This paper challenges the first Gettier counterexample to the tripartite account of knowledge. Noting that 'the man who will get the job' is a description and invoking Donnellan's distinction between their 'referential' and 'attributive' uses, I argue that Smith does not actually believe that the man who will get the job has ten coins in his pocket. Smith's ignorance about who will get the job shows that the belief cannot be understood referentially, his ignorance of the coins in his pocket (...) shows that it cannot be understood attributively. An explanation for why Smith appeared to have justified true belief is given by distinguishing between 'belief' and 'belief in truth'. Smith believes the sentence 'the man who will get the job has ten coins in his pocket' to be true (he mistakenly believes that Jones will get the job, of whom he knows that he has ten coins in his pocket) (hence his 'belief'), the sentence is true (hence 'truth'), and he has sufficient reason to assent to it (hence his 'justification'). But he does not believe the proposition expressed. Hence he does not know it either. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to present a theory of referential uses of definite descriptions that is alternative to Neale’s theory of Gödelian completions but nonetheless assumes two tenets of Neale’s view: the Russellian analysis of definite descriptions is basically correct, i.e. definite descriptions are quantified NPs and referential uses are not to be explained in terms of the Gricean distinction between what is said and what is meant. The proposition said is the intuitive content of an assertion as (...) opposed to contents that are conversational implicatures. The compositional system computes the proposition said taking into account the semantic information encoded in a sentence and all relevant contextual information. The proposition said is the input for processing the proposition meant as the result of Gricean conversational implicatures. The computation of the proposition said involves linguistic decoding as well as pragmatic inferences. Notice that Neale Philosophical Perspectives, 22, 375–442, uses ‘implied’ instead of ‘meant’). Neale’s Russellian approach to referential uses is assumed. I give no direct argument to prove that Neale’s approach is superior to a Gricean approach and no direct argument to prove that it is superior to an approach such as Devitt’s one that introduces a semantic ambiguity between referential and attributive definite descriptions. Contrary to Neale’s theory of Gödelian completions, the theory I present preserves the uniqueness condition of the orthodox quantificational meaning of definite descriptions as a contribution to what is said on referential uses. I argue that from the orthodox Russellian point of view this is a remarkable advantage over Neale’s theory of Gödelian completions. (shrink)

I argue that the contextualist account of the referential/attributive interpretation of definite descriptions, presented by Recanati and Bezuidehnout and based on the idea that definite descriptions are semantically underdetermined and in need of completion through optional top-down pragmatic processes, suffers from an explanatory gap. I defend the contextualist view but hold that the determination of the content of definite descriptions is a mandatory, linguistically driven process based on saturation rather than on optional pragmatic processes.

Contextualism, Pragmatics and Definite Descriptions Very few philosophers and linguists doubt that definite descriptions have attributive uses and referential uses. The point of disagreement concerns whether the difference in uses is grounded on a difference in meaning. The Ambiguity Theory holds while the Implicature Theory denies that definite descriptions are ambiguous expressions, having an attributive meaning and a referential meaning. Contextualists have attempted to steer between the Ambiguity Theory and the Implicature Theory. I claim that the early contextualist account provided (...) by Recanati and Bezuidehnout based on the idea that definite descriptions are semantically underdetermined and in need of a completion from the contextually available information through an optional top-down pragmatic process suffers from an explanatory gap. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that contrary to the approach widely taken in the literature, it is possible to retain Russell's theory of definite descriptions and grant some semantic significance to the distinction between the attributive and the referential use. The core of the argumentation is based on recognition of the so-called "roundabout" way in which the use of a definite description may be significant to the semantic features of the sentence: it is a case where the use of a (...) description contributes to the semantics of the sentence by affecting another expression of that sentence. I offer an appropriate example which illustrates the case in question and I demonstrate that the semantic difference between the two uses can be easily captured by Russell's account. (shrink)

In the first part of this paper I present a defence of the Austinian semantic approach to incomplete quantifiers and similar phenomena (section 2-4). It is part of my defence of Austinian semantics that it incorporates a cognitive dimension (section 4). This cognitive dimension makes it possible to connect Austinian semantics to various cognitive theories of discourse interpretation. In the second part of the paper (sections 5-7), I establish connections between Austinian semantics and four particular theories: • the theory of (...) reference and modes of presentation in terms of information files (see e.g. Perry 1993), • the theory of discourse interpretation as involving a process of context selection (see Sperber and Wilson 1986), • the theory of informational structure (for a survey, see Lambrecht 1994), • the theory of mental spaces (Fauconnier 1985). (shrink)

The argument from convention contends that the regular use of definite descriptions as referential devices strongly implies that a referential semantic convention underlies such usage. On the presumption that definite descriptions also participate in a quantificational semantic convention, the argument from convention has served as an argument for the thesis that the English definite article is ambiguous. Here, I revisit this relatively new argument. First, I address two recurring criticisms of the argument from convention: its alleged tendency to overgenerate and (...) its apparent evidential inadequacy. These criticisms are found wanting. Second, following Zacharska, I argue that while the argument from convention does alter the landscape of logical possibilities insofar as it provides good grounds for treating Donnellan’s referential–attributive distinction as having truth-conditional consequences, the argument from convention nonetheless fails to demonstrate that ‘the’ requires two lexical entries. (shrink)

It is generally thought that definite determiners exclusively mark nouns as definite. In several languages, however, definite determiners may modify both nouns and verbs. As I will argue, the existence of these “multi‐functional” elements suggests that determiners are in fact phrases. This syntactic move has a philosophical payoff. Among other things, it allows us to cast Donnellan's distinction as an ordinary consequence of the context‐invariant compositional semantics of natural language, not as a matter of contextual manipulation or lexical ambiguity. Multi‐functional (...) determiners show us that Donnellan's distinction is,contraDonnellan, a matter of grammar. (shrink)

In his influential paper 'Speaker's Reference and Semantic Reference', Kripke defends Russell's theory of descriptions against the charge that the existence of referential and attributive uses of descriptions reflects a semantic ambiguity. He presents a purely defensive argument to show that Russell's theory is not refuted by the referential usage and a number of methodological considerations which apparently tell in favour of Russell's unitary theory over an ambiguity theory. In this paper, I put forward a case for the ambiguity theory (...) that thwarts Kripke's defensive strategy and argue that it is not undermined by any of his methodological points. (shrink)

There is a core to the referential/attributive distinction that reveals a propositional ambiguity that is scope-related and rooted in syntax.

Abstract: A current debate in semantics and pragmatics is whether all contextual effects on truth-conditional content can be traced to logical form, or 'unarticulated constituents' can be supplied by the pragmatic process of free enrichment. In this paper, I defend the latter position. The main objection to this view is that free enrichment appears to overgenerate, not predicting where context cannot affect truth conditions, so that a systematic account is unlikely (Stanley, 2002a). I first examine the semantic alternative proposed by (...) Stanley and others, which assumes extensive hidden structure acting as a linguistic trigger for pragmatic processes, so that all truth-conditional effects of context turn out to be instances of saturation. I show that there are cases of optional pragmatic contributions to the proposition expressed that cannot plausibly be accounted for in this way, and that advocates of this approach will therefore also have to appeal to free enrichment. The final section starts to address the question of how free enrichment is constrained: I argue that it involves only local development or adjustment of parts of logical form, any global developments being excluded by the requirement for the proposition expressed to provide an inferential warrant for the intended implications of the utterance. (shrink)

A number of philosophers continue to argue, inthe spirit of Keith Donnellans classic paperReference and Definite Descriptions, thatthere is more to the semantics of definitedescriptions than Russells theory predicts. If their arguments are correct, then a completesemantic theory for sentences that containdefinite descriptions will have to provide morethan one set of truth conditions. A unitaryRussellian analysis of sentences of the form`the F is G would not suffice. In this paper,I examine a recent line of argument for thisanti-Russellian conclusion.Unlike earlier Donnellan-style (...) arguments, thenew argument does not rely upon the mereexistence of referential uses of definitedescriptions or the possibility of conveyinginformation about an object by misdescribingit. I argue, however, that we ought to rejectthis new line of reasoning and rest contentwith a Russellian theory of definitedescriptions. (shrink)

1. People standardly communicate by uttering phrases or sentences with certain intonation patterns, accompanied by facial expressions, eye contact and often a variety of gestures. If all goes well...

Over the past fifty years the philosophy of language and mind has been dominated by a nondescriptivist approach to content and reference. This book attempts to recast and systematize that approach by offering an indexical model in terms of mental files. According to Recanati, we refer through mental files, the function of which is to store information derived through certain types of contextual relation the subject bears to objects in his or her environment. The reference of a file is determined (...) relationally, not satisfactionally, so a file is not to be equated to the body of (mis-)information it contains. Mental files are the mental equivalent of singular terms, and the reference of linguistic expressions is inherited from that of the files we associate with them. On this approach, mental files, the vehicles of singular thought, do all the work of so-called 'modes of presentation' in Fregean and neo-Russellian theories. (shrink)

attributive/referential. Pragmatic intrusion.

Descriptions are phrases of the form ‘an F’, ‘the F’, ‘Fs’, ‘the Fs’ and NP's F (e.g. ‘John's mother’). They can be indefinite (e.g., ‘an F’ and ‘Fs’), definite (e.g. ‘the F’ and ‘the Fs’), singular (e.g., ‘an F’, ‘the F’) or plural (e.g., ‘the Fs’, ‘Fs’). In English plural indefinite descriptions lack an article and are for that reason also known as ‘bare plurals’. How to account for the semantics and pragmatics of descriptions has been one of the central (...) topics in philosophy for centuries. This entry focuses on the historical and contemporary philosophical debate about Bertrand Russell’s theory of descriptions and the theories that developed as responses to this theory. (shrink)

The present work explores the possibility of conciliating the truth-conditional relevance of referential uses of definite descriptions with the assignment of a univocal linguistic meaning to these constructions. It is argued that conciliation is possible if we reject the thesis, central to the debate between Russellians and ambiguity theorists, according to which referential uses are truth-conditionally relevant if and only if they constitute referential meanings. We sketch a framework within which the denial of that thesis has theoretical content, by drawing (...) on the conceptual resources of Relevance Theory and on a pragmatic conception of reference, following Strawson. The linguistic meaning of definite descriptions is analyzed as a procedural meaning that is semantically underdetermined with respect to both referential and attributive readings, and a pragmatic strategy for understanding this ambiguity is sketched. El presente trabajo explora una posible conciliación de la relevancia para las condiciones de verdad de los usos referenciales de descripciones definidas con la postulación de un significado lingüístico unívoco para tales construcciones. Se argumenta que dicha conciliación es posible si se abandona la tesis, central en el debate entre russellianos y teóricos de la ambigüedad, según la cual los usos referenciales son relevantes para las condiciones de verdad si y sólo si constituyen significados referenciales. Se esboza un marco dentro del cual la negación de esta tesis tiene contenido teórico, apelando a los recursos conceptuales de la Teoría de la Relevancia y a una concepción pragmática de la referencia en la línea de Strawson. Se analiza el significado de las descripciones definidas como un significado procedimental, semánticamente subdeterminado respecto de una lectura referencial o atributiva, y se esboza una manera pragmática de entender esta ambigüedad. (shrink)

Languages involving modalities and languages involving vagueness have each been thoroughly studied. On the other hand, virtually nothing has been said about the interaction of modality and vagueness. This paper aims to start filling that gap. Section 1 is a discussion of various possible sources of vague modality. Section 2 puts forward a model theory for a quantified language with operators for modality and vagueness. The model theory is followed by a discussion of the resulting logic. In Section 3, the (...) framework will permit us to address a puzzle raised by Elizabeth Barnes and Robert Williams. (shrink)

Accounts for referential communication (and especially communication by means of definite descriptions and indexicals) in the mental file framework.

This paper continues an ongoing debate between Michael Devitt and me on referential uses of definite descriptions. He has argued that definite descriptions have referential meanings, and I have argued that they do not. Having previously rebutted the view that referential uses are akin to particularized conversational implicatures, he now he rebuts the view that they are akin to generalized conversational implicatures. I agree that the GCI is not the best model, but I maintain that in exploiting the quantificational meaning (...) of definite descriptions, referential uses involve a different sort of pragmatic regularity. Also, I try to bolster my objection to Devitt’s claim that the word ‘the’ is semantically ambiguous. (shrink)

Bach fails to give a satisfactory pragmatic account of referential uses of definite descriptions because he does not explain how a description’s quantificational meaning plays a “key role” in those uses. Bach’s criticism that my semantic account does not explain how the hearer understands a description is misguided. Bach’s denial that a pragmatic account is committed to the attributive use being more fundamental detaches meaning from use in an unacceptable way.

The present article contains a defense of the thesis that definite descriptions can have referential meanings that include a descriptive component from the following objections contained in the preceding articles: the idea that the thesis at stake cannot adequately account for cases of misdescriptions, the claim that referential descriptions should be considered to be purely referential, with no descriptive meaning component whatsoever, and the alleged viability of a pragmatic approach according to which definite descriptions do not have referential meanings but (...) can only be referentially used. As far as is concerned, it is argued that misdescriptions can be clearly accounted for in pragmatic terms. Against, it is pointed out that sentences of the form 'The/an F is not F' have a contradictory status -they are taken to be contradictory even when the descriptions involved have referential meanings. Finally, regarding, it is argued that, in defending a very audience-directed stance, Caso confuses the epistemic and constitutive dimensions of reference determination, and as a consequence he is committed to an extreme form of linguistic pragmatism according to which the meaning of an expression is constitutively determined by the way in which hearers interpret utterances. El presente artículo contiene una defensa de la tesis según la cual las descripciones definidas pueden tener significados referenciales que incluyen un componente descriptivo frente a las siguientes objeciones contenidas en los artículos precedentes: la idea según la cual la tesis en cuestión no explica adecuadamente los casos de descripciones fallidas, la tesis de que no hay razones para creer que los significados referenciales de las descripciones incluyan un componente descriptivo, y la supuesta viabilidad de una perspectiva pragmática, desde la cual se considera que las descripciones no tienen significados referenciales sino que pueden ser usadas referencialmente. En relación con, se sostiene que las descripciones fallidas pueden ser claramente explicadas en términos pragmáticos. Contra, se destaca que las oraciones de la forma 'El/un F no es F' tienen un carácter contradictorio -se considera que son contradictorias aun en los casos en los que las descripciones involucradas tienen significados referenciales. Finalmente, contra, se argumenta que, al defender un acercamiento muy orientado hacia la audiencia, Caso confunde la dimensión epistémica de la determinación de la referencia con su dimensión constitutiva y, en consecuencia, resulta comprometido con una forma extrema de pragmatismo lingüístico según la cual el significado de una expresión se encuentra constitutivamente determinado por la manera en que los hablantes interpretan las emisiones. (shrink)

Straipsnyje keliamas klausimas: kokios sąlygos turi būti patenkintos, kad, ištarę sakinį su apibrėžiamąja deskripcija kaip sakinio subjektu, mes išreikštume singuliarinį teiginį. Autorius teigia, kad Wettsteino įsitikinimas, jog teiginio singuliariškumas nustatomas ištarimo metu nurodant apibrėžiamosios deskripcijos referentą, yra nenuoseklus. Straipsnyje siūlomas kitas singuliariškumo kriterijus: teiginys yra singuliarinis, jeigu jame dalyvaujanti apibrėžiamoji deskripcija įvertinama vieninteliame galimame pasaulyje, o jeigu apibrėžiamoji deskripcija turi būti įvertinta daugiau nei vieno galimo pasaulio atžvilgiu, tai teiginys yra bendrasis. Šis kriterijus veiksmingas aiškinant kontroversiškus atvejus – kai išreiškiame (...) teisingą singuliarinį teiginį, kurio subjekto dėmuo nedera su apibrėžiamąja deskripcija, pavartota ištartame sakinyje. (shrink)