
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 work investigates the fundamental mechanisms by which words acquire their reference, specifically questioning whether reference is determined by known conventions or more complex, indirect relations. Mario Gómez-Torrente, a scholar in the philosophy of language, utilizes a rigorous analytical framework to challenge traditional descriptivist accounts, proposing instead that reference-fixing conventions often function as lists of sufficient conditions rather than descriptive definitions.
What You Will Find
Scope Limits
Experts in the philosophy of language recognize this text as a significant contribution to the ongoing debate regarding reference-fixing conventions. Readers frequently note the high level of academic density and the technical precision required to engage with the author's arguments.
Page Count:
243
Publication Date:
2019-01-01
Publisher:
OUP Oxford
ISBN-10:
019258524X
ISBN-13:
9780192585240
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