Anti-descriptivism 2.0

Abstract

I first focus on Gomez-Torrente’s defense of a neo-Kripkean treatment of theoretical identification statements like “Water is H₂O” against objections (a) that ‘water’ is vague and (b) that ‘H₂O’ does not designate a genuine explanatory kind. On my reading, Gomez-Torrente accepts (a) and (b) while interpreting the identity statement as correctly attributing vague identity to the pair consisting of the vague natural kind water and the related kind H₂O. My discussion sketches a framework for making sense talk of vague objects, properties, and identities that seems to fit his discussion. Next I focus on his treatment of a problem posed by seemingly conflicting perceptual reports of secondary qualities, like being hot, or red, made by equally competent observers. Since the observers are equally competent, it is hard to explain the apparent inconsistency. Whereas Gomez-Torrente treats the reports as so fine-grained as not to conflict, I suggest dispensing with ultrafine-grained semantic contextual parameters in favor of richer pragmatic parameters determining negotiated asserted contents. Next I question whether his plausible individually sufficient but not disjunctively necessary rules for uses of names and demonstratives should be understood as providing speaker referents versus contributions to illocutionary contents of uses of sentences containing those terms. Finally, I explain why I take the crowning jewel of the book to be the account in chapter 4 of natural numbers as plural cardinality properties, and of verbal, and Arabic, numerals as Millian names of those properties, the referents of which are fixed by genuinely semantic reference-fixing expressions.