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Referential/Attributive

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 October 1975

Michael Beebe
Michael Beebe*
Affiliation:
University of British Columbia
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Extract

Donnellan has introduced a distinction between two uses of referring terms, the referential and the attributive. A referentially used term is said to pick out that object the speaker has in mind, the one he meant or intended to refer to, while a term used attributively is said to pick out whichever object it names or denotes. While it is generally agreed that Donnellan has discovered a real difference in the way referring terms work, it has by no means been dear how the distinction could or should be handled theoretically. That has two consequences. First, intuitions diverge over difficult or marginal cases and, with no theory to appeal to, the taxonomic part of the enterprise is threatened. Second, the referential/attributive distinction has not become an accepted, relatively uncontroversial tool for solving problems about the semantics of utterances; and this is a least partly because of a lack of theory. But the distinction, so one feels, really is more important than it has thus far shown itself to be.

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Philosophy , Volume 7 , Issue 1 , March 1977 , pp. 91 - 101
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 1977

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References

1 Donnellan, Keith “Reference and Definite Descriptions”, Philosophical Review, 75 (1966), 281-304.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

2 Donnellan, Keith “Putting Humpty Dumpty Together Again”, Philosophical Review, 77 (1968), 203-215CrossRefGoogle Scholar; see particularly p. 212.

3 To achieve full generality, we should replace “the conventional referent of one's designating expression” by “the conventional referent of one's designating expression construed as meaning what one intends by it” to allow for meaning-convention violations.

4 T. E. Patton suggested to me this explanation of what the “whoever he is” and “must be” qualifiers do here.

5 Keith Donnellan, “Reference and Definite Descriptions“; see pp. 285–287.

6 Kaplan, David “Quantifying In”, Words and Objections: Essays on the Work of W. V. Quine, edited by Davidson, D. and Hintikka, J. (Dordrecht-Holland: D. Reidel Publishing Co., 1969), pp. 178 - 214.Google Scholar