Philosophers of language inspired by Grice have long sought to show how facts about reference boil down to facts about speakers’ communicative intentions. I focus on a recent attempt by Stephen Neale (2016), who argues that referring with an expression requires having a special kind of communicative intention—one that involves representing an occurrence of the expression as standing in some particular relation to its referent. Neale raises a problem for this account: because some referring expressions are unpronounced, most language (...) users don’t realize they exist, and so seemingly don’t have intentions about them. Neale suggests that we might solve this problem by supposing that speakers have nonconscious or “tacit” intentions. I argue that this solution can’t work by arguing that our representations of unpronounced bits of language all occur within a modular component of the mind, and so we can’t have intentions about them. From this line of thought, I draw several conclusions. (i) The semantic value of a referring expression is not its referent, but rather a piece of partial and defeasible evidence about what a speaker refers to when using it literally. (ii) There is no interesting sense in which speakers refer with expressions; referring expressions are used to give evidence about the sort of singular proposition one intends to communicate. (iii) The semantics–pragmatics interface is coincident with the interface between the language module and central cognition. (shrink)

am going to discuss some issues inspired by a well-known paper ofKeith Donnellan, "Reference and Definite Descriptions,”2 but the interest—to me—of the contrast mentioned in my title goes beyond Donnellan's paper: I think it is of considerable constructive as well as critical importance to the philosophy oflanguage. These applications, however, and even everything I might want to say relative to Donnellan’s paper, cannot be discussed in full here because of problems of length. Moreover, although I have a considerable interest (...) in the substantive issues raised by Donnellan’s paper, and by related literature, my own conclusions will be methodological, not substantive. I can put the matter this way: Donnellan’s paper claims to give decisive objections both to Russell’s theory of definite descriptions (taken as a theory about English) and to Strawson’s. My concem is not primarily with the question; is Donnellan right, or is Russell (or Strawson)? Rather, it is with the question: do the considerations in Donneilarfs paper refute Russell’s theory (or Strawson’s)? For definiteness, I will concentrate on Donnellan versus Russell, leaving Strawson aside. And about this issue I will draw a definite conclusion, one which I think will illuminate a few methodological maxims about language. Namely, I will conclude that the considerations in Donnellan’s paper, by themselves, do not refute Russell’s theory. Any conclusions about Russell’s views per se, or Donnellan’s, must be tentative, IfI were to be asked for a tentative stab about Russell, I would say that although his theory does a far better job of handling ordinary discourse than many have thought, and although many popular arguments against it are inconclusive, probably it ultimately fails. The considerations I have in mind have to do with the existence of “improper” definite descriptions, such as “the table," where uniquely specifying conditions are not contained in the description itself.. (shrink)

Advocates of conceptual engineering as a method of philosophy face a dilemma: either they are ignorant of how conceptual engineering can be implemented, or else it is trivial to implement but of very little value, representing no new or especially fruitful method of philosophizing. Two key distinctions frame this dilemma and explain its two horns. First, the distinction between speaker’s meaning and reference and semantic meaning and reference reveals a severe implementation problem for one construal of conceptual (...) engineering. Second, the distinction between stipulating meanings and conceptually analyzing allows us to see why, on another construal of what conceptual engineering involves, the practice is neither a new nor neglected philosophical methodology. The article also argues that semantic externalism is not the root of the implementation problem for conceptual engineering, and that the usual rationale for adopting the practice, one that ties its value to the amelioration of “conceptual defects”, is unsound. (shrink)

According to what is perhaps the dominant picture of reference, what a referential term refers to in a context is determined by what the speaker intends for her audience to identify as the referent. I argue that this sort of broadly Gricean view entails, counterintuitively, that it is impossible to knowingly use referential terms in ways that one expects or intends to be misunderstood. Then I sketch an alternative which can better account for such opaque uses of language, (...) or what I call “sneaky reference.” I close by reflecting on the ramifications of these arguments for the theory of meaning more broadly. (shrink)

Some years ago, Machery, Mallon, Nichols, and Stich reported the results of experiments that reveal, they claim, cross-cultural differences in speaker’s ‘intuitions’ about Kripke’s famous Gödel–Schmidt case. Several authors have suggested, however, that the question they asked their subjects is ambiguous between speaker’s reference and semantic reference. Machery and colleagues have since made a number of replies. It is argued here that these are ineffective. The larger lesson, however, concerns the role that first-order philosophy should, and (...) more importantly should not, play in the design of such experiments and in the evaluation of their results. (shrink)

In this paper, I focus on the alleged distinction between speaker’s reference and semantic reference. I begin by discussing Saul Kripke’s notion of speaker’s reference and the theoretical roles it is supposed to play, arguing that they do not justify the claim that reference comes in two different sorts and highlighting that Kripke’s own definition makes the notion incompatible with the nowadays widely endorsed Gricean project, which aims at explaining semantic reference in terms (...) of speaker’s reference. I then examine an alternative account of speaker’s reference offered by Michael Devitt within his causal theory and express some doubts about its suitability for explaining proper name semantic reference. From all this, I conclude that there is at least some tension between Kripke’s chain of communication picture and the attempt to explain (Griceanly, so to say) semantic properties in terms of speakers’ mental states. (shrink)

My immediate conclusion, therefore, is a modest one. I only specifically rule out the semantic convention for definite descriptions in which the semantic referent just is the speaker's referent. In arguing for that I carefully avoided relying on the helpfulness assumption. But I did, implicitly, make use of the following procedure.In examining a claim that C is the semantic convention (or form of convention) for a term (or class of term), check to see that C is capable of being (...) helpful to the extent that an inspection of cases of successful communication employing that term shows it must be.My broader moral is that such a procedure should be employed in determining what are our semantic conventions. (shrink)

Kripke (1977) views Donnellan's (1966) misdescription cases as cases where semantic reference and speaker's reference come apart. Such cases, however, are also cases where semantic reference conflicts with a distinct species of reference I call "public reference", i.e. the object that the cues publicly available at the time of utterance indicate is the speaker's referent of the utterance. This raises the question: do the misdescription cases trade on the distinction between semantic reference (...) and speaker's reference, or the distinction between semantic reference and public reference? I argue that Kripke's own construal in terms of semantic reference and speaker's reference is at best incomplete, and probably wrong. I also explain the general importance of the notion of 'public reference'. (shrink)

In Korean, reference forms can be omitted so long as the referent can be understood by the interlocutor; speaker/recipient reference terms are most readily omitted because they are easily retrievable from the physical interactional context. The current study represents the first attempt to examine specifically when and why Korean speakers do use an overt reference form in referring to themselves or their recipients even when reference can be understood without such overt forms. It demonstrates that (...) Korean speakers build their talk to incorporate an overt form of speaker/ recipient reference in order to accomplish various interactional projects praising/blaming, responsibility-attribution, disagreement, projecting further talk by the current speaker, or selecting next speaker), often marking that reference form with a particle relevant to the specific action being implemented. Doing overt reference to speaker or recipient is thus a means by which speakers can accomplish other than simple reference that is done with zero anaphora. (shrink)

We report on two experiments investigating the effect of an increased cognitive load for speakers on the choice of referring expressions. Speakers produced story continuations to addressees, in which they referred to characters that were either salient or non-salient in the discourse. In Experiment 1, referents that were salient for the speaker were non-salient for the addressee, and vice versa. In Experiment 2, all discourse information was shared between speaker and addressee. Cognitive load was manipulated by the presence (...) or absence of a secondary task for the speaker. The results show that speakers under load are more likely to produce pronouns, at least when referring to less salient referents. We take this finding as evidence that speakers under load have more difficulties taking discourse salience into account, resulting in the use of expressions that are more economical for themselves. (shrink)

Theoretical accounts of negative expressives such as damn have ascribed two main properties to this type of adjective, namely that they are typically speaker-oriented, and that they can be flexible with regard to their syntactic attachment. However, it is not clear what this means during online sentence processing. For example, is it effortful for comprehenders to derive the speaker's negative attitude conveyed by an expressive adjective, or is it a rapid, automatic process? And do comprehenders understand the (...) class='Hi'>speaker's attitude regardless of the expressive's syntactic position? The current work provides the first evidence supporting theoretical claims by investigating the incremental processing of Italian negative expressive adjectives. In an eye-tracking study, we show that expressive content is rapidly integrated with information about the speaker's attitude, resulting in the anticipation of an upcoming referent, regardless of the expressive's syntactic realization. We argue that comprehenders use expressives as an ostensive cue that allows for automatic retrieval of the speaker's negative attitude. (shrink)

Mandarin speakers, like most other language speakers around the world, use spatial terms to talk about time. However, the direction of their mental temporal representation along the front-back axis remains controversial because they use the spatial term “front” to refer to both earlier times and the future. Although the linguistic distinction between time- and ego-reference-point spatiotemporal metaphors in Mandarin suggests a promising clarification of the above controversy, there is little empirical evidence verifying this distinction. In this study, Mandarin speakers’ (...) time- and ego-reference-point temporal representations on three axes were separately examined through two tasks. In a time-reference-point task, Mandarin speakers judged whether the time point of the second picture was earlier or later than the time point of the first picture, while in an ego-reference-point task, they judged whether an event or phase had happened in the past or would happen in the future. The results indicate that Mandarin speakers construe an earlier-times-in-front-of-later-times temporal sequence and adopt the front-to-the-future orientation. (shrink)

Speakers of English have available a set of terms dedicated to doing individual self-reference: `I' and its grammatical variants, `me', `my', `mine', etc. Speaker selection of other than these dedicated terms may invite special attention for what has prompted their use. This article draws on field recordings of talk-in-interaction in which speakers use `third-person' reference forms when speaking about themselves. We show that third-person forms are recurrently used for representing the views of someone else. We also show (...) how — by drawing on resources such as the distinction between recognitional and non-recognitional person reference forms, and on category bound attributes — the particular third-person term selected can be fitted to and thereby contribute to the action a speaker is implementing through their turn at talk. (shrink)

Speakers often overspecify by encoding more information than is necessary when referring to an object (e.g., “the blue mug” for the only mug in a group of objects). We investigated the role of a partner's linguistic behavior (whether or not they overspecify) on a speaker's own tendency to overspecify. We used a director–matcher task in which speakers interacted with a partner who either consistently overspecified or minimally specified in the color/size dimension (Experiments 1, 2, and 3), as well as (...) with a partner who switched behaviors midway through interaction (Experiments 4 and 5). We found that speakers aligned with their partner's linguistic behavior to produce overspecific or minimally specific descriptions, and we saw little evidence that the alignment was enhanced by lexical or semantic repetition across prime and target trials. Time‐course analyses showed that alignment increased over the course of the interaction, and speakers appeared to track a change in the partner's linguistic behavior, altering their reference strategy to continue matching that of their partner's. These results demonstrate the persistent influence of a partner's behavior on speakers across the duration of an interaction. (shrink)

It is not well known that in his Göttingen period (1900–1916) Edmund Husserl developed a kind of direct reference theory, anticipating,among other things, the distinction between referential and attributive use of adefinite description, which was rediscovered by Keith Donnellan in 1966 and further analysed by Saul Kripke in 1977. This paper defends the claim that Husserl''s idea of the mental act given voice to in an utterance sheds new light on that distinction and particularly on cases where semantic referent (...) and speaker''s referent diverge. It is argued that whenembedded in a dynamic theory of intentionality, the idea of giving-voice-to allows for a pragmatic (as opposed to a purely semantic) analysis of such cases. In Section 1 an example involving a referentially used description is presented, and the view that descriptions that can be used both attributively and referentially are thus ambiguous is criticized. Section 2 is concerned with Husserl''s discussion of a case where someone seems to demonstratively refer to something that he mistakes for something else. On thebasis of this discussion, a dynamic conception of the intentional content (and referent) of the mental act given voice to in an utterance is developed. Section 3 applies this neo-Husserlian conception to the example described in Section 1. Finally, it is shown how this conception serves to elucidate the referential/attributive distinction. (shrink)

Previous studies have shown that language contributes to humans' ability to orient using landmarks and shapes their use of frames of reference for memory. However, the role of environmental experience in shaping spatial cognition has not been investigated. This study addresses such a possibility by examining the use of FoRs in a nonverbal spatial memory task among residents of an Andean community in Peru. Participants consisted of 97 individuals from Ancash Quechua-speaking households who spoke Quechua and/or Spanish and varied (...) considerably with respect to the extent of their experience in the surrounding landscape. The results demonstrated that environmental experience was the only factor significantly related to the preference for allocentric FoRs. The study thus shows that environmental experience can play a role alongside language in shaping habits of spatial representation, and it suggests a new direction of inquiry into the relationships among language, thought, and experience. (shrink)

A pragmatic account of referential communication is developed which presents an alternative to traditional Gricean accounts by focusing on cooperativeness and efficiency, rather than informativity. The results of four language‐production experiments support the view that speakers can be cooperative when producing redundant adjectives, doing so more often when color modification could facilitate the listener's search for the referent in the visual display (Experiment 1a). By contrast, when the listener knew which shape was the target, speakers did not produce redundant color (...) adjectives (Experiment 1b). English speakers used redundant color adjectives more often than Spanish speakers, suggesting that speakers are sensitive to the differential efficiency of prenominal and postnominal modification (Experiment 2). Speakers were also cooperative when using redundant size adjectives (Experiment 3). Overall, these results show how discriminability affects a speaker's choice of referential expression above and beyond considerations of informativity, supporting the view that redundant speakers can be cooperative. (shrink)

Reference is a central topic in philosophy of language, and has been the main focus of discussion about how language relates to the world. R. M. Sainsbury sets out a new approach to the concept, which promises to bring to an end some long-standing debates in semantic theory.There is a single category of referring expressions, all of which deserve essentially the same kind of semantic treatment. Included in this category are both singular and plural referring expressions, complex and non-complex (...) referring expressions, and empty and non-empty referring expressions. Referring expressions are to be described semantically by a reference condition, rather than by being associated with a referent. In arguing for these theses, Sainsbury's book promises to end the fruitless oscillation between Millian and descriptivist views. Millian views insist that every name has a referent, and find it hard to give a good account of names which appear not to have referents, or at least are not known to do so, like ones introduced through error, ones where it is disputed whether they have a bearer and ones used in fiction. Descriptivist theories require that each name be associated with some body of information. These theories fly in the face of the fact names are useful precisely because there is often no overlap of information among speakers and hearers. The alternative position for which the book argues is firmly non-descriptivist, though it also does not require a referent. A much broader view can be taken of which expressions are referring expressions: not just names and pronouns used demonstratively, but also some complex expressions and some anaphoric uses of pronouns.Sainsbury's approach brings reference into line with truth: no one would think that a semantic theory should associate a sentence with a truth value, but it is commonly held that a semantic theory should associate a sentence with a truth condition, a condition which an arbitrary state of the world would have to satisfy in order to make the sentence true. The right analogy is that a semantic theory should associate a referring expression with a reference condition, a condition which an arbitrary object would have to satisfy in order to be the expression's referent.Lucid and accessible, and written with a minimum of technicality, Sainsbury's book also includes a useful historical survey. It will be of interest to those working in logic, mind, and metaphysics as well as essential reading for philosophers of language. (shrink)

It is widely though not universally accepted what speakers refer to in using demonstratives or “discretionary” (as opposed to “automatic”) indexicals depends on their intentions. Even so, people tend not to appreciate the consequences of this claim for the view that demonstratives and most indexicals refer as a function of context: these expressions suffer from a “character deficiency.” No wonder I am asked from time to time why I resist the temptation to include speaker intentions as a parameter of (...) context. So I thought it would be a good idea to compile some of the scattered statements of my main reasons for this evidently radical view. (shrink)

Definite descriptions, I shall argue, have two possible functions. 1] They are used to refer to what a speaker wishes to talk about, but they are also used quite differently. Moreover, a definite description occurring in one and the same sentence may, on different occasions of its use, function in either way. The failure to deal with this duality of function obscures the genuine referring use of definite descriptions. The best known theories of definite descriptions, those of Russell and (...) Strawson, I shall suggest, are both guilty of this. Before discussing this distinction in use, I will mention some features of these theories to which it is especially relevant. (shrink)

Reference and Existence, Saul Kripke's John Locke Lectures for 1973, can be read as a sequel to his classic Naming and Necessity. It confronts important issues left open in that work -- among them, the semantics of proper names and natural kind terms as they occur in fiction and in myth; negative existential statements; the ontology of fiction and myth. In treating these questions, he makes a number of methodological observations that go beyond the framework of his earlier book (...) -- including the striking claim that fiction cannot provide a test for theories of reference and naming. In addition, these lectures provide a glimpse into the transition to the pragmatics of singular reference that dominated his influential paper, " Speaker's Reference and Semantic Reference " -- a paper that helped reorient linguistic and philosophical semantics. Some of the themes have been worked out in later writings by other philosophers -- many influenced by typescripts of the lectures in circulation -- but none have approached the careful, systematic treatment provided here. The virtuosity of Naming and Necessity -- the colloquial ease of the tone, the dazzling, on-the-spot formulations, the logical structure of the overall view gradually emerging over the course of the lectures -- is on display here as well. (shrink)

Brian Loar [1976] observed that, even in the simplest of cases, such as an utterance of (1): ‘He is a stockbroker’, a speaker's audience might misunderstand her utterance even if they correctly identify the referent of the relevant singular term, and understand what is being predicated of it. Numerous theorists, including Bezuidenhout [1997], Heck [1995], Paul [1999], and Récanati [1993, 1995], have used Loar's observation to argue against direct reference accounts of assertoric content and communication, maintaining that, even (...) in these simple cases, the propositional contribution of a referring expression must be more than just its referent. -/- I argue here that, while Loar's observation is correct, the conclusion he and others have sought to draw from it simply does not follow. Rather, his observation helps to remind us of an important Gricean insight into the nature of communicative acts—including acts of speaker-reference—namely, that there is more to understanding a communicative act than merely entertaining what a speaker is intending to communicate thereby. Once we remember this insight, we see that the phenomenon to which Loar is calling our attention should actually be expected given the direct reference theorist's assumptions, together with independently plausible Gricean principles concerning how we make our referential intentions manifest in communication. More generally, the Gricean strategy for explaining the challenge posed by Loar cases suggests a novel way to account for certain crucial anti-direct reference intuitions—one requiring no modification of the original theory (e.g., no invocation of ‘descriptive enrichments’ as in Soames [2002]), thereby allowing for a direct reference account of what is asserted in utterances of ‘simple sentences’ such as (1). (shrink)

Speaker recognition under mismatched conditions is a challenging task. Speech signal is nonlinear and nonstationary, and therefore, difficult to analyze under realistic conditions. Also, in real conditions, the nature of the noise present in speech data is not known a priori. In such cases, the performance of speaker identification or speaker verification degrades considerably under realistic conditions. Any SR system uses a voice activity detector as the front-end subsystem of the whole system. The performance of most VADs (...) deteriorates at the front end of the SR task or system under degraded conditions or in realistic conditions where noise plays a major role. Recently, speech data analysis and processing using Norden E. Huang’s empirical mode decomposition combined with Hilbert transform, commonly referred to as Hilbert–Huang transform, has become an emerging trend. EMD is an a posteriori, adaptive, data analysis tool used in time domain that is widely accepted by the research community. Recently, speech data analysis and speech data processing for speech recognition and SR tasks using EMD have been increasing. EMD-based VAD has become an important adaptive subsystem of the SR system that mostly mitigates the effect of mismatch between the training and the testing phase. Recently, we have developed a VAD algorithm using a zero-frequency filter-assisted peaking resonator and EMD. In this article, the efficacy of an EMD-based VAD algorithm is studied at the front end of a text-independent language-independent SI task for the speaker’s data collected in three languages at five different places, such as home, street, laboratory, college campus, and restaurant, under realistic conditions using EDIROL-R09 HR, a 24-bit wav/mp3 recorder. The performance of this proposed SI task is compared against the traditional energy-based VAD in terms of percentage identification rate. In both cases, widely accepted Mel frequency cepstral coefficients are computed by employing frame processing from the extracted voiced speech regions using the respective VAD techniques from the realistic speech utterances, and are used as a feature vector for speaker modeling using popular Gaussian mixture models. The experimental results showed that the proposed SI task with the VAD algorithm using ZFFPR and EMD at its front end performs better than the SI task with short-term energy-based VAD when used at its front end, and is somewhat encouraging. (shrink)

. Speaker recognition has been an active research area for many years. Methods to represent and quantify information embedded in speech signal are termed as features of the signal. The features are obtained, modeled and stored for further reference when the system is to be tested. Decision whether to accept or reject speakers are taken based on parameters of the data modeling techniques. Real world offers various degradations to the signal that hamper the signal quality. The degradations may (...) be due to ambient background noise, reverberation or multispeaker scenario. This paper presents a survey of various feature extraction, data modeling methods, metrics that are used to take the decisions and methods that can be used to preprocess the degraded data that have been used to perform the task of speaker recognition. (shrink)

In this paper I discuss three different ways in which we can refer to those we teach: as learner, as student or as speaker. My interest is not in any aspect of teaching but in the question whether there can be such a thing as emancipatory education. Working with ideas from Jacques Rancière I offer the suggestion that emancipatory education can be characterised as education which starts from the assumption that all students can speak. It starts from the assumption, (...) in other words, that students neither lack a capacity for speech, nor that they are producing noise. The idea of the student as a speaker is not offered as an empirical fact but as a different starting point for emancipatory education, one that positions equality at the beginning of education, not at its end. (shrink)

While speakers have been shown to adapt to the knowledge state of their addressee in choosing referring expressions, they often also show some egocentric tendencies. The current paper aims to provide an explanation for this “mixed” behavior by presenting a model that derives such patterns from the probabilistic combination of both the speaker's and the addressee's perspectives. To test our model, we conducted a language production experiment, in which participants had to refer to objects in a context that also (...) included a visually misleading object whose function was either known to both partners, or known just to the speaker but not the addressee. Modeling results indicate that the experimental findings cannot be explained by assuming that speakers tailor a referring expression solely to their own perspective or to the perspective of their addressee. Instead, accounting for the behavioral pattern requires an approach where both perspectives influence the choice of referring expressions. Nevertheless, in our situation, speakers consider their partner's perspective more than their own. (shrink)

The various conclusions reached in this paper can be drawn together and briefly summarised in the following thesis: It is necessary to use variables ranging over times explicitly in the object language in the logical analysis of temporal reference in English. A discussion of Arthur Prior ideas, which are in direct opposition to those encompassed here, focuses on the principle that the point of view of the speaker dominates all subordinate clauses, which I maintain and Prior rejects. This (...) leads me to oppose the Priorean approach of considering tenses along the lines of propositional modal operators and in particular to criticise the notion of a proposition with variable truth value. My discussion concerns not only tenses, but also dates, and seeks to provide an account of tenses and dates together in a unified framework. (shrink)

To reduce ambiguity across a conversation, interlocutors reach temporary conventions or referential precedents on how to refer to an entity. Despite their central role in communication, the cognitive underpinnings of the interpretation of precedents remain unclear, specifically the role and mechanisms by which information related to the speaker is integrated. We contrast predictions of one-stage, original two-stage, and extended two-stage models for the processing of speaker information and provide evidence favoring the latter: we show that both stages are (...) sensitive to speaker-specific information. Using an experimental paradigm based on visual-world eye tracking in the context of a referential communication task, we look at the moment-by-moment interpretation of precedents and focus on the temporal profile of the influence of the speaker and linguistic information when facing ambiguity. We find two clearly identifiable moments where speaker-specific information has its effects on reference resolution. We conclude that these two stages reflect two distinct cognitive mechanisms, with different timings, and rely on different representational formats for encoding and accessing information about the speaker: a cue-driven memory retrieval process that mediates language processing and an inferential mechanism based on perspective-taking abilities. (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)

A standard view of reference holds that a speaker's use of a name refers to a certain thing in virtue of the speaker's associating a condition with that use that singles the referent out. This view has been criticized by Saul Kripke as empirically inadequate. Recently, however, it has been argued that a version of the standard view, a /response-based theory of reference/, survives the charge of empirical inadequacy by allowing that associated conditions may be largely (...) or even entirely implicit. This paper argues that response-based theories of reference are prey to a variant of the empirical inadequacy objection, because they are ill-suited to accommodate the successful use of proper names by pre-school children. Further, I argue that there is reason to believe that normal adults are, by and large, no different from children with respect to how the referents of their names are determined. I conclude that speakers typically refer /positionally/: the referent of a use of a proper name is typically determined by aspects of the speaker's position, rather than by associated conditions present, however implicitly, in her psychology. (shrink)

Utterances can convey more information than they explicitly encode, and speakers exploit communicative conventions in order to say more with less. However, the burden this places on perceivers is not well understood. This chapter examines the effect of speaker-specific information on pragmatic inferences using data from an experiment which investigated the time course of the use of pragmatic information in language comprehension. Previous evidence suggests that comprehenders who encounter a referential form, including a modifier that commonly indicates contrastiveness, assume (...) that the referential form is being used contrastively. Thus, they consequently look to the relevant object in the scene very early when processing the referential expression. In this case, people appear to be implicitly following H. P. Grice’s maxim of quantity. This chapter demonstrates that comprehenders stop using contrastive information early in resolving reference when speakers consistently do not use contrastive elements appropriately, consistent with a pragmatic explanation of referential contrast effects. (shrink)

According to the orthodox account developed by Kaplan, indexicals like I, you, and now invariably refer to elements of the context of speech. This essay argues that the orthodoxy is wrong. I, you, and the like are shifted by certain modal operators and hence can fail to refer to elements of the context, for example, I can fail to refer to the speaker. More precisely, indexicals are syntactically akin to logical variables. They can be free, in which case they (...) work, roughly, on the Kaplan model. But they can also be bound: this happens, in a systematic fashion, when they are in the scope of epistemic modals or attitude verbs. The new view has two interesting philosophical consequences. First, it vindicates a broadly Fregean perspective on referential expressions, essentially refuting the idea that indexicals are rigid designators. Second, it suggests a new picture of the interaction between context and linguistic meaning: compositional semantics does not need to look at the context and hence has no need for a context parameter. (shrink)

In this paper, I do four things. First, I argue that Recanati’s recent argument for intentionalist semantics for demonstratives is erroneous. I do this partly by suggesting that demonstrations should be treated as features of Kaplanian context. Second, I explain why the classic ambiguity objection against conventionalist positions regarding demonstratives is not in any way less problematic for intentionalism. Third, I propose a novel semantic framework for demonstratives that is able to simultaneously explain the appeal of some prominent conventionalist and (...) intentionalist intuitions. Finally, I present some additional advantages of my view, e.g. the prospects of unifying the semantics for bare demonstratives with that for other related types of expression. (shrink)

I take it as given that we manage to linguistically refer to objects we can neither perceive nor uniquely describe. Kripke accounts for this fact by appeal to causal-historical chains of communication. But Evans famously presented what has seemed to many a devastating counterexample to Kripke’s view: the phenomenon of reference-shifting. Here, I’ll agree with critics that Kripke’s view is insufficient to handle cases of reference shift, but I’ll argue for an alternative version of the causal-historical account that (...) is immune to Evans’ counterexample. The key move will be at the foundations; it will require a change in what it is we’re giving a causal-historical account of. Critically, I’ll argue that we should reject two claims associated with the causal-historical picture. First, we should reject the claim that names are used to think of their referents. Second, we should reject the claim that later speakers defer to earlier ones. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Learner Student Speaker Coda Notes References.

It is commonly supposed that an utterance of a demonstrative, such as “that”, refers to a given object only if the speaker intends to refer to that object. This paper poses three challenges to this theory. First, the theory threatens to beg the question by defining the content of the speaker’s intention in terms of reference. Second, the theory makes psychologically implausible demands on the speaker. Third, the theory entails that there can be no demonstratives in (...) thought. (shrink)

In this paper I discuss three different ways in which we can refer to those we teach: as learner, as student or as speaker. My interest is not in any aspect of teaching but in the question whether there can be such a thing as emancipatory education. Working with ideas from Jacques Rancière I offer the suggestion that emancipatory education can be characterised as education which starts from the assumption that all students can speak. It starts from the assumption, (...) in other words, that students neither lack a capacity for speech, nor that they are producing noise. The idea of the student as a speaker is not offered as an empirical fact but as a different starting point for emancipatory education, one that positions equality at the beginning of education, not at its end. (shrink)

This article makes a number of points about reference, both speaker reference and linguistic reference. The bottom line is simple: reference ain't easy — at least not nearly as easy as commonly supposed. Much of what speakers do that passes for reference is really something else, and much of what passes for linguistic reference is really nothing more than speaker reference. Referring is one of the basic things we do with words, (...) and it would be a good idea to understand what that involves and requires before worrying about the linguistic means by which this is done. (shrink)

The dominant tradition in analytic philosophy of language views reference as paradigmatically enabled by the acquisition of words from other speakers. Via chains of transmission, these words connect the referrer to the referent. Such a picture assumes the notion of a word as a stable mapping between sound and meaning. Utterances are constructed out of such stable mappings. While this picture of language is both intuitive and historically distinguished, various trends and programs that have developed over the last few (...) decades in theoretical linguistics suggest an alternative. According to these approaches, the word, conceived of as a linguistic ‘building block’, has no special theoretical significance. While natural language systems generate structures mapping sounds onto meanings, they need not do so by composing elements which themselves specify such mappings. I shall describe some of these developments, and show how they pose a problem for traditional philosophical views of language and communication, before identifying an alternative approach to reference which does not rely on this common-sense picture of words. (shrink)