Abstract

The First Person is ambitious, scholarly, clear, and worth close attention. Chisholm puts two momentous philosophical commitments to the proof by adhering to them in his handling of a wide range of problems in the theory of objective reference. The commitments are a “Platonic” ontology admitting no property that is conceivable only with reference to a contingently existing thing, and the logical principle of the primacy of the intentional, which means that linguistic facts must be explicated with reference to intentional facts instead of the other way around. The two commitments are linked, inasmuch as the singular propositions that are commonly invoked to make sense of beliefs with respect to individuals presuppose non-Platonic entities such as times, possible worlds, indexical properties, and individual essences or haecceities. If we can get along without such entities, then we can dismiss singular propositions and account for demonstrative beliefs and locutions in terms of attribution.