Although proper demonstratives28 cannot occur in a historical narrative, they can occur in a relative context, for example, in direct speech, such as Matthew 12:49: “Pointing to his disciples, he said, ‘Here are my mother and my brothers.’” The rule is that when the person making the speech says “I,” the pronoun co-refers with “he,” when he says “you,” the pronoun co-refers with “he,” referring to the person who is being addressed. I shall discuss such cases in the chapter in demonstratives.
Objectivity
That there is a natural interpretation of the reference of any part of a text, and that it is difficult to define alternative ways of interpreting that part in a way that would work systematically across the whole text, suggests that co-reference is a real and objective property of a text, rather than a product of unmediated authorial intention, for the author’s intention is necessarily unknown unless the author is able to express it unambiguously in writing, and such expression is only possible if there is some method or rule of interpretation understood by both author and reader. We must distinguish what an author or editor wants the text to signify, from what the text itself signifies. The text may have some private significance to the author that it has to no one else, but semantic reference is not private in this sense. Perhaps Mark wrote, “Herod feared John, knowing that he was a just man” intending that “he” should refer to Herod, rather than John. But this intention is irrelevant, given that, as expressed, it refers to John. Finis sermonis est intellectum constituere 29: the purpose of language is to establish understanding, which is only possible when there is a systemic method of doing so. If it were possible to divine the correct meaning from the author’s intention alone, spoken and written language would not be necessary at all.30
Thus, co-reference is a real property of the text. By “real” I mean objective, observable or determinable by others. The letter “A” is objective in that anyone who understands the roman alphabet can recognize a token of the type “A,” which is the whole purpose of having an alphabet. There are even mechanical systems for recognizing text, which would not work unless being a token of the letter “A” were not some mental or psychical feature, but rather an objective property that many different people, and some machines, could recognize. It is true that some tokens of the letter are harder to recognize, and that machines have more difficulty with handwritten tokens than printed ones, but that is a matter of economics. We have a system for producing well-written tokens of the letter “A” that allows us to produce tokens that everybody, including machines, can recognize, but it may take time to write neatly. Or we can save time and scribble. Similarly, we can make a precise reference to a character by using a proper name rather than a pronoun, by analogy with writing the letter “A” neatly, or we can use a pronoun, by analogy with scribbling. Passages such as the one about Zipporah, where pronoun resolution is impossible, are actually rare.
Meaning and Understanding
It follows from my definition of co-reference—a semantic relation such that it is clear from the meaning of two terms that if they have a referent at all, they have a single referent—that co-reference is an equivalence relation: it is reflexive, symmetric, and transitive. Every term clearly co-refers with itself, for if it has a referent, it has a single referent, so the relation is reflexive. It is symmetric—if a co-refers with b, then b co-refers with a. And if a, b, and c have a referent, and if a co-refers with b, and b co-refers with c, then a and b have a single referent x, and b and c have a single referent, which must also be x, hence a and c also have x as a referent, and the co-reference relation is transitive.
It also follows from that definition that if any person S understands the meaning of any two co-referring terms, then he or she understands that they co-refer, for if they understand the terms, they understand their meaning, and their meaning, as co-referring terms, is precisely that if they have a referent, they have a single referent. But it does not necessarily follow that understanding an occurrence of a name requires us to comprehend every past occurrence with which the occurrence co-refers. In order to understand the name “Moses,” we do not necessarily have to understand every one of the 700 occurrences of that name in the Hebrew Bible. Indeed, a text can easily be constructed so that it is clear from the meaning of a very small number of terms that they co-refer. Suppose that a is a proper name, that b is a pronoun referring back to b, and c is another pronoun referring back to b. To verify that c co-refers with a, we first have to check that c refers back to b, then that b refers back to a, so we have to check three terms in all. But pronouns have a local or short range, eventually terminating backward in some long-range term such as a proper name or unique description. If there is a rule that tokens of the same long-range term always co-refer (or if not, that there is explicit disambiguation such as with “Phinehas”), and that different long-range terms never co-refer unless stated otherwise, then it will be easy for a reader to quickly identify co-referring terms, wherever they occur in the narrative, without interpreting all the terms in the narrative. For example, if we find a pronoun in one place, and another pronoun of the same gender in another, then trace back the antecedents of each pronoun until we find two corresponding long-range terms. If the long-range terms are the same, then assume they co-refer, if they are different, assume that they do not co-refer.
Thus, we do not have to be a scholar to understand the name “Moses,” wherever it occurs. To decide whether the “he” in Ex. 2:15 co-refers with “the servant of the Lord” Deut 34:5, we find what “he” refers back to (“Moses”), and what “the servant of the Lord” refers back to (“Moses” again), and we have the answer. Nor do we have to understand the whole of a book previously written in order to construct a new book with fresh anaphorically co-referring chains, some of which link back to chains in the book written earlier. The Bible had many authors, all of whom were probably scholars, but scholarship is not strictly necessary. We merely use the same rules as the readers use. As long as we know which existing character we want to speak of, we can look for their name or unique description, then use that term to continue the chain, followed by suitable pronouns or descriptions.
This is not to say that readers cannot be mistaken about the co-reference of different terms. This can happen in two ways. First, the author may not have used the rules correctly, and created a term that referred back to two or more chains. This error probably occurred in the “Imran” example given earlier, where it is not clear whether the name refers to Moses’ father, or Jesus’ uncle. Co-reference is then strictly impossible. Second, the rules may have been clear enough for many readers, but not clear for all readers, some of whom may assign the wrong co-reference. The possibility of such error does not invalidate my claim that if any person S understands two co-referring terms, then he or she understands that they co-refer, since it is clear that in such cases, the interpreter has failed to follow the rules, thus has failed to understand the terms. Such a possibility has an important application in my resolution of Kripke’s belief puzzle (see chapter 9).
Author and Reader Reference
It is common to distinguish between speaker and hearer reference (and by extension, author and reader reference). Strawson31 says that when two people are talking, the speaker may refer to or mention some particular by means of proper names, pronouns, descriptions, and so on, whose function is to enable the hearer to identify the particular. This is “speaker reference” or “identifying reference.” But the hearer may not in fact identify that particular, according to Strawson, so there can be speaker reference without hearer reference. Kripke discusses a similar example, claiming that the speaker’s referent is the object which the speaker wishes to talk about.
Now, there may be cases of spoken reference where this distinction makes sense, that is, in cases where the speaker communicates their intention by gestures or other forms of demonstrative indication, but such cases have no relevance where the only context is written language. We are concerned with texts, the most recent of which was disclosed around 630 AD, that is, nearly 1,400 years ago, the authors (or transcribers)32 of which are long since dead, so we are unlikely