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Roads to Reference - An Essay on Reference Fixing in Natural Language (Hardcover)
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Roads to Reference - An Essay on Reference Fixing in Natural Language (Hardcover)
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How is it that words come to stand for the things they stand for?
Is the thing that a word stands for - its reference - fully
identified or described by conventions known to the users of the
word? Or is there a more roundabout relation between the reference
of a word and the conventions that determine or fix it? Do words
like 'water', 'three', and 'red' refer to appropriate things, just
as the word 'Aristotle' refers to Aristotle? If so, which things
are these, and how do they come to be referred to by those words?
In Roads to Reference, Mario Gomez-Torrente provides novel answers
to these and other questions that have been of traditional interest
in the theory of reference. The book introduces a number of cases
of apparent indeterminacy of reference for proper names,
demonstratives, and natural kind terms, which suggest that
reference-fixing conventions for them adopt the form of lists of
merely sufficient conditions for reference and reference failure.
He then provides arguments for a new anti-descriptivist picture of
those kinds of words, according to which the reference-fixing
conventions for them do not describe their reference. This book
also defends realist and objectivist accounts of the reference of
ordinary natural kind nouns, numerals, and adjectives for sensible
qualities. According to these accounts these words refer,
respectively, to 'ordinary kinds', cardinality properties, and
properties of membership in intervals of sensible dimensions, and
these things are fixed in subtle ways by associated
reference-fixing conventions.
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