Speaker Reference

Kripke

The notion of speaker reference, as a distinct phenomenon to semantic reference, plays a rôle not just in Sainsbury’s accounts of proper name

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Since the explanation is mine rather than Sainsbury’s, the inadequacy is presumably mine. However, it is hard to see how else Sainsbury would approach the problem using the framework he lays out in his (2005).

3.2. The Argument from Communication

reference, but in many semantic views of reference, both in order to account for discrepancies in intuitions about reference from the predictions of theories, and, as in Sainsbury’s causal accounts, in order to ground semantic reference. The speaker reference/semantic reference distinction first arises in Kripke (1977), which is, in part, a response to Donnellan (1966). As already mentioned, Donnellan argues that definite descriptions can be used to refer to objects, even if the referent fails to fulfil the relevant description. Kripke’s paper introduces the distinction between speaker’s reference and semantic reference in order to account for this alleged phenomenon. The distinction is claimed to be a special case of Grice’s distinction between speaker meaning and semantic meaning (Kripke 1977, p. 263).

Kripke claims that referential expressions such as definite descriptions, proper names, and indexicals have a semantic reference, which is what they refer to in virtue of their meaning, and determines their truth-conditional content. Thus, the expression ‘the King of Spain’ can only semantically refer to a person who is uniquely the King of Spain; the name ‘Felipe VI’ can semantically refer only to its bearer, which will be determined causally; and the indexical ‘yesterday’ uttered by me at the time of writing will semantically refer only to the 16th February, 2016. Kripke claims that the meanings he appeals to are determined by conventions in a speakers idiolect, which will usually be closely connected to a common language (ibid., n. 20), and that the particular convention that determines the semantic reference of a referring expression is a general intention to refer to a particular object with the expression (ibid., p. 264). Speaker reference, on the other hand, is determined, by a speaker’s specific intention to refer to an object on an occasion, together with a belief that the object is the semantic referent of the term being used. A speaker can, therefore, speaker refer to an object using an expression not conventionally used for such a referent so long as she has a specific referential intention to so refer, and believes it is semantically appropriate. However, in such a case the semantic reference will not be the speaker referent, and so, in spite of what the speaker might succeed in communicating about the speaker referent, the literal truth-value of the utterance will depend upon the semantic referent.

Sainsbury

Sainsbury appeals to speaker reference in both his (2005) and (2015), but does not specify what he means by it in either case, so I think it is largely safe to assume that his conception is similar to Kripke’s: a speaker, in using a proper name, speaker refers to whatever object they specifically intend to

3.2. The Argument from Communication

refer to using the name (where a referential intention may be a specific sort of thing). However, we might credit Sainsbury with dropping Kripke’s condition that a speaker must believe that the object of their referential intention is the semantic referent of the name they’re using. Such a condition is in tension with, for example, certain kinds of accidental baptisms. Diverging further from Kripke, Sainsbury (2015) goes on to define semantic reference as a conventional matter, supervening on a community’s use of a proper name (or other expression), that is, on individual members’ speaker reference:

The “semantic reference” of a name, as used in a community, is its conven- tionalized, stabilized or normalized speaker-reference in the community. “London” refers to London among many speakers who live in England (and elsewhere) because it’s a conventional or stabilized or normal fact about these speakers that they use the specific name “London” (I hope you know which specific name of the genus “London” I have in mind) only if they intend thereby to refer to London. The notion of semantic reference is a theoretical one, and one that needs to be constructed to suit theoretical purposes. In the present case, we need a conception of semantic reference that will supervene on use and help explain features of usage (for example agreement, disagreement, correction). Basing semantic reference on speaker-reference is the most straightforward, and perhaps the only, way to achieve this. Speaker-reference can be theoretically described without any theoretical commitment to semantic reference, so the supervenience has a reductive character. (ibid., p. 209)

This is in contrast to Kripke, who bases the conventions of semantic reference on speakers’ general intentions to use a name in a particular way within their idiolect.

The view that there is a distinction to be drawn between semantic reference and speaker reference is very much the orthodoxy amongst philosophers of language working on reference. With regard to proper names, it is fairly essential to any semantic view of reference because such views are characterized by their insistence that proper name reference is determined by (or constitutes) the semantics of the name: it is the semantic reference being determined. Any apparent deviation from the semantic reference must be accounted for by the notion of speaker reference, and, indeed, in the case of the causal theory of Sainsbury and others, a notion of reference prior to semantic reference is posited to ground the causal chains of semantic reference.

Speaker Reference and Communication

Speaker reference, and its distinction from semantic reference, are relevant to the argument from communication against causal-homophonism because

3.2. The Argument from Communication

speaker reference is often appealed to in cases in which a proper name is used to communicate about an object that is not its bearer, and thus, according to homophonism, is not its semantic referent. I have two main objections to the use of speaker reference by homophonists. The first is that examples are available in which a name is used, but the object communicated about—and what might intuitively be thought of as the referent of the use of a name—is neither what a homophonist would consider to be the semantic referent, nor the speaker referent, if we consider that to be just the object of the speaker’s referential intentions. The second objection is that the homophonists’ use of the speaker reference/semantic reference distinction provides a picture of reference that is overly complicated since it posits an unnecessary ambiguity in the notion of reference: If one notion of reference were able to account for everything we might want to say about reference, the distinction would be redundant.

My first objection is that there are cases of apparent reference which are explained by neither speaker nor semantic reference, and fall into neither cate- gory. Consider the following example: David Cameron has been attacked by a vengeful citizen, and is critically injured. In the newsroom of a broadcaster, political correspondents and journalists await further news. A man runs in and shouts ‘Cameron’s dead! Cameron’s dead!’. Naturally, those present take the speaker to be telling them that David Cameron, Prime Minister of the UK, has succumbed to his injuries, and, given the context, it seems very natural to claim that the speaker communicated that to his audience, and referred to David Cameron. However, suppose that the speaker, oblivious to the developing political situation, was actually trying to convey information about American actor Cameron Diaz, of whom he is a big fan. We can certainly agree that the speaker was trying to refer and communicate about Diaz. But, because his audience was primed to hear news of David Cameron, and, furthermore, they expected the name ‘Cameron’ to be used to refer to him, it is implausible that the speaker did refer to or communicate about Diaz: given the context in which he spoke, he did not have good reason to use the name he did without elaboration, and the name he used did not provide his audience with good reason for taking him to be talking about Cameron Diaz.14

However, the

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It is worth noting that the locution ‘was referring to’, employing the imperfective aspect, can be used to report what a speaker meant to refer to, even if the speaker is at fault in causing a misunderstanding. However, it is not clear that this imperfective locution entails success: Just as ‘I was running home’ does not entail ‘I ran home’, ‘She was referring to Lucy’ might not entail ‘She referred to Lucy’. It might not even entail partaking in an activity that might lead to success. Particularly in first-person reporting (‘I was referring to’), such locutions may simply be reports of a speaker’s intentions, or what they believed they intended, even if they were not in a position to fulfil those intentions or supposed intentions. This point is raised by Travis (1980, p. 142; 1981a, p. 16). The same point seems to hold for the locution ‘was talking about’.

3.2. The Argument from Communication

causal-homophonist has nothing to say about the speaker’s relationship to David Cameron, except that his audience wrongly took him to be referring to him, and this places the mistake on the audience and not the speaker. Cameron Diaz is both the semantic and speaker referent of the speaker’s utterance of ‘Cameron’ because he was using her name ‘Cameron’, causally linked to her baptism, and he intended to refer to her.

My second objection questions the need for positing a notion of semantic reference in addition to a notion of reference supposed to explain what happens in communication. As already discussed, Sainsbury (2015) maintains that semantic reference supervenes on speaker reference, and invokes speaker reference in explaining how names maintain or change their bearers and therefore (semantic) reference. Without speakers speaker referring with their uses of names, therefore, there would be no semantic reference: there would be no specific names with their referential semantic content. But if it is accepted that people can use names referentially, without those names being connected to their referents in virtue of their semantics, and, in doing so, at least sometimes communicate successfully (presumably when their intentions are perspicuous), then it is not obvious what rôle semantic reference fulfils, since it certainly does not provide correct truth-conditions in all cases. It is my view that the perceived need for proper names (and other referring expressions) to have a reference in virtue of their semantics, particularly a reference tout court, as homophonists contend, is symptomatic of the view that sentences (rather than utterances) (perhaps together with a formally represented context to allow for indexicals and tense) have a literal meaning that is truth-conditional, and thus are literally true or false simpliciter.

Such a view is particularly apparent in Kripke (1977).15

Kripke reveals his rather conservative conception of semantics and pragmatics in a dismissal of Donnellan’s apparent suggestion that the use of language is not merely epiphenomenal:

It is not “uses”, in some pragmatic sense, but senses of a sentence which can be analyzed. If the sentence in not (syntactically or) semantically ambiguous, it has only one analysis; to say that it has two distinct analyses is to attribute a syntactic or semantic ambiguity to it. (ibid., p. 262)

Whilst Kripke does not deny that speakers can use their words to do things that are not mandated by their semantics, he maintains that this is a pragmatic issue that must be accounted for separately. Kripke chastises Donnellan for positing unnecessary semantic ambiguities (ibid., p. 268), but does not consider that he is himself positing an ambiguity around reference that would

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