This article aims at defending the old theory of iconological dualism that opposes ‘handmade’ pictures to photographic pictures. I defend a new version of that theory, according to which photographs always enable viewers to have singular thoughts on the things photographed, while handmade pictures by themselves never enable viewers to have singular thoughts but only enable them to have what I call ‘thoughts by depiction’. To this end, I defend the old theory according to which singular thoughts require a special (...) relation—called ‘acquaintance’—between the thinker and the object thought about. I put this traditional view forward thanks to a new version of the classic spy argument for the acquaintance constraint on singular thoughts. (shrink)

We are very grateful to our critics for their kind words and thoughtful engagementwith The Reference Book (hereafter TRB), and also to the editors of Mind & Language for the opportunity to respond. We’ll start our reply by sketching the book’s positive thesis about specific noun phrases and names. In §2 we’ll relate the traditional semantic category we call ‘reference’ to semantic taxonomies given in terms of mechanisms of denotation. In §3, we’ll turn to acquaintance constraints on reference and singular (...) thought. And in §4, we’ll briefly address McGilvray’s and Devitt’s general doubts about the project of truth-conditional semantics to which our book contributes. (shrink)