The Vagaries of Reference

Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 9 (2022)
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Abstract

Evans (1973)’s Madagascar case and other cases like it have long been taken to represent a serious challenge for the Causal Theory of Names. The present essay answers this challenge on behalf of the causal theorist. The key is to treat acts of uttering names as events. Like other events, utterances of names sometimes turn out to have features which only become clear in retrospect.

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10.3998/ergo.3115

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Eliot Michaelson
King's College London

Citations of this work

Unspeakable names.Eliot Michaelson - 2023 - Synthese 201 (2):1-19.
Fictional Names and Co-Identification.Andreas Stokke - 2023 - Philosophers' Imprint 23:1-23.

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References found in this work

A puzzle about belief.Saul A. Kripke - 1979 - In A. Margalit (ed.), Meaning and Use. Reidel. pp. 239--83.
Designation.Michael Devitt - 1981 - New York: Columbia University Press.
Knowledge by acquaintance and knowledge by description.Bertrand Russell - 1911 - Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 11:108--28.
Individualism and self-knowledge.Tyler Burge - 1988 - Journal of Philosophy 85 (November):649-63.
The Causal Theory of Names.Gareth Evans - 1973 - Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 47 (1):187–208.

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