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Reference and Reflexivity (Center for the Study of Language and Information - Lecture Notes)
Reference and Reflexivity - Center for the Study of Language and Information - Lecture Notes Author:John Perry Following his recently expanded The Problem of the Essential Indexical and Other Essays, John Perry develops a ``reflexive-referential' account of indexicals, demonstratives and proper names. On these issues the philosophy of language in the twentieth century was shaped by two competing traditions, descriptivist and referentialist. — Oddly... more », the classic referentialist texts of the 1970s by Kripke, Donnellan, Kaplan and others were seemingly refuted almost a century earlier by co-reference and no-reference problems raised by Russell and Frege. Perry's theory, borrowing ideas from both traditions as well as from Burks and Reichenbach, diagnoses the problems as stemming from a fixation on a certain kind of content, coined referential or fully incremental.
Referentialist tradition is portrayed as holding that indexicals contribute content that involves individuals without identifying conditions on them; descriptivist tradition is portrayed as holding that referential content does not explain all of the identifying conditions conveyed by names and indexicals. Perry reveals a coherent and structured family of contents ? from reflexive contents that place conditions on their actual utterance to fully incremental contents that place conditions only on the objects of reference ? reconciling the legitimate insights of both traditions.« less