Abstract

This dissertation is addressed to the question of proper name reference, a topic prominent in contemporary philosophy of language. My aim here is not to defend nor to endorse any particular "theory" of reference. Rather, my purpose is to initiate a calling into question of the project of arriving at such a "theory"--at least as this project most commonly has been conceived. ;Recent attacks, by Kripke and others, upon "description" theories of name reference have forced the recognition that names commonly have reference within a community of speakers. An individual may "borrow" upon the communally-established reference of a name--he refers thanks to his co-reference. But what is it that makes for such "borrowing", for community-membership of this sort? I argue that a purely causal-theoretic account is unsatisfactory as an answer to this question, and thus as a theory of co-reference. We are left, by this account, with no way of distinguishing cases in which reference is preserved, as a name is passed on, from those in which a shift of reference occurs, despite causal connection with antecedent usage. ;Drawing upon suggestions from the work of Kripke, Putnam and Dummett, I propose an account which promises to provide us with sufficient and necessary conditions for co-reference. This is the "linguistic authority account", which takes as central the speaker's own recognition of and deference to other users of a name. But I argue that this approach, too, fails to yield non-circular conditions for the obtaining of co-reference. ;I conclude by exploring the possible lessons to be derived from these failures, in particular the suggestion that the ineliminable circularity of these "theories" reveals there to be no genuine semantic facts to be accounted for. This suggestion, in the end, I reject; but I agree that the upshot of these failures is their forcing us to re-construe the task of theorizing about reference. Such theorizing had best be viewed as the attempt to codify our practice of reference-ascription; it cannot, I argue, sensibly be construed as the attempt to justify that practice, nor to get at those semantic facts which underlie the practice