Search Results

In the ideal (and normal) case of successful direct reference to an individual particular (1) there exists a particular individual that the speaker means (i.e. intends to refer to), (2) the singular term (name or description) the speaker uses applies to that individual, (3) there is an individual the audience would, in the circumstances, naturally take to be the object of reference, and (4) the latter is identical with the intended object of reference. There can occur cases of failure of one or more of these conditions. Various possibilities of description of such cases are listed. What is important is not to choose between them but to understand both the normal case and these possibilities.

The discovery of the twin categories of reference and singular thought is widely felt to be one of the landmark achievements of twentieth-century analytic philosophy. On the one hand there is the distinction between bona fide referential expressions of natural language and those that are about objects only in some looser sense. On the other hand there is a corresponding distinction between a thought that is loosely about an object, and one whose bond with an object is robust enough for it to count as genuinely ‘singular’ or ‘de re’. This chapter tries to shed light on these two ideas by focusing on semantic ideas connected with Russell’s category of logically proper names that have been widely brought to bear on their successors.

It would appear on face value that some, but only some, property designators submit to a rigid–nonrigid distinction — designators that are grammatically singular. The present chapter does not call into question the default claim that some terms, like ‘whiteness’ and ‘courage’, are or can be treated as bona fide singular terms subject to a rigid–nonrigid distinction. It challenges the default view that terms like ‘white’ and ‘courageous’, as grammatically predicative terms, have to be treated differently. They do not. A uniform treatment of property designators as singular is plausible and preferable to the dualist alternative from J. S. Mill, which treats some property designators as singular but others as merely predicative. The present chapter also argues that even if Russell's theory of descriptions is adopted, so that definite descriptions are taken not to be singular terms, there is a rigid–nonrigid distinction for definite descriptions.

Inspired by remarks in Gottlob Frege's Grundlagen, Neo‐Fregeans claim that questions about the referentiality of an expression are to be determined through consideration of the expression's syntactical form (the ’context principle for reference’). This article is concerned with the problem of formulating acceptable syntactic criteria for singular termhood. Building on the work of Michael Dummett, criteria based on the inferential role of an expression are examined, and it is argued that such considerations can, at best, distinguish singular terms from expressions within the same broad grammatical category. Accordingly, Hale develops a test for distinguishing adjectives and predicates from substantival expressions, based on Aristotle's dictum that substances do not admit of contraries. Hale argues that, whereas the Aristotelian and inferential role tests are individually incomplete, they can be combined in such a way as to provide a criterion for singular termhood adequate to sub‐serve the neo‐Fregean project.

This essay is the sequel to ’Singular Terms (1)’ (also in this volume). After reviewing the criterion for singular termhood proposed in the earlier paper, Hale moves on to considering objections to the proposal. In particular, he discusses criticisms made by Linda Wetzel (Mind 1990) against Michael Dummett's original formulation of the ’inferential role’ part of the test. Hale argues that by modifying the detail of Dummett's proposals in well‐motivated ways, one can formulate a version of the inferential role test that can answer all of the criticisms. The final section considers how one should assess the adequacy of inferential role tests of this kind.

Ch. 9 initiates an investigation of the similarities between proper names and natural kind terms by arguing that although most proper names are clearly rigid, application of the notion of rigid designation to natural kind terms is highly problematic. Because natural kind terms come in a variety of syntactic and semantic types, and often function as predicates rather than singular terms, it is doubtful than any interesting notion of rigidity applies to them all. It is argued in particular that there is no notion of rigid designation for predicates that (1) is a natural extension of the notion of rigidity for singular terms, (2) is such that simple natural kind predicates are standardly rigid whereas many other predicates are not, and (3) plays the role imagined by Kripke in explaining the necessary a posteriori status of theoretical identities like Water is H₂O and An object x is hotter than an object y iff x has a higher mean molecular kinetic energy than y. Because of this, a new explanation of the status of these sentences is needed.

This chapter argues that there is no reference to facts by means of that-clauses because that-clauses are non-referential parts of speech. Four necessary conditions for an expression to be a singular term are discussed and shown not to apply to that-clauses. It is also argued that the expression ‘the fact that p’ is not a singular term and that the expression ‘is a fact’ is not a predicate. With this, the first condition of the Quine-like criterion of ontological commitment in the argument from nominal reference for facts is shown to be unmet, and the argument as not going through.

The introduction to The Reason's Proper Study outlines how the essays collected in this volume fit into the broader neo‐Fregean philosophical programme. The notion of an ’abstraction principle’ is introduced and the basic neo‐Fregean account of arithmetic is outlined. Central theses here include the idea that platonism can be underwritten by a proper syntactical analysis of the notion of 'singular term’ (the ’context principle for reference’), and the logicist claim that abstraction principles can give rise to a priori knowledge of the abstracta they introduce. Some of the central challenges facing these proposals are outlined, and possible extensions of the programme beyond arithmetic are canvassed.

Chs. 7 (and 6) set out and clean the formal tools that are needed in the remaining chapters to prove that Donald Davidson's and Richard Rorty's cases against facts and the representation of facts are unfounded, and their slingshot (collapsing) arguments for discrediting the existence of facts unsatisfactory. The previous chapter clarified what is meant by such terms as ‘extensions’, ‘extensionality’ and ‘scope’, and this one separates various inference principles common in extensional logic. The six sections of the chapter are: Introductory Remarks; A Principle of Substitutivity for Material Equivalents; A Principle of Substitutivity for Singular Terms; A Principle of Substitutivity for Logical Equivalents; An Inference Principle Involving ‘Exportation’; and A Principle of Substitutivity for Definite Descriptions.

Having previously dispatched singularism, this chapter turns to plural logic. First comes philosophical logic, beginning with the notion of a term. Singular and plural terms are different species of a common genus. As against a narrower Russellian conception, terms include definite descriptions and functional terms alongside proper names and demonstratives. Terms of any of these kinds may denote some thing(s) or may be empty. One aim of this book is to counterbalance the recent preoccupation with proper names and descriptions by placing functions and functional terms centre stage. Russell and Frege are criticized for failing to do justice to functions, despite their signal interest in mathematics. Of special interest are partial functions which map something to nothing, co-partial functions which map nothing to something, as well as functions which take several arguments at a given place, and multivalued functions which produce several values for a given choice of arguments.

Quine claims to investigate the process by which the learner progresses from a grasp of simple observation‐terms to mastery of objective reference and predication. By manipulating the notions of ‘compound observation‐term’ and ‘occasion’, his account represents this achievement as unrealistically deferred.

Davidson asks what properties a language must have to be learnable. He criticizes a (then) popular response that models the order of language acquisition on the epistemological priority of the types of expressions learnt; he labels this position the ‘building‐block theory’ (see further Essay 16). He discusses Strawson's critique of Quine's elimination of singular terms and shows how it is likewise premissed on the questionable derivation of claims about language learning from purely a priori considerations. On the positive side, Davidson proposes that a language is learnable by a creature with finite means if the language's number of semantic primitives or undefinables is finite. Using this criterion, he demonstrates that various theories in the philosophy of language introduce an infinite number of semantic primitives into the language and thus make it unlearnable; theories he alleges of this error (1) model quotations on names of expressions (Tarski, Quine; cf Essay 6), (2) analyse belief attributions in terms of linguistic marks (Scheffler, Carnap) or distinct one‐place predicates for each attributed belief (Quine; cf Essay 7), or (3) postulate intensional entities into their overall semantic framework (Frege, Church).

The chapter treats context-dependence of words’ and concepts’ reference, with truth a special case of reference. On a naturalistic analysis, reference is to explain communication of beliefs. Taken normative, reference should serve to explain how one ought to rely on beliefs of others. One should move from believing what Speaker ought to believe to centering a like belief on Speaker as one identifies her from one’s standpoint. A basic principle governs this: one should treat evidence one knows a speaker has as evidence for how things are as displaced to her standpoint. A claim at another standpoint, consisting of a thought and its context, is not an object of belief. Singular terms acquired from others are treated so as to capture the virtues of direct reference theory. Truth-conditional semantics is glossed accordingly.

Chs. 9 (and 8) convert the two basic forms of slingshot (collapsing) argument—one used by Alonzo Church, W. V. Quine, and Donald Davidson, the other by Kurt Gödel—into knock‐down deductive proofs that Donald Davidson's and Richard Rorty's cases against facts and the representation of facts are unfounded, and their slingshot arguments for discrediting the existence of facts unsatisfactory. The proofs are agnostic on key semantic issues; in particular, they assume no particular account of reference and do not even assume that sentences have references. Using the same procedure as in Chs. 8 and 9 shows that a slingshot argument engendered by Gödel's suggestions can be converted into a proof that delivers an exacting constraint on non‐extensional discourse—the Descriptive Constraint—and that is more general than anything Gödel appears to have had in mind. The proof of this constraint is constructed without appeal to logical equivalences, without assuming that a semantic theory must treat sentences as having references, without presupposing anything contentious about the semantics of singular terms, and without commitment to any particular semantics for definite descriptions. A constraint on facts, situations, states of affairs, and propositions—indeed on anything that is expressed or represented sententially—drops out as a trivial consequence of a constraint on non‐extensional discourse. The three sections of the chapter are: Principles of Conversion for Descriptions; Gödel's Proof in Quinean Format; and A Stronger Slingshot?

This introductory chapter surveys plural phenomena and argues for their logical significance. Terms may be classified as singular or plural, according to the number of things they are capable of denoting. Predicates and function signs may take plural terms as arguments, and function signs may express multivalued functions and produce plural functional terms (the wives of Henry VIII). Received philosophical and formal logic, however, makes no place for these plural phenomena. Strategies for a logic of plurals can therefore be broadly classified as singularist or pluralist. The singularist forces plurals into the old singular mould, whereas the pluralist develops a new plural logic that directly accommodates plural terms, plural predicates, multivalued functions, and plural quantification. In Chapters 3 and 4, general singularist strategies are eliminated. In this chapter, Michael Dummett’s more piecemeal singularist attempts to deal with plural phenomena are criticized.

The book concludes with a Postscript describing some items of unfinished business. It begins with three tricky topics: first, pseudo-singular terms—syntactically singular but semantically plural noun phrases—and then two extensions of full plural logic in very different directions—higher-level plural logic and higher-order plural logic. It adds a bunch of other items the authors have hardly explored