Abstract
Roads to Reference: An Essay on Reference Fixing in Natural Language by Mario Gómez-Torrente provides an ample attack against certain more recent variants of descriptivism in the theory of reference. The book discusses a wide variety of expressions, but the focus of this short note is on proper names and natural kind terms. In the case of proper names, indeterminacy plays an important role in Gómez-Torrente’s critical argument. Some questions related to it are raised. As to natural kind terms, the differences between ordinary kind terms and (proto-) scientific kind terms are discussed, and the somewhat ignored relevance of reference borrowing for natural kind terms is emphasized.
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Notes
Both these papers were written before I had had the opportunity to read Gómez-Torrente’s book.
Often (as here) such descriptions include other proper names, but the assumption obviously is that all proper names can be eventually eliminated with the help of descriptions (and similarly for natural kind terms).
Causal descriptivism is quite implausible as a theory of meaning (see Raatikainen, 2020); consequently, it is reasonable for its advocates to interpret it as a version of weak descriptivism only from the beginning.
I think that the much-discussed case of jade, where people began to count two different minerals as jade, is an example (cf. Gómez-Torrente, 2019, pp. 152–53, 190).
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Raatikainen, P. Indeterminacy and reference: comments on Roads to Reference. Philos Stud 179, 987–994 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-021-01681-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-021-01681-6