Discussing Keith Donnellan's distinction between attributive and referential uses of descriptions, Gareth Evans considered a speaker he found it natural to describe as having “given expression to” a singular thought, though he insisted she was not referring to the person she has in mind. On accounts otherwise similar to Evans's, to express a singular thought just is to refer. Thus, as he does not explain why this speaker might speak this way, it is tempting to ignore this as a slip. On the contrary, I shall argue, Evans has good reason to deny that picture of reference. My interest, though, is in the case itself. It turns out it is a presentational use of descriptions: it provides its audience a cognitive ability they would otherwise lack. This characterization raises deep theoretical questions which I only begin to address here. My goal is to show that we ought to address those questions, for there is no better way of understanding examples like Evans's than to see them as presentational.

中文翻译：

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描述的陈述性使用

在讨论基思·唐纳兰（Keith Donnellan）在描述的定语和指称用法之间的区别时，加雷斯·埃文斯（Gareth Evans）认为，他认为形容为“表达了”一个奇异的思想是很自然的，尽管他坚持认为她并不是在指所指的那个人。基于与埃文斯（Evans）相似的说法，表达单一思想只是指称。因此，由于他没有解释为什么这位发言者可能会这样讲，所以很容易忽略它。相反，我将辩称，埃文斯有充分的理由否认这种参考形象。不过，我的兴趣在于案件本身。事实证明，这只是一个陈述性的使用描述：它为听众提供了他们原本缺乏的认知能力。这种表征提出了深刻的理论问题，我仅在这里开始解决。我的目标是表明我们应该解决这些问题，因为没有比像埃文斯的例子那样理解例子的更好的方法了。