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Though many arguments have been offered for eliminativism, they all have a common structure. They begin with the premise that beliefs, desires, and other commonsense mental states are the posits of a widely shared, largely tacit psychological theory – “folk psychology.” The second premise of the argument, defended in many different ways, is that folk psychology is a seriously mistaken theory. From these premises, eliminativists draw the conclusion that commonsense mental states do not exist. However, the premises do not entail the conclusion, so some additional premise is necessary. One way to fill the gap is to appeal to a description theory of reference. But the description theory of reference has been challenged by the causal‐historical theory of reference. So in order to determine whether the eliminativist argument is sound, it appears we must determine which theory of reference is the correct one, and to do this, we must say what a theory of reference is supposed to do – what facts it is supposed to capture. Various accounts of what a theory of reference is supposed to do are considered, but none of them, it is argued, will help determine whether the eliminativist conclusion follows from the premises. Other ways of filling the gap are also considered and rejected; the most promising of these invokes the normative naturalism strategy.

Stich points out that typical arguments for eliminativism about the mind presuppose a description theory of reference. His gloomy view of theories of reference leads him to a gloomy view of ontological issues in general. What has gone wrong? Stich thinks that the mistake came in looking to such theories to settle ontological issues. This chapter argues that Stich is right about that, but for the wrong reasons. We should not share his gloom about theories of reference, taken as proto-science. Still, an appropriately modest view of the accomplishments of this proto-science counts against using it to settle ontological issues. We should put metaphysics first. How then are we to settle ontological issues? Stich's answer is very much along the right lines. We do not have any principles adequate to help us with the difficult cases and it may be that some of these are indeterminate.

McGinn's aim is two‐fold: to undermine both descriptive and causal theories of reference, and to argue for his preferred, ‘contextual’ theory of reference. McGinn is moved to this position by emphasizing indexicals—which he takes to be the primary referential devices—rather than proper names. Linguistic reference, for McGinn, is a conventional activity governed by rules that prescribe the spatio‐temporal conditions of correct use; the semantic referent of a speaker's term is given by combining its linguistic meaning with the spatio‐temporal context in which the speaker is located. McGinn concludes his defence of this theory by demonstrating the plausibility of its implications for such topics as abstract objects, self‐reference, attribution, the language of thought hypothesis, truth, and the reducibility of reference.

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”.

The skeptical argument against specific statements identifying a phenomenal property with a scientific one has been criticized for overlooking two salient resources that would put an end to skepticism, resources that could allegedly be used to establish psychophysical identities. The two resources are scientific induction with correlation and scientific necessitarianism (of which scientific essentialism is a variety). Neither is capable of securing psychophysical identities. The problem is that psychophysical identities lack terms with the right de jure connections binding the terms to their designata by way of conceptual mediation. De jure connections should not be controversial and are not avoided by either the recognitional theory of reference or direct reference. The chapter concludes by embracing scientific empiricism.

Begins by distinguishing different varieties of nominalism. All adherents of nominalism agree in rejecting mathematical and other abstract entities, and many have attempted to develop nominalist interpretations of scientific theories that appear to involve mathematical objects, with some (hermeneutic nominalists) claiming that these interpretations reveal what the theories really meant all along, and others (revolutionary nominalists) admitting that what they are developing are new, replacement theories. Before beginning our examination of these interpretative projects, we stop to examine critically their presuppositions, beginning with the distinction between abstract objects and concrete objects. We devote special attention to epistemological arguments and semantical arguments for nominalism, based on causal theories of knowledge and causal theories of reference. We also consider why more nominalists have not been content simply to adopt instrumentalism, which declares science to be a useful fiction, and offers no reinterpretation to turn theory into fact.

This chapter considers two other rival accounts of normative statements. First, it considers the account of ‘Cornell moral realism’ which is based on applying the causal theory of reference to normative terms. Secondly, it considers the accounts of David Lewis, Frank Jackson, Philip Pettit, and Michael Smith, which are based on the attempt to give a ‘conceptual analysis’ of normative statements. It is argued that both of these approaches fail, largely because they cannot accommodate the sort of ‘internalism’ that was argued for in Chapter 1.

This chapter lays out the background to the current debate between correspondence theorists and disquotationalists in the theory of truth: from Tarski, to Field, to Leeds. The disquotationalist's idea is that we don't need a robust theory of reference (like a causal theory) or truth (like typical correspondence theories), that the role of truth in our account of the world can actually be filled by a simple logical device of disquotation, as proposed by Quine among others. The Second Philosopher develops a pair of diagnostics to differentiate disquotational from correspondence theories (according to which Tarski turns out to have been a disquotationalist), and ends with a discussion of Field's notion of an ‘indication relation’ (in favourable cases, one's beliefs are good indicators of the facts).

Returning to the debate itself, does a full account of how humans use language require a correspondence theory of truth and reference? This chapter argues that disquotationalism is fully up to the job of explaining how our language use succeeds in guiding our worldly actions — because our beliefs are good indicators of the facts (often not because they are true) — and also what happens when language is vague or non-factual or indeterminate. Indeed the second-philosophical disquotationalist's analysis of well-trod cases like Priestley's talk of ‘dephlogisticated air’ involve careful analyses of indications relations that run parallel to the detailed work of causal theorists of reference. Word-world relations are as central to her account of language use as they are to correspondence theories; it's just that she doesn't share the belief that, e.g., the facts about Priestley and the world determine whether or not a given one of his utterances refers to oxygen. For her, this is a matter of how we interpret him into our current language, and that may vary with the context and goals of the interpretation.

Explores the distinction between the prevalent approach to ostensible intuitions, which takes such intuitions to be indicative of semantic conditions, and the broadly psychological approach, which does not. An attack is made against Kripke and Putnam's causal theory of (semantic) reference (for words, as opposed to names) via Putnam's Twin Earth thought experiments. Our responses to such examples may be distinguished into two types, (1) a dominant response, and (2) a dominated response. The common aspect to all demonstrable counterexamples to the causal theory of reference turns on the individual differences among the responses. The prevalent approach must deny semantic competence to dissenting agents. We may maintain, in a relativist spirit, that there is no absolutely right answer in such cases. Kripke's distinction between epistemological examples and metaphysical examples is noted and the two are united in order to generate combined examples. The failure of the causal theory of reference to deal with any such examples in a successful and systematic way tells against the prospect of maintaining an internalized semantics. Historical and current versions of the causal theory of reference are explored, with neither accurately capturing our natural responses, strengthening the objection against the prevalent approach and supporting the broadly psychological approach, which in contrast to the prevalent approach attributes agents’ responses to the examples to their (the agents’) egocentric bias, which may not be fully rational. As such, the relativist now has a direct reply to the objection from semantic intuitions, this being that such common sense intuitions are not a function of an internalized semantics. Supposing that the broadly psychological approach is no stronger than the prevalent approach merely strengthens the relativist's position.

This chapter provides a theoretical basis for the evaluation of the aspectual differences in Russian. It introduces and discusses the concept of reference time. It also presents the unified theory of reference time proposed in Reinhart (1986, 2000). It shows that this theory paves the way for clearly stating and formalizing the distinctions between different levels of aspectual information.

This chapter takes issue with the core assumption in Chapter 5 that the debate over scientific realism is primarily about what exists as opposed to how we represent what exists. It argues that a debate over scientific realism is primarily a debate over deep semantic issues – such as the plausibility of the causal theory of reference – a theory that is rejected. The chapter questions the core view that unobservables posited by a theory exist just when the theory has succeeded in giving good explanations. Rather, it often works the other way around: theories are said to give good explanations just when it is found that their posits exist.

This chapter begins with criticism of ‘description’ and ‘causal’ theories—arguing that they should not be regarded as theories of reference. There then follows a deflationary account according to which our meaning what we do by ‘refers’ consists, roughly speaking, in our acceptance of the schema, ‘n’ (in quotes) refers to n (out of quotes)—and, more accurately, in our acceptance of ‘(x)(<n>refers to x ↔ n=x)’, where <n>is the prepositional constituent expressed by the singular term, “n”. Finally, there are accounts of the utility of this notion of reference and of the meanings of names.

This chapter focuses on arguments that derive philosophically significant conclusions from the assumption of one or another theory of reference—what are called “arguments from reference.” It first considers the structure of arguments from reference, and reviews a number of projects in several areas of philosophy that employ such arguments. It then shows that while intuitions about reference are central in the philosophy of language for finding the correct theory of reference, the recent empirical work of Machery and colleagues suggests that intuitions about reference vary both within and across cultures. Next, it takes the variation suggested by this empirical work for granted and considers its implications for arguments from reference. It concludes that arguments from reference ought to be relinquished.

This chapter considers the influence of the Russian poet Osip Mandelshtam’s writings on the poetry and programmatic prose of Paul Celan against the background of two philosophers who read the latter’s poetry as illustrating their respective theories of meaning and understanding: Jacques Derrida and Hans-Georg Gadamer. Against Derrida, and drawing on Wittgenstein and Gareth Evans, the chapter argues that Celan’s poems propose a historically contingent model of understanding that relies on collective name-using practices. Against Gadamer, it claims that Celan’s poems bear intrinsically evanescent and personal references that cannot be discounted from the meaning of the poems. Celan’s poems thus invoke the Holocaust by highlighting the precariousness of the communities of understanding upon which the poems themselves rely, by inscribing existential references within aesthetic semblance.

This chapter addresses a classic topic: the advancement of science. In the wake of Kuhn’s groundbreaking work, positivist philosophy of science was replaced by a more realistic and historically informed depiction of science. However, over half a century has now passed since the publication of Structure. Despite valiant attempts, we still lack a fully developed, viable replacement for the cumulative model presupposed by positivism. At the dawn of the new millennium, mainstream philosophy eventually abandoned the project of developing a grand, overarching account of science. The quest for generality was traded in for a more detailed analysis of particular disciplines and practices. The goal of this chapter is to show how the black-boxing strategy can offer a revamped formulation of scientific progress, an important topic that lies at the core of any general characterization of science, and bring it back on the philosophical main stage, where it legitimately belongs.