The reference thesis is that we can make a reference statement in a text where the referring term of that statement has guaranteed co-reference with the mentioned term, so that the term must itself have a non-transportable meaning. We cannot specify the reference of a term used in a narrative without that specification itself being a part of the narrative.
In chapter 4, I address the question of co-reference between texts that are not independent, that is, when a text such as the New Testament mentions or cites the Hebrew Bible, and I distinguish between citation and reference.
Chapter 5 concerns implied or imputed co-reference between independent texts, where it is not signified that the same person is a character in both texts, but where we can reasonably infer that it is the same person, or where we could write a history using information from both texts, where the co-reference was signified. For example, the identity we assume between the man called “Moses” in Exodus and the man of the same name in Numbers or Deuteronomy is signified. If the men were different, the author would have said so, therefore to understand the text at all, we have to understand the identity. But the identity we assume between the man called “Pilate” in Philo’s De Legatione ad Gaium, and the man of the same name in the Gospel account, while fairly certain, is merely probable. The identity is not part of the meaning of the separate accounts, since they were independently written by different authors. It is not as though Philo would tell us whether the man he calls “Pilate” is or is not the same as the man of the same name in the Gospels. He was almost certainly unaware of the Gospels. Likewise, the author of the Gospels does not mention Philo’s text.
I argue that history involves taking separate accounts such as this—perhaps very short accounts contained in baptismal records and other kinds of register—and imputing co-reference by converting the probable identity into semantic identity. Thus, in writing “Pilate was ordered by Tiberius to remove the shields from the palace in Jerusalem” and later “he handed Christ over to be crucified,” the historian converts a probable identity between the man who Philo said removed the shields and the man who the Gospel said handed Jesus over, into a semantic one, via the pronoun “he.” I take up the philosophical implications of such probable (i.e., contingent) identity in the following chapter.
Chapters 6 and 7 concern two corollaries of the co-reference thesis that conflict with standard semantics. Chapter 6 considers, and rejects, two contemporary philosophical theories of reference. The first is strong Millianism or “direct reference,” which holds that the proposition, the bearer of truth and falsity, is not a linguistic item, a sentence capable of truth and falsity, but a Russellian proposition: an extralinguistic item expressed by an assertoric sentence. According to this theory, the semantic value of a proper name is the bearer itself: the proposition expressed by “Peter preached in Galilee” contains both Peter and Galilee. I argue that the semantic value of a proper name consists solely in its (intralinguistic) co-reference with its anaphoric antecedents, and that because its meaning is not transportable, it can have no semantic connection to its bearer. Thus, identity statements flanked by proper names can be informative when the proper names do not co-refer. Such an identity is not like “catsup is ketchup,” where the transportable meaning of the two terms is identical.
The second theory, following from the first, is that identity statements involving proper names, if true, are necessarily true. It was first stated by Ruth Barcan Marcus in 1947, becoming widely known and accepted after Saul Kripke’s defense of it in Naming and Necessity. I reject the theory by rejecting the principle of substitution on which it depends. Even if “Cicero” refers to Cicero, and Cicero is the same person as Marcus, it need not follow that “Cicero” refers to Marcus.
Chapter 7 is about existence. The co-reference thesis implies that proper names are meaningful even when empty. A proper name acquires its meaning through guaranteed co-reference alone, and so does not need a bearer in order to have a meaning. Hence, the fideist and the atheist can meaningfully disagree, given that “God does not exist” denies a referent, but not a meaning for the name “God.” However, the thesis involves two logical problems. First, “God does not exist” implies “something does not exist” in standard logic, and “there is no such thing as God” implies “there is no such thing as something.” Second, it follows from the reference thesis that “‘God’ refers to God” is true, even if “God” has no referent, that is, even if God does not exist. Yet standard logic requires that “a R b” implies “for some x, a R x.”
I argue that the grammatical form of a reference statement differs from its logical form. The relation that is suggested by its grammatical structure, that is, between the name “Asmodeus” and some supposed demon of that name, is not the relation that makes it true. “Tobit is referring to a demon” is like “Tobit needs a wife,” which is true precisely because Tobit has no wife.
In chapter 8, I consider the objection that “God” may not be a proper name at all, but a disguised description, such as “The omnipotent omniscient being.” If so, our conception of God would available to anyone who understands the meaning of “omnipotent,” “omniscient,” and of other common ordinary language terms, and so would be transportable as I have defined it, not semantically dependent on some part of a commonly available text. The question is whether such as conception of “God” is the standard one, which I take up in the next chapter.
Chapter 9 is an extension of the co-reference thesis to names that occur in everyday written or spoken communication. This requires resolving a problem suggested by Kripke, namely that we can understand the meaning of two proper names referring to the same thing, without believing that they refer to (or designate) the same thing. I argue that, while communication media do not form a single physical text, they are constructed as though they were a single text: a virtual text. To understand any name requires a context, which requires, in turn, that the appropriate parts of the narrative, or the virtual narrative, are available. We can move from “S assents to p” to “S believes that p” so long as the name that is mentioned in the sentence assented to co-refers with the name used in the “that” clause, and where the test for co-reference involves the rules of disambiguation common to all narratives, not just physical ones.
Chapter 10 is a further extension of the co-reference thesis to demonstrative identification. The forms of reference and identification discussed so far involve an intralinguistic semantic connection between propositions that allows us to identify a character within the framework of a narrative by grasping which individual a character is the same as. All reference is, as it were, relative to some large narrative about some world. How do we know the narrative is about this world? This question prompted Strawson to eliminate story-relative identification by grounding it in some form of demonstrative identification, so that even if an individual cannot itself be demonstratively identified, “it may be identified by a description which relates it uniquely to another particular which can be demonstratively identified.”32 If we can do this, can’t we also identify God in this way, by some form of supernatural revelation? The name “God” may co-refer in some trivial way with tokens of that name in the scriptures, but why can’t it refer in some stronger, non-trivial way, through prayer or meditation, or through God’s direct action in the world? I appeal to Hume’s principle that any objects of perception may be numerically different even though they perfectly resemble each other. Perceptual information, unlike linguistic information has only indefinite content, and there is nothing in our perception of some object that signifies whether it is numerically the same as or different from any other perception. Even if there were some private perception that identified its object (such as direct revelation from God), it would be impossible to communicate the identity using public language.
The final chapter extends the co-reference thesis to thought itself. I turn to the connection