A Theory of Language

 

In A Theory of Justice Rawls suggests a thought experiment designed to rid us of biases in our thinking about justice, labeled the Original Position. We find ourselves occupying a certain position in society, perhaps an unfairly privileged one, and we need a way to prescind from this contingency, so we imagine ourselves not to have knowledge of the facts of our actual position. In this way we can gain an impartial perspective on what constitutes a just distribution of resources. I want to suggest something similar in the philosophy of language: we are familiar with certain concepts and perspectives on our language that arise from the contingencies of our linguistic history, but these may give us a biased view of the real nature of language, so we need a way to prescind from such contingencies. We need to imagine ourselves not possessing our customary knowledge, stripped down to the basics of linguistic life; then we can start from scratch in producing a theory of language. That theory might be quite revisionary of our ordinary conceptions, as Rawls’s theory is quite revisionary of common assumptions about justice. He was trying to get to the very heart of justice; we are trying to get to the very heart of language—by suspending common assumptions (the method is also similar to Husserl’s epoche). So: what does our commonsense theory of language look like and where might it go wrong?[1]

Our commonsense understanding of language invokes a range of concepts familiar to philosophers of language: meaning, reference, sense, ambiguity, communication, intention, convention, speech act, assertion, command, question, grammar, logical form, use, word, sentence, speaker, hearer, implication and implicature, truth conditions, translation, and others. These make up the tacit theory we bring to bear on language, which are then converted into theoretical terms of an overall theory. They belong to a semantic meta-language. Maybe we acquire this meta-language in the course of our linguistic upbringing, maybe it has an innate component: in either case it comes to us naturally and spontaneously, without any self-consciously explicit theory construction. So let’s imagine that we do not acquire this set of concepts in the way we do but rather reach linguistic maturity without developing any such self-understanding: we speak an object language (say, English) but we don’t speak a meta-language about it—we have no thoughts at all about the nature of the language we speak. We don’t even have the concept of meaning. Perhaps animals that use symbolic systems—whales and dolphins, say—are in this cognitive situation: they speak and listen but they don’t theorize at all. They just act and react. Then the question is what account of language might we develop starting from this position of complete ignorance. Would it resemble the theories we currently espouse? Would it employ the concepts we employ now? We have no folk semantics to rely on, so what would a properly scientific semantics look like? If we could wipe the slate clean, what would we write on it starting from scratch? Would everything from our folk semantics survive, or just some, or none? In particular, are there any biases built into our existing theories, arising from the contingencies of our history?

Certainly there have been philosophers (and linguists and psychologists) who have detected such biases and recommended rejecting them. Quine, say, recommends rejecting most of folk semantics as irredeemably unscientific: meaning, reference, intention, synonymy, etc. He proposes replacing this obsolete theory with a behaviorist theory: the central concepts of scientific semantics are stimulus and response, stimulus meaning, holism, indeterminacy, and radical translation. Wittgenstein attacked the idea, supposedly part of common sense, that every word functions as a name, which he attributed to a natural human failure not to make distinctions; and he proposed replacing concepts like denotation with the concept of use. Others have rejected sense or meaning as anything over and above reference. Still others have expanded folk semantic concepts to include revisionary theories of language, as with Frege’s semantic theory (e.g. sentences denote truth-values construed as objects). The idea of criticizing our habitual thinking about language has not been off the table, but it has not been as radical as the sort of criticism we see in physics or biology (except perhaps in the case of Quine). And it has not been suggested that we are prone to systematic error because of a historical contingency regarding language, making us miss the essence of language. The contingency I have in mind is that we happen to use language for communication, but this is not the primary or original manifestation of language. We might never have used language to communicate, but we have shaped our understanding of language through consideration of this contingent expression of linguistic mastery. To put it directly: the use of language as a tool of thought is the primary manifestation of language, and it is not subsumable under the kinds of concepts we bring to language used as a vehicle of communication. If we had started by considering this kind of internal language, we would have arrived at a very different understanding of the essence of language; as it is we have been biased by the contingent circumstance that we use language to communicate. For various reasons communicative uses of language are salient to us, and certainly they require their own treatment, but they are not the only or the central uses to which language may be put. They are, in fact, derivative and parasitic, reflecting more about the human sensory-motor system than the inner workings of language as such.

I am not going to defend the cognitive view of language here—the idea that language is primarily a tool for thinking.[2] I will merely observe that a huge amount of language use goes on outside of any communicative context, being “in the head”. We talk to ourselves constantly and use language to help us solve problems (as well as being a resource for contemplation). A person can lack the ability to speak and hear and yet still employ language internally. A reasonable hypothesis is that language evolved initially as a cognitive aid and only later become adapted for communicative use (about 200,000 years ago by most estimates). It became integrated with our sensory-motor systems, thus inheriting their architectural features. Prior to that it functioned very much like our imagination—another human faculty that evolved as an aid to thought and which exists primarily as an internal system. We may suppose that language and imagination coexisted in the human mind for a considerable time quite cut off from any direct behavioral expression; they were not initially designed as communicative systems. Today imagination is still in this condition, but language was partially repurposed as a means of communication while preserving its cognitive function. Both imagination and language are essentially combinatorial systems with infinite potential, and this confers great utility on them in solving problems; but whether this structural feature becomes expressed in vocal speech is entirely contingent. We can imagine imagination achieving public expression in somewhat the way language has by coopting a sensory-motor system that reveals imaginative acts as they occur—say, by displaying visible images on the body of the organism—but as things stand this adaptation has not occurred. Likewise language could have remained internal and performed its cognitive function without the evolution of a sensory-motor system that embeds it in acts of communication. It seems to me entirely possible that many animals employ an internal symbolic system in their cognitive lives—a language of thought essentially—without ever transitioning to spoken language.[3] That is just an entirely different biological system with a different function and morphology (sounds, gestures, larynx, ears). The human species has been using internal language for its entire history, reaping the cognitive benefits, and only lately began incorporating it into their communicative repertoire. Presumably a mutation (or combination of them) led to this ability long before any thought of communication entered the picture: language has been aiding thought, solving problems, enabling contemplation, for lo these many years, well before overt speech took off. If speech were to cease tomorrow by some catastrophe, language would carry on performing its vital cognitive function. Of course, internal language use is inaudible and invisible, while external language use is noisy and visible (consider sign language), which may give salience to the latter compared to the former; but in point of biological priority, functional utility, and sheer pervasiveness internal language surely has the edge. We talk to ourselves all day but only occasionally do we open our mouths (and what an effort it is!). Internal language is woven into our entire conscious life (even when sleeping). Without it our minds would be much diminished.

The point of urging this perspective on language is to expose the parochial character of our current theorizing about language—the bias built into it, the skewed perception. Suppose we had never developed the ability to speak externally, confining ourselves to inner speech: what would the theory of language look like then? The entire apparatus of folk semantics for outer language (better, outer expression of language) would be redundant in so far as that apparatus is directed to communication. Two epistemic features of communicative speech may be noted: uncertainty about what the speaker has in mind and uncertainty about his or her truthfulness. We often don’t know who or what the speaker is referring to (has in mind) and we don’t know how reliable she is. Thus we must bring to bear the concept of reference and the concept of truthfulness. There is an epistemic gap between speaker and hearer—the hearer can’t read the speaker’s mind—and that gap must be negotiated in acts of communication. But no such gap obtains between the user of internal language and the recipient of such use. So there need be no concerns about what the speaker has in mind or whether he is being truthful. These reasons for bringing in the concepts of reference and truth do not exist for the internal use of language—so what purpose do they serve in the theory of internal language? The first thing we would light upon in theorizing about this use of language is its combinatorial structure, because that is what powers its central function—creative thought, problem solving. If we did come up with the concepts of reference and truth it would be an afterthought not a central concern, as it is for public language. Problem-solving potential would be the central concept, and this would lead us to focus on the constitutive structure of language—on syntax, basically. Grammar, recursion, infinite scope, embedding, transformations—these would be the properties to engage us. These are what drive the cognitive engine, making language apt for its function.

What about meaning? Would we make a point of assigning meaning to internal language? The word “mean” has two uses: applied to speakers and applied to words. The OED gives this for “mean”: “intend” and “intend to convey or refer to”. The primary meaning of the word is in application to agents who mean things, linguistically as well as otherwise. Words mean things in so far as people mean things by them (this connection is articulated in Grice’s account of meaning).[4] But this use of “mean” does not apply to internal language: a user of an internal sentence does not intend to convey information to anyone, still less to harbor Gricean intentions. We don’t mean things by the words we use when we engage in inner speech (that word itself is dubious—is this any kind of speaking?). But if internal language is not meant, does it mean? Is our inclination to say that it is meaningful a kind of projection from outer communicative speech? Would someone in the original linguistic position, with no spoken language to deal with, reach for the concept of meaning—our concept of meaning—in describing internal language? Maybe some notion of linguistic significance would be invoked, possibly the notion we apply to non-human languages, but would we say that our internal sentences have meaning? Who to and for what purpose? Who cares about what the sentences mean so long as they do their job—aid in problem-solving thought? I need to know what you mean in order to get information from you, but do I need to know what I mean when I am trying to solve a problem? My purpose is not to mean things by my inner sentences but to employ them in a cognitive task. So the concept of meaning seems irrelevant to internal sentences; maybe they have meaning, but who cares? What we are concerned about is their ability to facilitate cognitive functioning, which is a matter of their inner architecture and functional properties: syntax not semantics, roughly.

And so on down the line: speech act, intention, language game, convention, use, communication, assertion, command, and question—none of this is relevant to internal language. It is relevant to only one expression of language in acts of overt speech, which involves a sensory-motor apparatus extrinsic to language itself as a cognitive structure.[5] Just as vocal speech is not integral to communicative language as such (consider sign language), so overt speech in general is not integral to language as such—not part of its core. It is a relatively recent evolutionary step, not prefigured in the origins of the language faculty. Making outer speech the focus of language studies is like making those external signs of the imagination I mentioned earlier into the focus of imagination studies. What is called philosophy of language, as practiced by analytical philosophy heretofore, is really philosophy of one-expression-of-language, and not even the most central expression. It’s like focusing on writing while ignoring speech and calling that linguistics. Internal language has a far stronger claim to be basic and original. The mind consists of various faculties—mathematical, scientific, moral, imaginative, and linguistic (among others)—and the last item is no different from a locational point of view. True, we can manifest these internal faculties in external form by engaging our senses and motor capacities, but none of them is rightly seen as constituted by such exterior manifestations—including language. The theory of language must accordingly recognize that fact and shape its concepts appropriately. That will involve at least a shift of emphasis, possibly large-scale revision, in which some familiar concepts recede and others seize center stage. To put it bluntly, syntax will take over from semantics, at least as semantics is currently conceived. We have been bedazzled and distracted by the noises we make when accessing our internal language faculty and by our feeble attempts at interpersonal communication, when all along language was purring along inside us doing its vital work.[6]

[1] In physics and astronomy the analogue of position in society is position in the universe. We live on the surface of a small planet and our view of the universe is shaped by this contingency (e.g. the sun looks to rise); to do physics and astronomy correctly we need to prescind away from this and form a conception of the universe that excludes such factors. We need to replace the science we naturally assume given our contingent position with a science that gets to the heart of objective facts. We need to do this in physics and astronomy but also in theories of justice and in theories of language.

[2] Chomsky defends it in Why Only Us (2016) and What Kind of Creatures Are We? (2016).

[3] These symbolic systems might be as species-specific as human language is, so that internal discourse varies dramatically from species to species.

[4] Here is an interesting fact: we say “John means ‘unmarried male’ by ‘bachelor’” but not “John means ‘bachelor’ by ‘unmarried male’”, where we could paraphrase “means” by “intends”—despite the synonymy of the two terms. Likewise it is right to say “’bachelor’ means ‘unmarried male’” but it sounds wrong to say “’unmarried male’ means ‘bachelor’”—again despite the synonymy. This shows the affinity between “means” and “intends” and also the close connection between speaker meaning and word meaning.

[5] Ambiguity and the arbitrariness of sound-meaning pairings are properties of external speech, creating genuine problems for speakers and hearers, but they don’t trouble internal language users: we are not in doubt about which meaning we had in mind, and whatever arbitrariness there is in internal symbols poses no problem of inward interpretation. Internal language is peculiarly transparent.

[6] The conception of language I am working with will no doubt sound completely alien to the typical contemporary philosopher of language, but close students of Chomsky’s work will find it comfortably familiar. Time to get some reading done.

 

 

 

Is Reference Real?

 

“Sitting next to her, talking with her about the simplest and most insignificant subjects, Prince Andre admired the joyful shining of her eyes and smile, which referred not to what they were saying, but to her inner happiness”: Tolstoy, War and Peace, Volume II, Part Three, chapter XVII.

 

The standard position is that the concept of reference applies to some expressions but not to all. Which expressions refer is controversial: doubt has been cast on predicates, definite descriptions, “I”, quantifiers, connectives, adverbs, numerals, feature-placing sentences, and fictional names. The paradigms of referential expressions are taken to be names of persons or things and demonstrative pronouns: there are entities for these words to refer to and they succeed in referring to them. Reference is taken to be a real relation that can hold between words and things, but it may not hold in some cases. Not just any old expression can stand in this relation; the expression must contain a special power of referring, not conferred on every expression. Perhaps the power is derivative on a speaker’s performing a referential act, so that word reference is not an intrinsic property of the word, but it is still supposed that reference is not granted to any and every meaningful word. It is an elite property, marking a word out for ontological distinction: the word reaches majestically out to reality, sword-like, while non-referential words are semantically limited to language itself, trapped inside it. The referential words provide the hooks linking language to the world. They are lines thrown out to reality.

But this position is not the only one: Frege’s position stands in stark contrast. According to Frege, every expression refers: not just names and demonstratives but predicates, connectives, quantifiers, sentences, and that-clauses. A menagerie of entities is wheeled in to provide the reference for these expressions: first- and second-level concepts, truth functions, truth-values, and indirect senses. If each word refers, there must be something to which it refers; the relation needs relata. Reference thus comes cheap and is thoroughly democratic, making no distinctions. It is not a privilege possessed by names and other singular terms but a property of every meaningful expression. Language has hooks to the world at every point. Many philosophers have felt that this is excessive, that it empties the concept of reference of all significance; they evidently have a sufficient grasp on the notion of reference to feel this in in their bones. Another position, seldom if ever occupied, is that no word refers–not even the supposed paradigms of reference. True, traditional empiricist theories of meaning, which equate meanings with “ideas” or mental images, make no mention of a reference relation to the non-mental world; but even these theories don’t explicitly deny that reference applies to language. The neglected position does just that: it asserts that reference is a pseudo-concept, applicable to nothing. Frege took language to be semantically uniform with respect to reference and so does this third position, but in the opposite direction; only the standard position adopts a mixed perspective—partly referential, partly not. The uniformly non-referential position holds that there is no such relation as reference, not even for names—though it is not denied that every expression has meaning (determinately so). Reference is a myth, a philosopher’s invention, a trick of the imagination. Words don’t refer, period (and neither do speakers).

It must be admitted that the two pure positions enjoy a theoretical advantage: they don’t divide words into two groups characterized by different semantic concepts. The standard position posits an awkward theoretical disunity: on the one hand, the robustly referential expressions (or speech acts); on the other, the etiolated non-referential expressions locked up in themselves. At least Frege’s universal referential realism makes no such division and accordingly affords a generalized conception of meaning—all meanings are designed to generate acts of reference. The mixed position, by contrast, supposes that some meanings have the job of generating reference and some do not—and that seems like an unattractive lack of unity in the concept.[1] Also, there is intractable controversy about which expressions are referentially endowed, which casts doubt on the clarity of the concept of reference, as philosophers are wont to understand it. Some people have no doubt that definite descriptions refer while others stoutly deny it, and intuitions seem hazy on the question. Some people insist that predicates refer to properties while others vehemently deny it, and the issue is difficult to resolve. In certain moods Frege’s system can strike one as theoretically compelling, but then one snaps out of it and reverts complacently to the mixed position. We may find ourselves accepting that reference has its varieties, but we stubbornly maintain that expressions either have it or they don’t—even as we lack clear criteria to make the distinction. A more uniform position would seem desirable, but Frege’s position is too extravagant to contemplate; and the third anti-referential position just seems manifestly untrue, since surely some words refer!

The view I am going to defend is the anti-referential view, but this will require some subtlety and alertness to philosophical illusions. The basic idea is that the philosopher’s concept of reference is a misplaced reification of a common sense notion: it invests more in that notion that it can really bear. I will begin by consulting the dictionary, always a solid starting point. The OED has this for “refer”: “to mention or allude to” and then “(of a word or phrase) describe or denote”, followed by secondary meanings such as “send someone to a medical specialist”. Under “mention” we find “refer to briefly” and “refer to (someone) as being noteworthy”. So we have a speaker’s use of “refer” that includes mentioning and alluding, and then a linguistic use of “refer” that includes describing and denoting. Clearly “mention” is not a synonym of “refer”, so we can’t trade on its familiarity to validate the philosopher’s use of “refer” (we often mention that such and such but we can’t refer that such and such). The closest we get to the philosopher’s use is “describe or denote,” but “describe” doesn’t cut it since not all referring expressions are descriptive—and don’t predicates describe? So we are forced to fall back on “denote”. Here is the entry for “denote”: “be a sign of; indicate” and “stand as a name or symbol for”. The first thing that strikes one here is the generality of the notion as so defined. The notion of being a sign of or indicating is not even restricted to linguistic contexts: it is the analogue for denotation of Grice’s notion of natural meaning. Clouds can denote rain under this definition, since they can be a sign of rain or indicate it. So this cannot be the definition we are seeking if we want to capture the philosopher’s notion. We turn then to the second definition: here the generality is at least confined to language, since it concerns symbols. But isn’t “red” a name or symbol for redness? Isn’t “and” a symbol for conjunction? Isn’t “all” a symbol for universal quantification? Isn’t every word a symbol for something? Then everything in language denotes something, according to this definition. We are in Frege territory, with the notion shorn of all exclusive implications: denoting is just the property of being a symbol for. Isn’t a symbol precisely something that is a symbol for something—that’s what it is to be a symbol. Calling a symbol denotative doesn’t go beyond calling it a symbol. Clearly Frege and other philosophers intend something stronger than that—but what? That is all that the dictionary tells us and it does nothing to vindicate the philosopher’s use of the term. The notion of reference so understood is trivial not substantive: no concept of a special relation possessed only by special words can be gleaned from the dictionary definition.

At this point the philosopher is apt to fall back on something called “the name-bearer relation”: surely this is a case of genuine substantive reference. Here is the name and there is its bearer, clearly distinct things, and the former designates the latter—denotes it, refers to it. But what does this alleged relation come to?  Isn’t it just that the former is a name of the latter? It is the word (symbol) that we use for a certain individual. But nothing in that locution implies some special relation of reference that holds uniquely between name and object. Notice that the alleged relation is not perceptible and has no causal powers: it is not like a bridge or a light ray or a line drawn in space. It is curiously impalpable, strangely elusive. We might imagine it as analogous to a kind of pointing: pointing fingers are perceptible things, and some reference is indeed aided by pointing. So we imagine the name as pointing to its bearer (or the speaker doing so, physically or mentally): that is what reference looks like! But this is so much mythology: there is no such pointing going on. The idea is just an imaginative crutch designed to confer substance on the supposed special relation of reference. Someone might protest: “Surely sentences containing names are about something—isn’t that what reference is?” I would make two points. First, sentences are also “about” other things such as colors and conjunction—this is part of what they mean—but the idea is supposed to be that these expressions don’t refer. Second, the relevant notion of “about” is connected to truth, as follows: a name contributes to truth conditions in virtue of the fact that a certain object is relevant to the truth of sentences containing it and not other objects. The name “Aristotle” is such that sentences containing it are true just if Aristotle is a certain way. The name “Aristotle” is a name for Aristotle in this sense: but on the face of it this truism says nothing about any supposed relation of reference.[2] The mistake is to think that the very thin notion of reference that is captured by the truism is actually a thick substantive relation that it makes sense to investigate like other relations in nature. It is not, for instance, like the relation of perception (with which reference is often compared). It is quite true that we mention things and allude to them and even make reference to them, but these commonsense notions don’t add up to the philosopher’s special notion of reference—that privileged restrictive notion that invites such philosophical perplexity. We have taken an ordinary notion, fine in its place, and run away with it, postulating metaphysical facts that exceed anything common sense can ground. We have, in a word, reified the notion. This is why it sounds so strange to say in this sense that a predicate denotes a property or that “and” denotes conjunction or that sentences denote truth-values. We have stretched and mangled the notion beyond recognition. We have conjured a semantic reality from thin air and based our whole account of language around it. We are guilty of philosophical hyperbole.[3]

Notice that abandoning the notion of reference, as a heavy-duty theoretical tool, does not mean we have to abandon key insights. We can still distinguish names and demonstratives from descriptions, predicates, and quantifiers; and we can still say (if we like) that the meaning of a name is its bearer. What we must not do is invoke a special relation of reference that supposedly links names to their bearers, or demonstratives to objects in the environment, or “I” to a certain self. We might wish to speak this way for convenience, expressing only the thin deflationary notion I specified; but we can’t suppose we are speaking of a primitive relation, analogous to pointing, that links words with things. Seeking a causal theory of reference, say, or a functional theory, is folly, since reference is not the kind thing that could consist in such facts; it’s just a device we use for talking about words, sentences, and truth. Or again, it is a potentially misleading way to express the idea that symbols symbolize—that symbols are symbols for something. When someone learns that “and” is the word for conjunction in English we can express that fact by saying “He now knows that ‘and’ refers to conjunction in English”, but nothing can be read into that way of talking of the kind assumed in standard philosophical parlance. There is no such thing as reference in that sense—it isn’t real. The right thing to say is that in the ordinary dictionary sense every meaningful word refers (shades of Frege, suitably deflated) but in the philosopher’s sense no word refers, not even names. And that seems like a welcome result given that a mixed position is theoretically infelicitous: better to have a nice uniform account of meaning. Wouldn’t it be odd if one part of language—the part occupied by names and demonstratives—had the remarkable property of reference while the rest of language hobbled along without it? Imagine lines drawn vertically below every allegedly referential word and a blank below every non-referential word: that would suggest totally different functioning as between the two kinds of word. Yet syntactically and pragmatically (as well as sense-wise) all expressions are alike–why the anomaly?

How did the notion of reference find its way into the philosophy of language? We all remember Frege’s argument for why we need sense in addition to reference, but the same argument can be construed as a defense of reference (and may subliminally operate in this way). Suppose we start by assuming that “Hesperus” and “Phosphorus” have different senses: we then observe that they nevertheless have something in common, i.e. the same planet is relevant to the truth of sentences containing either name. Let’s introduce a name for this common feature: we say that both names refer to the same planet. Then we announce that two names can have the same reference—an interesting discovery about language. We invert Frege’s argument so as to move from diversity of sense to unity of reference, in the process inventing a new concept, viz. reference. And now we are off and running, applying this notion all over the place. But the data that led to this conceptual profusion merely concerned the fact that the same object figures in the truth conditions of sentences with different senses—it has no more content than that. Then too, we are influenced by the pointing gesture and by the relational nature of perception. We thus end up with a thick (yet elusive) concept of reference whose correct application proceeds to perplex us. We need to develop a healthy skepticism regarding the notion of reference that has grown from these dubious roots. There is nothing wrong with saying that names name people and things, but we shouldn’t convert this into the fanciful idea that there is some peculiar relation that links names to their bearers—an invisible string, a mental pointing, a magical arrow.[4] Alternatively, we could view talk of reference and denotation purely mathematically, as in mathematical model theory, and give up the idea of real empirical concrete relations between words and things. There should be no metaphysics (or science) of reference.

The usual way this subject has been pursued is to assume that there are certain paradigm cases of reference (the name-bearer relation, demonstrative reference to sense-data) and then ask whether other cases approximate to the paradigm. Then we debate how far the concept of reference can be extended from the paradigm cases. The more radical position is that there are no paradigm cases, because nothing refers. We can speak of meaning and sense as real properties of language, but it is pointless to debate how extensively the notion of reference applies. It has no serious application, not as a matter of linguistic theory (though a doctor can still refer a patient to a specialist). Articles with titles like “On Denoting” or “On Referring” are about nothing (this one might be called “Against Denoting”). Questions like whether the reference relation is rigid or non-rigid with respect to a particular class of expressions are also misguided, since there is no reference relation to be one or the other (though we can reconstruct the underlying issues without assuming realism about the reference relation). We must either purge the philosophy of language of the myth of reference or show that it can get by without going beyond the minimalist view of “refers”. The standard division between the referential and the non-referential is an untenable dualism.

 

[1] If the sense of names involves a mode of presentation of a reference, what does the sense of other expressions involve if there is no reference to be presented? The mixed position gives us a radically divided theory of what senses are, thus undermining the idea of a general notion of sense.

[2] It is commonly stated that predicates denote their extensions, thus conjuring up a special semantic relation between predicates and sets; but this is no more than a fancy way to talk about the things a predicate is true of. There is no more content to the idea of extension-denotation than the idea of what a predicate is true of. The same should be said of names: talk of their denotation is just a fancy way to talk about their contribution to truth.

[3] I am conscious of echoes from Wittgenstein in these remarks.

[4] Notice that other non-theoretical uses of “refer” and cognates do not suggest any such “queer” facts (Wittgenstein’s term): letters of reference, references as citations, works of reference. Nor does the comical use of “I don’t know to what you are referring” by the socially aspiring lady in the train station tearoom in the film Brief Encounter (she actually knows quite well to what the station master is referring).

I don’t usually like to comment on what is going on in the “the profession”, but the recent skirmish between Robin Dembroff and Alex Byrne over the definition of “woman” reminds me of two incidents in which I was involved: two young female professors wrote highly personal critical reviews of my books Basic Structures of Reality and The Meaning of Disgust which I thought overconfident and callow (I’m trying to be nice). I hope this is not a pattern. It is not good scholarship, to put it mildly.