2005 AUsersGuideToProperNames

(Pilatova, 2005) ⇒ Anna Pilatova. (2005). “A User’s Guide to Proper Names: Their Pragmatics And Semantics." PhD Thesis, Institute for Logic, Language and Computation. Universiteit van Amsterdam.

Subject Headings: Proper Name, Direct Reference, Meaning.

Notes

In order to describe the principal differences between the descriptivist and the new theories of reference more clearly, it is useful to distinguish between the senses in which the term ‘sense’ can be used.27 Sometimes the term ‘meaning’ is used as synonymous with 'sense’. When this is the case, the following distinctions apply to ‘meaning’ as well as ‘sense’.
Sense1 is a purely conceptual representation of an object, which a fully competent speaker associates with his use of a term. The sense1 of a term is something a subject is sometimes said to ‘grasp’. It includes only general properties (such as being male, being called ‘John Smith’). Individuals (e.g., John Smith) cannot occur as constituents of sense1.
Sense2 denotes the mechanism that determines the reference of a term with respect to a possible world, time, place, and possibly other contextual parameters. Sense2 is a semantic notion.
Sense3 is the information value of a term, that is, the contribution the term makes to the information content of sentences containing it. Sense3 is a cognitive, epistemic notion. It figures in any belief expressed by a sentence containing the term, and is relevant in determining the epistemological status (a priori or a posteriori, trivial or informative) of such sentences.

Direct reference The notion of direct reference, coined by David Kaplan,32 has been used to describe the way demonstratives and proper names refer. It is also sometimes used as a general name for Kaplan’s theory and theories based on it.33 These theories vary in the details but share a commitment to the view that singular terms34 refer directly in the sense that “the relation between a linguistic expression and the referent is not mediated by the corresponding propositional component, the what-is-said, the content.”35 Thus for example, in claiming that John is tall, one asserts that a property of being tall is true of John – not of anyone called ‘John’, or a particular individual who bears that name but of the individual himself. As Kaplan puts it, there is a sense in which the proposition is about “John himself, right there, trapped in a proposition.”

,

	Author	volume	Date Value	title	type	journal	titleUrl	doi	note	year
2005 AUsersGuideToProperNames	Anna Pilatova			A User’s Guide to Proper Names: Their Pragmatics And Semantics			http://dissertations.ub.rug.nl/FILES/faculties/fil/2005/a.pilatova/thesis.pdf