Reference and communicationde re

REFERENCE AND COMMUNICATION DE R E 1

DAVID LUMSDEN

Donnellan's distinction between the referential and attributive uses o f definite descriptions has attracted considerable attention. 2 Kripke has argued convincingly that Donnellan has not shown there to be a semantic ambiguity in definite descriptions. More likely we are dealing with a distinction in pragmatics, a Some philosophers have seen a parallel between the referential use and a de re occurrence of a description in an intensional context. Kripke has shown that we can't just identify referential uses with de re occurrences or attributive uses with de dicto occurrences. However, I shall show that there is a certain connection to be made between referential uses and de re occurrences. This gives us a definition of the referential use that emphasizes the pragmatic nature of the notion. With that definition in hand we can understand the connection between the independently plausible views that a causal condition is required for the truth of de re intensional sentences (such as belief sentences) and that with a referential use of a designator the referent is determined by causal origin.

(1) The referential and attributive uses of definite descriptions Donnellan has distinguished between the referential and attribu-

tive uses o f definite descriptions as follows:

A speaker who uses a definite description attributively in an assertion states something about whoever or whatever is the so-and-so. A speaker who uses a definite description referentially in an assertion, on the other hand, uses the description to enable his audience to pick out whom or what he is talking about and states something about that person or thing. 4

He emphasises that the one description can be used in either way, depending on the circumstances. One of his illustrations involves two situations which might prompt someone to say. "Smith's murderer is insane." In the first situation the speaker observes

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the brutal manner of the killing and intends to express the thought that whoever did it must be insane. This provides an example of the attributive use of the description, 'Smith's murderer'. In the second situation the speaker is looking at the defendant at the murder trial, whom he/she, perhaps wrongly takes to be guilty, and intends to make a remark about that person, whose odd be- havior has the mark of insanity about it, he/she thinks. This provides an example of the referential use of 'Smith's murderer.

Donnellan says that with the referential use the speaker intends his/her audience to realize whom he/she has in mind when he/she speaks of Smith's murderer, and to know it is this person about whom he/she is going to say something. Note that in this case the speaker may be using 'Smith's murderer' to refer to someone who did not murder Smith. And, indeed, if the death was really a murder performed by one person, the phrase 'Smith's murderer' would accu- rately describe some quite distinct person.

Saul Kripke has shown that Donnellan's distinction can be applied to proper names as well. s Here is a situation with names comparable to the one just described to illustrate the referential use of a definite description. A speaker wishes to make a remark about a person he/she sees in the distance, whom he/she takes to be Jones, but it is in fact Smith. The speaker says, "Jones is raking leaves". Kripke allows that the speaker may be said, in a sense, to refer to Smith in saying 'Jones'. He says that Smith is there the speaker's referent.

However, Kripke insists that we can still consider the semantic referent of a name used in such circumstances. The semantic referent here is Jones, the person for whom the speaker mistook Smith. Kripke's well known causal account of the reference of proper names concerns semantic reference. 6 The terminology of speaker's and semantic reference can be applied back to definite descriptions. In the courtroom situation where the speaker uses 'Smith's murderer' to indicate the defendant we can say that that person, the defendant, is the speaker's referent while the person who really murdered Smith, who may be someone else, is the semantic referent of 'Smith's murdere'.

Kripke says, 'In a given idiolect, the semantic referent of a designator (without indexicals) is given by a general intention of the speaker to refer to a certain object wherever the designator is used, ~ In the case of the use of 'Jones' we can well imagine there are some kind of long standing intentions underlying a speaker's repeated use

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of 'Jones' for a certain individual. Kripke has his own account of what the crucial intention is. It is the intention to use the name with the same reference as the person from whom he/she learned it.

In the case of 'Smith murderer' I would suppose the general intention is determined partly by the general intention associated with that use of 'Smith', partly by some general intention involving using 'murderer' in the conventional way, and partly by some general intention to employ the syntactic forms, here the posses- sive construction, with their conventional semantic significance. I spell out how a general intention applying to a whole phrase might be determined in this way for John Searle puts a quite different interpretation on the sentence I quoted from Kripke. s Searle takes Kripke to be requiring that wherever I use a definite description, say, 'the man eating a ham sandwich on top of the Empire State Build- ing at 10 a.m. on June 17, 1953' I must have the general intention to refer to a definite individual, Jones. This seems to me to be clearly not Kripke's intended meaning, although it would be a reason- able interpretation of that sentence of Kripke's taken in isolation. His use of 'a certain object' was misleading.

The speaker's referent is given by 'a specific intention, on a given occasion, to refer to a certain object.' In the case of the referential use the specific intention determines an individual via a route quite independent of the general intention. In this use the speaker's referent is the individual the speaker has in mind, to use Donnellan's phrase. The speaker would normally think the specific and general intention determine the same individual. But on occasion they do not, as in the courtroom case where the speaker's referent isn't really the murderer.

With the attributive use the specific intention simply is to refer to the semantic referent. That is, the intention of the moment is that the object of one's remark be whatever is determined by one's customary usage of the words, as reflected in one's general intentions. As there is no separate route to an individual there is no possibility for the speaker's referent and semantic referent being distinct.

Kripke's terminology of speaker's and semantic reference is based on the assumption that Donnellan is wrong to suggest that the notion of reference doesn't apply to the attributive use. While I agree that Donnellan's terminology is in that way not apt I shall still speak of the 'referential' use, thus using Donnellan's own label for his notion without commitment as to the most suitable notion of reference.

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Tile main division of opinion concerning the nature of Donnellan's distinction is whether it is of a semantic or pragmatic nature. Don- nellan himself raised the issue but, as Kripke pointed out, the drift of most of the article rested on the assumption that it was semantic. Kaplan considered the most worthwhile feature of the contrast was as between a rigid and non-rigid sense of definite descriptions, and thus placed the contrast firmly within semantics. 9 Kripke argued that Donnellan has not shown that we have a semantic ambiguity and I will not repeat that argument here. He went on to explain the distinction in terms of two kinds of specific intentions as I have described. That puts the distinction in the area o f pragmatics, as the communicative intentions o f the moment concern pragmatics, a~ What follows is an analysis of the referential use that, again, emphasizes its place in pragmatics.

(2) Referential and Attributive and De Re and De Dicto There seems to be a parallel between the referential use o f a desig-

nator and a de re occurrence of a designator in an intensional context. For a de re occurrence of a designator in a necessity sentence means an individual itself is ascribed an essential property and a de re occurrence o f a designator in a belief sentence means an individual is described as the object of someone's belief. So with both a referential use and a de re occurrence there is a certain dis- crimination between a part of the sentence involving an individual and the rest of the sentence. This is to be contrasted with the attributive and de dicto cases where the sentence is treated in a more homogenous way.

Some philosophers have wanted to simply identify the two distinctions. ~1 Kripke has shown that to be a mistake. 12 However, I shall be suggesting that there is a kind of connection between referential uses and de re occurrences that Kripke does not appear to envisage. Let us first consider his argument against identifying the referential use of a definite description with a de re occurrence o f that description in the sentence. What he does is provide cases such as this one where 'Smith's murderer' occurs de re but is used attributively.

Smith's murderer, whoever he may be, is known to the police but they are not saying.

The example is recast in a more explicit but less colloquial form as:

The police know concerning Smith's murderer, whoever he is,

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that he committed the murder, but they're not saying who he is.

The nature of the truth conditions of de re epistemic sentences is a matter of considerable debate. Let me suggest for now that it requires that the knower be in some kind of direct contact with the object of the de re attitude. So the truth of our sentences requires that the police be in direct contact with the murderer. What is required for 'Smith's murderer' to be used referentially? It is that the speaker has a particular individual in mind (in using the phrase) about which he/she wishes to make a remark. Let me suggest that that requires that the speaker be in direct contact with the murderer. I shall return to this notion of direct contact and its appropriateness in both circumstances. I hope it has sufficient intuitive significance for the time being.

The message of the sentence rules out the possibility that the speaker is in direct contact with the murderer. For one thing, the phrase 'whoever he is' carries that suggestion. Given my assumptions we can put very simply the reason why 'Smith's murderer' occurs in a de re position but is used attributively in any utterance of the sentence. The truth of the de re form depends on the knower being in direct contact with the individual while the referential use requires the speaker to be in direct contact with the individual. 13

While this shows that we should not just identify referential uses with de re occurrences there is cause for optimism, if my suggestions are correct, for establishing a certain less direct connection between the two notions. What we need to do is somehow reflect this difference as to who is in contact with the individual. My strategy is to work with a pair of sentences. One is a sentence uttered in some suitable context, and the other is a sentence about the speaker's communicative intentions in uttering that first sentence. I shall start with a simple pair of sentences to suggest the general strategy.

(1) Smith's murderer is insane. (2) The speaker communicated (or conveyed) that Smith's

murderer was insane.

Here is a first theory of the connection between the referential use and a de re occurrence.

TI 'Smith's murderer' is used referentially in an utterance of (1) iff (2) as interpreted concerning that utterance is true with 'Smith's murderer' in de re position.

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Here we have bridged the difference as to who is in direct contact with the individual by making the speaker of (1) the subject of the intensional attitude in (2).

It might seem that the strategy involves establishing a semantic relationship between two sentences and this rules out the claim in Section I that the notion of the referential use is a pragmatic one. But note that (2) contains the verb 'communicate' and is interpreted concerning an utterance (of a certain kind) of (1). (2) does not describe semantic characteristics of sentence (1) but rather concerns the communicative features of an utterance of (1), which is a pragmatic matter. It is useful to see why 'believed' would not serve as the intensional attitude instead of 'communicated'. This relates to Donnellan's remark that the difference between the referential and attributive uses does not lie in the beliefs of the speaker) 4 The speaker may use 'Smith's murderer' attributively while still believing of some individual that he/she is Smith's murderer. The speaker wants to say that whoever murdered Smith is insane, as the grounds for his/her belief concern the nature of the killing and Smith's genial character) s

T1 does not actually provide an accurate account of DonneUan's notion of the referential use as the truth of (2) requires that the audience understood the message, which is not required by a referential use in Donnellan's sense. Even so, T1 is not without interest as it may capture some notion of ' refer ' ) 6 Still in a tentative vein let's replace (2) with:

(3) The speaker intended to communicate that Smith's murderer was insane.

and consider:

T2 as T1 but with '(3)' revlaeang '(2)'.

This is closer to Donnellan's notion of the referential use, as the emphasis is on communicative intentions rather than on communicative success. But we still have not captured Donnellan's notion, for we have not allowed for the possibility that the person the speaker of (1) had in mind was not realiy the murderer. As it stands the truth of (3), interpreted de re, requires that it was indeed the murderer who was the object of the speaker's communicative intentions. A similar problem was inherent in T1.

To avoid that difficulty we can replace (2) or (3) with:

(4) There was someone concerning whom the speaker

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intended to communicate (convey) that he/she was insane.

and consider:

T3 'Smith's murderer' is used referentially in an utterance of (1) iff (4) is true as interpreted concerning that utterance.

Sentence (4) expresses the familiar 'quantitying in' situation, which is the reflection of d e re forms in quantified sentences. Stylistic awkwardness tempts us to adopt a formal symbolism.

I propose to employ Quine's symbolism. 17 That was designed to cope with the situation where there is in the contained sentence more than one singular term which either could be interpreted in a de re way or not.

Thus we could have four possible interpretations of:

(5) Jones believes the youngest policeman killed the shortest spy.

We have one interpretation where both terms are interpreted in a d e re way, two more where just one is, and one in which neither is. Quine's symbolism involves intensions written thus: xy (x murdered y) and x (x murdered the shortest spy), where the free variables are repeated as a prefix. Quantification into intensions is banned. Where a belief involves an intension of n free variables we have a sequence of n terms in corresponding order specifying the objects of the belief. So the four interpretations of (5) become:

(Sa) Jones believes xy (x killed y) of the youngest policeman and the shortest spy.

(5b) Jones believes x (x killed the shortest spy) of the youngest policeman.

(5c) Jones believes x (the youngest policeman killed x) of the shortest spy.

(Sd) Jones believes (the youngest policeman killed the shortest spy).

Existential generalization on, for example, (Sa) gives us

Eu Ev t (Jones believes xy (x killed y) of u and v)

That shows us what 'quantifying in' becomes in the symbolism. Let us now restate 1"3 using this symbolism, and in a general

form.

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T3* A speaker, a, uses a designator, d, referentially in an utterance of a sentence, S, iff Eu (a intends to communicate x (S') concerning u).

where S' is the sentence S with the relevant occurrences of d re- placed by the variable 'x ' and with other changes made so that S' is in indirect speech, as

Will T3* do as an account of DonneUan's notion of the referential use o f a definite description? A careful reading of Donnellan's text shows us that unfortunately it will not. This is because Donnellan allows that in extreme cases there can be referential failure with the referential use. An expression can be used referentially even where there is no individual there, such as where a trick of the light made the speaker think there was someone there. 19 Hence there is in that situation no real individual that is the object o f the speaker's intention to communicate as T3* requires. Nonetheless the account is of some interest. It captures an interesting notion of the referential use even though not precisely Donnellan's. Also it does show how the intuitive connection between de re attitudes and referential uses can be made explicit, albeit for the variant notion of the referential use.

I will not here arrive at a final account of Donnellan's precise notion o f the referential use. Nonetheless, let me point out a flaw in one other possible analysis. This is where we replace

Eu (a intends to communicate x (S ~) concerning u) as it occurs in T3* with

(6) a intends Eu (a communicates x (S ) concerning u)

Consider the teacher who feels that he/she is usually discouraging to class contributions and forms the intention of picking on a student who makes a reasonably promising remark and telling the class that he/she is brilliant. So the teacher has formed the intention at one time to both pick a student and communicate about him/her at another time. The following sentence could be interpreted that way.

The teacher intends to communicate about someone that he]she is brilliant.

Understood that way the sentence should have the form of (6), but we do not have the kind of intention characteristic o f the referential use. So that revised analysis will not do. 20

(3) Directness of connection A crucial claim in the previous section was that with a referential

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use of a designator the speaker has a direct connection with the referent, and with a de re occurrence of a designator in a belief or similar context the subject of the attitude has a direct connection with the object of the attitude, if the sentence is true. The nature of such a direct connection was deliberately left vague as I was mainly concerned to suggest that parallel rather than committing myself to specific theories of de re belief and of the 'referential' use. None- theless I consider an explication of the directness of connection in (at least partly) causal terms to be plausible both with regard to de re belief and with regard to the referential use. Describing that causal account will enable us to elaborate on the connection between a referential use and a certain kind of de re occurrence.

First, I shall describe the causal requirement involved in the truth conditions of de re belief sentences, borrowing terminology from Gareth Evans. 21 While there may be a separate additional condition required I shall leave discussion of that to another time.2~ Let us say that a person represents an individual by means of a dossier of information, that is all of the information the person believes to hold of one individual. Speaking of 'information' here carries with it the suggestion that we are speaking of something physically real within the person's head, just as a sentence token has a particular physical presence on the page. Evans introduces the notion of the dominant source of the information, that is the source, the causal origin, of the majority of the pieces of information in the dossier, though not just an ordinary majority as there is a weighting to favour spread, i.e., covering various different aspects of a person's career. There is also a relativity to the person's interests in the individual.

We can now phrase one causal account of de re belief like this. A person has a de re belief about a certain real individual where his/her representation of the belief involves a dossier whose dominant source is that real individual. Here we have the idea that it is the causal origin of information that is significant. It is a notorious difficulty with causal theories to narrow down the kind of causal connection appropriately. Certainly the causal relation between an object and perceptual states of its perceiver is of the kind we want. But we want to include less direct kinds as well, so as not to rule out a connection by hearsay. Evans characterizes the kind of connection we want as one that is apt for producing knowledge. Maybe that is the best that we can do.

While I am more concerned to indicate one school of thought on

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de re belief than to arrive at a definite theory, here is one criticism and consequent modification of the above view that will be of some relevance. If I am currently observing a leaf taker, Smith, whom I temporarily mistake for Jones then it might both be said that I have a de re belief about Smith that he/she is raking leaves and a de re belief about Jones that he/she is raking leaves. One way of handling that intuition is to allow that it might suffice for an individual to be the object of a de re belief that it be the dominant source of merely a major portion of the dossier. The portion consisting of the old information would here originate in Jones while the portion consisting of the current perceptual information would originate in Smith.

Now we can move on the notion of directness of connection in its place in the referential use of a designator. In such a case the speaker has an individual in mind concerning whom he/she has some communicative intentions. This, I claimed, requires that the speaker be in direct contact with that individual. (I leave aside the case where there is no real individual at all). I hold that the directness of connection here can be causally explicated as before. We can say that the speaker's communicative intentions involve the speaker focussing on a dossier or part of a dossier, and the individual that is the speaker's referent is the dominant source of the information in (that part of) the dossier.

It should be clear now how the connection between the referential use and the de re occurrence in T3* can be redescribed. Let us return to the example where a speaker uses 'Jones' referentially in an utterance of

(7) Jones is raking leaves.

In this particular case the speaker's communicative intentions involve focussing on the current perceptual information in the dossier. The dominant source of that is Smith. That makes the following true.

(8) Eu the speaker intends to communicate x (x is raking leaves) concerning u.

For the truth of (8) depends on a real individual being the dominant source of the part of the dossier that the speaker is focussing on.

I originally made the connection between the referential use and the intention to communicate de re without first presuming the correctness of a detailed causal approach to both topics. I feel that the connection itself has independent plausibility, though naturally

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that plausibility relies on certain very general assumptions about the topics. I have now given a causal account of the two topics 2a and have redescribed the connection in those terms. On my view it is no accident that we have a similar approach to the two topics.

However, there are those who have different intuitions and a different approach to the whole area. Searle downplays the significance of both the referential/attributive distinction and the de re/de dicto distinction for belief and similar intentional notions. Searle deals with Donnellan's referential cases like this. A speaker can refer to an individual under various aspects, which can be given by some description, name or demonstrative. When the word(s) chosen are actually inappropriate owing to a false belief, as in the example of the referential use of 'Jones', the speaker could fall back on some other aspect, such as 'being the person over there'. The aspect that he/she would ultimately fall back on is called the primary aspect. Searle claims that in every 'referential' use there is some such aspect under which the speaker could have referred to the individual such that the expression is accurate. ~ The extreme cases of referential failure with the referential use are neglected.

How does this relate to my account presented above? In our case where the speaker uses 'Jones' referentially he/she is focussing on the portion of the dossier containing the current perceptual information and that does not correspond to the expression used. This is in part similar to what Searle says. Where Searle talks of two aspects of the object, (one reflecting the expression used and one reflecting the speaker's meaning), I rather talk of two portions of a dossier of the speaker's.

But those are not simply two ways of saying the same thing, as Searle's talk of aspects of the objects goes along with the assumption that the primary aspect corresponds to a potential use of an expression that is accurate. I say it is the source rather than the descriptive content of the dossier that is crucial. Therefore in describing the portion of the dossier that reflects the speaker's meaning I may not be mirroring any true aspect of the object.

But this difference amounts to less than it first seems. Suppose at a party I mistakenly take a certain imaginatively dressed person to be wearing a nun's habit. The description 'the person wearing a nun's habit ' is correct of no one at the party. Its significance as a piece of information I possess is in terms of its causal origin in one-party goer. But couldn't I be expected to also possess the description 'the person who appeared to me to be wearing a nun's

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habit ' . If here is an argument to show that one always has available such a description which points to the source of information such as 'person wearing nun's habit ' , then we need not quarrel with Searle's claim that one always could refer using an accurate expression. 2s

One could argue that if the causal account as I have described is really correct then we could expect people to have some implicit recognition of its correctness. Could the causal theory really be right if a person whose dossier was largely inaccurate of its dominant source flatly denied, on being confronted with the inaccuracies, that he/she had in mind the individual that was the dominant source? The implicit recognition of the correctness of the causal view could be shown by the availability of those special kind of descriptions relating to causal origin. The most cautious of those would be ' the dominant source of such and such information' . This reasoning may not be decisive as it stands, but it looks the most promising direction to follow.26 I shall henceforth be assuming that we always do have such special descriptions available. I shall no longer put my view in terms of the dominant sources of portions of dossiers. From now on the importance of causal contact will be shown by pointing to a particular role that such special descriptions play.

The main difference between my account and Searle's now concerns his view that, where Donnellan says that with a referential use of 'Smith's murderer ' the referent may not indeed by Smith's murderer, all that is really going on is that the term used doesn't express the primary aspect. All aspects are there considered equally. So, just as one could say 'Smith's murderer ' and mean (mainly), ' the person I am now looking at ' , one could say 'the person I am now looking at ' and mean 'Smith's murderer ' . In fact Searle provides a case like that. A person says, 'I bet that guy was driving a turbine-powered car ' , when he and his hearer were looking at the man they suppose won the race and mean 'I bet the winner of the race was driving a turbine-powered car' .

I find that most implausible. Of course, if the previous conversation had concerned who had won the race then it is possible that 'that guy' would be understood anaphorically, connecting back to a previously mentioned description. But that is not how Searle views the case. He thinks that the speaker is referring to an individual under the aspect of being that guy where it is clear that the primary aspect is that of being the winner. I just do not accept that it works that way round. Of course there is no clear limit to human abilities to guess the true intentions of others. But I find a clear difference

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between using a general description such as 'the winner' and meaning something like 'that guy' and using a phrase such as 'that guy' and meaning something more general such as 'the winner'.

This means I am discriminating between descriptions, I am treat- ing as special those descriptions that indicate a direct relation one has to a particular individual. I include 'that guy' here, as the demonstrative emphasizes the immediate visual contact with the person. I consider that such descriptions are intrinsically more suitable for falling back on. Choosing such a special description is choosing a safer description. It is safer because it points to the individual that one actually has dealings with. I have used a designator referentially when I would ultimately fall back on a special description, (which may not be expressed in the designator), and that shows my true intentions. So, to have an individual in mind in saying something is for one's communicative intention to involve a special description true of the individual. To have a de re belief is to have a belief in which the believer focusses on a special description true of an individual.

As Searle treats representation under all aspects equally he has no time for the notion of having an individual in mind, as it appears in Donnellan's exposition. For Searle, to have an individual repre. sented under any aspect, whether it be, 'whoever won the race' or 'being that man' is equally to have the individual in mind. So the concept of having an individual in mind loses its interest.

It is my view that, where the speaker has not had anything (directly or indirectly) to do with the referent of the designator, the speaker does not have a special description true of the referent and thus the speaker does not have the individual that is the referent in mind in saying what he/she does.

For example, Kaplan's Ralph considers that, of the spies, one must be the shortest, and on that basis uses 'the shortest spy' in an utterance. 27 In this situation Ralph does not have another aspect to fall back on. Searle would presumably say of this situation that, as there was only one aspect available, the designator used automatically reflected the primary aspect, so we do not have an example of a referential use with inaccurate designator. But I would add that it is significant that this is a case where there is no direct contact with the individual, for that removes at least one kind of route for falling back on a safer designator, where one indicates how one has come into contact with the individual.

There are cases of falling back on a safer description that, argu-

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ably, do not fit the pattern I have described. Donnellan mentioned the case of an attributive use of 'Smith's murderer' where Smith was not murdered, in that he died of natural causes rather than as a result of the injuries inflicted. On learning that, the speaker might fall back on the description 'Smith's assailant'. Donnellan considers that to exemplify a phenomenon quite different from the sub- stitution of a new designator for an individual the speaker has in mind in a 'referential' use. Donnellan described this as a 'near miss' and says the move to 'Smith's assailant' is a move to a phrase close in meaning to the original. ~ Searle doesn't accept the contrast. For him it is just another cause of the speaker falling back on the primary aspect. My intuitions follow those of Donnellan here. I do find a contrast between finding a new term to indicate an individual one has in mind and finding a term close in meaning to the original, even though that is a rough and ready contrast not susceptible to precise definition. To miss that contrast is to miss one of the crucial features of the referential/attributive distinction.

Still it must be admitted that the matter is far from clear cut. Even with the case exemplifying the attributive use of 'Smith's murderer' the speaker has some contact with the relevant individual via his works, the injuries inflicted upon poor Smith. That might incline us to believe that we need to introduce another notion in addition to that of causal contact .29

Searle's views on the de re/de dicto distinction for belief sentences follows from what has already been discussed. We could put it by saying that he regards the distinction as merely between two ways of reporting a belief. He views the de re style of reporting as one in which the reporter commits him/herself to the accuracy of the term used for the appropriate individual. He points out that if the reporter selects the primary aspect then he/she can commit him/herself to the accuracy of the term as well as reflecting the believer's own point of view.

It is quite natural that Searle should take this attitude to the de re/de dicto distinction for belief. As he does not discriminate between aspects, he thinks that whenever there is an individual that satisfies the representation under the primary aspect then the belief is open to the de re style of reporting. However, for me, more is required for the truth of de re belief sentences. The believer's representation of the object of his or her belief must be (in part) special, in the way I have discussed.

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(4) Conclusion It is my view that there is something to both the referential /at tr ib-

utive distinction and the de re/de dicto distinction for belief and other intensional at t i tudes. We can relate referential uses to de re atti tudes by saying that the referential use o f a designator in an utterance requires that the speaker intends to communicate de re. Thus we have a referential use in an utterance where we have a de re structure in a true sentence about the speaker 's communicative intentions in making the utterance. This makes explicit a natural connection between the topic of speaker's reference and the topic of designators in de re posit ion in intensional contexts. I have described causal approaches to both topics. Understanding the connection I have described helps us understand why the same approach is plausible for both topics.

UNIVERSITY OF WAIKATO HAMILTON, NEW ZEALAND

NOTES

' This paper pursues themes discussed in my Princeton doctoral dissertation, Individuals, Belief, and Communication. (University Microfilms, Ann Arbor, Michigan, 1979). Thanks to David Lewis for help at that stage. An earlier version of the paper was read at the Australasian Association of Philosophy meeting at the University of Otago, New Zealand, in May 1980. Thanks to those at that meeting and to colleagues at St. Cloud State University, Minnesota and at the University of Waikato, New Zealand, especially Edwin Hung.

2 Keith S. Donnellan, 'Reference and Definite Descriptions', The Philo- sophicalReview, 75 (1966): pp. 281-304.

s Saul A. Kripke, 'Speaker's Reference and Semantic Reference'. Contem- porary Perspectives in the Philosophy of.Language, P.A. French, T.A. Uehling, and H.K. Wettstein, eds., (Minneapolis: University of Min- nesota Press, 1979): pp. 6-27. There is a more recent endorsement of that position in Rod Bertolet's "l'he semantic significance of Donnellan's Distinction', Philosophical Studies 37 (1980): pp. 281-8.

4 'Reference and Definite Descriptions', p. 285. s Saul A. Kripke, 'Naming and Necessity', Semantics of Natural Language,

D. Davidson and G. Harman, eds., (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1972), note 3, p. 343.

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6 'Naming and Necessity', especially pp. 298-303. 7 'Speaker's Reference and Semantic Reference', p. 15. s John R. Searle, 'Referential and Attributive', Monist 62 (1979): p. 203.

Subsequent references to Searle's views concern this article.; David Kaplan, 'Dthat ' , Contemporary Perspectives in the Philosophy of Language, P.A. French, T.E. Uchling, and H.K. Wettstein, eds., (Min- neapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1979): pp. 383-40 . The intuition that a referential use is a rigid use is sound enough. But we do not have to assume that the rigidity is the essential feature of the phenomenon.

1o What I have called 'The communicative intentions of the moment ' is often called 'the speaker's meaning', following Grice. See his 'Meaning', The Philosophical Review 66 (1957): 377-88 . For his work more explicitly focussed on pragmatics see his 'Logic and Conversation' of which a portion appears in The Logic of Grammar, D. Davidson and G. Harman, eds. (Eneino, Cal: Dickenson, 1975): pp. 64 -75 . For a treatment of the referential use that discusses it in terms of the complexities of Grice's theory of speaker's meaning see Michael Beebe, 'Referential and Attributive', Canadian Journal o f Philosophy 7 (1977): pp. 91 -101 .

~1 See Hintikka's 'Grammar and Logic: Some Borderline Problems', Approaches to Natural Language, J. Hintikka et al. eds. (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1973).

as 'Speaker's Reference and Semantic Reference', section 2a. ,3 If here and in what follows I appear to be labouring the point that the

person in direct contact is different, I should point out that t he difference has been missed by Michael Devitt in his critical notice of Con- temporary Perspectives in the Philosophy o f Language, in the Austral- asian Journal of Philosophy 59 (1981): pp. 211-21 . He offers as a theory of exportation the principle that only referential terms may be exported (p. 216). But Kripke's example that I quoted shows that that can't be a complete theory of exportation, for 'Smith's murderer' appears in de re position and is thus able to be exported although any speaker uttering the sentence would be using the phrase attributively. Devitt appears to mix up causal chains to the subject of a belief sentence and causal chains to the speaker of the sentence.

~4 'Reference and Definite Descriptions', section IV. 13 Here we are using the grounds for the belief to suggest the nature of

the speaker's intention. But even th~ grounds of the belief may not be essentially related to the communicative intention. It seems to me that a speaker could have as grounds those just described, but, considering the person in the dock to be indeed the murderer, might wish to make a remark about that person and thus use 'Smith's murderer' referentially.

16 In fact Gareth Evans' notion of 'refer' requires audience comprehension. ~'he causal theory of Names', Proceedings o f the Aristotelian Society, supplementary vol. 47 (1973): pp. 187-208. See page 199.

1~ W.V.O. Quine, 'Quantifiers and Propositional Attitudes', The Journal o f

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Philosophy 53(1956): pp. 177-187. is I find that this connection between the referenciai use and a certain

communicative intention has been essentiaily already proposed by Michael Beebe, op. cit., in that he talks of a connection between the referential use and a relational intention. I use the terminology of de dicto and de re as it is handy terminology in current use. Actually the statement of T3* does not require either the terms 'de re' or 'relational'. The use of the quantifier with broad scope is sufficient.

1~ Donnr raises that possibility at the end of section VI of 'Reference and Def'mite Descriptions'. That is an extreme case for him that is not seen as central to his notion of the referential use.

a0 There is also the problem that the intention is that he himself or she herself communicate such and such. Castaneda has shown that that notion of 'self' is not expressed by a mere repetition of the singular term 'a'. See Nector-Neri Castaneda, 'on the Logic of Attributions of Self-Know- ledge to Others', The Journal of Philosophy 65 (1968): pp. 439-56 .

21 Gareth Evans, Whe Causal Theory of Names', section II. =2 I have sympathy with David Kaplan's proposal concerning "vivid names'

which supplements a causal requirement. 'Quantifying In', Words and Objections: Essays on the Work of W.V. Quine, D. Davidson and G. Hat- man, eds., (Boston: D. Reidel, 1966) pp. 178-214.

2s A causal approach to speaker's reference has been adopted by Michael Devitt in 'Singular Terms', The Journal of Philosophy 71 (1974): pp. 1 8 3 - 205. Kaplan has a partly causal approach to de re belief In 'Quantifying In'.

a4 See 'Referential and Attributive', p. 195, the italicized passage. This suggests that the 'aspects' terminology is not as neutral as Searle claims. But he does allow, in note 4, that perfect neutrality may be unattainable. He does not elaborate. On p. 194 he allows for a certain kind of inaccuracy, where one mistakenly supposes Smith's name is pronounced 'sehmidt ' . That kind of inaccuracy is not what concams us here.

=s David Lewis is inclined towards the view that one would have available such special descriptions. See his 'Attitudes De Dicto and De re" The Philosophical Review, 87 (1979): pp. 513--43.

a4 Such an argument may provide a response to Bertolet's criticism of Michael McKinsey's reinstatement of a descriptions theory of having an individual in mind. See Michael KcKinsey, 'Names and Intentionality', The Philosoph- ical Review 87 (1978): pp 171-200 and Rod Bertolet, 'McKinsey, Causes and Intentions', The PhilosophicalReview 88 (1979): pp. 619-632 . Another article by Bertolet of interest here is his c~iticism of Searle's article in 'Referential Uses and Speaker Meaning', The Philosophical Quarterly 31 (1981): pp. 253 -9 .

=' 'Quantifying In', section VII. as Keith S. Donnellan, 'Putting Humpty Dumpty Back Together Again',

ThePhilosophicalReview 77 (1968): p. 209. =~ See note 22.

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