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The Reference Book
John Hawthorne and David Manley present an original treatment of the semantic phenomenon of reference and the cognitive phenomenon of singular thought. In Part I, they argue against the idea that either is tied to a special relation of causal or epistemic acquaintance. Part II challenges the alleged semantic rift between definite and indefinite descriptions on the one hand, and names and demonstratives on the other--a division that has been motivated in part by appeals to considerations of acquaintance. Drawing on recent work in linguistics and philosophical semantics, Hawthorne and Manley explore a more unified account of all four types of expression according to which none of them paradigmatically fits the profile of a referential term. On the preferred framework put forward in The Reference Book , all four types of expression involve existential quantification but admit of uses that exhibit many of the traits associated with reference--a phenomenon that is due to the presence
of what Hawthorne and Manley call a 'singular restriction' on the existentially quantified domain. The book concludes by drawing out some implications of the proposed semantic picture for the traditional categories of reference and singular thought.
of what Hawthorne and Manley call a 'singular restriction' on the existentially quantified domain. The book concludes by drawing out some implications of the proposed semantic picture for the traditional categories of reference and singular thought.
274 pages, Hardcover
First published March 29, 2012
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September 30, 2024
As you will see from my notes (below), the book sort of ends at its most interesting
Fine’s (2009) distinction between
• Facts that are semantic as to topic = they pertain to the semantic features of things
• Facts that are semantic as to status = their truth hinges on the meaning of the expressions they concern
, and the latter allow us to cash out the idea of object-dependence thus:
- An expression e is object-dependent (on an occasion) for its meaningfulness iff it is a semantic-as-to-status type of (semantic) fact that a sentence containing e is true (on that occasion) iff there is some x such that e is about x,
- And a term has an object-dependent meaning (on an occasion) iff, for some x, it is a semantic-as-to-status type of (semantic) fact that e is about x.
(Hawthorne and Manley 2012: 9n) In other words, semantic-as-to-status facts are those facts that make it true that an expression is object-dependent for its meaningfulness iff we need something it is about for it to be true. Those facts therefore provide a way of connecting meaningfulness to truth via aboutness.
Two possible accounts of singular thought: what makes a thought singular can either be the way it is entertained, or the nature of its content itself.
Hawthorne and Manley (H&M) call ‘liberalism’ a rejection of the acquaintance constraint on reference. Although Lois Lane is acquainted with Clark Kent, there are plenty of contexts where she doesn’t count as knowing who he is (64). Against Evans, they contrive examples with mirrors showing that one can have singular thoughts about some x even if the acquaintance channel is disturbed, notably in a way that makes the tracking of the object in space unreliable (79). Instead of appealing to acquaintance, H&M suggest that, in order to be in a position to disallow utterances like ‘I knew you were the murderer’, from a detective to a murderer he dubbed ‘Vlad’ in the beginning of the investigation, the theory only need point out that the detective is unable to identify the murderer in a canonical way other than as being the murderer (e.g. by sight or name). It is not super clear, however, how the detective could identify the murderer in the required way without being necessarily acquainted with him. What is more, H&M also want to say that the detective’s utterance ‘I knew you were insane’, in the same context, would be felicitous. Liberalism is a more appealing view when put in the context of minimalist semantics, to argue for the ability of a speaker to grasp the propositional content of an utterance without doing all the reference fixing first. On the subject of covert domain restrictions, H&M propose to distinguish between two ways in which the restriction might be manifested: either the restriction is manifest from the simple use of the quantified expression, without any need for the speaker to further perform cognitive acts (‘candid restrictions’), or such acts are needed (‘coy restrictions’).
More interesting, H&M mention the idea of handling belief reports using UCs and QDR. In ‘Ernest believes that a certain person is more devious than anyone else’, and supposing Ernest is crazy and believes he is being followed by a devious CIA agent (144f), the idea is that the speaker’s use of the indefinite ‘a’ triggers a restriction of the circumstances of evaluation of what follows to the singleton set of Ernest’s belief worlds (what Schlenker (2009) calls a ‘local context’), because it is there that singular reference can be secured (i.e. it is only at Ernest’s belief world, i.e. (what the indefinite picks out) at worlds relevant in the local context, that who the person is can be settled). Therefore, it will not do to say that the presupposition as a whole is satisfied in worlds relevant at the local context (i.e. Ernest’s belief world), because at Ernest’s belief world, it is not true that Ernest (merely) believes that he is being followed by a devious CIA agent: at Ernest’s belief world, Ernest is being followed by a devious CIA agent.
The possibility to use covert restriction to achieve singular reference generalizes the Kripkean analysis of proper names.
‘Intensional anaphora. It has been noted by Geach and others that specific indefinites license anaphoric pronouns within the scope of intensional verbs in a way that patterns with their behavior outside intensional contexts. Thus I can say: ‘Ernest thinks that a certain crazy clown is following him. Ernest plans to trap him.’ (146) This to consider in a discussion of the analogy between deixis and reference (Recanati 2005): can you same-track objects in other modes than visual perception (hallucination, imagination, dream)?
H&M (197) oppose the idea that ordinary present-tense utterances are saturated by a time. For instance, ‘The cat is on the mat’ uttered by someone now expresses the proposition that the cat is on the mat now. But we can say ‘The cat is on the mat. That didn’t used to be true.’ However, this presupposes that the proponent of saturation by time is committed to being an essentialist about indexicality as well, and to hold that ‘The cat is on the mat’ expresses the proposition that the cat is on the mat now, and not that the cat is on the mat at t, since, in the latter case, the proposition didn’t used to be either true or false: it was indeterminate, since it was a future-tense utterance.
Interesting discussion of the predicative view of proper names (224f), establishing, among other things, that proper names attract only highly unalienable features of the person they name (‘Mary the judge’ is felicitous, and constitutes a complex name, while ‘*frustrated Mary’ is not, and does not). The discussion brings a distinction between calling and describing to salience: it is one thing to describe someone as a Smith, and another to call that person ‘Smith’ (229). The first thing can be identified to the description of a naming practice, while the second thing consists in engaging in that very practice. Likewise, ‘Bill is a knucklehead’ is an act of describing, but ‘Knucklehead fell down’ and ‘Knucklehead, go upstairs!’ are acts of calling (i.e. they are parasitic on the description of some x (e.g., Bill) as a knucklehead).
The general idea behind H&M’s book, as they emphasize in the conclusion, is that language need covert operators or material to achieve reference, barring rare exceptions like ‘I’. Eliminativism about reference would be dialed down to eliminativism about voiced expressions, or PF (246). ‘If this is the case, however, one might wonder: why are these referential lexemes never, or almost never, vocalized? One bold hypothesis recently suggested by Paul Pietroski is that there are no referential lexemes: the language organ does not, in its natural course of operations, allow them. Insofar as there are referential vehicles of thought—or terms of Mentalese—these are simply never lexicalized.’ (id) H&M remain neutral on Pietroski’s hypothesis, and end up embracing a Fodorian psychosemantics.
Fine’s (2009) distinction between
• Facts that are semantic as to topic = they pertain to the semantic features of things
• Facts that are semantic as to status = their truth hinges on the meaning of the expressions they concern
, and the latter allow us to cash out the idea of object-dependence thus:
- An expression e is object-dependent (on an occasion) for its meaningfulness iff it is a semantic-as-to-status type of (semantic) fact that a sentence containing e is true (on that occasion) iff there is some x such that e is about x,
- And a term has an object-dependent meaning (on an occasion) iff, for some x, it is a semantic-as-to-status type of (semantic) fact that e is about x.
(Hawthorne and Manley 2012: 9n) In other words, semantic-as-to-status facts are those facts that make it true that an expression is object-dependent for its meaningfulness iff we need something it is about for it to be true. Those facts therefore provide a way of connecting meaningfulness to truth via aboutness.
Two possible accounts of singular thought: what makes a thought singular can either be the way it is entertained, or the nature of its content itself.
Hawthorne and Manley (H&M) call ‘liberalism’ a rejection of the acquaintance constraint on reference. Although Lois Lane is acquainted with Clark Kent, there are plenty of contexts where she doesn’t count as knowing who he is (64). Against Evans, they contrive examples with mirrors showing that one can have singular thoughts about some x even if the acquaintance channel is disturbed, notably in a way that makes the tracking of the object in space unreliable (79). Instead of appealing to acquaintance, H&M suggest that, in order to be in a position to disallow utterances like ‘I knew you were the murderer’, from a detective to a murderer he dubbed ‘Vlad’ in the beginning of the investigation, the theory only need point out that the detective is unable to identify the murderer in a canonical way other than as being the murderer (e.g. by sight or name). It is not super clear, however, how the detective could identify the murderer in the required way without being necessarily acquainted with him. What is more, H&M also want to say that the detective’s utterance ‘I knew you were insane’, in the same context, would be felicitous. Liberalism is a more appealing view when put in the context of minimalist semantics, to argue for the ability of a speaker to grasp the propositional content of an utterance without doing all the reference fixing first. On the subject of covert domain restrictions, H&M propose to distinguish between two ways in which the restriction might be manifested: either the restriction is manifest from the simple use of the quantified expression, without any need for the speaker to further perform cognitive acts (‘candid restrictions’), or such acts are needed (‘coy restrictions’).
More interesting, H&M mention the idea of handling belief reports using UCs and QDR. In ‘Ernest believes that a certain person is more devious than anyone else’, and supposing Ernest is crazy and believes he is being followed by a devious CIA agent (144f), the idea is that the speaker’s use of the indefinite ‘a’ triggers a restriction of the circumstances of evaluation of what follows to the singleton set of Ernest’s belief worlds (what Schlenker (2009) calls a ‘local context’), because it is there that singular reference can be secured (i.e. it is only at Ernest’s belief world, i.e. (what the indefinite picks out) at worlds relevant in the local context, that who the person is can be settled). Therefore, it will not do to say that the presupposition as a whole is satisfied in worlds relevant at the local context (i.e. Ernest’s belief world), because at Ernest’s belief world, it is not true that Ernest (merely) believes that he is being followed by a devious CIA agent: at Ernest’s belief world, Ernest is being followed by a devious CIA agent.
The possibility to use covert restriction to achieve singular reference generalizes the Kripkean analysis of proper names.
‘Intensional anaphora. It has been noted by Geach and others that specific indefinites license anaphoric pronouns within the scope of intensional verbs in a way that patterns with their behavior outside intensional contexts. Thus I can say: ‘Ernest thinks that a certain crazy clown is following him. Ernest plans to trap him.’ (146) This to consider in a discussion of the analogy between deixis and reference (Recanati 2005): can you same-track objects in other modes than visual perception (hallucination, imagination, dream)?
H&M (197) oppose the idea that ordinary present-tense utterances are saturated by a time. For instance, ‘The cat is on the mat’ uttered by someone now expresses the proposition that the cat is on the mat now. But we can say ‘The cat is on the mat. That didn’t used to be true.’ However, this presupposes that the proponent of saturation by time is committed to being an essentialist about indexicality as well, and to hold that ‘The cat is on the mat’ expresses the proposition that the cat is on the mat now, and not that the cat is on the mat at t, since, in the latter case, the proposition didn’t used to be either true or false: it was indeterminate, since it was a future-tense utterance.
Interesting discussion of the predicative view of proper names (224f), establishing, among other things, that proper names attract only highly unalienable features of the person they name (‘Mary the judge’ is felicitous, and constitutes a complex name, while ‘*frustrated Mary’ is not, and does not). The discussion brings a distinction between calling and describing to salience: it is one thing to describe someone as a Smith, and another to call that person ‘Smith’ (229). The first thing can be identified to the description of a naming practice, while the second thing consists in engaging in that very practice. Likewise, ‘Bill is a knucklehead’ is an act of describing, but ‘Knucklehead fell down’ and ‘Knucklehead, go upstairs!’ are acts of calling (i.e. they are parasitic on the description of some x (e.g., Bill) as a knucklehead).
The general idea behind H&M’s book, as they emphasize in the conclusion, is that language need covert operators or material to achieve reference, barring rare exceptions like ‘I’. Eliminativism about reference would be dialed down to eliminativism about voiced expressions, or PF (246). ‘If this is the case, however, one might wonder: why are these referential lexemes never, or almost never, vocalized? One bold hypothesis recently suggested by Paul Pietroski is that there are no referential lexemes: the language organ does not, in its natural course of operations, allow them. Insofar as there are referential vehicles of thought—or terms of Mentalese—these are simply never lexicalized.’ (id) H&M remain neutral on Pietroski’s hypothesis, and end up embracing a Fodorian psychosemantics.
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