A causal theory of reference or historical chain theory of reference is a theory of how terms acquire specific referents based on evidence. Such theories have been used to describe many referring terms, particularly logical terms, proper names, and natural kind terms. In the case of names, for example, a causal theory of reference typically involves the following claims:
Weaker versions of the position (perhaps not properly called "causal theories"), claim merely that, in many cases, events in the causal history of a speaker's use of the term, including when the term was first acquired, must be considered to correctly assign references to the speaker's words.
Causal theories of names became popular during the 1970s, under the influence of work by Saul Kripke and Keith Donnellan. Kripke and Hilary Putnam also defended an analogous causal account of natural kind terms.
In lectures later published as Naming and Necessity , Kripke provided a rough outline of his causal theory of reference for names. Although he refused to explicitly endorse such a theory, he indicated that such an approach was far more promising than the then-popular descriptive theory of names introduced by Russell, according to which names are in fact disguised definite descriptions. Kripke argued that in order to use a name successfully to refer to something, you do not have to be acquainted with a uniquely identifying description of that thing. Rather, your use of the name need only be caused (in an appropriate way) by the naming of that thing.
Such a causal process might proceed as follows: the parents of a newborn baby name it, pointing to the child and saying "we'll call her 'Jane'." Henceforth everyone calls her 'Jane'. With that act, the parents give the girl her name. The assembled family and friends now know that 'Jane' is a name which refers to Jane. This is referred to as Jane's dubbing, naming, or initial baptism.
However, not everyone who knows Jane and uses the name 'Jane' to refer to her was present at this naming. So how is it that when they use the name 'Jane', they are referring to Jane? The answer provided by causal theories is that there is a causal chain that passes from the original observers of Jane's naming to everyone else who uses her name. For example, maybe Jill was not at the naming, but Jill learns about Jane, and learns that her name is 'Jane', from Jane's mother, who was there. She then uses the name 'Jane' with the intention of referring to the child Jane's mother referred to. Jill can now use the name, and her use of it can in turn transmit the ability to refer to Jane to other speakers.
Philosophers such as Gareth Evans have insisted that the theory's account of the dubbing process needs to be broadened to include what are called 'multiple groundings'. After her initial baptism, uses of 'Jane' in the presence of Jane may, under the right circumstances, be considered to further ground the name ('Jane') in its referent (Jane). That is, if I am in direct contact with Jane, the reference for my utterance of the name 'Jane' may be fixed not simply by a causal chain through people who had encountered her earlier (when she was first named); it may also be indexically fixed to Jane at the moment of my utterance. Thus our modern day use of a name such as 'Christopher Columbus' can be thought of as referring to Columbus through a causal chain that terminates not simply in one instance of his naming, but rather in a series of grounding uses of the name that occurred throughout his life. Under certain circumstances of confusion, this can lead to the alteration of a name's referent (for one example of how this might happen, see Twin Earth thought experiment).
Causal theories of reference were born partially in response to the widespread acceptance of Russellian descriptive theories. Russell found that certain logical contradictions could be avoided if names were considered disguised definite descriptions (a similar view is often attributed to Gottlob Frege, mostly on the strength of a footnoted comment in "On Sense and Reference", although many Frege scholars consider this attribution misguided).[ citation needed ] On such an account, the name 'Aristotle' might be seen as meaning 'the student of Plato and teacher of Alexander the Great'. Later description theorists expanded upon this by suggesting that a name expressed not one particular description, but many (perhaps constituting all of one's essential knowledge of the individual named), or a weighted average of these descriptions.
Kripke found this account to be deeply flawed, for a number of reasons. Notably:
A causal theory avoids these difficulties. A name refers rigidly to the bearer to which it is causally connected, regardless of any particular facts about the bearer, and in all possible worlds where the bearer exists.
The same motivations apply to causal theories in regard to other sorts of terms. Putnam, for instance, attempted to establish that 'water' refers rigidly to the stuff that we do in fact call 'water', to the exclusion of any possible identical water-like substance for which we have no causal connection. These considerations motivate semantic externalism. Because speakers interact with a natural kind such as water regularly, and because there is generally no naming ceremony through which their names are formalized, the multiple groundings described above are even more essential to a causal account of such terms. A speaker whose environment changes may thus observe that the referents of his terms shift, as described in the Twin Earth and Swampman thought experiments.
Variations of the causal theory include:
Gareth Evans argued that the causal theory, or at least certain common and over-simple variants of it, have the consequence that, however remote or obscure the causal connection between someone's use of a proper name and the object it originally referred to, they still refer to that object when they use the name. (Imagine a name briefly overheard in a train or café.) The theory effectively ignores context and makes reference into a magic trick. Evans describes it as a "photograph" theory of reference. [7]
The links between different users of the name are particularly obscure. Each user must somehow pass the name on to the next, and must somehow "mean" the right individual as they do so (suppose "Socrates" is the name of a pet aardvark). Kripke himself notes the difficulty, John Searle makes much of it.[ citation needed ]
Mark Sainsbury argued [8] for a causal theory similar to Kripke's, except that the baptised object is eliminated. A "baptism" may be a baptism of nothing, he argues: a name can be intelligibly introduced even if it names nothing. [9] The causal chain we associate with the use of proper names may begin merely with a "journalistic" source. [10]
The causal theory has a difficult time explaining the phenomenon of reference change. Gareth Evans cites the example of when Marco Polo unknowingly referred to the African Island as "Madagascar" when the natives actually used the term to refer to a part of the mainland. Evans claims that Polo clearly intended to use the term as the natives do, but somehow changed the meaning of the term "Madagascar" to refer to the island as it is known today. Michael Devitt claims that repeated groundings in an object can account for reference change. However, such a response leaves open the problem of cognitive significance that originally intrigued Russell and Frege.
In the philosophy of language, a proper name – examples include a name of a specific person or place – is a name which ordinarily is taken to uniquely identify its referent in the world. As such it presents particular challenges for theories of meaning, and it has become a central problem in analytic philosophy. The common-sense view was originally formulated by John Stuart Mill in A System of Logic (1843), where he defines it as "a word that answers the purpose of showing what thing it is that we are talking about but not of telling anything about it". This view was criticized when philosophers applied principles of formal logic to linguistic propositions. Gottlob Frege pointed out that proper names may apply to imaginary and nonexistent entities, without becoming meaningless, and he showed that sometimes more than one proper name may identify the same entity without having the same sense, so that the phrase "Homer believed the morning star was the evening star" could be meaningful and not tautological in spite of the fact that the morning star and the evening star identifies the same referent. This example became known as Frege's puzzle and is a central issue in the theory of proper names.
Saul Aaron Kripke is an American philosopher and logician in the analytic tradition. He is a Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and emeritus professor at Princeton University. Since the 1960s, Kripke has been a central figure in a number of fields related to mathematical logic, modal logic, philosophy of language, philosophy of mathematics, metaphysics, epistemology, and recursion theory. Much of his work remains unpublished or exists only as tape recordings and privately circulated manuscripts.
In the philosophy of language, the distinction between sense and reference was an innovation of the German philosopher and mathematician Gottlob Frege in 1892, reflecting the two ways he believed a singular term may have meaning.
In metaphysics and the philosophy of language, an empty name is a proper name that has no referent.
David John Chalmers is an Australian philosopher and cognitive scientist specializing in the areas of philosophy of mind and philosophy of language. He is a Professor of Philosophy and Neural Science at New York University, as well as co-director of NYU's Center for Mind, Brain and Consciousness. In 2006, he was elected a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. In 2013, he was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.
In modal logic and the philosophy of language, a term is said to be a rigid designator or absolute substantial term when it designates the same thing in all possible worlds in which that thing exists. A designator is persistently rigid if it also designates nothing in all other possible worlds. A designator is obstinately rigid if it designates the same thing in every possible world, period, whether or not that thing exists in that world. Rigid designators are contrasted with connotative terms, non-rigid or flaccid designators, which may designate different things in different possible worlds.
Michael Gareth Justin Evans was a British philosopher who made substantial contributions to logic, philosophy of language and philosophy of mind. He is best known for his posthumous work The Varieties of Reference (1982), edited by John McDowell. The book considers different kinds of reference to objects, and argues for a number of conditions that must obtain for reference to occur.
The theory of descriptions is the philosopher Bertrand Russell's most significant contribution to the philosophy of language. It is also known as Russell's theory of descriptions. In short, Russell argued that the syntactic form of descriptions is misleading, as it does not correlate their logical and/or semantic architecture. While descriptions may seem fairly uncontroversial phrases, Russell argued that providing a satisfactory analysis of the linguistic and logical properties of a description is vital to clarity in important philosophical debates, particularly in semantic arguments, epistemology and metaphysical elements.
A mediated reference theory is any semantic theory that posits that words refer to something in the external world, but insists that there is more to the meaning of a name than simply the object to which it refers. It thus stands opposed to the theory of direct reference. Gottlob Frege is a well-known advocate of mediated reference theories. Similar theories were widely held in the middle of the twentieth century by philosophers such as Peter Strawson and John Searle.
A direct reference theory is a theory of language that claims that the meaning of a word or expression lies in what it points out in the world. The object denoted by a word is called its referent. Criticisms of this position are often associated with Ludwig Wittgenstein.
In the philosophy of language, semantic externalism is the view that the meaning of a term is determined, in whole or in part, by factors external to the speaker. According to an externalist position, one can claim without contradiction that two speakers could be in exactly the same brain state at the time of an utterance, and yet mean different things by that utterance, that is, the term picks out a different extension.
In cognitive science and semantics, the symbol grounding problem concerns how it is that words get their meanings, and hence is closely related to the problem of what meaning itself really is. The problem of meaning is in turn related to the problem of how it is that mental states are meaningful, hence to the problem of consciousness: what is the connection between certain physical systems and the contents of subjective experiences.
In the philosophy of language, the descriptivist theory of proper names is the view that the meaning or semantic content of a proper name is identical to the descriptions associated with it by speakers, while their referents are determined to be the objects that satisfy these descriptions. Bertrand Russell and Gottlob Frege have both been associated with the descriptivist theory, which is sometimes called the Frege–Russell view.
In semantics, semiotics, philosophy of language, metaphysics, and metasemantics, meaning "is a relationship between two sorts of things: signs and the kinds of things they intend, express, or signify".
Keith Sedgwick Donnellan was an American philosopher and Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Frege's puzzles are puzzles about the semantics of proper names, although related puzzles also arise in the case of indexicals. Gottlob Frege (1848–1925) introduced the puzzle at the beginning of his article "Über Sinn und Bedeutung" in 1892 in one of the most influential articles in analytic philosophy and philosophy of language.
In analytic philosophy, philosophy of language investigates the nature of language and the relations between language, language users, and the world. Investigations may include inquiry into the nature of meaning, intentionality, reference, the constitution of sentences, concepts, learning, and thought.
Naming and Necessity is a 1980 book with the transcript of three lectures, given by the philosopher Saul Kripke, at Princeton University in 1970, in which he dealt with the debates of proper names in the philosophy of language. The transcript was brought out originally in 1972 in Semantics of Natural Language, edited by Donald Davidson and Gilbert Harman. Among analytic philosophers, Naming and Necessity is widely considered one of the most important philosophical works of the twentieth century.
Meinong's jungle is the name given by Richard Routley (1980) to the repository of non-existent objects in the ontology of Alexius Meinong.
This is an index of articles in philosophy of language
