Inscrutability Of Reference Research Articles

The Inscrutability of Reference

The Inscrutability of Reference

The Inscrutability of Reference

The Inscrutability of Reference

Semantics: An Interdisciplinary Reader in Philosophy, Linguistics and Psychology

Preface Acknowledgements and references to reprinted articles Part I. Philosophy: Overview Charles E. Caton Section 1. Meaning: 1. On sentence-sense, word-sense and difference of word sense. Towards a philosophical theory of dictionaries David Wiggins 2. How does one tell whether a word has one, several or many senses? William P. Alston 3 A reply to Mr Alson David Wiggins 4. Meaning H. G. Price 5. Three levels of meaning Gilbert H. Harman Section 2. Reference: 1. Reference and referents Leonard Linsky 2. Identifying reference and truth-values P. F. Strawson 3. Reference and definite descriptions Keith Donnellan 4. Singular terms Zeno Vaendler 5. The problem of proper names John R. Searle 6. The inscrutability of reference W. V. Quine Part II. Linguistics: Overview Howard Maclay Section 1. The Role of Semantics in a Grammar: 1. Deep structure, surface structure, and semantic interpretations Noam Chomsky 2. Where do noun phrases come from? James D. McCawley 3. On generative semantics George Lakoff Section 2. Meaning, Presupposition and Reference: 1. Semantic theory Jerrold J. Katz 2. Explorations in semantic theory Uriel Weinreich 3. Presupposition and relative well-formedness George Lakoff 4. Presupposition and assertion in the semantic analysis of nouns and verbs in English D. Terence Langendoen 5. Fact Paul Kiparsky and Carol Kiparsky Section 3. The Lexicon: 1. Types of lexical information Charles J. Fillmore 2. The data of semantic description Edward H. Bendix 3. On classifying semantic features Manfred Bierwisch 4. A method of semantic description R. M. W. Dixon 5. A note on a Walbiri tradition of antonymy Kenneth Hale Part III. Psychology: Overview Danny Steinberg Section 1. Theoretical Issues: 1. Where do sentences come from? Charles E. Osgood 2. Are there specifically linguistic universals? David McNeill 3. Language and cognition Eric H. Lenneberg 4. Could meaning be an rm? Jerry A. Fodor Section 2. Empirical Studies: 1. Empirical methods in the study of semantics George A. Miller 2. Some lexical structures and their empirical validity Thomas G. Bever and Peter S. Rosenbaum Index.

A Scrutiny of Reference

In many of his writings, Quine has argued that language is indeterminate in various ways. He has pursued, at length and often, an ingenious conclusion about one such way, which he sometimes calls the inscrutability of reference and, sometimes, the inscrutability of terms. It is the conclusion that one dimension of indeterminacy leaves the references of general terms unfixed among a number of alternatives; further, that no sort of scrutiny of the terms or of the occasions of their utterance could, in principle, provide a means for settling objectively which referent to assign to a term. This single doctrine assumes various guises: there is a firm claim about incompatible but equally acceptable translations of certain Japanese classifiers; there is a somewhat less clear commitment to the inscrutability of a choice between expressions and their Godel numbers as referents for quoted expressions; further, there is a yet more tentative endorsement of Harman's example of the various referents of numerical expressions given by competing set theoretic reductions of number.