On the reference thesis, by contrast, no extralinguistic truthmaker is required. The conditions for the reference statement to be true are, first, that the mentioned term (“God”) anaphorically co-refers with the used term (“him”). This is clearly so in the above example, hence the reference statement must be true whether or not “God” has an external referent at all, so cannot express a relation between “God” and an external referent. The second condition is that the mentioned term must have some antecedent in a chain of co-referring terms. If a story begins “There was a young man called ‘Mark,’” then we can say truly that “Mark” refers to the young man, for the mentioned term “Mark” has the antecedent “a young man,” which co-refers with “the young man” in our reference statement. But we cannot say that “a young man” refers to Mark, for “a young man” cannot be an anaphor term, given that the whole purpose of an indefinite term is to block any kind of back-reference. An indefinite term a cannot locate any previous term b such that it is clear simply from the meaning of the statements containing them that if one is true of a thing, the other, if true, is true of the same thing also. Some writers (such as Sommers) have claimed that indefinite terms, such as “a young man,” have a sort of non-identifying reference. This is a mistake, which I shall discuss in chapter 3.
Thus, according to the reference thesis, a reference statement is illusory: it purports to express a relation between a mentioned term and an object, but such a relation is not what makes it true. What makes it true is a relation that is intralinguistic, although its grammatical form misleadingly suggests the relation is extralinguistic. On this hypothesis, co-reference is primary, reference is secondary. The thesis has wide ranging implications (e.g., for received logico-philosophical principles such as the necessity of identity).
I will not argue for the thesis at length now, except to say, and to avoid any confusion, that I am not claiming that one term refers to another. I am not, for instance, saying that “God” refers to the word “God,” or that the name “Moses” refers to the expression “the man who led the Israelites out of Egypt.” On the contrary, “Moses” refers to a man, not an expression. That is to say, it is true that “Moses” refers to a man. However I claim that what makes it true is not some external reference relation between “Moses” and that man, but rather an internal relation between the reference statement and some textual or uttered antecedent. Nor does the name refer to the concept of Moses, for the noun phrase “the concept of Moses” does that.27 Nor do I claim that there are intentional objects or non-existent things. I shall argue (see chapter 7) that the name “Asmodeus” refers to Asmodeus, so the name “Asmodeus” refers to something. I shall argue that we can truly think of Asmodeus hence, in thinking of Asmodeus, be thinking of something. But the grammatical objects of intentional verbs like “refer to,” “think of” do not require that there be anything that satisfies them. The fact that “Asmodeus” refers to something does not entail that there is (or exists) something which is the referent of “Asmodeus,” nor that “Asmodeus” has a referent, for the non-intentional verb, phrase “has a referent” does not function in the same way as the intentional verb phrase “refers to.” I say this to avoid all confusion about my use of that verb phrase in the text that follows.
The third claim, the dependency thesis, is that communicating with proper names is dependent on the availability of a common text such as the Hebrew Bible, which uses those names (“Moses”) within a narrative, rather than a dictionary, which contains mostly general names (“prophet”) and which merely makes the names without using them.
Any theory of proper names must explain why names for our relatives, friends and neighbors are generally not in dictionaries, and why learning how to use them is not in any sense a prerequisite for learning the language, whereas common names like “red,” “round,” “person,” “house,” and so on are found in all dictionaries, and are in some sense necessary for understanding the language. Somewhere in between, there are proper names, such as “Caesar” and “Moses,” which are found in some dictionaries, but are not in any sense necessary for understanding English, as opposed to understanding history or theology.
Any theory must also explain why there is a proper name/common name distinction, and a local/national distinction between proper names. Locke explains the first on the assumption that in order to understand a proper name, we must be acquainted with its bearer, so that we have “the idea in my mind” of it, and in order to communicate using the name, the other person must also be acquainted with the bearer.28 Common terms, by contrast, signify “general ideas,” which are separated from the circumstances of time and place, “and any other ideas that may determine them to this or that particular existence.” Since we use language to communicate our thought by combining general ideas, language for the most part consists of general terms.
Reid explains the local/national division by a similar reasoning. He says the meaning of a local name is “known” only to the people in the locality, assuming like Locke that we can only know it through acquaintance with the bearer. Such knowledge will be unavailable to the greater part of the community that uses the language. There are a few proper names that are understood by the whole community (he mentions “the Sun” as an example, but presumably “Caesar” and “Moses” would do), but that is because the bearers are known to the whole community.29
These explanations are inadequate. In what sense are the very individuals Caesar and Moses “known” to the whole community that understands their names? How exactly are we acquainted with them? How is it we understand names like “Frodo” and “Sherlock Holmes” that have no bearers, so that there is no possibility of knowing or being acquainted with the bearers? I shall argue that our knowledge begins and ends with the text that introduces those names. If the texts (The Gallic wars, The Lord of the Rings, etc.) are available to the whole community, the whole community is able to understand the names. Acquaintance with the text is both sufficient and necessary. No acquaintance with the individual is necessary, nor is it even sufficient. If I am confronted with Caesar, I do not know that this individual conquered Gaul, unless I am know that that this person is Caesar.
Hence, if our knowledge begins and ends with the text that introduces names such as “Caesar,” “Moses” and “God,” we cannot understand the proper name “God” without acquaintance with the Hebrew Bible, or some text that co-refers with it, and so cannot have a singular conception of God.
Organization of the Book
In the second chapter, I defend the co-reference thesis, arguing that there is a natural reading of a text to which all authors will try to conform, not always successfully, and this natural reading determines the co-reference of the singular terms occurring in the text. There is evidence for systematic rules or heuristics known to both author and reader, and which in principle suggests the possibility of mechanical systems or algorithms for determining co-reference. A common reference is an objective property of the text. No acquaintance or knowledge of a bearer is necessary. I claim that, in principle, a computer could analyze the text of The Lord of the Rings to determine the set of terms, which co-refer with “Frodo Baggins,” or with “Gandalf,” and so forth.
In the third chapter, I introduce the dependency and the reference theses through the puzzling phenomenon (sometimes called the puzzle of unbound anaphora) of proper names introduced by indefinite description, such as “a man named Moses” and “a woman named Martha.” It can be shown that these proper names co-refer in some sense with their indefinite antecedent, yet the antecedent itself does not refer. I claim this is because the meaning of a singular term is non-transportable:30 it co-refers with some indefinite antecedent, but the whole purpose of an indefinite term is its indifference to what came