Given the preceding elucidation of Travis’s position, one might reasonably wonder how occasion sensitivity will be relevant to the reference of proper names. As I have already mentioned, my major thesis about proper name reference is that it is a pragmatic, rather than a semantic phenomenon, and this position was initially, at least partially, motivated by Travis’s position on the occasion sensitivity of other types of expression.
As I have discussed, occasion sensitivity (for predicates) is, or has the result that, the contribution that is made by predicates to the truth or falsity of an utterance is radically under-determined by their semantic content, where semantic content is taken to be something determinate and constant between uses. Being able to tell whether or not a predicate is being correctly or appropriately applied on an occasion is something that requires domain- general knowledge about the ways the world is on the occasion, not merely knowledge of the semantics of the predicate. Thus, what is said with an utterance—the content of an utterance—is not dependent upon the semantic meaning of the utterance. That the semantics of predicates and sentences under-determine utterance content might lead one to think that semantics per se does not aim at providing determinate utterance content. Reference, however, is a phenomenon that has an impact on the truth-evaluable content of an utterance—in order to analyze what is said by an utterance containing a proper name, and whether the utterance (or what is said) is true, we must
2.4. Communication
know (in some sense) to what the name refers (at least, in most circumstances). Indeed, a name can be said to refer to an object only if the truth of the utterance containing it turns on the way that object is (again, in most circumstances). Given these two claims—that semantics is not utterance content-oriented, and that reference is utterance content-contributing—there is reason to think that reference is not a semantic phenomenon. If reference belongs in the domain of truth-evaluable content, and truth-evaluable content is a pragmatic phenomenon, reference is pragmatic.
Of course, an argument of this sort is not going to convince anyone who is not already inclined to take what Travis calls ‘the pragmatic view’ (Travis 1997, p. 111-3), but, again, it will be helpful to the reader to appreciate my own initial motivations for developing the pragmatic view of proper name reference. In chapters 3–6, I will try to motivate that view independently of the broader Travisian framework.
2.4
Communication
Whether or not, and how, communication is relevant to what words mean, whether and how it is relevant to when sentences, utterances, or thoughts are true, and whether and how it is relevant to what proper names refer to, are all controversial questions in the philosophy of language. I will not attempt to explore them in great depth here, but since I make certain assumptions about the rôle of communication, it will do well at least to stake my ground. It seems to be a minimal constraint upon a theory of natural language and meaning that it does not exclude the possibility of communication, even if it does not explain it. Moreover, since communication is, at the very least, something that humans use language for a great deal—to my mind, its primary use17
—it must be considered a boon if a theory of language and meaning makes successful communication plausible. Indeed, we should look very unfavourably upon a theory that makes communication implausible.18
Therefore, an account of proper name reference should not make communication impossible, and, if it has nothing to say with regard to communication, we might reasonably expect
17
Chomsky has, famously, doubted such a claim. He observes:
Language is used in many different ways. Language can be used to transmit information, but it also serves many other purposes: to establish relations among people, to express or clarify thought, for play, for creative mental activity, to gain understanding, and so on. In my opinion, there is no reason to accord privileged status to one or the other of these modes. (Chomsky 1979)
However, it is unclear that any of his examples are genuine challenges to the significance of communication. All of the examples Chomsky provides seem to require information transfer, at least at some stage, and I will claim below that communication amounts to nothing more than information transfer.
18
2.4. Communication
to be able to see how it makes communication possible, and why it is that it does not need to address communication. In this section, I will highlight why it is that I think that communication is relevant to language and meaning, and how it relates to proper name reference.
First, a word about what I take communication to be. The most plausible, minimal account of communication that I am aware of is that in the vein of Shannon-influenced models,19
whereby communication is simply the transfer of information. Information here need not be in the form of thoughts or propositions, in the sense of fully determinate, truth-evaluable entities, but could simply be an ‘indicator of probable states of affairs’ (Sutton 2013, p. 126), though not necessarily correct indicators. This idea of communication and information is compatible with the thought that words on their own communicate relatively little, but that uses of words in context, together with the application of various kinds of awareness about the circumstances of those uses, allows for a great deal more information to be transferred. Speakers and audiences are able to make use both of the information that might be carried by words independently of any particular circumstance of utterance—what I characterized in the previous section as their (semantic) meaning—but also the information that they can carry upon particular occasions of utterance, being aware that those words, having been spoken by the speaker, who has particular purposes, provide reasons to believe certain things. All this is of relatively little importance for the bulk of what I will have to say in this thesis, except to make the point that what I take to be communicated by a referential use of a name is just that information (which need not be true, or correct, or intended) that is transferred to the audience given a speaker’s use of the name.