Abstract
According to Mario Gómez-Torrente in Roads to Reference, the reference of a demonstrative is fixed in an object by the speaker’s referential intentions (IRH). I argue that this is a mistake. First, I draw attention to a venerable alternative theory that Gómez-Torrente surprisingly overlooks: the reference is fixed in an object directly by a relation established in perceiving the object. Next I criticize IRH, arguing that it is implausible, redundant, and misleading. Finally, I present a theory of demonstrations that is like the alternative theory for demonstratives. For, though demonstrations do not determine the reference of demonstratives, they play an independent referential role which is important in explaining David Kaplan’s famous Carnap-Agnew example and many others including some of Gómez-Torrente’s.
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Notes
All citations of Gómez-Torrente are to this work.
Hanna (1993) is a helpful discussion of Husserl, relating his views to contemporary discussions.
Almog attributes the view to Donnellan without evidence; for discussion, see Devitt (2015, 111 n. 4.)
Some may be tempted to clutch at the popular weasel word ‘tacit’ at this point. But, absent an account of what it is to tacitly intend to refer, this move yields no explanation.
Developmental evidence (Hakes, 1980) suggests that the capacity to have metalinguistic thoughts comes later, in middle childhood.
There is a theoretical need to distinguish much of the behavior of these organisms, including their referring behavior, from mere bodily movements; we need to distinguish what an organism does, in some sense, from what just happens to it. It is natural to say that the former behavior is intentional. But, according to what Michael Bratman calls “the Simple View” (1984), a behavior is intentional in virtue of having a certain intention as its immediate cause. I follow Bratman in presuming that this view is wrong. If it is not wrong, then we would need some less cognitive notion than this intentional to distinguish these behaviors from mere bodily movements.
Similarly, of analogously parasitic causal-descriptive theories of proper names (Devitt and Sterelny, 1999, 61).
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Thanks to Andrea Bianchi and Dunja Jutronić for comments on a draft.
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Devitt, M. The irrelevance of intentions to refer: demonstratives and demonstrations. Philos Stud 179, 995–1004 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-021-01682-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-021-01682-5