Online research in philosophy

used) (Evans 1982: 31). He dubbed these terms "descriptive names"1, and used them as a foil against which to test several theories of reference: Frege's, Russell's, and his own.

Singular-term semantics has been intractable. Frege took the referents of singular terms to be their semantic values. On his account, vacuous terms lacked values. Russell separated the semantics of definite descriptions from the semantics of proper names, which caused truth-values to be composed in two different ways and still left vacuous names without values. Montague gave all noun phrases sets of verb-phrase extensions for values, which created type mismatches when noun phrases were objects and still left vacuous names without values. There is a single type of value for all noun phrases that dissolves the difficulties which have beset singular-term semantics.

Machine generated contents note: 1. Introduction; 2. A short history of reference; 3. Acts, roles and singular reference; 4. Elements of reference; 5. Demonstratives; 6. Context sensitivity and indexicals; 7. Names; 8. Definite descriptions; 9. Implicit reference and unarticulated constituents; 10. Locutionary content and speech acts; 11. Reference and implicature; 12. Semantics, pragmatics and critical pragmatics; 13. Harnessing information; 14. Examples.

Dayal’s (2004) theory of kind terms accounts for the definiteness and number marking patterns in kind terms in many languages. Brazilian Portuguese has been claimed to be a counter-example to her theory as it seems to allow bare “singular” kind terms, which are predicted to be impossible according to her theory. However, the empirical status of the relevant data has not been clear so far. This paper presents a new data point from Singlish and confirms the existence of bare “singular” kind terms. A revised theory of kind terms is proposed that accounts for it. The proposed theory puts forth a number system with three basic categories, i.e. singular, plural and general. It is claimed that bare “singular” kind terms are in fact derived from general NPs, which are associated with number-neutral properties. The paper also discusses why bare “singular” kind terms are not perfectly acceptable in Brazilian Portuguese.

In a recent book, Jeffrey King (King 2001) argues that complexdemonstratives, i.e., noun phrases of the form `this/that F, are not singular terms. As such,they are not devices of direct reference contributing the referent to the proposition expressed.In this essay I challenge King's position and show how a direct reference view can handle the datahe proposes in favor of the quantificational account. I argue that when a complex demonstrativecannot be interpreted as a singular term, it is best understood as a case of deferredreference – in which case it should be viewed as an anaphora inheriting its value from a quantifiedterm – or as an emphatic description.

In The Theory of Objects, Alexius Meinong used true negative existentials to argue in favour of non-existent objects: in order to assert veridically that an object O does not exist, one has to refer to O itself1. From Bertrand Russell's "On Denoting" onwards, it has become a commonplace to say that this argument does not work. For every sentence apparently concerning non-existents one can provide a paraphrase which eliminates the singular term contained in it and therefore dispels the illusion of a reference to a non-existent item2. As is well known, this strategy implies that such a singular term is a camouflaged definite description. However, Saul Kripke and other supporters of the so-called new theory of reference have claimed that singular terms directly referring to their designation (ordinary proper names, indexicals, mass and substance terms: from now on, DR terms) are not at all synonymous with descriptions. In their opinion, true negative existentials represent no exception to this claim. In what follows I would like to stress that, though Kripke's critique of the Russellian treatment of negative existentials is convincing, his treatment of true negative existentials containing a DR term is flawed. Nor do other contemporary accounts that share Kripke's critique as far as these sentences are concerned fare any better. In fact, I think that Meinong's argument may be correct where true negative existentials containing DR terms are concerned. But I shall aim to demonstrate this elsewhere.

Presenting a novel account of singular thought, a systematic application of recent work in the theory of speech acts, and a partial revival of Russell's analysis of singular terms, this book takes an original approach to the perennial problems of reference and singular terms by separating the underlying issues into different levels of analysis.

1. Nathan Salmon paper is entitled with a question: are general terms rigid? He asks this question in way of engaging the issue of the extension of the notion of rigidity beyond the domain of singular terms. While singular terms has been the province of most of the discussion of this rigidity since Naming and Necessity, it is well known that Kripke saw the notion extending to at least certain general terms such as terms for natural kinds. Scott Soames has recently weighed in on this issue in the latter chapters of his book Beyond Rigidity. His conclusion is that although there are significant overlaps in the properties of singular and general terms, there is no direct extension of rigidity to the general terms, and that rigid designation is properly applied only to singular terms. Salmon disagrees. His view, based in part of views dating back to his book Reference and Essence, is that there is an extension to be had, one which allows the application of the standard Kripkean characterization of rigidity to be applied to both sorts of terms. Central to his thesis is a claim about the status of certain definite descriptions. In these remarks, I will try to outline the issues to which NS is reacting, and the proposal he posits in response. I will then consider in a more critical light his claim about definite descriptions, bringing to bear considerations of their grammar.

“The expression ‘free logic’ is an abbreviation for the phrase ‘free of existence assumptions with respect to its terms, general and singular’.”1 Classical quantification theory is not a free logic in this sense, as its standard formulations commonly assume that every singular term in every model is assigned a referent, an element of the universe of discourse. Indeed, since singular terms include not only singular constants, but also variables2, standard quantification theory may be regarded as involving even the assumption of the existence of the values of its variables, in accordance with Quine’s famous dictum: “to be is to be the value of a variable”.