Reference and Attention

de Ponte & Korta (eds.) Reference and Representation in Thought and Language. Oxford University Press , 2017

The use of language is one the most remarkable abilities of humans by which they express their thoughts, ideas and emotions in order to communicate effectively. However, until now linguists and philosophers of language are still perplexed about the nature of language and the relation between humans' minds and language and many other questions concerning it. Throughout this essay, we will deal with Frege's 1892 paper "Über Sinn und Bedeutung" ("On Sense and Reference") in which he tries to solve two puzzles: one is concerned with identity statement and the other is concerned sentences with subordinate clause such as propositional attitude report. This article was a response to John Stewart Mill's view of how signs and their reference are related. Fredge's work is now a classic, and it is groundbreaking in both semantics and the philosophy of language. He is often considered as one of the most influential intellectual in the philosophy of language.

Dr Leonard Polonsky thesis digitisation, 1992

The following question is taken as central: What role is to be assigned to nonempty and syntactically simple singular terms in fixing the semantic contents of utterances of declarative sentences in which they may occur? I focus on those aspects of the current dispute between Millian and neo-Fregean approaches to singular reference which are related to issues about the cognitive significance of language use; the following two issues are singled out as crucial: the issue about (alleged) potential differences in informativeness between sentences constructed out of co-referential singular terms; and the issue about (alleged) failures of substitutivity $alva veritate of co-referential singular terms in propositional-attitude contexts. The general direction of my arguments is as follows. On the one hand, I argue that "notational variance" claims recently advanced on both sides of the dispute should be deemed unsound; and hence that one is really confronted with separate accounts of singular content. On the other, I argue that Milllanism does not provide us with a satisfactory solution to the problems about cognitive significance; and hence that a framework of singular senses is Indispensable to deal with such problems in an adequate way. I also discuss the problem of Cognitive Dynamics, i.e. the issue of attitude-retention and persistence of mental content, in connection with the individuation of indexical thought. I argue that the standard Intuitive Criterion of Difference for thoughts might be reasonably extended to the diachronic case, allowing thus the possibility of discriminating between thoughts entertained by a thinker at different times.

1 There is considerable controversy over the proper interpretation of Frege, and it is not clear that all that roles that Frege wanted to be filled by his notion of sense could be filled by a single thing. I will be taking as a starting point one aspect of the Fregean notion of sense to draw a distinction between sense based theories of reference and direct reference theories. I will not insist on the identification of what is true and what is the referent for Frege of a sentence in indirect discourse with the sense of a sentence. See John Perry, "Frege on Demonstratives," (Philosophical Review, 86 (1977): pp. 474-97) for more on these elements in Frege's thought, and Gareth Evans, "Understanding Demonstratives," (Collected Papers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985): pp. 291-321) for a rejoinder.

Journal of Pragmatics, 2009

This book is available in Oxford Scholarship Online. This book develops what is, in one respect, a Gricean approach to language and thought, but it is Grice with the pragmatics deemphasized. Davis has written previously on implicature (Davis, 1998), but his view is unfavourable and in this volume it plays only a minor role. This volume follows on from a different volume (Davis, 2003) and Part 1 of the current work, the Expression Theory of Meaning, which consists of six chapters and stretches to over 150 pages, provides a summary of its main claims and arguments. This very detailed summary, while valuable for readers not familiar with Davis's general position, does make for a slow start. Part 1 could with equal justice be described as 'The Ideational Theory of Meaning'. For the classic expression of the ideational theory one looks in particular to Locke (1690/1959). The basic notion is that a word is meaningful as the mark of an idea in the speaker's mind that it expresses. Communication occurs when the word produces a similar idea in the hearer's mind. Davis associates himself with that broad picture. Davis's notion of an idea is different from Locke's, though. In Locke's empiricist view, ideas are derived from sensation. Davis's conception is more abstract, as we shall see. Both the ideational theory of meaning and Grice's theory of meaning can be classified as psychological theories and Grice's theory can be construed as an ideational theory (Lycan, 2000:78). Grice's theory bases sentence meaning on speaker's meaning (Grice, 1957). For a speaker to mean something by an utterance is for them to intend to produce an effect in the hearer by means of the recognition of that intention. Grice, like Locke, understands meaning as what a speaker expresses and Davis, in adopting the phrase 'expression theory of meaning', shows links with both. A major flaw with Grice's theory, as originally stated, is that it treats the meaning of utterances as unstructured wholes and thus ignores the compositional structure of the meaning of sentences, although there was a later attempt to acknowledge compositionality (Grice, 1968/1989). Davis defines ideas (or concepts) as being thoughts or cognitive parts of thoughts (p. 40). This allows him to develop an account of the compositionality of thoughts, which later (Chapter 14) is developed formally as a Tarskian theory of thoughts (Tarski, 1944). Amongst the ideas some are atomic (p. 61). This is important when we come on to consider the meaning of proper names. A lot of ground is covered in detail in Part I, but we need to move on. The main theme of this work is how the expression theory of meaning applies to names. Part II, Reference, relates the expression theory to existing approaches to reference and prepares the ground by discussing such topics as speaker's reference, the referential-attributive distinction, the opaque-transparent distinction, causal theories of reference, twin-earth cases, referential theories of meaning and more. The key notion is that a word refers to something if it expresses the idea of that thing. It is in Part III, Names, that we really get to the action. The expression theory of meaning appears diametrically opposed to a Millian view of names (Mill, 1879). Davis distinguishes between the moderate Millian, who thinks that the meaning is simply the referent, and the radical Millian who thinks that names have no meaning, but only reference. Millian views are extensively discussed in chapters 10 and 11. Various objections to Millianism are raised, notably the difficulty in handling names within belief contexts where the Millian view struggles to deal with beliefs involving empty names (Russell's problem) or names where the believer is unaware of the relevant identities (Frege's problem). Chapter 12 deals with the Fregean alternative in which names have a sense as well as a reference and where a sense is often understood as having a descriptive content (Frege, 1892/1952

Logic, Intelligence, and Artifices. Tributes to Tarcísio H. C. Pequeno. London: College Publications, 2018

My purpose in this paper is to combine a fregean account of senses with a kripkean account of reference and a descriptivist account of connotation. The main ideas derive from my book Logical Forms, where my account of senses, thoughts, and truth is developed in some detail.

Journal of Pragmatics, 2010

A. Bianchi, V. Morato, G. Spolaore (eds.) The importance of Being Ernesto, 2016

Disputatio

Journal for the History of Analytical Philosophy, 2014