Razones o argumentos que han llevado al legislador a optar por la forma anónima

One problem with talking about “reference” is that this word has an ordinary common meaning that we are trying to accord a consistently used technical meaning. Not only must we contend with this, but we also must contend with the extent to which translation decisions regarding Frege’s use of Sinn and Bedeutung are best thought of as “Sense” and “Reference,” when the German terms have no exact counterparts in English. Would things be different were these labeled “Concept” and “Designatum” instead? Perhaps – just perhaps – Frege was not even trying to talk about something called “reference” at all.

We certainly want our discussions of reference to be substantive and not terminological. Thus far, we have been following the intuitive idea that the

“reference” of a word or phrase is what contributes to the truth or falsity of a sentence (or a sentence in use). The strategy of fixing on those elements of language, such as names and definite descriptions, which most clearly are in line with our native understanding of the word, is an understandable and productive strategy. But what about all those other words and expressions in a sentence? Does a notion of “reference” fit them as well?

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If we apply the notion, in slogan form: “reference determines truth,” across the board, and consider all those other words and phrases in a sentence, it turns out that all of them play a role in determining truth and falsity. This, in very rough form, is what Church (1943) and Gödel (1944) quite independently noted about Frege’s theory (see also Salmon 1981, 1986). The possibility of syncategorematic introduction of some words aside, what this means is that all words and all phrases within a sentence have a “reference” besides a “sense.”

If we examine, say, Montague’s (1973) framework, which to a large extent can be thought of as one implementation of Frege’s framework, at least in many important respects, most of the references of words and phrases turn out to be functions. This holds true as well for proper names (which turn out to be generalized quantifiers, that is, functions from properties to truth values) as well as definite descriptions (to which he gives a type of Russellian analysis).

What then becomes of our naïve notions of “reference” that lead us to see the sense in focusing on names and definite noun phrases to the exclusion of everything else? Again, our naïve notion of reference brings us to the under-lying intuition that reference is a “picking out” of a definite object, which we want to say something about. And the type of linguistic device that seems best suited for these purposes are (certain types of) noun phrases. An understand-ing of why this might be so might be gained from an analysis of the variety of noun phrase meanings.

Let us examine a proper name, within the Montague framework. Although its “reference” within a sentence is the set of properties that individual might have (an analysis suggested in Leibniz: Mates 1968), (nearly) any proposition in which this occurs is equivalent to another formally distinct proposition in which the individual itself appears as the subject (object, etc.) of predication.

Thus, although the analysis of something like “John snores” is:

(14) λP[^∨P(j)](^∧snore′)

which is semantically equivalent to:

(15) snore′ (j)

However, with quantificational noun phrases, which are not considered refer-ential on the whole, no such similar reduction is possible. Since Montague chooses to represent definite descriptions in the Russellian manner, they too come out as quantified noun phrases. But updating the framework some, and allowing for presupposition failure with definite noun phrases, one can arrive at an interpretation which is of the form P(a), with a, as Russell might say, as the “logical subject” of the predication. In this way, we might begin to under-stand why certain types of noun phrases can be used “referentially,” and others not. However, looking at things this way may seem to open the door once again to a semantic view of reference.

One view is discussed in McGinn (1981) and rests on an analogy. We do, in fact, make reference to things by uttering certain noises under certain

Reference 89 circumstances. However, consider the commonplace activity of buying some-thing. This might at first sight seem to be a causal interaction describable in such terms, but this doesn’t seem correct (e.g. that we can buy things, and often do, which do not exist at the moment of purchase). In making a pur-chase, we operate against a background of conventions and constructs, such as the notion of money, ownership, legalities of exchange, and so forth.

These notions are not behaviors, but rather collectively define certain types of economic relations between individuals and objects. In actually making a purchase, we are in fact guided by perception and perform actions, but these things are not part of the economic relations themselves. And we also have considerable freedom of behavior in that there are many ways to make a purchase. Rather, making a purchase results in a relation between us and objects that we “get into” by doing certain things in concert with others.

Similarly, McGinn invites us to consider, reference is like this. Reference is defined semantically by a relation between expressions and objects of the world, but this relation is not defined in any way by actions or intentions. Rather, it is a relation we can “get into” with an object by acting certain ways in a given context.

There is also a concrete strategy for “semanticizing” reference. It is, basic-ally, Kaplan’s notion of how to accord a meaning to indexical expressions (see also Levinson, this volume). Before doing this, though, we need to give a bit of background on the notion of “truth.”

The focus on truth and falsity as indicators of the reference of the use of a phrase needs to be distinguished from the notion of giving truth conditions.

Let’s approach it this way, within a possible worlds framework. In saying something like “Larry is in Spain,” I am expressing a proposition p. That proposition p is a function in some theories from possible worlds (and times, but I’ll omit this) to truth values. That is, given a certain possible world w, then p(w) will yield either T or F. At the moment, I happen to know that who I am referring to by using the name Larry is, in fact, not in Spain. That is, I know that p(w) = F. Does this mean that, as a speaker, I know which possible world w is? No, I do not. For instance, I do not know if this is among the possible worlds in which Larry is in Spain and the rug in my office was in-stalled in a month ending with -ber. I have no idea when it was inin-stalled. What this means is this: I do not know which possible world is the actual world. Nor does anyone else: no one is in command of all the statements that are true and false in our world. This does not stop me from referring to it, indexically or by description; it’s just that the world we happen to inhabit as the actual one is not identifiable to us as w³³⁸ rather than, say, w⁷⁸⁴. We believe, of course, that we can narrow down the host of candidates – this is not one of the worlds where

“Cleveland is the capital of France” is true, and a lot of other such things. This would seem something of a step in the right direction, but this assumes none of us hold any false beliefs about the world, nor that we hold any contradic-tory beliefs about the world, which only makes things worse for any kind of psychological identification. In short, if we attempt a psychologization of the

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possible worlds framework, our limitations prevent us from ever “homing in”

on which world among them all we inhabit. This is not a quirky feature of a possible worlds point of view: any theory of intensionality leads to the same conclusion.

None of this means we can have no cognitive “grasp” of truth conditions, however. For any world wⁿ, p(wⁿ) is true or false. We just don’t happen to know if it’s our world or someone else’s.