Reference is a central topic in the philosophy of language, linguistic semantics, and related areas of philosophy and linguistics. This textbook offers an up-to-date introduction to key debates about reference. While comprehensive in approach, it is written for students and does not assume any prior training in philosophy of language.

Seminar paper from the year 2022 in the subject Philosophy - Theoretical (Realisation, Science, Logic, Language), grade: 1,0, University of Luxembourg, language: English, abstract: While talking to someone, both may be speaking of the same thing, without realizing that they are doing so. When I am talking about the Morning Star, and someone else is talking about the Evening Star, are we both talking about the same thing? Or are we talking about two different things, as we are using different names for the thing we are talking about? To start an analysis on this topic, this paper will elaborate Frege’s Puzzle’s, which he introduces at the beginning of "On sense and reference". He talks about two puzzles, one concerning identity statements, and the other, concerning propositional attitude reports. As he himself elaborates those puzzles, he will also try to find the solution to those puzzles. To understand his solution to the Puzzles, I will elaborate his solutions, giving various definitions, which are necessary to have a great understanding of what is being argued for. While his first puzzle is especially based on proper names, his second puzzle, will concern entire declarative sentences and forms of argumentation. After having a clear understanding of what the problem with identity is, and how Frege claims to have solved it, we will see how one could oppose to Frege’s resolution to the puzzle. Analyzing multiple reproaches, would go beyond the scope of this paper. Therefore, we will only focus on a claim stated by Glezako Stravoula, saying that Frege started his argumentation wrong, by supposing that a=a can be known a priori.

A fascinating study of the bounds between science and language; knowledge and truth. Jody Azzouni explores how the language of science transforms our fragmented investigations of the world into a unitary and seamless discourse.

How is it that words come to stand for the things they stand for? Is the thing that a word stands for - its reference - fully identified or described by conventions known to the users of the word? Or is there a more roundabout relation between the reference of a word and the conventions that determine or fix it? Do words like 'water', 'three', and 'red' refer to appropriate things, just as the word 'Aristotle' refers to Aristotle? If so, which things are these, and how do they come to be referred to by those words? In Roads to Reference, Mario Gómez-Torrente provides novel answers to these and other questions that have been of traditional interest in the theory of reference. The book introduces a number of cases of apparent indeterminacy of reference for proper names, demonstratives, and natural kind terms, which suggest that reference-fixing conventions for them adopt the form of lists of merely sufficient conditions for reference and reference failure. He then provides arguments for a new anti-descriptivist picture of those kinds of words, according to which the reference-fixing conventions for them do not describe their reference. This book also defends realist and objectivist accounts of the reference of ordinary natural kind nouns, numerals, and adjectives for sensible qualities. According to these accounts these words refer, respectively, to 'ordinary kinds', cardinality properties, and properties of membership in intervals of sensible dimensions, and these things are fixed in subtle ways by associated reference-fixing conventions.

This Handbook offers students and more advanced readers a valuable resource for understanding linguistic reference; the relation between an expression (word, phrase, sentence) and what that expression is about. The volume’s forty-one original chapters, written by many of today’s leading philosophers of language, are organized into ten parts: I Early Descriptive Theories II Causal Theories of Reference III Causal Theories and Cognitive Significance IV Alternate Theories V Two-Dimensional Semantics VI Natural Kind Terms and Rigidity VII The Empty Case VIII Singular (De Re) Thoughts IX Indexicals X Epistemology of Reference Contributions consider what kinds of expressions actually refer (names, general terms, indexicals, empty terms, sentences), what referring expressions refer to, what makes an expression refer to whatever it does, connections between meaning and reference, and how we know facts about reference. Many contributions also develop connections between linguistic reference and issues in metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of science.

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Original papers by leading international authors address the most important problem in the philosophy of language, the question of how to assess the prospects of developing a tenable theory of meaning, given the influential sceptical attacks mounted against the concept of meaning by Willard Van Quine and Saul Kripke and their adherents in particular. Thus the texts attempt to answer the fundamental questions – of whether there are meanings, and, if there are, of what they are and of the form a serious philosophical theory of meaning should take.