about. Regarding referring expressions as second order allows them to have an epistemic function that is distinct from the fact-representing function of the object sentence. There is doubtless much more to be said about this, if this approach is correct – and much less, if it isn’t.

10. Conclusion

Historically important theories of reference have included Mill’s direct reference view, and dual component views such as those held by Frege, Russell and many others. However the arguments that motivated these dual component views conflate semantics and epistemic issues and are not compelling.. Meaning in general comes from conventions governing speech acts. When these conventions are followed, the result is a three-way correlation between tokening event,

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state of the world, and structure of the token. We have seen that reference is something that speakers do, an aspect of the act of producing a sentence token. We have also seen that there are conventions governing the use of expressions that indicate the speaker’s referent, that is, that perform an epistemic function. Thus these expressions refer, and to particular objects, in the sense that they are conventionally used to refer, and conventionally used to refer to particular objects.

[Reference - names, descriptions - djc.txt]

The subject expression in a sentence lets us know what thing the sentence is about, that is, what thing it is that is having its state represented. In understanding reference it is useful to start with simple systems such as instruments. Thus the subject expression plays a role analogous to the label on a gauge ("Boiler #3") or even the label on an imagistic representation, such as a live webcam ("Duluth liftbridge").

As such, the job of a name is just to pick out its bearer. That is the contribution it makes to the sentence, its significance for the whole, the sentence, and thus is its "meaning". The name doesn't have something else, a "sense", that enables it to have its job. The arguments that purportedly showed otherwise, fail. Thus names do not have a meaning that is equivalent to a description. It is crucial here, as always, not to conflate semantic and epistemic matters (informativeness).

Names are causally connected to their bears indirectly, via tokenings of sentences that contain the names and that are causally connected to the bearer. Again, there is a parallel with labels on instruments.

The “Qua problem” concerns dubbings, and what makes a term refer to one entity rather than another from the myriad with which the dubber is causally (e.g. perceptually) connected at the time of dubbing. We saw that one can avoid supposing that a description is necessarily invoked to determine meaning. The cognitive system of the dubber may be constructed so that the causal chain goes through a representation that is linked to just one of the many possibilities in world. Or reference may be determined by subsequent practice.

Names are not the only kind of sentence subject or referring expression. Descriptive phrases also serve as subjects: "The man who corrupted Hadleyburg was Protestant." "The cat in the hat came back." Here the subject is indicated by some trait that it has. With "The", the implication is that the trait is uniquely had by candidates in the context. (The context here is not necessarily the physical context of utterance. If I am telling a story about a deceased senator I once knew, and say "The senator", I am not referring to the senator who currently represents myself and my auditors.)

Unlike names, descriptions generally do tell you something non-linguistic about the subject. Thus they have a "sense", a way in which co-referring terms can differ in meaning. "The cat in the hat" and "the cat in the vat" differ in meaning, in the way they are semantically composed, even if the cat in hat and the cat in the vat are one and the same cat. In translating into predicate logic, we treat these descriptions as predicates. Thus "The cat in a hat sat" is represented in logic as "there is a unique thing that is a cat and wears a hat and sat". This treatment loses the special epistemic role of the subject expression.

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We concluded with a brief look at ways in which referring expressions are like second-order operators. The moral is that reference is not foundational for semantics.

_________________Bibliography:

Devitt, Michael and Kim Sterelny 1984 Language and Reality: an Introduction to the Philosophy of Language MIT Press

Frege, Gottlob 1892 "On Sense and Reference" reprinted in The Philosophical Writings of Gottlob Frege Peter Geach and Max Black (eds.) 1952 Oxford: Blackwell

Martin, Robert M. 1987 The Meaning of Language MIT Press

Mill, John Stuart 1961 A System of Logic Longmans

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