According to Russell, '... the phi ...' means: 'exactly one object has phi and ... that object ...'. Strawson pointed out that, if somebody asked how many kings of France there were, it would be deeply inappropriate to respond by saying '... the king of France ...': the respondent appears to be presupposing the very thing that, under the circumstances, he ought to be asserting. But it would seem that if Russell's theory were correct, the respondent would be asserting exactly (...) what he was asked to assert. So Russell's theory wrongly predicts that the respondent's answer will be appropriate. Russellians deal with this by saying that this anti-Russellian intuition embodies our reaction not to what is semantically encoded in the respondent's words, but to what is pragmatically imparted by them. So Russell's theory is correct: the fact that it appears wrong is due to the distorting effects of pragmatics. In this paper I show that pragmatic phenomena cannot possibly be responsible for the just mentioned anti-Russellian intuition. No matter how hard we try to put the blame on pragmatics, Russell's theory still falls short. It follows that defi nite descriptions really are what they appear to be: referring expressions. I argue that defi nite descriptions are complex demonstratives; and, within that framework, I deal with cases where defi nite descriptions appear to be functioning non-referentially. I also solve Frege's puzzle within the framework defi ned by my treatment of defi nite descriptions taken in conjunction with Kripke-Kaplan semantics. (shrink)

According to Russell, '... the phi ...' means: 'exactly one object has phi and ... that object ...'. Strawson pointed out that, if somebody asked how many kings of France there were, it would be deeply inappropriate to respond by saying '... the king of France ...': the respondent appears to be presupposing the very thing that, under the circumstances, he ought to be asserting. But it would seem that if Russell's theory were correct, the respondent would be asserting exactly (...) what he was asked to assert. So Russell's theory wrongly predicts that the respondent's answer will be appropriate. Russellians deal with this by saying that this anti-Russellian intuition embodies our reaction not to what is semantically encoded in the respondent's words, but to what is pragmatically imparted by them. So Russell's theory is correct: the fact that it appears wrong is due to the distorting effects of pragmatics. In this paper I show that pragmatic phenomena cannot possibly be responsible for the just mentioned anti-Russellian intuition. No matter how hard we try to put the blame on pragmatics, Russell's theory still falls short. It follows that defi nite descriptions really are what they appear to be: referring expressions. I argue that defi nite descriptions are complex demonstratives; and, within that framework, I deal with cases where defi nite descriptions appear to be functioning non-referentially. I also solve Frege's puzzle within the framework defi ned by my treatment of defi nite descriptions taken in conjunction with Kripke-Kaplan semantics. (shrink)

Theranostics or theragnostics are new terms which start to appear occasionally in publications from 2001 onwards, with a marked increase in references from 2011. In the last few years more than 1100 articles using this term were published each year. In 2011 the journal Theranostics was founded. This paper addresses the question of whether this new term is appropriate. The etymology of the term is analysed. A literature search for definitions of “theranostics” is carried out and the definitions examined (...) as to whether they give grounds for justifying the use of a new term. The differences between diagnostics and therapy are explored. A broad and a narrow definition are found. According to the broad definition theranostics provides a closer relationship between diagnostics and therapy. According to the narrow definition diagnostics and therapy become a single intervention. On closer examination it turns out that in the narrow definition the diagnostics capacities are limited to monitoring. Neither the broad nor the narrow definition actually demonstrate a new concept in medicine. Rather, they describe the well-known practice of medical decision making. In this respect, the new term cannot be justified. The level of diagnostics is new but not the relationship between diagnostics and therapy. The term theranostics is misleading as it obscures the existing differences between diagnostics and therapy and wrongly insinuates that steps between diagnostics and therapy could be omitted. (shrink)

Putnam and Burge have been viewed as launching a joint attack on individualism, the view that the content of one's psychological state is determined by what is in the head . Putnam argues that meanings are not in the head while Burge argues that beliefs are not in the head either, and both have come up with convincing arguments against individualism. It is generally conceived that Putnam's view is a version of physical externalism, which argues that factors in the physical (...) environment play a role in determining the meanings of natural kind terms. Burge, on the other hand, is regarded as following up Putnam's argument to bring in factors in the social environment for the determination of belief. Burge's view has been commonly referred to as 'social externalism.' The general consensus in the field is that physical externalism and social externalism are compatible views. Furthermore, both Putnam and Burge seem to endorse each other’s position for the most part. In this paper, however, I shall argue against this general view to show that the two theories are deep down incompatible. (shrink)

The article first rehearses three deflationary theories of reference, (1) disquotationalism, (2) propositionalism (Horwich), and (3) the anaphoric theory (Brandom), and raises a number of objections against them. It turns out that each corresponds to a closely related theory of truth, and that these are subject to analogous criticisms to a surprisingly high extent. I then present a theory of my own, according to which the schema “That S(t) is about t” and the biconditional “S refers to x iff S (...) says something about x” are exhaustive of the notions of aboutness and reference. An account of the usefulness of “about” is then given, which, I argue, is superior to that of Horwich. I close with a few considerations about how the advertised theory relates to well-known issues of reference, the conclusions of which is (1) that the issues concern reference and aboutness only insofar as the words “about” and “refer” serve to generalise over the claims that are really at issue, (2) that the theory of reference will not settle the issues, and (3) that it follows from (2) that the issues do not concern the nature of aboutness or reference. (shrink)

According to Scott Soames’ Beyond Rigidity, there are two important pieces of unfinished business left over from Saul Kripke’s influential Naming and Necessity. Soames reads Kripke’s arguments about names as primarily negative, that is, as proving that names don’t have a meaning expressible by definite descriptions or clusters of them. The famous Kripkean doctrine that names are rigid designators is really only part of the negative case. The thesis that names refer to the same object with respect to every (...) possible world is a byproduct of their meaning, not a positive account of what they mean. As well, the hints about causal chains and dubbings are no more than a picture, as Kripke says, and not a positive theory of meaning. Thus one piece of unfinished business, to which Soames devotes the most attention, is to give a positive account of the meanings of names. To do this Soames proposes that the meaning of a singular term is the contribution it makes to the semantic content of the sentences in which it occurs. The semantic content of a sentence is ordinarily a proposition, that proposition expressed by the most commonly intended assertion using the sentence. Soames’ proposal for a positive account is that the meaning of a proper name is its contribution to those propositions, simply the object to which it refers. Arguing for this positive account occupies the bulk of the book but I will not discuss it in my contribution to this symposium. (shrink)

This article responds to a case-based argument by Mark Richard that rule of reference is not essential to meaning. It objects that the argument requires shifting between understanding the relevant term in the case, ‘marriage,’ as a determinable, in order to support one premise, and a determinate, in order to support another. On no univocal interpretation can both premises be made true.

B. H. Slater has argued that there cannot be any truly paraconsistent logics, because it's always more plausible to suppose whatever "negation" symbol is used in the language is not a real negation, than to accept the paraconsistent reading. In this paper I neither endorse nor dispute Slater's argument concerning negation; instead, my aim is to show that as an argument against paraconsistency, it misses (some of) the target. A important class of paraconsistent logics - the preservationist logics - are (...) not subject to this objection. In addition I show that if we identify logics by means of consequence relations, at least one dialetheic logic can be reinterpreted in preservationist (non-dialetheic) terms. Thus the interest of paraconsistent consequence relations - even those that emerge from dialetheic approaches - does not depend on the tenability of dialetheism. Of course, if dialetheism is defensible, then paraconsistent logic will be required to cope with it. But the existence (and interest) of paraconsistent logics does not depend on a defense of dialetheism. (shrink)

The term 'referring expression' is often used without definition, and models of referring usually ignore the question of how NP's are recognized as referring expressions in discourse. In this paper, I review some relevant distinctions from the research in generics and, on that basis, provide a definition of referring expressions as specific and non-kind-referring noun phrases. I discuss some complications to the definition. Using Kronfeld's model of referring as my framework, I discuss the interaction (...) of the recognition of referring expressions and the recognition of relevant identification criteria. I propose that all present suggestions for identification constraints fall into three groups, and argue that the recognition of referring expressions always depends on the recognition of some identification constraints. On this basis, I extend the framework with procedural information. (shrink)

The term 'referring expression' is often used without definition, and models of referring usually ignore the question of how NP's are recognized as referring expressions in discourse. In this paper, I review some relevant distinctions from the research in generics and, on that basis, provide a definition of referring expressions as specific and non-kind-referring noun phrases. I discuss some complications to the definition. Using Kronfeld's model of referring as my framework, I discuss the interaction (...) of the recognition of referring expressions and the recognition of relevant identification criteria. I propose that all present suggestions for identification constraints fall into three groups, and argue that the recognition of referring expressions always depends on the recognition of some identification constraints. On this basis, I extend the framework with procedural information. (shrink)

I argue that indefinite descriptions are referring terms. This is not the ambiguity thesis: that sometimes they are referring terms and sometimes something else, such as quantifiers . No. On my view they are always referring terms; and never quantifiers. I defend this thesis by modifying the standard conception of what a referring term is: a modification that needs to be made anyway, irrespective of the treatment of indefinites. I derive this approach from (...) my speech-act theoretic semantics . The basic thought is that referring terms have as their meanings speech-acts of a certain kind called proto-referring acts. These are acts in which speakers advertise or present intentions to denote, where denotation is a word-world relation, and advertising an intention is acting as if one has intentions, where it is open whether one has them or not, or whether the referring term used denotes or not. I show how this works for proper names. The meaning of a proper name is the speech-act proto-referring act type defined by a certain referential tree. This gives us the basis for an account of proper name meaning irrespective of denotation: a uniform treatment of full and empty names. Applied to indefinites, we can capture cases where speakers perform proto-acts—in which they advertise an intention to denote something—where they intend to denote, but others where they do not, but they still perform the proto-act: advertising an intention to denote. Two cases are ‘Fred saw a hippo’ and ‘Jane did not see a hippo’. In both cases U performs the same proto-act, represent it as Rpro, but possesses the advertised intention in the first case, but not in the second. In the first case, Rpro gains referential content—its descriptive content is expanded to include seen by Fred, whereas in its second token use it has no content augmentation or sentential determination of reference. In the second case ‘a hippo’ is an empty referring term, just as ‘Pegasus’ is empty in ‘Fred did not see Pegasus; he does not exist’. But in both sentences ‘a hippo’ functions in the same basic way: in both cases the basic proto-referring act Rpro is performed. Using this approach, I show how definite descriptions can be construed as indefinites with added meaning. (shrink)

A main selling point of predicativism is that, in addition to accounting for predicative uses of proper names, it can successfully account for their referential uses while treating them as predicates, thus providing a uniform semantics for proper names. The strategy is to postulate an unpronounced determiner that is realised with names when they appear to function as singular terms, making them effectively a concealed determiner phrase. I argue against the thesis that names are really predicates in referential (...) uses. I discuss four different environments where names do not behave like the determiner phrases that are thought to embed them. (shrink)

Neglected tropical diseases are defined operationally as diseases that prevail in “tropical” regions and are under‐researched, under‐funded, and under‐treated compared with their disease burden. By analysing the adjectives “tropical” and “neglected,” I expose and interrogate the discourses within which the term “neglected tropical disease” derives its meaning. First, I argue that the term “tropical” conjures the notion of “tropicality,” a form of Othering which erroneously explains the disease‐prevalence of “tropical” regions by reference to environmental determinism, rather than colonialism and neocolonialism. (...) Second, I examine the way in which this Othering enables the abjection of tropical regions and their peoples, leading to neglect. I recommend that the term “neglected tropical diseases” be more carefully contextualised within health scholarship, education, and policy. (shrink)

“What is an emotion?” William James asked that question in the title of an essay he wrote in 1884, and his answer was that an emotion is a sensation brought about by bodily disturbance. Writing as a psychologist, he was concerned to help turn his discipline into a science. But as a philosopher writing about religious faith, by contrast, James argued that emotions must be understood in terms of such large and fuzzy issues as “the meaning of life.” The (...) philosophy of emotions and emotions research has since gone off in two quite different directions, one a broad-based perennial philosophical concern with the proper place of the emotions in ethics and living well, the other an increasingly sophisticated pursuit of the latest ammunition and theoretical weaponry in the biological and neurological sciences. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Sophistics, Rhetorics, and Performance; or, How to Really Do Things with WordsBarbara CassinTranslated by Andrew Goffey"How to do things with words?" How can you really do things with nothing but words? It seems to me that sophistics is in a way the paradigm of discourse that does things with words. Doubtless it is not a "performative" in Austin's sense of the word, although Austin's sense varies considerably (...) in extension and intension. But it is for real a discourse that operates, that transforms or creates the world, and has what I call a "world effect."Making the connection with performativity is all the more tempting, as epideixis, the word that serves in Plato to designate sophist discourse, cannot be rendered better than by "performance," on condition that "performance" is also understood in the sense of contemporary aesthetics as a "happening," an "event," an improvisation that requires engagement (Gorgias is the inventor of discourse ex tempore, according to Philostratus)—something like an "exploit."1"Performative" is Austin's own invention, acclimated to French by Austin himself at a colloquium held at Royaumont (Austin 1962); thereafter it was immediately adopted and popularized by Émile Benveniste (1966). "Performance" is a much older term, which, after ceaseless borrowings to and fro between English and French, has seen its meaning shifted and extended accordingly. Klein's Comprehensive Etymological Dictionary of English Language (Klein 1971) maintains that in English "performer" [End Page 349] was coined from Old French parfournir (from medieval Latin perfurnire) and/or parformer; in addition French borrowed the term at least three times, if the Dictionnaire culturel de la langue francaise (Rey 2005) is to be believed: in 1869, by analogy with the vocabulary of horse races to mean the "manner of developing a subject, of executing a work in public"; in 1953, to denote "individual result in the accomplishment of a task"; and in 1963, in the wake of Chomsky, to mean the opposite of "competence." In sum, the word is a fluid, bilingual term that bridges sport (performance in the sense of a record), technique (performance in the sense of the output of a machine), psychology (performance of a test), linguistics (performance/competence), and modern art (performance in the sense of happening).Let us start with the relationship between performance and performative. It is a way to interrogate the status of rhetorics, for which Austin, without naming it, reserves a somewhat unstable place between the "locutionary" on the one hand and the "illocutionary" or performative on the other, calling it the "perlocutionary" ("per" precisely as in "performative").2But it is not of Austin that I will speak. Austin is simply the contemporary frame of reference that informs us today: he "invented" the performative as such for us, by trying to isolate it. And he never hides the difficulty, the permeability, of his taxonomy. Just one citation is enough to show the difficulty. In the seventh lecture of the twelve that make up How to Do Things with Words (quite late then) he writes: "It is time [...] to make a fresh start on the problem. We want to reconsider more generally the senses in which to say something may be to do something, or in saying something we do something (and also perhaps to consider the different case in which by saying something we do something). Perhaps some clarification and definition may help us out of our tangle. For after all, 'doing something' is a very vague expression. When we issue any utterance whatsoever, are we not 'doing something'?" (1975, 91–92).In the framework of the generalized theory of speech acts, the difference between the locutionary, the illocutionary, and the perlocutionary has for a long time been in a "tangle". It is not so easy to differentiate between the three. All three are, precisely, "acts" of language, and without doubt the categories are at once abstract, slippery, and overlapping. The "locutionary" or "constative," a "normal" statement, is an utterance that "says something"; it is an "act of saying something" (1975, 100): "The cat is on the mat" has a meaning (both a "sense" and a "reference") and is susceptible of being either true or false. For... (shrink)

This paper presents an experimental study on definite descriptions. According to the classical views, a definite description, i.e., a phrase of the form “the F”, has – roughly speaking - purely descriptive semantics, that is, it designates the object which uniquely (opt. uniquely in a context) satisfies the description. However, as several philosophers including Keith Donnellan have argued, there are uses of definite descriptions on which these expressions do not seem to designate objects which satisfy the descriptions. Namely, a description (...) may refer in some circumstances to an object which does not have the property from the description. This argument is called “the Argument from misdescription” and it is raised against the classical views on the semantics of definite descriptions. In our paper, we present an experimental study on misdescription and explored reactions of ordinary users of language to various statements involving misdescriptions. The results of our research indicate that the intuition of ordinary speakers is consistent with the prediction expressed in the Argument from misdescription. We argue that the most common pragmatic explanation of misdescription, appealing to Gricean distinction between saying and meaning, is unconvincing. We vote for an alternative semantic account of definite descriptions, on which a description “the F” designates an object being F, which is at the same time the most salient individual according to a contextually established ranking of salience. (shrink)

The question whether numbers are objects is a central question in the philosophy of mathematics. Frege made use of a syntactic criterion for objethood: numbers are objects because there are singular terms that stand for them, and not just singular terms in some formal language, but in natural language in particular. In particular, Frege (1884) thought that both noun phrases like the number of planets and simple numerals like eight as in (1) are singular terms referring (...) to numbers as abstract objects. (shrink)

Extrapersonal frames of reference for aimed movements are representationally convenient. They may, however, carry associated costs when the movement is executed in terms of the complex coordination of multiple joints they require. Studies that have measured both fingertip and joint paths suggest the motor systems may seek a compromise between simplicity of extrapersonal spatial representation and computational simplicity of multi-joint execution.

In this paper, I will outline some of the important points made by Kripke and Putnam on the meaning of natural kind terms. Their notion of the baptism of natural kinds- the process by which kind terms are initially introduced into the language — is of special concern here. I argue that their accounts leave some ambiguities that suggest a baptism of objects and kinds that is free of additional theoretical commitments. Both authors suggest that we name the (...) stuff and then let the scientists tell us what properties it really has, and hence what the real meaning is. I contend that such a barren baptism, taken at face value, cannot succeed in the semantic roles it has been assigned and that softening the stance on baptism suggests a more subtle and complex relation between reference and theoretical commitment than has emerged thus far. (shrink)

IN the final section of his chapter on ‘Perception’ in The Problem of Knowledge, Ayer makes the statement that ‘The failure of phenomenalism does not mean, however, that there is no logical connection of any kind between the way physical objects appear to us and the way they really are’. To prove his contention, he sets out ‘a pair of limiting cases’ of conditions in which the truth of premises referring exclusively to ‘appearance’ would allegedly afford logical guarantees (...) for the existence, or the non-existence, of physical objects. In this paper I wish to raise some serious reservations concerning the viability of the second of these two limiting conditions, which reads. (shrink)

Neurological Positivism’s single- and two-neuro-algorithmic referent conceptions of subjective and objective experience respectively are discussed. NP’s account of Bohr and Heisenberg’s Copenhagen interpretation of quantum reality is then described in terms of nonlinear constructions of two-neuro-algorithmic referents that are proposed also to undergird William James’s pragmatic conception of truth. In turn, qualia are depicted as nonlinear single-neuro-algorithmic referents in relation to the two-neuro-algorithmic quantum measurement procedure. Experientially, qualia are described as nonlinear "black twinkling" neuro-flux patterns which in the context (...) of overall brain organization in both phylogeny and ontogeny increase the brain’s probability of survival. It is concluded that ontological questions are really about the relationships between the two-neuro-algorithmic referent systems in the brain, and the quantum theoretical measurement procedure is the best "test" of NP’s two-neuro-algorithmic hypothesis and, as a test, greatly alters the traditional interpretation of Bell’s theorem. (shrink)

In his logical foundation of arithmetic, Frege faced the problem that the semantic interpretation of his system does not determine the reference of the abstract terms completely. The contextual definition of number, for instance, does not decide whether the number 5 is identical to Julius Caesar. In a late writing, Quine claimed that the indeterminacy of reference established by Frege’s Caesar problem is a special case of the indeterminacy established by his proxy-function argument. The present paper aims to show (...) that Frege’s Caesar problem does not really support the conclusions that Quine draws from the proxy-function argument. On the contrary, it reveals that Quine’s argument is a non sequitur: it does not establish that there are alternative interpretations of our terms that are equally correct, but only that these terms are ambiguous. The latter kind of referential indeterminacy implies that almost all sentences of our overall theory of the world are either false or neither true nor false, because they contain definite descriptions whose uniqueness presupposition is not fulfilled. The proxy-function argument must therefore be regarded as a reductio ad absurdum of Quine’s behaviorist premise that the reference of terms is determined only by our linguistic behavior. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Still Defining Mental Disorder in Terms of Our Goals for Demarcating Mental DisorderJukka Varelius (bio)Keywordsmental disorder, definition, psychological capacity for autonomy, Matthews, SavulescuI thank Eric Matthews and Julian Savulescu for their thought-provoking comments. Unfortunately, I am not here able to discuss all the important points they raise, but must settle for briefly addressing their main criticisms of my view.Reply to MatthewsI believe that some arguments are rationally irresolvable, (...) but do not think that about all philosophical arguments. In terms of moral philosophical argumentation, though not only that, I share the rather common belief that we should proceed by seeking reflective equilibrium between requirements of logic, the best factual knowledge about ourselves and our environment, and our strongly held evaluative intuitions. (This is not to say that there would always be a clear distinction between facts and values.) By such intuitions I refer, for example, to the intuition that it is morally wrong to torture babies for fun. If we are considering whether it is morally permissible to act in a particular way and realize that acting in that way is in the morally relevant respects similar to torturing babies for fun, we conclude that it is not morally permissible to act in that way. That question is solved for persons who accept the moral intuition that it is wrong to torture babies for fun and wish to take facts and logic into account. This method is useful in the context of defining mental disorder, too.Although we have some strongly held intuitions as to what mental disorder is about, such as that person A is a paradigm case of a mentally disordered person, referring to them has not sufficed to solve the controversy concerning the demarcation of mental disorder. Therefore, I want to consider the possibility that referring also to the goals we have for demarcating mental disorder could help us in solving it. At this stage of enquiry at least, I thus believe that the controversy is solvable, but only among persons who share certain points of departure. Accordingly, the "our" in expressions like 'our goals for demarcating mental disorder,' whose reference Matthews enquires about, refer to those who share the intuition that A is a paradigm example of a mentally disordered person, consider the demarcation goals significant, want to take [End Page 67] facts into account, and wish to make logically valid inferences.If one cares about the other things but does not want to consider A's case, one can focus on some other case of a person whose psychological capacity for autonomy is diminished. (Unless, of course, one thinks that no such persons exist and all whom we believe to lack psychological capacity for autonomy are really playacting, malingering, etc.) I, however, now continue with A's case. We have, ex hypothesi, sufficient reason to believe that A lacks not merely relevant information, but also the psychological capacity that understanding it and making use of it in assessing her beliefs and desires presupposes. If someone who knows this about A still insists that A is in perfect mental health and wants, say, to treat her as an object of entertainment in a human zoo, my argument is unlikely to reach him. But who is he to say that we should not care about A's loss of capacity for autonomy and the misfortunes it involves?And of course, also rationally establishing that a person who lacks such capacity is mentally healthy or that the controversy on the nature of mental disorder is not rationally resolvable presupposes that the discussants share some points of departure, including evaluative intuitions. Instead of the intuitions that to be ill is essentially to suffer harm, that behavior governed by one's feelings is always autonomous, and so on, that Matthews refers to, proponents of such views are, however, well advised to resort to less obscure and less controversial intuitions. What, for example, is meant by 'harm'? Is a person who is so overwhelmed by emotions that she is unable to think clearly always autonomous with respect to the actions she performs while in that state? If one takes that all intuitions are useless... (shrink)

'Implicit understanding' is much wider than what we can attend to at one time, and it is in some respects more precise. Examples are examined. What is implicit functions in certain characteristic ways. Some of these are defined. They explain how new concepts come to us in a bodily process that goes beyond previous logic but takes implicit account of it, without new logical steps. All concepts can be considered 'explications' of implicit body- environment interaction. 'Explication' provides an overall model (...) within which the objectivity of logical concepts can be explained and preserved. Section III concerns new kinds of operational research. Section IV shows how a theory of logically connected terms can always be formulated from something known implicitly. Section V shows how the explication model affects the theory of language. (shrink)

This article argues that we can understand Jean Epstein's theory of photogénie as an instance of technics. Starting from a reading of Epstein's final fictional film Le Tempestaire, we can see that Epstein collapses the distinction between human and technological. This insight leads to a discussion of Epstein's theory of photogénie more generally, and one that highlights the term's relationship to temporality. This temporal dimension recalls Bernard Stiegler's discussion of technics in Technics and Time. As the series evolves, Stiegler increasingly (...) foregrounds cinema as technics, and the essay ends with a discussion of the ways that Epstein's understanding of photogénie can press on Stiegler's claims. (shrink)

1. Nathan Salmon paper is entitled with a question: are general terms rigid? He asks this question in way of engaging the issue of the extension of the notion of rigidity beyond the domain of singular terms. While singular terms has been the province of most of the discussion of this rigidity since Naming and Necessity, it is well known that Kripke saw the notion extending to at least certain general terms such as terms for (...) natural kinds. Scott Soames has recently weighed in on this issue in the latter chapters of his book Beyond Rigidity. His conclusion is that although there are significant overlaps in the properties of singular and general terms, there is no direct extension of rigidity to the general terms, and that rigid designation is properly applied only to singular terms. Salmon disagrees. His view, based in part of views dating back to his book Reference and Essence, is that there is an extension to be had, one which allows the application of the standard Kripkean characterization of rigidity to be applied to both sorts of terms. Central to his thesis is a claim about the status of certain definite descriptions. In these remarks, I will try to outline the issues to which NS is reacting, and the proposal he posits in response. I will then consider in a more critical light his claim about definite descriptions, bringing to bear considerations of their grammar. (shrink)

"Let us call whoever invented the zip "Julius"." With this stipulation, Gareth Evans introduced "Julius" into the language as one of a category of terms that seem to lie somewhere between definite descriptions (such as "whoever invented the zip") and proper names (such as "John", or "Julius" as usually used) (Evans 1982: 31). He dubbed these terms "descriptive names"1, and used them as a foil against which to test several theories of reference: Frege's, Russell's, and his own. I (...) want to look at some tensions in the first two chapters of The Varieties of Reference, tensions in Evans' account of singular terms that become apparent his account of descriptive names in particular. Specifically, I will concentrate on his claim that although descriptive names are referring expressions, they are not Russellian terms (i. e., terms which cannot contribute to the expression of a thought when they lack a referent). A recurring theme in this paper, and perhaps its sole point of interest for those not directly concerned with how to account for singular terms, is an attempt to place the blame for Evans' difficulties with an aspect of his thinking and method which I have referred to as "anti-realism". This might be confusing, as the aspect I am criticising is often of a vague and general sort, more akin to the ancient idea that "man is the measure of all things" than to any of the technical modern positions for which the term "anti-realism" is now normally used. But to refer to this aspect as "Protagorean" would suggest that I am accusing Evans of having been some kind of relativist, which I have no wish to do. Furthermore, there are times when the aspect does take a form which has more similarities to than differences from conventional notions of anti-realism. (shrink)

In this book, Alan Berger further develops the new theory of reference -- as formulated by Kripke and Putnam -- applying it in novel ways to many philosophical problems concerning reference and existence. Berger argues that his notion of anaphoric background condition and anaphoric links within a linguistic community are crucial not only to a theory of reference, but to the analysis of these problems as well. The book is organized in three parts. In part I, Berger distinguishes between two (...) styles of rigid designation. Based on this distinction, he develops a theory of reference change for rigid designator terms and shows how this distinction sheds light on identity statements. In part II, he offers an account of belief attribution containing vacuous names within the belief context, of intentional identity statements, and of true negative existential statements. In part III, he analyzes anaphoric expressions and presents a formalization of anaphora and plural quantification. (shrink)

In an article in Cognition, Machery, Mallon, Nichols, and Stich [Machery et al., 2004] present data which purports to show that “East Asian” native Cantonese speakers tend to have descriptivist intuitions about the referents of proper names, while “Western” native English speakers tend to have causal-historical intuitions about proper names. Machery et al take this finding to support the view that some intuitions, the universality of which they claim is central to philosophical theories, vary according to cultural background. Machery et (...) al hypothesize that the differences in intuitions about reference stem from general psychological differences between Eastern and Western subjects. Machery et al conclude from their findings that the philosophical methodology of consulting intuitions about hypothetical cases is flawed vis ` a vis the goal of determining truths about some philosophical domains. To quote Machery et al, “our data indicate that philosophers must radically revise their methodology” because “the intuitions philosophers pronounce from their armchairs are likely to be a product of their own culture and their academic training” ( [Machery et al., 2004] pp.B9). “The evidence suggests that it is wrong for philosophers to assume a priori the universality of their own semantic intuitions” ( [Machery et al., 2004] pp. B8). In the following study, I present data incompatible with Machery et al’s results. Native Cantonese-speaking immigrants from a Cantonese diaspora 1 in Southern California do not have descriptivist intuitions about the referents of proper names when presented with a Cantonese story and Cantonese questions about reference and truth-value. This data raises questions about the quality of Machery et al’s study and the conclusions they draw from it. (shrink)

Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002. Pp. xi + 234. H/b £?.??, $?.??, P/b £?.??, $?.??. If asked for an example of a rigid designator it is likely that one would suggest a name, like ‘Aristotle’ or ‘Tony Blair’, or a demonstrative, like ‘that book’ said whilst pointing at a certain text. Intuitively, what these expressions have in common is the central role they accord to perception of an object: you can see the book you want to talk about, there are (...) people around in our community who have bumped into Tony, and, although no one alive today perceived Aristotle directly, it seems plausible to claim that our ability to use the name now relies on the fact that someone, sometime, did perceive him directly. However, as anyone at all familiar with rigid designation knows, not all such expressions follow this model. Kripke himself stressed that certain definite descriptions have a constant extension across all possible worlds (for example, ‘the smallest prime number’, ‘the actual prime minister of Great Britain now’) and thus meet the criterion for being rigid designators; while Kaplan emphasized the role of a descriptive rule in determining the referent for a token utterance of an indexical, like ‘I’ or ‘tomorrow’. (shrink)

Philosophy with children often focuses on abstract reasoning skills, but as David Bohm points out the “entire process of mind” consists of our abstract thought as well as our “tacit, concrete process of thought.” Philosophy with children should address the “entire process of mind.” Our tacit, concrete process of thought refers to the process of thought that involves our actions such as the process of thought that goes into riding a bicycle. Bohm contends that we need to develop an awareness (...) or proprioception of thinking as well. When Socrates enters into dialogue with his interlocutors, he shows the limitations of purely abstract thought by leading them to admit that they really “don’t know.” But, of course, they know. We know what bravery is or what love is, even though we can never “explain” these concepts in abstract terms. Life has taught us through experience what these concepts mean and we have developed an understanding of them. We can recognize when a person acts bravely. This is where I see the link between our tacit, concrete process of thought and emotional intelligence. We need emotional intelligence to learn how to be brave, to learn how to love, and be just in the way we act in the world. Knowing what justice is abstractly does not make us act justly. We have to develop awareness of our actions in order to develop the skills necessary to act the part. This is also where emotional intelligence comes in. In the bulletin of the play Romeo and Juliet, director Barry Edelstein wrote the following: “To perform Romeo and Juliet, actors need a series of skills… they must have the emotional and psychological awareness and openness of uncommon depth; they must listen with acuteness, they must possess an imagination of real suppleness and subtlety…” An abstract portrayal would not bring these characters to life. We can surely agree – abstractly – that racism is destructive, but still act racist, without being even slightly aware of it. My contention is that while our abstract sense of racism has evolved, our tacit, concrete knowledge has not, which explains that racism is for the most part still rampant, even though we know abstractly that it is wrong. So how do we educate and develop the awareness of the tacit, concrete knowledge that informs our actions, and develop the emotional intelligence to give a depth of understanding to what we know and believe abstractly. (shrink)

This paper aims to propose a version of the description theory of reference –for short, descriptivism– on natural kind terms. This version is grounded on some proposals of descriptivists, such as Searle and Strawson, about proper names, which will be extended to natural kind terms. According to Searle and Strawson the reference of a proper name is determined by a sufficient number of the descriptions that speakers associate with the name, but among the sorts of descriptions admitted by (...) these authors are those in which the average speaker defers the reference of a term to other speakers. In this regard, descriptivism can accept Putnam’s thesis of the division of linguistic labour and claim that some of the descriptions associated by non-experts have the function of deferring the reference of natural kind terms to their reference in the use by experts. Thus, descriptivism can maintain that the reference of a natural kind term is determined by a sufficient number of the descriptions that experts concerning a natural kind associate with the term. I will argue that this version of descriptivism, which grants more weight to social links than to historical links, can explain better than Kripke’s theory the reference of the use of natural kind terms by the average speaker. (shrink)

The word enhancement is value laden and potentially misleading in the context of genetics. Dictionary definitions of enhance include and The term geneticenhancement would be better replaced with a more neutral term such as to reflect the fact that the consequences of as yet largely untried technology may be beneficial, balanced, or harmful. The aim of this paper is to highlight some of the potential negative consequences of the use of and hence to challenge whether are actually always enhancements. Thus (...) it is necessary to question whether what may appear to be a new means of enhancement may not actually result in any significant change or is less effective than existing means of enhancement; may actually make things worse; or may on some measures actually make some things better, but on other measures or in other senses make things worse. (shrink)

The prevalence of the term post-truth suggests that we have, in the last few years, moved from being members of societies dedicated to truth to being members of ones that cannot agree on truth’s parameters and, even worse, have given up trying. But is this really what has happened? The author argues that, under the sway of the Enlightenment, truth has actually been unstable and a source of contention in public life ever since the founding moment for modern democracies (...) in the late eighteenth century; the ‘post’ in ‘post-truth’ elides this complex history even as it accurately describes some of the conditions of our moment. What that means, though, is that rather than attempt to turn the clock back to past models and practices for restoring the reign of truth, we should be looking for new, post-Enlightenment paradigms for how to define and locate truth in the context of democracy, as well as new mechanisms for making this possible. (shrink)

Natural kind terms appear to behave like singular terms. If they were genuine singular terms, appearing in true sentences, that would be some reason to believe that there are entities to which the terms refer, the natural kinds. Paul Needham has attacked my arguments that natural kind terms are singular, referring expressions. While conceding the correctness of some of his criticisms, I defend and expand on the underlying view in this paper. I also briefly (...) sketch an account of what natural kinds in fact are—natural complexes of sparse (natural) universals. (shrink)

In this essay I argue that given Donnellan’s formulation of the attributive uses of definite descriptions, as well as Kripke’s [6] and Salmon’s [10] generalized accounts, most uses of definite descriptions that are taken to be attributive turn out not to be so. In building up to my main thesis, I first consider certain problematic cases of uses of definite descriptions that do not neatly fit into any category. I then argue that, in general, a complete definite description we use (...) is complex, in which there is an embedded singular term that is used referentially. From this I conclude that an attributive use of a definite description is an extremely rare linguistic phenomenon, much less frequent than what Donnellan, Kripke, and Salmon have presupposed; so much so that the standard examples given by Donnellan of the attributive use of definite descriptions do not qualify as attributive. (shrink)

In this essay I argue that given Donnellan’s formulation of the attributive uses of definite descriptions, as well as Kripke’s [6] and Salmon’s [10] generalized accounts, most uses of definite descriptions that are taken to be attributive turn out not to be so. In building up to my main thesis, I first consider certain problematic cases of uses of definite descriptions that do not neatly fit into any category. I then argue that, in general, a complete definite description we use (...) is complex, in which there is an embedded singular term that is used referentially. From this I conclude that an attributive use of a definite description is an extremely rare linguistic phenomenon, much less frequent than what Donnellan, Kripke, and Salmon have presupposed; so much so that the standard examples given by Donnellan of the attributive use of definite descriptions do not qualify as attributive. (shrink)

Recent experimental work on “natural” kind terms has shown evidence of both descriptive and nondescriptive reference determination. This has led some to propose ambiguity or hybrid theories, as opposed to traditional description and causal‐historical theories of reference. Many of those experiments tested theories against referential intuitions. We reject this method, urging that reference should be tested against usage, preferably by elicited production. Our tests of the usage of a biological kind term confirm that there are indeed both descriptive and (...) causal‐historical elements to the reference determination of some natural kind terms. We argue that to accommodate our results and earlier ones, we should abandon the common assumption that any one theory of reference fits all natural kind terms. Rather, it is likely that some terms are descriptive, some causal‐historical, some ambiguous, and some hybrid. This substantive conclusion is accompanied by a methodological one. Our experiments, like some earlier ones, found participants contradicting both each other and themselves. We argue that these contradictions indicate a lack of linguistic competence with the term. We conclude that these experiments have been faulty, because they test terms that are novel to participants and/or use fantastical vignettes. We provide some suggestions for future research. (shrink)

What is real? Less than you might think. We advocate austere metaphysical realism---a form of metaphysical realism claiming that a correct ontological theory will repudiate numerous putative entities and properties that are posited in everyday thought and discourse, and also will even repudiate numerous putative objects and properties that are posited by well confirmed scientific theories. We have lately defended a specific version of austere metaphysical realism which asserts that there is really only one concrete particular, viz., the entire (...) cosmos (see Horgan and Potr (2000, 2002), Potr (2003)). But there are various potential versions of the generic position we are here calling austere metaphysical realism; and it is the generic view that constitutes the ontological part of the overall approach to realism and truth that we will describe here. What is true? More than you might think, given our austere metaphysical realism. We maintain that truth is semantically correct affirmability, under contextually operative semantic standards. We also maintain that most of the time, the contextually operative semantic standards work in such a way that semantic correctness (i.e., truth) is a matter of indirect correspondence rather than direct correspondence between thought or language on the one hand, and the world on the other.1 When correspondence is indirect rather than direct, a given statement (or thought) can be true even if the correct ontology does not include items answering to all the referential commitments (as we will here call them) of the statement. 2 This means that even if a putative object is repudiated by a correct ontological theory, ordinary statements that are putatively about that object may still be true. For instance, the statement “The University of St. Andrews is in Scotland” can be semantically correct (i.e., true) even if the right ontology does not include any entity answering to the referring term ‘The University of St. Andrews’, or any entity... (shrink)

In a number of influential papers, Hartry Fieldhas advanced an account of truth and referencethat we might dub quasi-disquotationalism. According to quasi-disquotationalism, truth and reference are to be explained in terms of disquotationand facts about what constitute a goodtranslation into our language. Field suggeststhat we might view quasi-disquotationalism aseither (a) an analysis of our ordinarytruth-theoretic concepts of reference andtruth, or (b) an account of certain otherconcepts that improve upon our ordinaryconcepts. In this paper, I argue that (i) ifthe view (...) is understood along the lines of (a)it fails, and (ii) if it is construed along thelines of (b) it is, at best, under-motivated. (shrink)

The paper is aimed to show that directly referring terms have to be rigid designators. Since directly referring expressions refer to something on the basis of semantic conventions alone and since the conventions are independent of possible worlds, there cannot be a directly referring expression with shifting reference across possible worlds. Although this claim seems to be indubitable and widely recognized, it was questioned recently. Drawing on D. Lewis’ ontology of counterparts, G. Martí has shown that (...) a directly referring expression is capable to refer to different objects in different possible worlds. A directly referring term designating an object in our world is supposed to designate its counterparts in other possible world. The paper tries to show that the purported directly referring terms assumed by Martí’s argument are not, in fact, directly referring.U ovome članku nastoji se pokazati da izravno referirajući termini moraju biti kruti označitelji. Budući da izravno referirajući izrazi referiraju na nešto samo na osnovi semantičkih konvencija i budući da su konvencije neovisne o mogućim svjetovima, ne može postojati izravno referirajući izraz s referencijom koja se pomiče duž mogućih svjetova. Iako se ta tvrdnja čini neprijepornom i široko prihvaćenom, u novije je vrijeme dovedena u pitanje. Oslanjajući se na Lewisovu ontologiju parnjakâ, G. Martí je pokazala da izravno referirajući izraz može referirati na različite predmete u različitim mogućim svjetovima. Izravno referirajući termin koji označava predmet u našem svijetu trebao bi označavati svoje parnjake u drugome mogućem svijetu. U članku se pokušava pokazati da navodno izravno referirajući termini koji su pretpostavljeni Martínim argumentom zapravo nisu izravno referirajući. (shrink)

A common view is that natural language treats numbers as abstract objects, with expressions like the number of planets, eight, as well as the number eight acting as referential terms referring to numbers. In this paper I will argue that this view about reference to numbers in natural language is fundamentally mistaken. A more thorough look at natural language reveals a very different view of the ontological status of natural numbers. On this view, numbers are not primarily treated (...) abstract objects, but rather 'aspects' of pluralities of ordinary objects, namely number tropes, a view that in fact appears to have been the Aristotelian view of numbers. Natural language moreover provides support for another view of the ontological status of numbers, on which natural numbers do not act as entities, but rather have the status of plural properties, the meaning of numerals when acting like adjectives. This view matches contemporary approaches in the philosophy of mathematics of what Dummett called the Adjectival Strategy, the view on which number terms in arithmetical sentences are not terms referring to numbers, but rather make contributions to generalizations about ordinary (and possible) objects. It is only with complex expressions somewhat at the periphery of language such as the number eight that reference to pure numbers is permitted. (shrink)

The increasingly pluralistic character of modern societies has led to questions, not only about the proper use of ethnic-group terms, but also about the correct semantic analysis of them. Here I argue that ethnic-group terms are analogous to other linguistic expressions whose extension is fixed in the way suggested by a causal theory of reference. My view accommodates precisely those scenarios of communication involving ethnic-group terms that will be seen puzzling to Fregeans. At the same time, it (...) undermines the plausibility of skepticism about those terms. (shrink)

Any living organism interacts with and responds specifically to environmental molecules by expressing specific olfactory receptors. In this paper, this specificity will be first examined in causal terms with particular emphasis on the mechanisms controlling olfactory gene expression, cell-to-cell interactions and odor-decoding processes. However, this type of explanation does not entirely justify the role olfactory receptors have played during evolution, since they are also expressed ectopically in different organs and/or tissues. Homologous olfactory genes have in fact been found in (...) such diverse cells and/or organs as spermatozoa, testis and kidney where they are assumed to act as chemotactic sensors or renin modulators. To justify their functional diversity, homologous olfactory receptors are assumed to share the same basic role: that of conferring a self-identity to cells or tissues under varying environmental conditions. By adopting this standpoint, the functional attribution as olfactory or chemotactic sensors to these receptors should not be seen either as a cause conditioning receptor gene expression, or as a final effect resulting from genetically predetermined programs, but as a direct consequence of the environmental conditions olfactory receptor genes have explored during evolution. The association of odorant patterns with specific environmental or contextual situations makes their relationship semiotically triadic, due to the emergence of an interpretant capable of perceiving odorants as meaningful signs out of a noisy background. This perspective highlights the importance of odorant-receptor relationships as respect to the properties of the interacting partners. It is our contention that only when taken together can these different explanatory strategies provide a realistic account of how olfactory receptor genes have been structurally and functionally modified during evolution. (shrink)

Finding out which terms – scientific or otherwise— fail to refer is an extremely complex business since both felicitous reference and failure to refer must be negotiated. Causal theories of reference –even so-called hybrid theories – posit that in order to refer to something, we need the regulative idea of an ontological reference, which operates even when we refer to impossibilia or inconceivable objects. Evidently, this is not the case of the referent of phlogiston, which is neither inconceivable nor (...) impossible, nor, alas, does it exist. In the antipodes, from a representational-physicalist point of departure, a term fails to refer if it has no actual ontological grounds: phlogiston fails to refer because it has no physical existence. Phlogiston can even be considered to be a fictional entity, and referring to a fictional entity is not the same as a reference in a fiction or a fictional reference Salmon : a fictional entity is an object in the same sense as an abstract object, and therefore we can genuinely refer to it. The question is: who claims that phlogiston does not exist? Nowadays, everyone does, fundamentally and primarily because science has established it as a fact. The process that led to this result is extremely complex, lengthy and multi-dimensional. It involved factors of several kinds: cognitive, social, political, historical, as well as ontological, and this last factor has been neglected. I do not claim that phlogiston once existed and then ceased to exist -- science only allows us a sneak-peek into what exists and what, sometimes mistakenly, is supposed to exist. Paraphrasing Latour, this inquiry is about following the journey of the referents, even when they do not end up being physical-existent or existing objects. I believe with Bach that the notion of reference is essentially pragmatic; that the difference between alluding to something and referring to or denoting something must be established; that to achieve this the semantic properties of terms are not sufficient, and finally that references are not semantic but cognitive properties that relate thoughts and objects of any kind. My assumption is that to refer to something one must be capable of having thoughts about it and that the propositions one attempts to communicate in the course of referring to it are singular with respect to it. Being in a position to have a thought about a particular thing requires being connected to that thing, via perception, memory, communication and/ or education. Therefore, only in an exceedingly narrow realist theory of reference does phlogiston fail to refer. Unless a theory of reference of scientific terms is based on the study of the actual linguistic communicative practices among scientists, it will inevitably pose serious epistemological difficulties. (shrink)

Both descriptivism and the causal theory of reference fail to account for the meaning of theoretical terms in a way consistent with scientific realism. Faced with this problem, hybrid theories of reference have been developed. They combine features of both descriptivism and the causal theory and seek to capture the advantages of each. In this work, we critically analyze two strategies to articulate hybrid theories of reference in the face of the problem of the meaning of theoretical terms. (...) They are exemplified by the proposals of Psillos and Kitcher. We argue that neither of these strategies is successful in articulating the descriptive and causal elements in a genuine hybrid theory of reference that satisfies the standards of scientific realism. (shrink)

A growing number of studies on fairness in artificial intelligence (AI) use the notion of intersectionality to measure AI fairness. Most of these studies take intersectional fairness to be a matter of statistical parity among intersectional subgroups: an AI algorithm is “intersectionally fair” if the probability of the outcome is roughly the same across all subgroups defined by different combinations of the protected attributes. This paper identifies and examines three fundamental problems with this dominant interpretation of intersectional fairness in AI. (...) First, the dominant approach is so preoccupied with the intersection of attributes/categories (e.g., race, gender) that it fails to address the intersection of oppression (e.g., racism, sexism), which is more central to intersectionality as a critical framework. Second, the dominant approach faces a dilemma between infinite regress and fairness gerrymandering: it either keeps splitting groups into smaller subgroups or arbitrarily selects protected groups. Lastly, the dominant view fails to capture what it really means for AI algorithms to be fair, in terms of both distributive and non-distributive fairness. I distinguish a strong sense of AI fairness from a weak sense that is prevalent in the literature, and conclude by envisioning paths towards strong intersectional fairness in AI. (shrink)

Over the centuries the term “talent” has changed semantically and slowly transformed itself into a floating signifier or become an accidental designator. The term “talent” no longer has one single meaning and a “referent” in real life, but instead a multiplicity of meaning and references to something beyond real life, something indefinite and indefinable. In other words, today we do not know specifically what the term “talent” in talent management really means or refers to. Indeed, this is problematical, because (...) in late modernity the term “talent” has become a popular and frequently used key term among business consultants and, within the science of human resource management, a cornerstone in the discipline of “talent management”, and not knowing what the term really means will turn any talent discussion, talent identification and talent recruitment into a question of subjectivity and belief in talent rather than objectivity and knowledge of talent. (shrink)

Previous studies have shown that multiple reference frames are available and compete for selection during the use of spatial terms such as “above.” However, the mechanisms that underlie the selection process are poorly understood. In the current paper we present two experiments and a comparison of three computational models of selection to shed further light on the nature of reference frame selection. The three models are drawn from different areas of human cognition, and we assess whether they may be (...) applied to a reference frame selection by examining their ability to account for both existing and new empirical data comprising acceptance rates, response times, and response time distributions. These three models are the competitive shunting model, the leaky competing accumulator model, and a lexical selection model. Model simulations show that only the LCA model satisfactorily accounts for the empirical observations. The key properties of this model that seem to drive its success are its bounded linear activation function, its number and type of processing stages, and its use of decay. Uncovering these critical properties has important implications for our understanding not only of spatial term use, in particular, but also of conflict and selection in human cognition more generally. (shrink)