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This chapter presents the author’s recollections from 1964 until 1968, as a graduate student in the Philosophy Department—that is, in the Sage School of Philosophy—at Cornell University, where Keith Donnellan was a professor. Donnellan is described as an extraordinarily nice person and an effective and encouraging teacher. He also became a good friend.

This chapter is a story about the author’s three favorite philosophers—Donnellan, Russell, and Frege—about how Donnellan’s concept of having in mind relates to ideas of the others, and especially about an aspect of Donnellan’s concept that has been insufficiently discussed: how this epistemic state can be transmitted from one person to another.

The name “Jacob Horn” comes from the book The Horn Papers (1945), published and apparently written by William Horn of Topeka, Kansas. He presented this book to the public as if it were the newly discovered diary of an eighteenth-century American, his great-great-great-grandfather. Scholars eventually concluded that it was a hoax, and it is assumed that the scholars were right, and that Jacob Horn does not exist and never did. Now consider these statements: (1) Jacob Horn does not exist. (2) Jacob Horn exists. (3) Jacob Horn was an important person in colonial America. (1) is true. (2) and (3) are false. This chapter uses a so-called reflexive-referential theory to extend Donnellan’s ideas to provide an account not only of the truth-conditions of (1) and (2), but also an account of their content—what one says with (1) and (2), and what one says generally with statements like (3) that involve empty names, and what the participants in a debate about existence, like the scholars who poured over The Horn Papers, are saying to one another.

This chapter seeks to bring to light some of Keith Donnellan’s underappreciated views concerning the surprising metaphysical claim that is supposed to follow from a popular theory of reference. The claim is that certain “theoretical identifications of science”—that is, statements of the form “Water is H₂O” or “Gold is the element with atomic number 79”—are necessary truths even though they can be known only through a posteriori or empirical methods, not through a priori reasoning or analysis. Such claims were famously made by Kripke and Putnam in the 1970s. Donnellan’s views on the matter are underappreciated, because not all of them have been published. But the views that emerge from both Donnellan’s published paper “Kripke and Putnam on Natural Kind Terms” and Nathan Salmon’s discussion of Donnellan’s unpublished papers focus on a set of issues that are underdeveloped in the usual discussions of “the necessary a posteriori”.

In “Reference and Definite Descriptions,” Donnellan deepened Strawson’s classic critique of Russell’s theory of descriptions. For Russell, definite descriptions involve generality and quantification; one is speaking in the general way that quantifiers facilitate. By contrast, Strawson insisted that there was singularity here; descriptions characteristically function as singular terms referring to individuals. Donnellan endorsed and developed the singularity idea, but additionally made room for another kind of use of definite descriptions, an “attributive use,” something closer to what Russell mistakenly thought was their only use. This chapter argues that there is a Russellian strain in Donnellan’s thinking about reference. Reference and the reference-involving de re attitudes require an appropriately strong cognitive connection to the referent. Mere conceptual satisfaction, à la Frege, is not sufficient.

This chapter focuses on Keith Donnellan’s innovative 1966 paper “Reference and Definite Descriptions.” It suggests that it was in this paper that the now so influential “direct reference” semantic turn originated. It considers Kripe’s analysis of Donnellan, and suggests, contra Kripke, that Donnellan’s notion of referential use is designed to be of semantic significance. Indeed in 1966, Donnellan was submitting in the late sections of his paper, as he was analogizing with Russell’s notion of logically proper names, that referential uses may well be the ground zero of semantic (logical) reference. This is in contrast to Frege’s ground zero of semantics, the notion of denotation.

This chapter compares two different conceptions of and foundations for semantics. Ultimately the two conceptions and foundations go back to ideas of Frege and Russell. To put it in a nutshell: for Frege, at the ground zero of semantics there is denotation; for Russell, instead, at the ground zero of semantics there is reference. Reference and denotation are two distinct semantic relations that one should not confuse. The first, that of reference, is grounded in natural-historical processes flowing from objects; the other, that of denotation, is grounded in the logical relations of truth and satisfaction. In the past thirty years, most philosophers of language have agreed with Kripke against Donnellan. The prevailing view has been that Donnellan’s distinction between referential and attributive uses of a definite description belongs to pragmatics. Semantics, in fact, deals only with conventional rules of denotation. The chapter suggests that one can look at what Donnellan is doing from a different perspective. Instead of pursuing Frege’s denotation-based semantic project, as Kripke in the end seems to do, Donnellan—distinguishing between referential and attributive uses of definite descriptions—is reviving Russell’s approach to semantics.

Around 1970, an uprising against Frege’s doctrines was initiated by “the quartet”: Keith Donnellan, Saul Kripke, Hilary Putnam, and David Kaplan. Indeed “the quartet engendered a set of ideas...that is often called ‘Millian’ or ‘direct reference’ semantics.” As a result, a new tradition in philosophy was established, called “American referential realism.” This chapter suggests that two different models of the functioning of natural language are at work within American referential realism: the psychological model of the functioning of language and the social model of the functioning of language. The chapter outlines some of the basic features of these models.

This chapter discusses some issues inspired by a well-known paper of Keith Donnellan, “Reference and Definite Descriptions,”. Donnellan's paper claims to give decisive objections both to Russell's theory of definite descriptions (taken as a theory about English) and to Strawson's. The chapter' concern is not primarily with the question: is Donnellan right, or is Russell (or Strawson)? Rather, it is with the question: do the considerations in Donnellan's paper refute Russell's theory (or Strawson's)? For definiteness, it focuses on Donnellan versus Russell, leaving Strawson aside. And about this issue it draws a definite conclusion, one which will illuminate a few methodological maxims about language.

This chapter discusses the relations between three approaches to the referential/attributive distinction: the Gricean approach advocated by Kripke and others, the two-dimensional approach pioneered by Kaplan and Stalnaker, and the Millian approach favoured by Donnellan. In contrast to the two-dimensional approach, the Millian approach honours the intuitions which led to the rejection of descriptivism, but it is subject to Gricean criticism based on the speaker’s reference/semantic reference distinction. The chapter shows that, suitably elaborated and revised, the Millian approach can be made immune to that criticism. The resulting view, it is argued, applies beyond the case of definite descriptions. It also supports Austin’s and Strawson’s speech act theoretic approach to reference and truth—an approach which Grice initially dismissed and which Travis insightfully attempted to defend and resurrect.