INDEFINITE DESCRIPTIONS AS REFERRING TERMS

• Authors: Barker Stephen
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

The author argues that indefinite descriptions are referring terms. This is not the ambiguity thesis: that sometimes they are referring terms and sometimes something else, such as quantifiers (as argued by Chastain and recently Devitt). On his view they are always referring terms; and never quantifiers. The author defends this thesis by modifying the standard conception of what a referring term is: a modification that needs to be made anyway, irrespective of the treatment of indefinites. He derives this approach from his speech-act theoretic semantics (2004). The basic thought is that referring terms have as their meanings speech-acts of a certain kind called proto-referring acts. These are acts in which speakers advertise or present intentions to denote, where denotation is a word-world relation, and advertising an intention is acting as if one has intentions, where it is open whether one has them or not, or whether the referring term used denotes or not. The author shows how this works for proper names. The meaning of a proper name is the speech-act proto-referring act type defined by a certain referential tree. This gives us the basis for an account of proper name meaning irrespective of denotation: a uniform treatment of full and empty names. Applied to indefinites, we can capture cases where speakers perform proto-acts - in which they advertise an intention to denote something - where they intend to denote, but others where they do not, but they still perform the proto-act: advertising an intention to denote.

Keywords

EN

INDEFINITE DESCRIPTIONS; INDEFINITES; PROPER NAMES; PROTO-REFERRING ACTS

Discipline

• PHILOSOPHY: PHILOSOPHY

• Publisher: Institute of Philosophy of the Slovak Academy of Sciences and Institute of Philosophy of Academy of Sciences of Czech Republic
• Journal: Organon F. medzinárodný časopis pre analytickú filozofiu
• Year: 2009
• Volume: 16
• Issue: 4
• Pages: 587-614
• Document type: ARTICLE

Contributors

author

Barker Stephen

• Stephen Barker, Department of Philosophy, University of Nottingham, University Park, Trent Building, Nottingham, NG7 2RD, United Kingdom; www.klemens.sav.sk/fiusav/organon

Identifiers

CEJSH db identifier

10SKAAAA074816