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- Vojislav Bozickovic (2001). The Semantic Insignificance of Referential Intentions. Grazer Philosophische Studien 62 (1):125-135.It is argued that none of the speaker's referential intentions accompanying his utterance of a demonstrative are semantically significant but rather the associated demonstration (or some other source of salience). It is constitutive of the speaker's having the specifically referential intention - held by Kent Bach to be semantically significant - that the speaker is taking, and relying upon, his accompanying gesture (or some other source of salience) as semantically significant, making it the case that this intention is not even partly semantically significant. The same is then shown to hold for the speaker's remaining referential intentions: his intention aimed at a perceived object, believed by David Kaplan to be semantically significant, as well as the intention to refer to the object that he has in mind.In my reading list | Discuss this article | Edit | Categorize |My bibliography
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| | Other links: philosophy.ucsd.edu | Scholar | More.. This is a welcome opportunity to clarify my approach to referential uses of definite descriptions, as well as to highlight what I take to be the main shortcomings of the view that definite descriptions have referential meanings. Michael Devitt and I have previously debated referential uses in the course of stating our respective views (see our 2004 articles), but here in this issue we both aim to dispel certain misunderstandings and to sharpen our criticisms of the other’s views.1 Devitt recognizes (...)
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