Reference and Beyond

Free Download Reference and Beyond: Essays in Philosophy of Language
English | 2025 | ISBN: 0199280819 | 477 Pages | PDF (True) | 26 MB
In Reference and Beyond, Michael Devitt explores philosophy of language from a naturalistic approach. A dominant theme of this book is the semantics of proper names, definite descriptions, and demonstratives. It shows that these terms have conventional "referential" uses to express "singular" thoughts. Those uses are explained by a unified "causal" theory: a term's reference is largely fixed in an object by a causal link between the person and the object when it is, or was, the focus of that person's perception. Furthermore, Devitt argues that a term's meaning is its largely causal mode of reference. So, a related theme is the rejection of the "direct reference" view that the meaning of a name is its bearer.