Michael Devitt has recently claimed that the Neo-Donnellian position about mind and language puts us “en route to the batty conclusion that we don’t have a language” (2020, p. 391). My aim in this paper is to sketch what I take to be Devitt’s argument for this claim and explain how a Neo-Donnellian might resist it. This will involve sketching Neo-Donnellian answers to two key questions raised by Devitt--first, the question of what a language is, and second, the question of (...) what we get out of having one. (shrink)

Philosophers of mind and language who advance causal theories face a sort of conjunction problem. When we say that the thing had in mind or the thing referred to is a matter of what causally impacted the thinker or speaker, we must somehow narrow down the long conjunction of items in a causal chain, all of which contributed to the having in mind, but only one of which becomes the object of thought or the linguistic referent. Here, I sketch a (...) notion of cognitive focus intended to do this narrowing. The notion borrows three key aspects from visual focus and some technological aides—causation, amplification, and suppression. I suggest a broader application of this framework to address the conjunction problem not only in ordinary contexts of perceptual focus but also in evidence cases involving non-perceptual cognitive focus. I further suggest cognitive focus is helpful in distinguishing referential vs. attributive thought. (shrink)

Evans (1973)’s Madagascar case and other cases like it have long been taken to represent a serious challenge for the Causal Theory of Names. The present essay answers this challenge on behalf of the causal theorist. The key is to treat acts of uttering names as events. Like other events, utterances of names sometimes turn out to have features which only become clear in retrospect.

Both Russell and Donnellan proposed direct, non-descriptive cognitive relations between thinkers and objects. They agreed that such relations couldn’t be initiated in evidence cases, but Donnellan, unlike Russell, thought direct cognitive relations could be transmitted from person to person. Kaplan (2012) suggests the issues of initiation and transmission are separable—allowing one to deny that evidence yields direct cognition while believing direct cognition is transmittable. Here, cases involving transmission, evidence, ordinary perception, and perception aided by technology are considered. It is concluded (...) that the same mechanism is at work in each case, and that the initiation issue cannot be separated from the transmission issue since transmission cases are evidence cases. Finally, it is argued that this doesn’t threaten the directness of the cognitive relations involved. (shrink)

Theoria, Volume 88, Issue 2, Page 406-433, April 2022.

In the last decade a new debate concerning the foundations of reference and semantics emerged, which mainly focuses on how to interpret Donnellan’s seminal works and, in particular, on _how_ it differs from Kripke’s influential contributions to so-called “direct reference”. In this paper, I focus on this “new” reading/understanding of Donnellan and how, as it is nowadays presented, differs from Kripke’s picture. I will discuss a Kripke-inspired picture and the way it differs from a Donnellan-inspired one and show that there (...) is a tension between the views that: (i) the token of a name refers to the object conventionally (causally) linked with the tokened name _and_ (ii) the token of a name refers to the object the speaker has in mind. I will end up suggesting that Korta and Perry’s (Critical pragmatics, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2011 ) critical referentialism/pragmatics and their name-notion network conception help to clarify this tension (and possibly evade it). (shrink)

Kripke’s picture of how people use names to refer to things has been the dominant view in contemporary philosophy of language. When it is mentioned at all, Donnellan’s view of proper names is considered the same as Kripke’s. It is certainly true that both Donnellan and Kripke rejected descriptivism about proper names and appealed to historical facts to determine whom a speaker is referring to by using a proper name. However, the relevant historical facts Kripke and Donnellan appeal to are (...) ultimately quite different. In this paper, I argue that Donnellan’s view of proper name fares better than Kripke’s. (shrink)

In this paper, I try to outline what I take to be Naming and Necessity’s fundamental legacy to my generation and those that follow, and the new perspectives it has opened up for twenty-first century philosophy. The discussion is subdivided into three sections, concerning respectively philosophy of language, metaphysics, and metaphilosophy. The general unifying theme is that Naming and Necessity is helping philosophy to recover a Golden Age, by freeing it from the strictures coming from the empiricist and Kantian traditions (...) and reconnecting it to the world and the objects that populate it. Because of this, in the concluding paragraph I tentatively suggest that Kripke’s philosophy may be seen as a sui generis form of naturalism. (shrink)