Abstract

Much has been written on the semantics of singular terms within the last twenty years. During this time, Fregean and neo-Fregean theories have been rejected by many in light of criticisms raised by Saul Kripke, Keith Donnellan, David Kaplan and others. Nowadays, the direct reference theory and its variants are popular. ;We claim that the Kripke-Donnellan style objections to descriptivism do not warrant the wholesale rejection of descriptivist theories. There are, however, other telling objections the descriptivist must address. ;We present examples showing that descriptivist theories misdescribe a speaker's communicative intentions on certain ordinary utterances containing singular terms. For example, it is far-fetched to think that when I utter "Bill is in Ireland," referring to my brother, that I intend to communicate a completed Fregean proposition, containing all or a subset of all uniquely identifying descriptions I know of that pick out my brother. I was not thinking of my brother under these descriptions, and I do not intend that my audience believe or consider a proposition containing them. ;This does not mean we should abandon descriptivism. We canvass several theories of the semantics of singular terms, including the direct reference theory. We conclude that these alternatives to descriptivism are deficient. We further conclude that descriptivist theories can be modified to avoid our objections based on communicative intentions. ;We propose that, where "t" is a singular term , an utterance of "t is G" does not express a completed proposition. Instead, it expresses a propositional scheme of the form "The F--which is the S--is G." The description "the F" is the explicit description for the utterance. The expression "the S" is a placeholder for the implicit description which is the description the speaker would ultimately rely on to fix the reference of the term. We extend our analysis to propositional attitude ascriptions