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Theories of reference

University of British Columbia

The aim of this thesis is to put in both historical and logical perspective certain features of current theories of reference. The theory of reference came to life as a separate subject around the turn of the century in the writings of Gottlob Frege and Rertrand Russell. Although their theories are quite different in detail, they have some important features in common. One of these is the methodological commitment to study language on its own, as a set of sentences more or less. This is reflected in the theory of reference by their determination to describe how expressions refer without regard for the linguistic or non-linguistic context they occur in. Another important common feature of the two "classical" theories, as I will call them, is that expressions accomplish reference by specifying a set of conditions such that the referent and only the referent satisfy them. In recent years these two assumptions have been questioned by philosophers such as Saul Kripke, Keith Donnellan, David Kaplan, and others who have been developing what can fairly be called the "new" theory of reference. In following the development from the classical to the new theories, I concentrate on the set of problems generated by the phenomenon of referentially opaque contexts. After setting out, in Chapter I, the main features of Russell's and Frege's theories, I devote a chapter to W. V. O. Quine's considerable contribution to our understanding of these contexts. I discuss, among other things, the relationship between a certain understanding of modal contexts and the metaphysical theory of essentialism and try to determine to what extent Quine was right in condemning quantified modal logic on the grounds that it is committed to essentialism. The third and final chapter is devoted to the new theories of reference. Throughout the thesis I am concerned to relate a whole range of important distinctions whose interconnections have not been sufficiently well understood. Apart from the distinction between reference accomplished by means of a set of conditions and reference linking term and object directly, there is Quine's distinction between opaque and transparent contexts, Frege's between oblique and direct ones, Russell's between primary and secondary scopes of definite descriptions, Saul Kripke's between rigid and non-rigid designators, K. Donnellan's between referential and attributive uses of definite descriptions, and the various interpretations of the medieval De Re - De Dicto distinction. I think that there is a general agreement that all these and some other distinctions are related in various ways. In this thesis I describe just some of these relations. My aim is not to come to any definite conclusions about reference, but merely to understand how the different conclusions which philosophers have already reached relate to one another.

Text

2010-02-26

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http://hdl.handle.net/2429/20962

Philosophy

University of British Columbia

Graduate