Roads to reference : an essay on reference fixing in natural language Gomez-Torrente

Roads to reference : an essay on reference fixing in natural language – Ebook Instant Download/Delivery ISBN(s): 9780198846277,0198846274

Product details:

• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0198846274
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0198846277
• Author: Mario Gomez-Torrente

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 Gomez-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.

Table contents:

1. Reference: Problems and Promises

2. Demonstratives and Conflicting Intentions

3. Proper Names and Referential Indeterminacy

4. Arabic Numerals and the Problem of Mathematical Sophistication

5. Nouns for Natural Kinds and the Problem of Arbitrariness

6. Words for Sensible Qualities and the Problem of Perceptual Variation

7. Concluding Notes

References
Index

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