Direct reference theory

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A referential theory of meaning (also called direct reference theory [1] or referential realism) [2] is a theory of language that claims that the meaning of a word or expression lies in what it points out in the world. [3] Ex , The word tree may have an exterior meaning from the one always intended , that is , tree can be translated into different form of meaning .The object denoted by a word is called its referent. Criticisms of this position are often associated with Ludwig Wittgenstein. [1]

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In the 19th century, mathematician and philosopher Gottlob Frege argued against it, and contrasted it with mediated reference theory. [3] In 1953, with his Philosophical Investigations , Wittgenstein argued against referentialism, famously saying that "the meaning of a word is its use." [3] Direct reference theory is a position typically associated with logical positivism [3] and analytical philosophy. Logical positivist philosophers in particular have significantly devoted their efforts in countering positions of the like of Wittgenstein's, and they aim at creating a "perfectly descriptive language" purified from ambiguities and confusions. [3]

John Stuart Mill

The philosopher John Stuart Mill was one of the earliest modern advocates of a direct reference theory beginning in 1843. [4] In his A System of Logic Mill introduced a distinction between what he called "connotation" and "denotation". Connotation is a relation between a name (singular or general) and one or more attributes. For example, 'widow' denotes widows and connotes the attributes of being female, and of having been married to someone now dead. If a name is connotative, it denotes what it denotes in virtue of object or objects having the attributes the name connotes. Connotation thus determines denotation. The same object can, on the other hand, be denoted with several names with different connotations. A name can have connotation but no denotation. Connotation of a name, if it has one, can be taken to be its meaning in Mill. [5]

In contrast to proper names, most individual concrete names, in Mill's opinion, are not connotative. Proper names, then, have no significance. On the other hand, all general phrases are connotative in Mill's view. Overall, Mill's argument is quite similar to the description theory of reference, with the exception of his view on proper names. [5]

Bertrand Russell

Saul Kripke, a proponent of direct reference theory, in his Naming and Necessity dubbed mediated reference theory the "Frege–Russell view" and criticized it (see below). [6] Subsequent scholarship refuted the claim that Bertrand Russell's views on reference theory were the same as Gottlob Frege's, since Russell was also a proponent of direct reference theory. [7]

Saul Kripke

Saul Kripke defended direct reference theory when applied to proper names. Kripke claims that proper names do not have any "senses" at all, because senses only offer contingent facts about things. [8] Ruth Barcan Marcus advanced a theory of direct reference for proper names at a symposium in which Quine and Kripke were participants: published in Synthese , 1961 with Discussion in Synthese 1962. She called directly referring proper names "tags" (see tag theory of names). Kripke urged such a theory in 1971 and thereafter. He called such directly referring proper names "rigid designators".

Kripke articulated this view using the formal apparatus of possible worlds. The possible worlds thought-experiment first takes the subject, and then tries to imagine the subject in other possible worlds. Taking George W. Bush, for example. First (1) the thought-experiment must state that the name "George W. Bush" is the name used to describe the particular individual man that is typically meant. Then (2), the experimenter must imagine the possible states of affairs that reality could have been - where Bush was not president, or went into a different career, was never born at all, etc. When this is done, it becomes obvious that the phrase "President of the United States in 2004" does not necessarily describe George W. Bush, because it is not necessarily true in all possible worlds; it only contingently describes him. By contrast, for instance, the word "apple" will always describe the same things across all possible worlds, because of premise (1). So use of the word "apple" to describe apples is true in all possible worlds.

Terms that are true across all possible worlds in this way are called "rigid designators".

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Related Research Articles

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 or 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.

<i>Philosophical Investigations</i> 1953 work by Ludwig Wittgenstein

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Saul Aaron Kripke was an American analytic philosopher and logician. He was Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and emeritus professor at Princeton University. Kripke is considered one of the most important philosophers of the latter half of the 20th century. Since the 1960s, he has been a central figure in a number of fields related to mathematical and modal logic, philosophy of language and mathematics, metaphysics, epistemology, and recursion theory.

A connotation is a commonly understood cultural or emotional association that any given word or phrase carries, in addition to its explicit or literal meaning, which is its denotation.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sense and reference</span> Distinction in the philosophy of language

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In linguistics and philosophy, the denotation of an expression is its literal meaning. For instance, the English word "warm" denotes the property of having high temperature. Denotation is contrasted with other aspects of meaning including connotation. For instance, the word "warm" may evoke calmness or coziness, but these associations are not part of the word's denotation. Similarly, an expression's denotation is separate from pragmatic inferences it may trigger. For instance, describing something as "warm" often implicates that it is not hot, but this is once again not part of the word's denotation.

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.

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:

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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 direct reference theory. 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.

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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.

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<i>Naming and Necessity</i> Philosophy book by Saul Kripke

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.

This is an index of Wikipedia articles in philosophy of language

References

  1. 1 2 Severin Schroeder (2006), Wittgenstein, p. 30: "This view that the meaning of a word has to be explained in terms of what it stands for, its reference, I shall call referentialism."
  2. ↑ Andrea Bianchi (2012) Two ways of being a (direct) referentialist, in Joseph Almog, Paolo Leonardi, Having in Mind: The Philosophy of Keith Donnellan, p. 79
  3. 1 2 3 4 5 Emery J. Hyslop-Margison, Ayaz Naseem (2007), Scientism and Education: Empirical Research as Neo-Liberal Ideology, pp. 83–4
  4. ↑ Stainton, Robert J. (1996). Philosophical Perspectives on Language. Broadview Press. pp.  61. ISBN   978-1-55111-086-8.
  5. 1 2 "John Stuart Mill – Connotation and Denotation". University of Helsinki. 2008. Retrieved 2009-01-30.[ dead link ]
  6. ↑ Saul Kripke, Naming and Necessity . Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1972. p. 27.
  7. ↑ Howard Wettstein, "Frege-Russell Semantics?", Dialectica44(1–2), 1990, pp. 113–135, esp. 115: "Russell maintains that when one is acquainted with something, say, a present sense datum or oneself, one can refer to it without the mediation of anything like a Fregean sense. One can refer to it, as we might say, directly."
  8. ↑ Kripke, Saul (1980). Naming and Necessity. Basil Blackwell.
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