Abstract

The phenomenon of reference is a very ordinary one. We refer to things in one manner or another in nearly every sentence we utter or thought we entertain. Yet within the analytic tradition, the phenomenon of reference has proved oddly resistant to philosophical clarification. Attempts to provide such clarification have met with a wide range of paradoxes and seemingly intractable aporias. The phenomenon has generally been treated in one of three ways: as an unexplained relation between words and entities of the 'non-linguistic world'; as an internal feature of language lacking a genuinely relational structure; or as a 'mentalistic excrescence' that can and should be dissolved by logical analysis. I argue that none of these ways of accounting for the phenomenon does justice to it, and that the difficulties surrounding the problem of reference in the analytic tradition stem largely from certain reductive and metaphysical prejudices within that tradition. ;I attempt to demonstrate here that the phenomenon of reference can be adequately clarified only when its relational structure and its essential nature as an act are acknowledged. I argue that Husserl's phenomenology is uniquely able to meet this criterion, providing a clarification of the phenomenon while correcting the philosophical prejudices of the analytic account. That the phenomenological account of reference compares favorably to the analytic one is illustrated here by examining the difficulties that have attended analytic attempts to explain reference from Frege onward. These include the puzzle of informative identity statements, problems with substitution, naming, identification and description, Russell's Paradox, difficulties with occasional/indexical reference, 'intentional inexistence' and several others. Each of these problems can be readily solved with the phenomenological model. ;Though Husserl's phenomenology is certainly not without its own difficulties and limitations, it provides a much-needed correction to the myopia of the analytic tradition, particularly with respect to the irreducibly relational and act-driven structure of experience. The phenomenological clarification of reference, a phenomenon that issues directly from this structure, is uniquely illustrative of the value of such a correction