I start my discussion of Kripke’s theory of reference by questioning whether it is necessary that we intend to use a name with the same reference as the person we learned the name from. In at least one simple example, this is neither necessary nor sufficient. Imagine a game were a group of people make up a story by successive members of the group uttering successive sentences of the story. So the first member starts:
(1) A soldier called ‘Alex’ returned from the war.
And the second member goes on
(2) Alex was looking forward to seeing his wife, Jenny, and his daughter Lucy.
And the third continues
(3) Jenny was only eight years old.
Now clearly the third speaker got it wrong. She probably meant to say ‘Lucy’; she meant the daughter, since it is a matter of biology that the wife cannot be eight years old. But her meaning or intentions are irrelevant in any case. For she has successfully used the name ‘Jenny’ with the same reference as the second speaker, and has successfully communicated the proposition that the soldier’s wife was only eight years old, even though she did not intend to use the name that way. What is relevant is not the intention of the speaker, but rather the rules of use of proper names (or other referring terms like pronouns or descriptions), plus an informational background available to both speaker and audience*.
Causation and intention are irrelevant, at least in this particular case. I shall argue in subsequent posts that all the different ways of passing on a reference are reducible to examples such as this one.
*Or an assumed background, which I shall discuss later.
9 comments:
Kripke handles this sort of issue with a distinction between speakers reference and semantic reference. Cf. his paper by that name, available at http://philo-crimmins.stanford.edu/PhilLang/readings/Kripke-Speakers-Reference-and-Semantic-Reference.pdf
I'd be interested to hear whether you think this answers your objection.
Once again an attempt to develop a theory of reference based on fictional stories.
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By the way, it is not a matter of biology that Jenny cannot be eight years old. The story doesn't say that Lucy is the daughter of Jenny, only of Alex. :)
But, once again, I'll pretend you said something different from what you actually said.
Always so much sloppiness...
Pardon the lack of punctuation... that's the first time I've commented on a philosophy post using a touch screen keyboard.
>>Once again an attempt to develop a theory of reference based on fictional stories.
That's the whole point, of course.
>>By the way, it is not a matter of biology that Jenny cannot be eight years old. The story doesn't say that Lucy is the daughter of Jenny, only of Alex. :)
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You mean it could be that the soldier was married to an 8 year old Jenny, and had a daughter, Lucy, by another woman?
Does that affect my point about what the third speaker 'probably meant'?
Tristan, thanks for the link to that article. Too important for a comment box, I will discuss it in a post this week.
No. read the lecture II in N & N. First he tosses out the cluster theory, across the board (e.g there's no necessity to the reference-fixing). Then he slyly sneaks in Ostension (per guru Wittgenstein). In effect SK's sort of a constructivist--so, one can use names like....chess pieces. But that doesn't really describe how they are named (say with historical personages, which do have a class of events attached to their name, and one might say that is significant--Napoleon's not the charwoman.)
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