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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Reference and Beyond: Essays in Philosophy of Language

Reference and Beyond: Essays in Philosophy of Language

Devitt, Michael

Hardcover

Philosophy

ISBN10: 0199280819
ISBN13: 9780199280810
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: Oct 15 2025
Pages: 480
Weight: 1.98
Height: 1.32 Width: 6.49 Depth: 9.40
Language: English
In Reference and Beyond, Michael Devitt explores philosophy of language from a naturalistic approach. A dominant theme of this book is the semantics of proper names, definite descriptions, and demonstratives. It shows that these terms have conventional referential uses to express singular thoughts. Those uses are explained by a unified causal theory: a term's reference is largely fixed in an object by a causal link between the person and the object when it is, or was, the focus of that person's perception. Furthermore, Devitt argues that a term's meaning is its largely causal mode of reference. So, a related theme is the rejection of the direct reference view that the meaning of a name is its bearer.

Another theme in Reference and Beyond concerns thoughts and their ascriptions, including de se thoughts and Kripke's Paderewski puzzle. Devitt approaches the semantics of ascriptions from a perspective on thoughts, thus according with the slogan, Put Metaphysics First, that governs the author's approach to all philosophical problems. A further framework is naturalism. Languages are parts of the spatio-temporal world playing causal roles in virtue of certain properties, meanings. The task of a theory of language is then to explain the nature of those causally significant properties. The book takes a very dim view of the popular idea that propositions have a place in explanations of meanings. The naturalism leads to a rejection of the received view that theories of language must rest on an evidential base of speakers' intuitions and to a search for a respectable empirical base.

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