Reference and Beyond

In Reference and Beyond, Michael Devitt explores philosophy of language from a naturalistic approach. A dominant theme of this book is the semantics of proper names, definite descriptions, and demonstratives. It shows that these terms have conventional "referential" uses to express "singular" thoughts. Those uses are explained by a unified "causal" theory: a term's reference is largely fixed in an object by a causal link between the person and the object when it is, or was, the focus of that person's perception. Furthermore, Devitt argues that a term's meaning is its largely causal mode of reference. So, a related theme is the rejection of the "direct reference" view that the meaning of a name is its bearer.

Another theme in Reference and Beyond concerns thoughts and their ascriptions, including "de se" thoughts and Kripke's Paderewski puzzle. Devitt approaches the semantics of ascriptions from a perspective on thoughts, thus according with the slogan, "Put Metaphysics First," that governs the author's approach to all philosophical problems. A further framework is naturalism. Languages are parts of the spatio-temporal world playing causal roles in virtue of certain properties, "meanings." The task of a theory of language is then to explain the nature of those causally significant properties. The book takes a very dim view of the popular idea that "propositions" have a place in explanations of meanings. The naturalism leads to a rejection of the received view that theories of language must rest on an evidential base of speakers' intuitions and to a search for a respectable empirical base.