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Switch to: References
Citations of:
The Reference of Proper Names: Testing Usage and Intuitions
Cognitive Science 42 (5):1552-1585 (2018)
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The past eighteen years witnessed the rapid development of experimental philosophy of language. Adopting a bibliometric approach, this study examines the research trends and status quo of this burgeoning field based on a corpus of 237 publications retrieved from PhilPapers. It is observed that experimental philosophy of language has undergone three stages, the initiation stage, the development stage, and the extension stage, across which there is a clear upward trend in the annual number of publications. Michael Devitt, Edouard Machery, John (...) |
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In this brief reply I respond to criticisms of my book, The referential mechanism of proper names, from Michael Devitt and Nicolo D'Agruma. I focus on the question of whether the perspectivism advocated in the book explains the empirical results there detailed. |
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Experiments have led some philosophers to conclude that the reference determination of natural kind terms is neither simply descriptive nor simply causal-historical. Various theories have been aired to account for this, including ambiguity, hybrid, and different-idiolects theories. Devitt and Porter (2021) hypothesized that some terms are covered by one theory, some another, with a place for all the proposed theories. The present paper tests hypotheses that the term ‘Rio de Janeiro Myrtle’ is simply causal-historical but the term ‘rice’ is hybrid. (...) |
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This paper reports the first study in the literature that adopts a bibliometric approach to systematically explore the scholarship in the young and fast‐growing research field of experimental philosophy. Based on a corpus of 1,248 publications in experimental philosophy from the past two decades retrieved from the PhilPapers website, the study examined the publication trend, the influential experimental philosophers, the impactful works, the popular publication venues, and the major research themes in this subarea of philosophy. It found, first, an overall (...) |
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A series of recent experimental studies have cast doubt on the existence of a traditional tension that aestheticians have noted in our aesthetic judgments and practices, viz. the problem of taste. The existence of the problem has been acknowledged since Hume and Kant, though not enough has been done to analyse it in depth. In this paper, we remedy this by proposing six possible conceptualizations of it. Drawing on our analysis of the problem of taste, we argue that the experimental (...) |
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In this paper, we present two experimental studies on reference of complex demonstratives. The results of our experiments challenge the dominant view in philosophy of language, according to which demonstrative reference is determined by the speaker's intentions. The first experiment shows that in a context where there are two candidates for the referent—one determined by the speaker’s intention, the other by some “external” factors—people prefer to identify the referent of a demonstrative with the latter object. The external factors for which (...) |
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Since Machery et al. _Cognition_ 92, B1-B12 ( 2004 ) attacked Kripke’s refutation of classical descriptivism, their experiment has been repeated several times, in its original version or in some revised ones, by theorists with contrasting intents. Some repeated the experiment for confirming its results, others for proving them unreliable. One striking characteristic of those surveys is that they mostly replicated the data collected in Machery et al.’s _Cognition_ 92, B1-B12, 2004 experiment: less than 60% of Westerners showed preference for (...) |
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In this paper, we present and discuss the findings of two experiments about reference change. Cases of reference change have sometimes been invoked to challenge traditional versions of semantic externalism, but the relevant cases have never been tested empirically. The experiments we have conducted use variants of the famous Twin Earth scenario to test folk intuitions about whether natural kind terms such as ‘water’ or ‘salt’ switch reference after being constantly (mis)applied to different kinds. Our results indicate that this is (...) |
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The finding that intuitions about the reference of proper names vary cross-culturally was one of the early milestones in experimental philosophy. Many follow-up studies investigated the scope and magnitude of such cross-cultural effects, but our paper provides the first systematic meta-analysis of studies replicating. In the light of our results, we assess the existence and significance of cross-cultural effects for intuitions about the reference of proper names. |
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Concerns with cultural variation and epistemic perspectives have played major roles in experimental semantics. They dominate Li's book (2023). Li's own experimental work provides two promising explanations of the cultural variation: Chinese, but not Americans, tend to agree with a character's false statement because they think it is not her fault that she is wrong or because they are socially conforming. So, the notice argues, the cultural variation is a red herring to the theory of reference. Li preferred explanation is (...) |
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Theoria, Volume 88, Issue 2, Page 406-433, April 2022. |
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In her engaging book, The referential mechanism of proper names, Li presents empirical studies involving American and Chinese laypeople. Li interprets her results as supporting an epistemic‐perspective reading of the variability in referential intuitions on proper names. Building upon this thesis, Li defends the ambiguity view, claiming that names are ambiguous between a descriptivist and a causal‐historical meaning. I argue that either Li's data do not enable a comparison of the two theories of reference, or support for the ambiguity view (...) |
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Martí argued that referential intuitions are not the right kind of empirical evidence for testing theories of reference. Machery, Olivola, and De Blanc replied with a survey aimed at providing evidence that referential intuitions are in sync with truth‐value judgments and argued that truth‐value judgments provide empirical data from linguistic usage. We present the results of a survey indicating that Machery, Olivola, and De Blanc's experiment fails to overcome Martí's objection: The truth‐value judgements tested by Machery, Olivola, and De Blanc (...) |
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Recent experimental work on “natural” kind terms has shown evidence of both descriptive and nondescriptive reference determination. This has led some to propose ambiguity or hybrid theories, as opposed to traditional description and causal‐historical theories of reference. Many of those experiments tested theories against referential intuitions. We reject this method, urging that reference should be tested against usage, preferably by elicited production. Our tests of the usage of a biological kind term confirm that there are indeed both descriptive and causal‐historical (...) |
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The paper urges that polysemous phenomena are typically semantic not pragmatic. The part of a message sent by a polysemous expression is typically one of its meanings encoded in the speaker's language and not the result of pragmatic modification. The hearer receives that part of the message by a process of disambiguation, by detecting which item in the lexicon the speaker has selected. This is the best explanation of observed regularities. The paper argues that the experimental evidence from psycholinguistics, particularly (...) |
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