How can the phenomenon of reference to particular individuals be explained? This book examines the ongoing debate about the semantic relevance of Keith Donnellan's distinction between referential and attributive uses of descriptions and about the semantic foundation of direct reference. A new solution to this debate is proposed, based on the philosophy of Josef König: Donnellan's distinction can be semantically justified by the linguistic practical/alethic distinction, following König's distinction between practical and theoretical sentences. Direct reference is semantically grounded by the notion of communication as speech act that is addressed to someone.
Most theorists have offered different accounts of reference fixing for names, demonstratives, and indexicals. Indeed, this variety can seem an inevitable response to a certain class of hard cases. Here, I will offer a unified account of reference fixing equally capable of handling these cases. Then, I will show how t...
Eliot Michaelson· Philosophy and Phenomenologi...· 0 citations
In this paper, I consider several issues related to the concept of iden-tity—the concept that is in many ways related to Heda Festini’s early philosophical interests. I speci fi cally focus on discussion of the issues in Frege, Russell, and Wittgenstein. I contrast two competing conceptions of identity—the objectual (ac...
While traditional semantic accounts of demonstratives assume spatial contrast to be fundamental, typological studies reveal that the encoded meanings go well beyond physical distance and involve contrasts in perceptual and epistemic access. This article reviews the main findings from typological studies and the implica...
In my (2020) I defended an intentionalist understanding of Chomskyan linguistics whereby standard linguistic entities (“SLEs”) such as words, phrases and phonemes don’t exist, but are “intentional inexistents” merely represented in our brains. Reviewers complained this was in tension with “externalist” theories of re...
This paper offers a comprehensive and critical examination of Bertrand Russell's theory of descriptions as articulated in On Denoting (1905) and P. F. Strawson's response in On Referring (1950). Russell's logical analysis aims to resolve puzzles of non-referring expressions by treating definite descriptions as quantifi...
Rajendra Kumar Verma, Priya Rawat· The Social ION· 0 citations
