## 1. Introduction



We use language to talk about the world. Much of what we say about the
world appears to be meaningful; some of it, presumably, is even true.
For instance, I seem to be saying something true when, in the
appropriate sort of setting, I assertively utter:


1. Barack Obama is a Democrat.



How do we manage to do such things? How, for instance, do I manage to
talk about Barack Obama and thereby say meaningful and true things
about him? In a word: how do I *refer* to Barack Obama by means
of the name 'Barack Obama'? Metaphorically, we seem to be
capable of using language to talk about the world because some of our
words are themselves capable of 'hooking onto' things in
the world, things like Barack Obama. Proper names--that is,
expressions like 'Barack Obama' and 'David
Cameron'--are widely regarded as paradigmatic referring
expressions. Although it may seem implausible to suppose that
*all* words refer, that all words somehow 'hook
onto' bits of reality, certain types of words are arguably of
the referring sort. These include: proper names, pronouns, indexicals,
demonstratives, plurals, natural kind terms, and various other sorts
of property terms. Definite descriptions are another, though highly
controversial, candidate. Here, we'll focus on just a subset of 
these--namely, what are often called 'singular'
referential terms. These are terms that, supposing they refer, refer
to particular objects and individuals as opposed to groups or
properties. Since singular referential terms have been subjected to
intensive philosophical scrutiny over the past hundred years, this 
will still leave us with plenty to discuss.



This article will focus on five central, related questions regarding
reference: (i) How does the reference relation that obtains between
token uses of terms and objects relate to the act of reference, the
thing that speakers *do* with these terms? In other words, do
terms refer to what they do in virtue of our using them to do so, or
do we use them to refer in virtue of their already doing so? 
(ii) What are the meanings of referential terms? Are they
just referents, or rather something more? (iii) What is the
*mechanism* of reference? In other words, in virtue of what
does a token referential term attach to a particular
object/individual? (iv) Is there a single mechanism of reference
common to all referring terms, or do different sorts of terms hook
onto their referents in virtue of different sorts of things? And (v)
to what extent, if at all, can reference depend on relatively private
features of the speaker, such as her intentions or other mental
states?



Our goal here will be to map out how answers to these various
questions naturally cluster together into several distinct outlooks on
reference, outlooks which drive a great deal of theorizing about
particular referential terms and phrases. To get there, we'll start in
Section 2 by looking at two of the main approaches to proper names.
Then, in Section 3, we'll turn to indexicals and demonstratives, which
put pressure on the thought that these two approaches represent an
exhaustive set of options. Section 4 will focus on definite
descriptions, which will serve to bring to the fore the question of
how the reference relation itself relates to the act of 
reference--a question which serves to highlight some potential
deficiencies in earlier models of linguistic reference. Section 5 will
step back to outline the main clusters of positions we will have
developed by that point. Finally, Section 6 wraps up by looking at the
reasons that have been offered for doubting whether there is really
any such thing as the reference relation at all.



For the sake of both clarity and brevity, this entry will refrain from
venturing too deeply into the detailed debates regarding the meaning,
syntactic form, or function of the various terms we'll be looking at.
Rather, we'll focus instead on what, if anything, can be said about
the nature of linguistic reference *in general*. For a more detailed look
at the idiosyncrasies of these various terms, please see the entries
on
 names,
 descriptions, and
 indexicals.
 See also the related entry on
 natural kinds,


## 2. Proper Names



Proper names have long taken center stage in debates about linguistic
reference. For present purposes, we'll treat these as roughly
co-extensive with what ordinary (non-philosophically trained) speakers
standardly call 'names'. So expressions like 'Barack
Obama', 'Kyoto', and 'Mount Kilimanjaro'
will all count as proper names for our purposes. What do these
expressions have in common? In virtue of what do they constitute a
*genuine class* of linguistic expressions? At least at first
glance, these would appear to be *syntactically simple*
expressions that refer, or at least purport to refer, to
*particular* objects or individuals. Thus, 'Barack
Obama' refers to a particular man, 'Kyoto' refers to
a particular city, and 'Mount Kilimanjaro' refers to a
particular mountain. And, even though it is questionable whether
expressions such as 'Santa Claus' and 'Sherlock
Holmes' *actually* refer to anything, there can be no
doubt that they at least *purport* to refer: to Santa Claus and
Sherlock Holmes, respectively. They are thus to be counted as proper
names as well for present purposes.



With respect to proper names, there are two basic orientations that
have long captured philosophers' attention: one that views names on
the model of tags, and another that views them on the model of
descriptions. We'll briefly survey these two views, along with some
complications that arise for each. Then we'll turn to a problem that
arises for both sorts of view: explaining how reference works for
names with more than one bearer.


### 2.1 Descriptivist Theories



According to descriptivist theories of proper names, a particular use
of a proper name refers when the descriptive content somehow
associated with that use suffices to pick out a specific object or
individual. On one standard way of working out this sort of view, one
associated with both Gottlob Frege (1892) and Bertrand Russell (1911),
some particular descriptive content is associated with a given use of
a name because *the speaker* associates this content, in her
mind, with the name in question. For the use of the name to refer,
this descriptive content must *uniquely determine* the name's
referent. So when a speaker uses the name '*N*'
and, in so doing, successfully refers to a particular object or
individual *x*, this sort of descriptivist claims (i) that the
speaker must be thinking of *N* as the (unique) *F* and
(ii) that *x* must in fact be the (unique) *F*. In other
words, this sort of 'classical' descriptivist posits that
referential success hinges on speakers attaching to each name in their
repertoire some descriptive content *F* which uniquely singles
out a specific object in the world. Conversely, when speakers fail
to associate a sufficiently precise description with a name, this sort
of descriptivist predicts that reference fails.



Classical descriptivists, like Frege and Russell, were perfectly
willing to acknowledge that the descriptive content in question might
vary--sometimes quite markedly--from one speaker to the
next. Indeed, according to Russell, such contents may vary across time
for one and the same speaker. Thus, while I might associate the name
'Obama' with the descriptive content *the previous U.S.
president*, Michelle Obama might associate the same name with the
descriptive content *my husband*. If Trump were to assume
dictatorial powers, my identifying content associated with Obama might
well change--perhaps to something like *the last legitimate
president of the United States*. If Barack and Michelle were to
divorce, Michelle's identifying descriptive content would no doubt
change as well--perhaps to *my ex-husband*. In all of
these cases, the individual referred to by means of the name is
determined (or, as it is often put, is 'picked out' or
'fixed') by the particular descriptive content the speaker
associates with that name. Because the descriptive content in question
is typically characterized by means of a definite description (an
expression of the form *the F*), such theories are often (even
if somewhat
 misleadingly[2])
 known as 'descriptivist theories' of proper names.



To get the intuitive appeal of descriptivism more clearly in view,
consider a case where we know two individuals named 'David
Cameron'--one of whom is a mutual friend and has never
held any elected office, the other of whom is the former Prime
Minister of the United Kingdom. Suppose now that I assertively
utter:


2. David Cameron made a grave error.



If for some reason you are confused about who I am talking about, the
natural thing for you to do is to ask me "Which David Cameron do
you mean?" I might then respond "The former Prime Minister
of the U.K.," and this seems to be dispositive of the facts
here. That is, supposing that this is the description I had in mind,
then it would seem that my utterance of (2) is genuinely
*about* David Cameron the former Prime Minister and not our
mutual friend, the non-politician. Likewise, the truth or falsity of
(2) would seem to hinge on how things are with the former Prime
Minister and not on how things are with our mutual friend of the same
name. 



Some other appealing aspects of descriptivism become evident when we
pair the thesis considered above, a thesis about what determines
reference, with a natural companion thesis to the effect that the
descriptive contents associated with uses of names also provide their
token meanings. In other words, proper names may well refer, but they
only do so *via* their meanings--which are more like
definite descriptions. By adopting this thesis, the descriptivist now
has ready explanations available for a range of philosophically
interesting cases. So, consider:


3. Hesperus is Phosphorus.
4. Santa Claus lives at the North Pole.
5. Fred believes that Cicero, but not Tully, was Roman.



(3) is true, but not knowable *apriori*. That said, if the
meanings of these two names is just whatever they refer to, we lack
any obvious explanation for why (3) isn't knowable *apriori*.
After all, it just turns out to be an instance of the law of
self-identify--something which very plausibly *is*
knowable *apriori*. The meaning descriptivist, however, can say
that what (3) asserts is that two distinct descriptions are satisfied
by the same object. Given what the relevant descriptions are likely to
be here, this won't be something that can plausibly be known
*apriori*. (4) presents a different sort of challenge: if the
name 'Santa Claus' fails to refer, then how can an
utterance of this sentence count as meaningful? What, in other words,
is such an utterance *about*? Again, the meaning descriptivist
has an easy answer here. What (4) means is something like *there is
some unique bearded, jolly elf who lives at the North Pole*.
Finally, one might worry that if 'Cicero' and
'Tully' just refer, and refer to the same thing, then it
becomes rather difficult to see how Fred could believe something about
the one but not about the other. But if Fred associates each name with
a different description, and if those descriptions are crucial to the
meaning of (5), then the problem simply dissolves.



The central challenge to the descriptivist theory is that there is
reason to suspect that proper names are not semantically equivalent to
definite descriptions. Saul Kripke (1972) argues, for example, that
names pick out the same object even when embedded under modal terms
like 'might', whereas definite descriptions typically
don't do this. Returning to our earlier example of 'David
Cameron' and supposing that the description I associate with
Cameron is *the British Prime Minister who called for a referendum
on Brexit*, it seems that I can still truly assert:


6. David Cameron might not have called for a referendum on
Brexit.



If descriptivism is right about both meaning and reference, however,
then (6) should be equivalent to:


7. It might have been the case that: the British Prime Minister who
called for a referendum on Brexit did not call for a referendum on
Brexit.



Granted, (7) is not really a claim of ordinary English. Still, holding
fixed that we are talking about *metaphysical* rather than
*epistemic* possibility here, it should be clear enough that (7)
is false: if there is someone who satisfies the description 'the
British Prime Minister who called for a referendum on Brexit' in
whatever possible situation we are considering, then that individual
called for a Brexit referendum in that possible situation.



Now, in more ordinary English, there is a way of hearing something
along the lines of (7) as true: assuming that we are talking about the
Prime Minister who  *actually* called for a referendum, of
course he might not have. But that is not how definite descriptions
are typically assumed to function; rather, they are typically
understood to be flexible, or  *non-rigid* across the space of
possibility, picking out whatever happens to satisfy them in whatever
possible situation we are considering. So, if the descriptivist is to
avail herself of this sort of defensive maneuver, as some have been
tempted to, then she will have to motivate the claim that names are
semantically equivalent not to definite descriptions *per se*,
but rather to 'actualized' or 'rigidified'
versions
 thereof.[3]



This challenge can be avoided by a descriptivist who is willing to
give up on the claim that what a proper name means, on a given occasion,
is equivalent to a definite description. In that case, an associated
description will fix reference relative to the actual world, and then
that referent is what relevant to determining the truth of modal
statements. This response, however, entails giving up on the nice
explanations of (3)-(5) that the more committal meaning
descriptivist was able to provide. What's more, even this more minimal
version of descriptivism will run into another problem raised by
Kripke, what is often called the 'semantic' problem.



This problem runs as follows: often, we don't associate enough
information with a name to pick out any particular individual.
Nonetheless, we seem to be capable of using that name to refer to a
specific individual. Kripke offers as an example the name
'Feynman'. Most people, Kripke claims, will at best know
that Feynman was a physicist; they will not know anything, aside from
the name, that would serve to differentiate Feynman from any other
physicist they have heard of. The problem is that an indefinite
description like *a physicist* will not suffice to pick out any
particular individual in the world. Even  *a physicist named
'Feynman'* won't do, at least in a world where two
physicists bear this name. At best, this sort of description
will pick out an arbitrary member of a class of individuals, not a
particular one. And yet, as Kripke points out, it seems perfectly
coherent for someone who knows nothing about Feynman, who has only
overheard someone using the name, to say to herself "I wonder
who Feynman is," or to ask her friend "Who is
Feynman?" In each of these cases, the natural thing to say is
that the speaker is using the name 'Feynman' to wonder or
ask about Feynman. How she can manage to do so, however, looks to be
something that is going to be very difficult for the descriptivist to
explain--assuming (i) that she wants to maintain
the link between associated descriptions and the information available
to an individual speaker, and (ii) that she is unwilling
to rely on descriptions like *whoever the person I overheard this
name from was using it to talk about*.



Before moving on to the Millian alternative, it is worth noting that
some descriptivists have indeed been tempted to defend the theory by 
giving up on the link mentioned in (i). P.F. Strawson (1959), for instance,
suggests that speakers may rely on others to provide the relevant
descriptive content, the content that serves to hook a given use of a
name onto an object or individual in the world. In fact, Strawson
allows that groups can effectively use names to refer so long as there
is a at least one expert among them for whom for whom the following holds:
when we pool expert opinion, a plurality of the the descriptions
they associate with the relevant name are true of a single object. This
will effectively deal with Kripke's Feynman case, but at an intuitive
cost. For now the descriptivist has not only forfeited her ability to
explain (3)-(5), she has also risked making it the case that
speakers will have no special access to who they are talking about
when using a name. If speakers regularly lack sufficient information
to identify the referent of their use of a proper name, then it is
highly unclear why we would be justified in relying on them to answer
questions like "Which *N* were you talking about?"
Some may be tempted to pay this price. Others may be tempted to try to
integrate bits and pieces of descriptivism even into theories which
are otherwise anti-descriptivist. In fact, this latter option has
proven a popular one, and much of what follows can be viewed as a study
in how this strategy has played out with respect to different sorts of
referential terms.


### 2.2 Millian Heirs



The primary alternative to the descriptivist theory of names has
typically gone by the name of 'Millianism'. According to
this view, which dates back to John Stuart Mill (1867), a name's
meaning is simply its referent. In its modern form, the view was
introduced by Ruth Barcan Marcus (1961), who proposed that we ought to
conceive of proper names as 'tags'. To say that proper
names are tags is, for Marcus, to say that they have no linguistic
meaning beyond their reference. Proper
names do not, on this sort of view, refer by way of the descriptions
they allegedly stand for. Rather, they refer *directly*, as it
is sometimes put, to their bearers. Important consequences of this
theory include, as Marcus notes, the necessity of identity statements
between co-referring proper names--something which, though
highly intuitive, is not guaranteed by many descriptivist theories of
proper
 names.[4]
 Other important consequences include the dissolution of puzzles
involving substitutivity in modal contexts (Marcus 1993).



Of course, saying that names function as tags--or that they are
'directly referential'--is not to provide a full
theory of names. That will require, at the very least, an explanation
of what makes a name the particular tag that it is. In other words, we
need to specify what it is, if not an associated description,
that fixes what a name refers to in context. Put slightly differently,
the claim that names function as tags effectively furnishes us with a
*semantics* for names. What remains, is to provide a
*metasemantics* for names, a theory that tells us which
semantic value should be associated with each name, and why.



The most popular option has been to pair a Millian semantics with a
metasemantic picture adumbrated at roughly the same time by Peter
Geach (1969), Keith Donnellan (1970), and the aforementioned Kripke
(1972). Typically called the 'causal theory of reference',
the central idea developed in these works is that (the use of) a name
refers to whatever is linked to it in the appropriate way--a
way that does not require speakers to associate any identifying
descriptive content whatsoever with the name. The causal theory is
generally presented as having two components: one dealing with
reference fixing, the other dealing with reference borrowing.
Reference, on this sort of view, is initially fixed via a dubbing. In
other words, a language user *gives a name* to an object, by
saying something like "You're to be called
'*N*'." The standard case is supposed to be
one where the dubber is occurrently perceiving the target object when
she utters this. Then, after this initial act of reference-fixing, the
name is passed on from speaker to speaker through communicative
exchanges. Speakers succeed in referring to something by means of its
name, on this sort of view, because underlying their uses of the name
are links in a causal chain stretching back to the initial dubbing of
the object with that name. Subsequent speakers thus effectively
'borrow' their reference from speakers earlier in the
chain, though borrowers needn't be able to identify any of the lenders
they are in fact relying on. All that is required is that borrowers
are appropriately linked to their lenders through chains of
communication, chains of passing on the name.



As Kripke points out, complications arise due to the fact that we can
apparently re-use names. So, I may have come across the name
'Napoleon' via a chain of use leading back to the most
famous of French generals. Having heard the name, I may now decide to
call my cat, who likes to imperiously survey the domain of my
apartment, 'Napoleon'. When I use the name in this way, my
intentions make it the case, Kripke claims, that I have introduced a
new name, or at least a new use of the name. This is in spite of the
fact that there is a very real sense in which I inherited the name
from a historical tradition that traces back to 18th century France.
The take-home is this: not every sort of causal connection to previous
use is equal, according to the causal theorist. Some will help to fix
reference, whereas others are irrelevant. And while it would certainly
be nice to have a complete theory of which of these is which, a
detailed account of all this has proven remarkably difficult to
 offer.[5]



### 2.3 Names with Multiple Bearers



So far, we've generally proceeded as though names were 
univocal--that is, as if only one person or thing can bear a given name.
But that hardly seems right. As we already saw, a name like
'David Cameron' would seem to apply equally well to the
former British Prime Minister and to anyone else who's parents decided
to call them this, regardless of their politics; likewise, once I've
named my cat 'Napoleon', it would seem that the name
'Napoleon' can be used equally well to talk about either
the greatest of French generals or, alternatively, my cat. Classical
descriptivists have no real trouble accounting for this, since each
time a name is used, its reference is essentially fixed anew by
whatever description the speaker happens to have in mind. In other
words, according to the descriptivist, it is really only a matter of
happenstance that uses of names ever co-refer. That might seem a
rather large bullet to bite. On the other hand, once we move away from
classical descriptivism, explaining how names can refer to different
individuals in different circumstances becomes far more
challenging.



Consider a descriptivist in the Strawsonian mold, one for whom an
utterance of the name '*N*' refers in accord with
the plurality of the beliefs of the relevant experts. What are we to
do with a name like 'David Cameron' then, which sometimes
refers to the former British Prime Minister and sometimes to our
mutual friend? We cannot simply aggregate all the relevant beliefs
associated with this name, considered as an orthographic or
phonological form, and then see who or what the plurality of those
beliefs picks out. For that would leave us only ever able to use the
name to refer to one or the other of these David Camerons, and that
hardly seems like the right thing to say. It seems, therefore, that a
descriptivist of this sort will have to think about names in some more
fine-grained manner. Yet this will not prove easy. She cannot simply
go back to appealing to the information the speaker happens to have to
do the job--for we can easily imagine someone who has names for
both David Camerons in her vocabulary, and yet lacks sufficient
information to distinguish the one from the other.



Similar issues arise for the Millian. Here, however, some concrete
proposals have been floated. For instance, David Kaplan (1990) has
argued that, against all appearances, names really do only have one
referent apiece. In fact, Kaplan suggests that we should think of
names as individuated, in part, by their referents. In other words, on
Kaplan's view, one cannot simply 'read off' which name has
been used from its overt phonological or orthographic form. Rather,
Kaplan posits that there are any number of names all written and
pronounced 'David Cameron'. While each of these names is
written and pronounced identically, each refers to a different person.
The question now becomes: what determines *which name* a
speaker has used in a given context? Kaplan suggests that the answer
to this question has to do with the speaker's mental states, and in
particular with the speaker's intention to talk about one or another
individual. In effect, Kaplan takes it that hearing a name leaves us
with a mental trace, a mental analogue of a linguistic name, that
directly refers to some particular individual. By looking to see who
or what that trace refers to, we come to know the referential
properties of the utterance or inscription being used to express this
mental trace. In a word, on Kaplan's theory, names are first and
foremost a mental phenomenon. We do, of course, use certain marks and
sounds to externalize the mental traces, or mental names, that we
acquire from each other in the course of things; linguistic names, in
the sense of something that will bear referential features, are
*types of uses* of a particular phonological or orthographic
form to externalize the use of a mental name to refer in thought.



Kaplan's theory has some rather odd consequences, however. For
instance, it turns out that no two people actually ever share a 
name--for a name comes complete with its referential features.
Kaplan suggests that what people share are not names but rather some
common aspects of how their names tend to be externalized. In other
words, for Kaplan, what it is to share a name with someone else is for
both of your names to belong to the same class of phonological and
orthographic forms. Kaplan calls these 'generic names', as
opposed to the 'common currency names' which, for him, are
the bearers of semantic properties like reference.



Finding themselves dissatisfied with Kaplan's proposal here, other
direct reference theorists have opted for different responses
to the problem of names with multiple bearers. For instance, both
Francois Recanati (1997) and Michael Pelczar and Joe Rainsbury (1998)
have suggested that names ought to be treated on the model of
indexicals, a sort of term that we will consider in more detail
shortly. Briefly though, the suggestion runs: there is one and only
one name 'David Cameron', but context makes clear to which
individual a particular utterance of this name refers. In effect, the
proposal preserves something of the causal theory--by allowing
that baptisms and passings-on of names are the right sort of thing to
determine the set of possible referents associated with a name at any
given time--while appealing to some further feature of the
context to do the work of selecting an individual from this set. One
lingering problem is that, in contrast to the pure indexicals like
'I' or 'here', it is less than clear what
aspect of the context might serve to make this selection. Things get
worse still once we consider contexts in which multiple people bearing
the same name are all present and being talked about in the course of
a single utterance (e.g. "David was Prime Minister, now retired
in disgrace, whereas David is a plumber in good
 standing.").[6]
 One possibility would be to posit that proper names function more
like the demonstratives 'this' and 'that' than
they do any of the pure indexicals. Alternatively, one might posit
that proper names themselves denote only the property of bearing the
relevant name, but that singular reference emerges when proper names
are supplemented with a determiner like 'that' or
'the' to form a determiner phrase like 'that
David' or 'the Michelle' (see Burge (1973) and Graff
Fara (2015), respectively; see also the entry on
 names
 for more on such 'predicativist' views). In languages
like English, of course, these determiners would turn out to be mostly
silent. Still, one might take it that positing silent determiners is a
price worth paying for coherent story about the reference of names (or
definite noun phrases containing names, as the case may be) that is
compatible with the claim that two individuals can genuinely share a
name.



As should be clear, to better understand these last few proposals
we'll first need to get clearer on how reference is supposed to work
for each of the various terms and phrases just appealed to: pure
indexicals, impure indexicals, complex demonstratives, and definite
descriptions. Over the next few sections, we'll work to fill in these
gaps.


## 3. Indexicals



We've now seen two basic models of how words refer to things. On the
descriptivist model, words refer by being associated, somehow, with a
description that serves to isolate a particular object as the
referent. Different versions of this model derive from different ways
of associating the relevant descriptions with particular uses of
words. On the causal model, in contrast, words are associated with
chains of use that lead back to some original act of dubbing. That act
itself then serves to bridge the gap between word and world. While
both these models were developed with names in mind, we should ask
ourselves "Can either serve to explain linguistic reference
*in general*? That is, can either model plausibly extend to
other sorts of referential terms, beyond just names?"



To answer this question, and ultimately to introduce a third distinct
model of linguistic reference, we turn now to the indexicals. That is,
we turn to terms like 'I', 'you',
'here', 'now', 'he',
'she', 'this', and 'that'. As
we'll soon see, it is hardly clear that *all indexicals* refer
in the same way. In particular, a distinction has often been drawn
between what are called 'pure' and 'impure'
indexicals, with rather different theories of reference being offered
for each. The challenges that arise in trying to offer accounts of the
impure indexicals will bring us full circle to one of the questions
with which we began: namely, do words refer because we use them to do
so, or rather do we use them to do so because they already refer?


### 3.1 Pure Indexicals



What are pure indexicals? Roughly, they are expressions the reference
of which appears to co-vary with certain very regular aspects of the
contexts in which they are used. Here, 'context' should be
understood as incorporating, *inter alia*, a speaker, hearer,
time, and place. In contrast, the reference of 'impure'
indexicals is supposed to be more difficult to characterize in terms
of picking out some distinct, repeatable feature of a context. While
both the existence and the significance of this distinction are
controversial (see the entry on
 indexicals
 for further discussion; see also Radulescu (2018)), examples of each
sort of term--should the distinction prove both real and
significant--typically are not. Standard examples of pure
indexicals include 'I', 'here',
'now', and arguably 'you'. The list of impure
indexicals, on the other hand, is generally agreed to include
'this', 'that', 'he',
'she', and 'it'.



The traditional approach to indexicals, dating back once more to Frege
and Russell, has it that the reference of such expressions is fixed by
some sort of descriptive content associated by the speaker with the
expression. This reference-fixing description is the meaning of a
given utterance of the expression. The motivation for such a view is
largely intuitive. Indexicals certainly do appear to mean something,
and their meanings presumably have something to do with how these
expressions refer. For instance, the meaning of 'I' is
arguably *the speaker of this utterance* and refers to that
individual; the meaning of 'now' is arguably *the time
of this utterance* and refers to that time. And so on. 



One obvious objection to this view is that what the term
'I' refers to does not appear to be sensitive to whatever
sort of descriptive content a speaker might happen to associate with
that term. For instance, the fact that I might happen to associate the
description *the previous U.S. president* with the term
'I' does not mean that I can somehow succeed in using the
term 'I' to refer to Barack Obama. Another problem with
this view, discussed extensively in Kaplan (1989b), is that taking
these reference-determining descriptions to be part of what we assert
when we use indexicals can lead to our making some rather odd
predictions. Consider an assertive utterance of: 


8. I am hungry.



Suppose, first, that I am the speaker. I utter (8). Now, suppose that
you are the speaker. You utter (8). While there may be a sense in
which we 'said the same thing'--that is, the sense
in which we uttered the same sentence-type--there is another
sense in which we clearly did not. We could also put this as: we
asserted very different things. And yet, according to the classical
descriptivist, we've both asserted the very same thing. Namely, we've
both asserted that the speaker is hungry. All that differs is the
context in which we asserted this.



Now, to be clear, there are ways of tinkering with the view to avoid
both these objections. Some, like Hans Reichenbach (1947) or more
recently Manuel Garcia-Carpintero (1998) and John Perry (2001), have
argued that indexicals are 'token reflexives', meaning
that the descriptions that should be associated with them will need to
involve explicit reference to the utterance of that very token use of
the term. So, for instance, the description for 'I' might
be: the speaker of this very token of 'I'. Since different
tokens will be involved when each of us utters (8), we'll no longer be
asserting the very same thing. If we add that, for token indexicals at
least, the relevant descriptions aren't under the speaker's control,
but are rather associated with particular terms via the rules of
language, then we can avoid the former objection as well.



A different sort of approach was developed by Reichenbach's student,
David Kaplan. Kaplan (1989b) took many of the same elements that
Reichenbach was working with, but put them into a direct reference
framework where the meaning of an indexical in context--its
contribution to what is said or asserted--is just an object.
According to Kaplan, we need to distinguish between two types of
meaning, which he called 'character' and
'content'. Content is basically what we have been calling
meaning to this point; it is what the utterance of an individual term
contributes to what is said or asserted by the utterance of a complete
sentence of which it is a part. On direct reference theories, this is
an object, thereby making the truth or falsity of what is said or
asserted object-dependent. Character, on the other hand, is more akin
to a rule of use; a character tells us, for any given context, what
the content of a given expression is. Names, on Kaplan's way of
thinking about them, have constant characters: in any two arbitrary
contexts, uses of the same name will be mapped to the same referent
(recall that Kaplan thinks of names in a fine-grained way, such that they
are never shared). The rule for any name '*N*' thus
turns out to be: in any context whatsoever, return *N* as the
referent. Not so for terms like 'I' or 'here',
which Kaplan takes to be associated with rules like *return the
speaker* and  *return the location of the utterance*. So in
a context where I am speaking in Foyle's, utterances of these
indexicals will refer to me and to Foyle's, respectively. When you are
speaking at the American Bar, they will refer to you and to the
American Bar.



Importantly, the characters of the pure indexicals are supposed to be
insensitive to speakers' mental states. That rules out any possibility
of my using the term 'I' to refer to Barack Obama. Nor are
your and my utterances of (8) predicted to assert the same thing.
What's more, as Kaplan points out, the view allows us to productively
distinguish between 'metaphysical' necessity and what
Kaplan calls 'logical' necessity. The sentence "I am
here now," Kaplan claims, represents a logical necessity: in
virtue of what the indexicals 'I', 'here', and
'now' all mean, this sentence cannot be uttered falsely.
Yet clearly it is not necessary in any sort of metaphysical sense that
a particular speaker must be wherever she happens to be at the time of
utterance; she could just as easily have been somewhere
 else.[7]



Now we have three basic models of reference, of the metasemantics of
referential terms, on the table: the descriptivist model, the causal
chain model, and the character model. With the last of these in view,
we can clarify an important aspect of the indexical theory of names
that was discussed at the end of the last section. Essentially, that
theory proposed to hybridize our second and third models. Instead of
names having constant characters, as Kaplan would have it, the
proposal is to assign them more interesting ones. For instance, we
might try stipulating that the context, in addition to containing a
speaker, place, time, etc., must also include a most salient
individual bearing a given name. Names, the idea runs, always refer to
their most salient bearer at a context. Since names no longer have
constant characters, they are more like indexicals than we might
initially have thought. On the other hand, we can preserve a good
amount of the causal theory by re-characterizing it as a theory about
who counts as a name-bearer in a given
 context.[8]




This way of developing the indexical theory is not without its
downsides, however. For instance, it hardly seems to be true that we
always use names to refer to the most salient bearer of that name in a
context, particularly once we consider utterances of names prefixed
with phrases like 'the other' (e.g. "The other David
is not here yet, though I can hear him down the hall."). What's
more, there is reason to worry that embracing this sort of indexical
theory entails giving up on one of the purported advantages of the
causal theory: its ability to explain how it is that we can pass on
the capacity to think about objects merely by passing on names for
those objects. Since names are causally anchored to the objects they
name, according to the causal theory, acquiring a new name should
suffice to put us in causal contact with the object named. On the
indexical theory of names, on the other hand, we do not pass on names
for things; rather, we use names to refer to the most salient bearer
of that name in a given context. Perhaps this suffices to pass on a
*use* of a name--loaded, as it were, with a 
referent--where the listener doesn't already have that use in her
repertoire. But if the listener fails to have this use in her
repertoire, then it becomes hard to see how the referent of that use
could count as the most salient bearer of the relevant name in the
context. 


### 3.2 Impure Indexicals



In contrast to the pure indexicals, the reference of impure indexicals
like 'he', 'she', and 'it' or the
'true demonstratives' like 'this' and
'that' looks to be far less amenable to an analysis in
terms of character. After all, what regular feature of a speech
context might any of these terms serve to pick out? One option would
be to say that tokens of each of these simply refer to *the
demonstratum* of the context. But not only does that threaten to
force us to say that all of these terms effectively mean the same
thing--something which seems rather counterintuitive--now 
we also need to know what exactly serves to make something the
demonstratum in a context. And what are we to do when multiple such
terms, or multiple instances of the same term, are used within the
span of a single utterance? Are we really to believe that contexts
involve not just a demonstratum role, but also a *first
demonstratum* role, a *second demonstratum* role,
etc.?



Several possible responses arise at this point. First, we might try to
take advantage of the fact that many uses of these terms are
accompanied by ostensive gestures. So perhaps, as Kaplan (1978) and
McGinn (1981) both suggest, it is such gestures that serve to make
objects the demonstrata of contexts--one per use of an impure
indexical. This suggestion also gives us a rather natural way of
understanding what makes something the first demonstratum as opposed
to the second, and so on. On the other hand, this approach faces a
rather obvious objection: many perfectly good uses of impure
indexicals and demonstratives simply aren't accompanied by any sort of
ostensive gesture. That observation leads to a second possible
response, one which is in many ways a generalization of this first:
perhaps it is not the ostensive gesture itself that makes an object
the demonstratum, but rather what that gesture does. Gestures, we
might take it, serve to make objects salient in a context. So perhaps
what matters is just that an object be particularly salient in a
context; perhaps this is what serves to make it the demonstratum,
whether or not that salience is the direct result of an ostensive
gesture.



Howard Wettstein (1984) develops a view along these lines, and this
same sort of view has more recently been fleshed-out and defended by
Allyson Mount (2008). The basic idea is that a term like
'she' refers to whoever counts as *the most salient
female in the context*. Similar rules will apply to the other
impure indexicals. Problems start to arise, however, once we consider
bare uses of 'this' and 'that'--which
don't seem to contain any substantial information about the relevant
sortal. While it might seem plausible enough that some object will
count as the maximally salient female in a context, it seems far less
plausible that contexts will contain maximally salient objects
*simpliciter*, or without further qualification. What might
serve to make an object maximally salient *simpliciter*? The
natural suggestion would seem to be: our interests. If anything is
going to make an object maximally salient *simpliciter*, it's
presumably going to be that we, as agents, have brought a certain set
of interests to the conversational exchange. 



Dialectically though,
this suggestion is problematic. For one thing, the interests of the
speaker and listener can easily diverge. So we need to know whose
interests, if either, trumps when those interests fail to align.
Otherwise, all that we can say is that a certain object is maximally
salient relative to both a context and a particular agent--but
not relative to a context itself, without further qualification. Mount
specifies that what we are interested in is *mutual maximal
salience*. But this threatens to make a great many uses of the
impure indexicals fail to refer when the speaker and listener's
interests diverge. What's more, as Mount herself notes, the view
entails that reference fails in almost any instance where the listener
happens not to be paying attention to the speaker's utterance. Other
ways of precisifying the view face analogous worries, seemingly
handing too much control to either the speaker or the listener.



This brings us to a third possibility for how the impure indexicals
refer: perhaps, as Kaplan (1989a) suggests, token uses of the impure
indexicals, like demonstratives and deictic uses of pronouns, refer to
whoever or whatever the speaker intends for them to refer to. Kaplan
sees some continuity here with his earlier pointing-based approach,
since he takes it that such intentions (what he calls 'directing
intentions') might well be thought of as the internal analogue
of an externalized pointing. Still, the suggestion is more durable
than this earlier one; no explicit gesture is necessary for reference
to succeed. Indeed, not only can we now account for uses of impure
indexicals with no accompanying ostensive gesture, this sort of
intentionalist theory can also allow for uses of impure indexicals to
refer to objects that aren't physically present in the context--as 
there is no block to speakers having intentions directed at such
objects. Since we do indeed use impure indexicals to refer to
physically and temporally distant objects, this looks like a
significant advantage for Kaplan's 'intentionalist' theory
of reference.



None of this is to say that Kaplan's view has been universally
embraced. On the contrary, the view has often been thought to face a
rather serious problem. We noted above that terms like the bare
demonstratives 'this' and 'that' look to be
rather flexible in their application. Yet even these terms are not
*infinitely* flexible. Presumably, you cannot point directly
and deliberately at a picture of David Cameron, utter (9), and succeed
in referring to the picture of David Kaplan that you have tucked away
in your desk drawer for just such occasions:


9. That is a picture of one of the most Hawaiian shirt-loving
philosophers of the twentieth century.



This is an instance of what has sometimes been called the
'Humpty Dumpty
 Problem'.[9]
 Basically, any time we might be tempted to suggest that what token
uses of some particular term mean or refer to depends on the speaker's
intentions, the following sort of problem inevitably arises: unless we
impose some constraints on what those intentions can look like, then
we'll end up with seemingly absurd results, results like that the
token use of 'that' in (9) really does refer to the
picture of Kaplan you have tucked away in your desk.



A slightly more complicated case, confusingly from an earlier
time-slice of Kaplan (i.e. Kaplan 1978) and used to help motivate the
pointing theory, can be used to make much the same point. Kaplan asks
us to imagine a scenario where the speaker is sitting at her desk and
her prized picture of Rudolf Carnap, which typically hangs on the wall
behind her, has been switched for a picture of Spiro Agnew. Failing to
notice the switch, and intending to use the term 'that' to
refer to her picture of Carnap, the speaker points behind herself,
directly at the picture of Agnew, and utters (10):


10. That is a picture of one of the greatest philosophers of the
twentieth century.



On Kaplan's telling of things, (10) is false not in virtue of
reference failing here. Rather, it is false in virtue of the speaker's
having asserted something false of the actual picture hanging behind
her, the picture of Agnew. Most philosophers have been inclined to
agree about this (see King (2013) for an exception, however).
Importantly, this case is slightly different from our (9) in that it
doesn't seem altogether implausible that the speaker here might
*also* intend for her use of 'that' to refer to
whatever picture is hanging behind her. After all, she is somehow
confused about what picture that is. This confusion might, therefore,
give the intentionalist some additional room to maneuver.



One possibility would be for the intentionalist to dispute the
above judgments and embrace the claim that the token uses of
'that' in (9) and (10) do in fact refer to the pictures of
Kaplan and Carnap, respectively (see Radulescu (forthcoming) for a
response along these
 lines).
 Most intentionalists have not gone down this route, however. Instead,
they have either tried to restrict the range of intentions that count
as properly 'referential', or else they have tried to
impose certain limitations on when speakers' intentions in fact
determine reference. This first strategy has generally proceeded by
appealing to certain considerations drawn from Paul Grice's (1957)
theory of meaning. The second, in contrast, has tended to try to
derive the relevant constraints from the standing meanings of, or
rules of use for, the impure indexicals and demonstratives. More
recently, some philosophers have also tried combining these two
approaches.



The Gricean approach to reference was first clearly articulated by
Gail Stine (1978)--though it had been alluded to by both Grice
himself and Keith Donnellan
 (1968).[10]
 The basic idea is that the relevant sorts of intentions for fixing
the reference of impure indexicals are, properly speaking, intentions
aimed at getting the listener to identify a particular object as the
referent. In keeping with Grice's broader theory of meaning, these
intentions are posited to be even more complicated than just this: not
only are they aimed at getting the listener to identify some object as
the referent, they are also meant to be fulfilled in part on the basis
of the listener's recognizing that this is how she is intended to
act.



Having followed the Gricean line this far, now we need to ask: can the
Gricean thesis regarding the complexity of referential intentions
somehow cut off the threat of a collapse into Humpty Dumpty-ism? The
answer, according to the Gricean, is "Yes." More
precisely, the Gricean will claim that the speaker lacks a
*genuinely* referential intention in a case like (9), since she
should have no expectation that her listener will be in a position to
recover her intended referent. In a case like (10), however, she
*does* look to have an intention for her listener to recover
the picture of Carnap as the referent. So how is the Gricean in any
position to help here? As Bach (1992) helpfully clarifies, the Gricean
line really ought to run as follows: while genuinely referential, the
speaker's intention to refer to the picture of Carnap runs
*via* an intention to refer to whatever picture happens to be
behind her. That latter intention is meant to be recognized directly,
whereas the former can only be recognized indirectly, via the
recognition of both this latter intention and (in the good case) the
fact that the picture behind the speaker actually is the picture of
Carnap. So a better way of formulating the Gricean thesis when it
comes to reference is in terms of a primary/secondary distinction that
reflects this sort of asymmetry: when there is a conflict between a
primary and secondary referential intention, and both are genuinely
referential, it is the primary one that serves to fix
 reference.[11]



So far, so good for the Gricean. But just how general is her solution
to the Humpty Dumpty Problem? Can she, for instance, account for a
speaker who appears to be fully competent in a language like English,
but who mistakenly believes that everyone else can simply read off 
her referential intentions, directly? In other
words, consider a speaker who believes that her listener can read her
mind regarding her referential intentions, though nothing else, and
only when she actually utters a demonstrative. Unless we rule out such
a speaker as broadly incompetent in speaking English, it would seem
that she can now succeed, according to the Gricean, in making a token
of 'this' or 'that' refer to whatever she
likes, on any occasion whatsoever. For this speaker can coherently
intend for her listener to recover that object as the referent of her
use of the demonstrative, partly in virtue of recognizing this very
intention, and regardless of what that object is. In other words,
given some strange enough background beliefs, the Gricean predicts that a
speaker *really can* make a use of 'that' in an
utterance like (9) refer to her picture of David Kaplan--regardless 
of whether anyone short of a real clairvoyant would ever be
capable of recovering this referent. So the Gricean strategy to block
intentionalism's collapse into Humpty Dumpty-ism won't fully
generalize.



Partly in response to worries like these, we might think that the
right sort of response to the Humpty Dumpty Problem is not to up the
complexity of referential intentions themselves, but rather to impose
limits on how particular sorts of terms--even the true
demonstratives--can be used to refer. Marga Reimer (1991, 1992)
offers a suggestion along just these lines: *when* uses of the demonstratives
'this' and 'that' are accompanied by ostensive
gestures, then the referent itself must lie in the general direction
indicated by that
 gesture.[12]
 When there is no gesture, then there is no such constraint. In other
words, Reimer re-emphasizes the apparently special connection between
demonstratives and gestures that earlier theorists tried to leverage
into a full theory of demonstrative-reference. This time, however,
Reimer suggests that we use this connection not to generate a complete
theory of demonstrative reference, but rather to impose some
constraints on the intentionalist theory. Those constraints, in turn,
are what allows Reimer to make the intuitively correct predictions
regarding (9) and (10): with respect to (9), she will say that one
cannot succeed at pointing to one picture and referring to another
picture, unless perhaps the first is a photograph of the second; with
(10), she will say that the speaker intends *both* to refer to
the picture behind herself and to that of Carnap, but only one of
these satisfies the constraint associated with the gesture. Thus, only
one of these intentions is in a position to determine reference.



To be clear, Reimer's position is by no means incompatible with the
Gricean theory of referential intentions. One might, in fact, accept
both that there are substantive constraints on reference that derive
from the meanings of the impure indexicals themselves, and also that
referential intentions are as the Gricean describes them to be. Bach
(2017) has recently embraced such a view, for instance. That said, one
should demand an independent reason for adopting the Gricean thesis.
For it would seem that one can prevent a collapse into Humpty
Dumpty-ism simply by accepting that there are constraints on reference
conventionally associated with particular impure indexicals; one thus
no longer needs the Gricean thesis to rein in the scope of referential
intentions. Still, it is perfectly reasonable to think that there are
going to be plenty of more general theoretical reasons to prefer the
combination of these theories to a pure constraint-type approach like
Reimer's.


## 4. Definite Descriptions



In contrast to the sorts of terms we have considered so far, the
primary question regarding definite descriptions--complex
expressions like 'the biscuit' or 'the
off-license'--is not how they refer, but whether they
refer at all.



Both Meinong (1904) and Frege (1892) thought that they did. That left
them with a problem, however, since the overt descriptive material
found in definite descriptions is typically insufficient to identify a
single object as the referent. For Frege, at least, there was a fairly
obvious solution: treat that overt descriptive material as *just a part*
of the sense of the definite description, allowing more material to be
added by whatever fuller description the speaker happens to have in
mind. Faced with this same set of issues, Russell (1905) took the
opposite tack: he posited that descriptions simply do not refer.
Rather, what he offered was a translation procedure for sentences of
the form 'The A is B', which he posited to mean: there is
one and only one A, and that A is also
 B.[13]



This dispute becomes even more interesting when one considers that
both Russell and Frege *agreed* that names were to be
understood as, in some sense, akin to definite descriptions. Now we
are in a better position to see the deep differences between them, in
spite of this superficial agreement. For Frege, that claim in no way
prevented names from being genuine devices of reference. For Russell,
it did. For Frege, a name's contribution to the truth or falsity of a
sentence was (intensional contexts to the side) its referent. For
Russell, it was the associated description.



Why suppose that definite descriptions fail to refer? After all, we
certainly seem to use them to talk *about* particular objects;
when I say "I want the sloop to the right of that one," I
seem to be expressing a desire to possess a particular sloop, not just
a desire to be relieved from slooplessness in some complicated
fashion. What's more, we can substitute definite descriptions for
names and indexicals in most linguistic contexts. Naively then, it
might seem reasonable to posit that, if names and indexicals refer,
then so too do token definite descriptions. Russell, however, did not
lack for motivation in his claim that definite descriptions fail to
refer. Consider assertive utterances of the following sentences:


11. The King of France is bald.
12. The author of *Middlemarch* is the third child of Robert
and Christiana Evans.



(11) is meaningful, and certainly not true. Russell takes it to be
plainly false, though that is controversial (see Strawson (1950) and,
more recently, Von Fintel (2004)). Regardless, if one thinks that
definite descriptions are devices of reference, then it's unclear how
one will be justified in claiming that sentences like (11) are
meaningful. After all, the description clearly doesn't refer. With
(12), the problem facing the referentialist is different: since both
these descriptions should refer to the same individual, Mary Ann Evans
(or 'George Eliot'), it becomes highly unclear why (12)
shouldn't be knowable *apriori*. As with identity statements
involving co-referring names, this looks to be merely an instance of
the law of self-identity.



Note that Russell's theory, in contrast, has no difficulty explaining
any of this. (11) just makes a claim about there being a unique king
of France, a claim which is both perfectly meaningful and
straightforwardly false. (12), on the other hand, makes a claim about
the unique satisfier of one set of properties also uniquely satisfying
another set of properties. That should hardly ever count as knowable
*apriori*.



Still, there are also reasons to question Russell's claim that
definite descriptions fail to refer. For instance, as Strawson (1950)
pointed out, many assertive utterances involving definite descriptions
will seem true even when the relevant description fails to have a
unique satisfier. So, consider:


13. The table is covered with books.



Assertively uttered in a context where there is a single table stacked
high with books, (13) would seem to be true. Yet Russell predicts the
opposite, so long as there is at least one additional table somewhere
or other in the universe. Strawson's alternative was to claim that
there are genuinely *referential uses* of definite
descriptions. Used in this way, definite descriptions will, like names
and indexicals, contribute an object or individual to the content
asserted by the utterance--so long, that is, as that object
satisfies the relevant descriptive material. Otherwise, such tokens
will still count as meaningful in virtue of being associated with
coherent rules of use, but they will fail to refer. That, Strawson
claims, means that the assertive utterances of which they are a part
will fail to be either true or false. The contrasting category here is
of a *attributive use* of a definite description, which is
supposed to function more or less as Russell suggested.



Keith Donnellan (1966) went even further than Strawson, claiming that
definite descriptions can be used to refer even when the putative
referent fails to satisfy the descriptive material explicit in the
description itself. In what is probably his most famous example,
Donnellan asks us to consider an utterance of the following:


14. Who is the man drinking the martini?



Suppose that we are both looking at a man who appears to be drinking a
martini, but is in fact drinking water, when you utter (14). On
Donnellan's telling, this is irrelevant; the token description
'the man drinking the martini' can refer to this man in
our visual field regardless of whether he is in fact drinking a
martini. What matters, according to Donnellan, is just that you
have this man 'in mind' when using the relevant
description, that you use the description with this man as your
intended target.



One might worry, as did Alfred MacKay (1968), that this means that
Donnellan is open to the charge of offering a Humpty Dumpty view of
definite descriptions--one on which there are no substantive
constraints on what token descriptions can be used to refer to.
Interestingly, Donnellan (1968)'s response was to appeal to the
Gricean theory of meaning, thus raising the possibility that what he
meant by 'having in mind' is something akin to the
Gricean's notion of having a referential intention. As we saw above,
however, there is reason to think that even this sort of move won't
suffice to head off the collapse of intentionalism into Humpty
Dumpty-ism in a fully general sense. So there is still reason to be
concerned that Donnellan's willingness to jettison the explicit
descriptive material as a constraint on referential success is perhaps
a bridge too far.



But what of the intuitions behind Donnellan's example? For, even if we
reject his claim that a description like 'the *F*'
can be used to refer to something that isn't an *F*, it still
seems as though communication is possible in a case like (14). That
is, I should be able to tell who you're asking about regardless of
whether I know that this man is drinking a water rather than a
martini. Kripke (1977) suggested that the way to deal with cases like
these is to view the sort of reference involved as merely pragmatic,
as having to do with communicative efficacy rather than with the sort
of strict aboutness relevant to determining truth or falsity in a
context. According to Kripke, there is no need to posit that definite
descriptions *ever* refer; instead, we can explain away their
apparent referential properties by noting that, even if they do not
refer, speakers will typically have targets in mind for them to latch
onto nonetheless. So long as we are reasonably good at recovering
those targets, we can use them to direct each other's thought to
particular objects without needing to posit that token instances of
these expressions themselves ever manage to lock onto those objects
and individuals. In other words, we are free to accept the Russellian
theory of descriptions, supplemented with this claim that descriptions
are very often used to direct listeners' attention to the
'speaker's referent', as Kripke called what he took to be
the referential analogue of Gricean 'speaker's meaning'
(or, roughly, whatever the speaker is trying to get across to the
listener, literally or otherwise).



Kripke seems to have in mind that genuine linguistic reference--or
what he calls 'semantic reference'--needs to run
purely via convention. His paradigm example is names, which he takes
to be associated with a convention to the effect that their reference
is fixed via an appeal to causal chains. Alternatively, he might have
pointed to Kaplan's character-based approach to the pure indexicals, a
view which is equally reliant on conventions to establish reference.
As we saw above, however, there are plausibly limits to
this sort of approach: a conventionalist approach to the reference of
impure indexicals, like demonstratives and pronouns, has not been
forthcoming. Likewise, once we take seriously the problem of names
with multiple bearers, it becomes far less clear that the reference of
token uses of names can be fixed by anything so simple as a linguistic
convention. Rather, in both cases, it looks like it is going to be
rather tempting to appeal to facts about the speaker in order to fix
linguistic reference. But if that is acceptable there, the case for
ruling out definite descriptions as non-referring starts to look much
weaker. 



If, unlike Kripke, we start with the idea that linguistic
reference is, at root, the result of an act, of something that
*we* do rather than something that words themselves do, then
definite descriptions start to look more like the normal case and
indexicals like the outlier. This is, in fact, an old idea, one that
dates back to Susan Stebbing (1943) and the later work of Ludwig
Wittgenstein (1958), and which we already saw running through the
ideas of Grice, Strawson, and
 Donnellan.[14]
 The enduring worry, of course, is that without some restrictions on
how we can use terms to successfully refer, we will divorce the theory
of reference from both our intuitions on cases and from any role in an
overall theory of communication. But if we embrace certain limits on
referential success--to be imposed by either Gricean
reflexivity, conventionalized constraints, or both--these
worries can plausibly be avoided. And, indeed, with respect to
definite descriptions the case for there being a conventionalized
constraint on referential success, as Strawson took there to be, can
look particularly appealing.



More recently, a different sort of challenge has emerged for those
claiming that token definite descriptions sometimes refer: namely, the
difference in meaning which is standardly assumed to mark definite
descriptions off from their indefinite cousins (that is, descriptions
like 'a philosopher' as opposed to 'the
philosopher') has itself been called into question. Two main
reasons have been offered for rejecting a difference in meaning
between these sorts of phrases. First, pinning down exactly what this
distinction is supposed to amount to has proven remarkably difficult;
every aspect of Russell's original analysis, for instance, has
subsequently been cast into doubt. Second, a great many
languages turn out to lack anything like the definite/indefinite distinction. This
raises the possibility that this distinction is a far less
significant, and less well-defined, feature of meaning, even in a
language like English, than it is usually taken to be (see Ludlow and
Segal (2004); see also Abbott (2008) for counterarguments and the
entry on
 descriptions
 for extensive discussion along with further references).



How would rejecting the definite/indefinite distinction affect debates
on whether token definite descriptions sometimes refer? Well, if it
were clear that indefinite descriptions could not be used to refer,
and if these were indeed semantically equivalent to definite
descriptions, then we would have additional reason to think that
definite descriptions cannot be used to refer either. On the other
hand, some have argued that indefinite descriptions *can* refer,
though these arguments are highly controversial (see Chastain (1975)
and Fodor and Sag (1982); again, see the entry on
 descriptions
 for further discussion and references). Even if we were to reject
such a view, advocates of the unitary theory still typically grant
that there is a pragmatic difference marked by the use of
'the' as opposed to 'a'. So it would be open
to the stalwart defender of the view that token definite descriptions
sometimes refer to try to argue that such pragmatic markers can play a
significant role in regulating the use of descriptions to 
refer--despite these markers being nowhere reflected in meaning at
the level of what is said or asserted. Obviously, none of this will be
settled here.


## 5. Four Models of Linguistic Reference



By looking at how philosophers have attempted to account for the
referential features of various sorts of linguistic terms, we have
effectively introduced four distinct ways of conceiving of how
referential terms might come to refer to particular objects and
individuals in the world. In other words, we have introduced four
distinct models for the metasemantics of referential terms: 



1. On the descriptivist model, words refer in virtue of being
associated with a specific descriptive content that serves to identify
a particular object or individual as the referent.



2. On the causal model, words refer in virtue of being associated with
chains of use leading back to an initiating use or
'baptism' of the referent.



3. On the character model, words refer in virtue of being associated
with regular rules of reference. Paradigm rules of this sort will
themselves allude to repeatable elements of the context,
identifying which of these elements is the referent for which sort of
term.



4. On the intentionalist model, words refer in virtue of being used,
intentionally, to refer to particular objects. In other words, words
refer in virtue of their being uttered as part of complex intentional
acts which somehow target particular objects or individuals.



As should be clear by now, these four models aren't strictly exclusive
of each other. One might, for instance, think of the classical
descriptivism--which appeals to the speaker's mental state in
order to associate a particular description with a particular token
referential term--as a particular version of intentionalism.
Presumably, speakers will only manifest the right sort of mental state
when they are intentionally using a referential term to refer.
Likewise, one might view the causal theory as a special case of the
character theory: in the case of terms like names, the invariant rule
of use associated with a particular name is itself to be explained in
terms of a chain of uses leading back to a specific object or
individual. In fact, if one is willing to allow the characters of
certain sorts of terms, like the demonstratives, to allude to the
speaker's referential intentions, then character theorists can
countenance a certain sort of intentionalism within the scope of their
theory as well. In doing so, however, it is unclear what remains of
the original character model, with its reliance on 
publicly-identifiable aspects of the context as the primary driver of
the rules of reference.



It's worth noting some clear divisions among these options. First,
there is a divide between views according to which referential terms
themselves refer, and that we thus use them to refer because they
already do so, and views according to which it is *us* who do
the referring, with token linguistic reference following only
derivatively. The causal theory and certain non-classical versions of
descriptivism are paradigm instances of the former sort of view,
whereas the intentionalist model is a paradigm instance of the 
latter--along with the classical descriptivism of Frege and Russell.
Due to its inherent flexibility, the character model is harder to
place along this spectrum. Kaplan's rules for the true indexicals seem
to straddle this divide: indexical tokens acquire their reference
because they are uttered in a particular context, presumably
intentionally. But they acquire their reference independently of
anything having to do with the speaker's mental state. If we extend the character
theory to include both intention-dependent characters for
demonstratives and constant, context-invariant characters for names,
then things become more complicated still. In that case, the character
theory starts to look pluralistic with respect to this division; some
referential terms acquire their reference in virtue of our using them
to refer, whereas we use other such terms to refer in virtue of their
antecedently referring.



A second important divide has to do with the extent to which reference
is allowed to depend on potentially idiosyncratic and relatively
inaccessible aspects of the speaker's mental state. As we saw above,
both classical descriptivists and intentionalists allow for a strong
dependence on the speaker's mental states, and this can lead to some
odd predictions regarding reference. Griceans and constraint-type
theorists like Reimer have offered ways of trying to minimize these
results, but one might also worry that allowing reference to depend on
the speaker's mental state at all undercuts our ability to explain how
we use referential terms to coordinate our object-directed thoughts
with each other--in other words, to communicate. On the causal
model, for instance, we literally give each other ways of thinking
about the same object by passing on a name. That makes explaining
communication rather straightforward, supposing, that is, that we are
consistently able to recognize which name has been uttered on a given
occasion. The problem of names with multiple bearers means that this
might turn out to be non-trivial; but at least the payoff looks
significant. Alternatively, on the Kaplanian theory of true
indexicals, we can explain our ability to coordinate our thought on
particular places, times, and individuals in virtue of the fact that
the place, time, and speaker of the utterance are things that are
typically public knowledge, equally available to every member of the
conversation. The question is whether such an analysis is available
for terms like the impure indexicals.



Third, and finally, there is an important divide between models of
reference which are *expansive* as opposed to *narrow*.
In their broadest forms, both intentionalism and descriptivism are
expansive; they purport to apply equally well to any sort of
referential term whatsoever. The causal model is a narrow model of
reference; it has only ever been purported to apply to the reference
of names. Once more, the character model proves difficult to place;
just how broad or narrow it proves will depend on just how far we are
willing to stray in our theorizing from the paradigm case of the true
indexicals. Expansive theories hold out the promise of offering a
substantive account of the reference relation. That is, expansive
theorists can claim that the reason that token uses of referential
terms play a certain sort of role in explaining the the truth or 
falsity of an utterance is that a
certain sort of substantive relation obtains between that token use
and some object in the world. Narrow theorists, in contrast, will have
to allow that there are different sorts of relations that serve to fix
reference for different sorts of referential terms, and even perhaps
different uses of the same term. Thus, they will have to say that what
unifies referential terms is not that, when they succeed in referring,
a particular sort of relation obtains between that token use and some
object or individual, but rather that they play some particular
functional role in determining the truth-conditions or assertive
content of an utterance. In other words, standing behind debates over
which of these models we should adopt is a much larger, and as yet
unresolved, question: just what are our explanatory ambitions in
offering a theory of reference in the first place?


## 6. Negative Views of Reference



So far, this article has been concerned with what might be called
'positive' views of reference. Reference, construed as a
relation between bits of language and bits of reality, is assumed to
be a genuine, substantive relation worthy of philosophical 
scrutiny--or perhaps a family of such relations. Accounts are then
offered of what constitutes this link. Some philosophers have even
tried to work up from this link to more substantive conclusions
about the nature of knowledge and reality (see, in particular, Putnam
(1981); see also the entry on
 skepticism and content externalism).
 But not all philosophers are so sanguine about the theoretical
significance of reference, or even the thesis that there is either one
or a family of substantive relations to be explained. In closing, we
will briefly discuss several 'negative' views of
reference. 



W.V.O. Quine is probably the most famous reference skeptic. In
his (1960), he argued that reference is inherently indeterminate or
'inscrutable'. By this, Quine means that there is no fact
of the matter about what our words refer to. This is not to say that
our words refer to something but we are unable to determine what that
is. Rather, there is simply no such thing as that to which our words
refer. Nevertheless, Quine does not go so far as to say that our words
fail to refer in any sense. His view is rather that it makes sense to
speak of what our words refer to only relative to some purpose we
might have in assigning referents to those words. Quine's argument for
the inscrutability thesis involves an application of the thesis that
empirical theories are underdetermined by their supporting evidence.
For any body of empirical evidence we might have about speakers of a
given language, there will be a number of competing theories regarding
what their words refer to. Such theories will be empirically
equivalent, equally consistent with the empirical data. One theory
might say that, in the language in question,
'*gavagai*' refers to rabbits; another might say
that it refers to undetached rabbit parts; a third might say that it
refers to time-slices of rabbits. Quine's views on underdetermination
can be applied to one's own language as well. The result is that the
available evidence no more forces the speaker to the conclusion that
by 'rabbit' she means rabbits than it forces her to
conclude that by 'rabbit' she means undetached rabbit
parts or time-slices of rabbits. If a speaker observes herself using
the word 'rabbit,' the evidence she amasses will give
equal support to all three theories, as well as to many others. So,
according to Quine, for any given body of empirical evidence, there
will be numerous competing theories as to what the words one uses
refer to. And there will be no principled way of adjudicating between
these
 theories.[15]



A related and much-discussed problem, the problem of the many, was
raised by Peter Unger (1980) and Geach (1980). Basically, the idea is
that with many, probably even most, physical objects, there are any
number of equally compelling candidates for their borders, and hence
their physical constitution. In the terms we've been dealing with
here, there are any number of equally compelling candidates for being
the referent of a singular referential term, like 'that',
when that term is being used to target a physical object. Without some
way of selecting one of these as somehow privileged, we might wonder
whether we should really think of such terms as referring--unless, 
that is, we are happy to accept that apparently-singular
referential terms in fact refer to sets of objects, vague objects, or
the
 like.[16]



Donald Davidson's instrumentalist views on reference are in some sense
more radical still. Davidson (1984) claims that reference
is a theoretically vacuous notion: it is of absolutely no use in a
semantic theory, or a theory of strict and literal meaning. His basis
for endorsing this position is his conviction that no
*substantive* explanation of reference is possible. The problem
is that any such explanation would have to be given in
*non-linguistic* terms, but no such explanation can be given,
Davidson claims. As Davidson puts it: if the name
'Kilimanjaro' refers to Kilimanjaro, then no doubt there
is some relation between English (or Swahili) speakers, the word, and
the mountain. But it is inconceivable that one should be able to
explain this relation without first explaining the role of the words
in the sentences; and if this is so, there is no chance of explaining
reference directly in non-linguistic terms. However, this does not
mean that there is no hope for semantics. On the contrary, on
Davidson's view, a theory of truth for a language is at the same time
a theory of meaning for that language. The point here is that a
Davidsonian theory of meaning has no place for the notion of reference
per se; instead, it assimilates what we might be tempted to call
'reference' into the theory of linguistic truth. That might, however,
prove compatible with the sorts of pluralist approaches to reference
we canvassed above.



Similar in spirit to Davidson's view are deflationist theories of
reference--not to be confused with deflationism about truth,
though often motivated by a desire to endorse that latter theory.
Deflationists about truth typically claim that to assert that a
statement is true is just to assert the statement itself.
Deflationists about reference, on the other hand, claim that there is
nothing more to the notion of reference than what is captured by
instances of a schema like: '*a*' refers to
*a*. Such a schema generates claims like 'Frege'
refers to Frege, claims which can seem perfectly plausible until we
consider the problem of names with multiple bearers or indexicals,
both pure and impure. In such cases, the deflationist might then reach
for a slightly more complex schema incorporating the notion of a use
of a term. But then we need to ask what is meant by a
'use' in these circumstances, and once we start to answer
this question it becomes increasingly unclear whether a truly
deflationist approach to reference can in fact be
 preserved.[17]



In spite of the myriad concerns which motivate these
'negative' views of reference, concerns which might well
make us rethink the idea that there is any one relation which deserves
to be called 'reference', the nature of the relation
between language and reality continues to be one of the most talked
about and vigorously debated issues in the philosophy of language.
What remains to be seen is whether and to what extent this work might
prove useful for understanding a broader notion of reference, or a
broader notion of the relationship between representational tokens and
the world around us, which is equally at home in aesthetics, ethics,
and the philosophy of mind as it is in the philosophy of language.