The mechanism of reference

Abstract

Reference is what relates words to the world of objects on whose condition the truth of sentences hinges. It is natural to wonder what sorts of relations underlie the reference relation-to wonder, that is, what constitutes the mechanism of reference. This question comes naturally because reference has the appearance of a supervenient phenomenon: semantic facts, one feels, hold in virtue of facts of some other kind. To ask for a specification of the underlying facts is not (necessarily) to commit oneself to a reductionist view of reference; it may be that our best account of the reference relation, though substantial and illuminating, fails to reach the standards of genuine reduction-it takes the form of a 'picture' rather than a 'theory'.1 An account of reference, of the shape I envisage, would consist in a set of rules the rules of reference which determine a function from expressions to the items which are their referents. The rules would speak of relations, not themselves directly characterised in terms of the notion of reference, recognition and deployment of which is comprised in mastery of a language: a speaker has mastered the rules of reference for a language if and only if he appreciates (perhaps inchoately) what relations go to determine the referent of an arbitrary singular term. Specifying the rules of reference is thus part of an account of the principles in which a speaker's ability to interpret words as possessed of specific referents consists, and hence of his ability to come to know the truth conditions of sentences. Articulating the rules of reference is thus analogous to devising a theory of the structure of sentences: such a theory should likewise be construed as a representation of a speaker's ability to understand sentences by way of the meaning of their constituent parts. Recent discussion of the mechanism of reference has tended to focus on the case of proper names, as if these were the basic referential devices. This focus reflects the assumption that the mode of operation of names provides the model for an account of how