The Reference Book

by Hawthorne, John; Manley, David

• ISBN13: 9780199693672
• ISBN10: 0199693676
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2012-05-23
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

John Hawthorne and David Manley present an original treatment of the semantic phenomenon of reference and the cognitive phenomenon of singular thought. In Part I, they argue against the idea that either is tied to a special relation of causal or epistemic acquaintance. Part II challenges the alleged semantic rift between definite and indefinite descriptions on the one hand, and names and demonstratives on the other--a division that has been motivated in part by appeals to considerations of acquaintance. Drawing on recent work in linguistics and philosophical semantics, Hawthorne and Manley explore a more unified account of all four types of expression according to which none of them paradigmatically fits the profile of a referential term. On the preferred framework put forward in The Reference Book, all four types of expression involve existential quantification but admit of uses that exhibit many of the traits associated with reference--a phenomenon that is due to the presence of what Hawthorne and Manley call a 'singular restriction' on the existentially quantified domain. The book concludes by drawing out some implications of the proposed semantic picture for the traditional categories of reference and singular thought.

Author Biography

John Hawthorne is Waynflete Professor of Metaphysical Philosophy at the University of Oxford, having previously been Professor of Philosophy at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey. His books include Knowledge and Lotteries, Metaphysical Essays, and Relativism and Monadic Truth.


David Manley is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. His papers have appeared in such journals as Mind, The Journal of Philosophy, Nous, and Philosophy and Phenomenological Research.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	p. vii
Against acquaintance
Introduction: reference and singular thought	p. 3
Preliminaries	p. 3
Themes from Russell	p. 4
Reference after Russell	p. 8
Singular thought after Russell	p. 15
Acquaintance after Russell	p. 19
Should auld acquaintance be forgot?	p. 25
Gameplan	p. 35
A defense of liberalism	p. 37
The spy argument	p. 37
Acquaintance and attitude reports	p. 40
Turning the tables	p. 45
Harmony, Sufficiency, and impoverished cases	p. 50
'Believing ofÆ	p. 53
The Neptune argument	p. 56
The irrelevance of Constraint	p. 61
Sources of confusion	p. 64
Conditional reference fixers	p. 68
Epistemic acquaintance	p. 71
Knowing-which and discrimination	p. 71
Evans on acquaintance	p. 74
Objections	p. 78
Knowledge of existence	p. 83
Understanding and knowledge	p. 85
Beyond acquaintance
From the specific to the singular	p. 93
Indefinites: preliminary observations	p. 93
Specificity: the bifurcated view	p. 99
Interlude: presupposition	p. 105
Specificity: the simple view	p. 107
Interlude: covert domain restriction	p. 117
Specificity as domain restriction	p. 122
Singular restrictors	p. 133
Acquaintance again	p. 136
Coy and candid restrictions	p. 138
Variant views	p. 141
Specifics in attitude ascriptions	p. 144
The representation requirement	p. 151
What 'the'?	p. 155
Three approaches to uniqueness	p. 155
Existentialism	p. 156
Exceptions to specificity?	p. 168
Russellianism	p. 175
Neo-Fregeanism	p. 181
Three arguments for a neo-Fregean 'the'	p. 190
Five arguments against a neo-Fregean 'the'	p. 196
The upshot	p. 202
Et tu, 'Brute'?	p. 203
Demonstratives	p. 203
Non-rigid uses	p. 205
Salience	p. 207
Modal themes	p. 211
The view so far	p. 218
Names	p. 219
The predicate view: details	p. 221
Two ineffective arguments	p. 224
Calling and describing	p. 227
Against the predicate view	p. 233
Bare and bound?	p. 235
Varieties of validity	p. 239
Names: a tentative verdict	p. 241
Afterword	p. 243
Bibliography	p. 249
Index	p. 259
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