How to bridge the gap between meaning and reference

Abstract

There is a temptation, during a revolution, to minimize the significant differences among the revolutionary parties. The activists themselves, due to their deep and unanimous opposition to the old regime and their exhilaration at recent successes, often find it difficult to overcome the illusion of general agreement on fundamentals. The past two decades has been a period of revolutionary activity in the philosophy of language. The members of the old regime are, as it were, the pro ponents of the Fregean picture of how words hook up with the world, the idea that singular terms express descriptive concepts and refer to those items that satisfy the concepts. Frege's perspective has been vigorously attacked by those recently called by one anthologist "the new theorists of reference", originally Donnellan, Kaplan, Kripke, and Putnam. Singular terms refer, according to the latter theorists, not by expressing concepts but in some much more immediate and direct way. The definite description, Frege's paradigm, has been replaced by a new paradigm or two, the demonstrative expression and/or the Millian proper name that merely tags but does describe its bearer. I plead guilty, as one of the advocates of the newer approach, to the charge of laboring under the illusion of agreement on fundamentals. I became suspicious, however, when I was accused of advocating the causal theory of reference, a view that seemed foreign to my thinking but was supposedly central to or even definitive of the new approach.1 The question I shall address, the question mentioned in the title, will highlight profound disagreements among the new theorists and will provide an opportunity to further develop the direct reference ap proach. I shall restrict my discussion to indexical reference, specifically to reference by means of pronouns and demonstratives. That there is a gap between meaning and reference in the case of indexical expressions has been a cornerstone of the new approach. Consider the first person pronoun. Each of us can use it to refer to ourselves, yet it is not ambiguous. Its lexical meaning remains constant