Peirce on Reference

Posted on June 2, 2008
Filed Under Philosophy | 3 Comments

Just a very brief post as a followup to the Derrida post about Davidson and reference. I wanted to talk briefly on how Peirce conceives of reference.


Now most philosophers, perhaps largely following Frege, reference is an abstract relation between terms and things which one takes for granted. Now Davidson has a skepticism of Frege but talks instead about causal relations grounding reference. (More on that in an other post) That is still taken for granted. For Davidson object O causes in the the mind of some person P an idea I. Reference is the relation of I to O.

Peirce adopts quite a different view. For Peirce reference is always inferential. Now Peirce doesn’t completely reject the causal relation. However he doesn’t allow the movement from idea I in person P to object O in an uncritical fashion. (That is taking it for granted that we can make this 1-1 relation) Instead we move from I to O by means of a guess. Hermeneutics thus become a kind of guessing at a riddle.

The way this is often taken is that some term T refers to an object O means that term T indicates an object O taken by an interpretant (person) as a real thing.

Now it might be objected that this is merely the traditional critique of Davidson in terms of pure social extermalism. It isn’t though since for Peirce one is continually inquiring into ones guess to see if it is accurate. As one inquires new experiences will produce surprises which make us reformulate the new sign (the indication) we’ve created as the reference.

All that is getting a bit technical. So here’s the short answer.

Idea I in person P refers to Object O by Person P creating a new sign that indicates Object O by means of Idea I. As one uses the term and inquires new experiences may surprise us such that we reformulate the indication (maybe indicating a new object).

Where things get tricky with Peirce is his conception of unlimited semiosis. That is the new sign created must itself be interpreted which will result in yet an other sign which requires yet an other interpretation ad infinitum. So we never are able to get back purely to the object itself. Rather we have an unending number of guesses, each of which needs to be dealt with.

This is why in On Grammatology Derrida sees Peirce as coming closest to his conception of Deconstruction.

Related posts:

  1. Intentionality and Potentiality
  2. Peirce & OOP
  3. Derrida on Reference
  4. Virtual Peirce
  5. Peirce and Things
  6. Gary and Peirce on Mind and Functionalism

Comments

3 Responses to “Peirce on Reference”

“Now Davidson has a skepticism of Frege but talks instead about causal relations grounding reference.”

This is a misreading of Davidson. Nothing grounds reference; reference is inscrutable. All a Tarski-type theory of meaning makes use of is a notion of satisfaction, and there are always multiple satisfaction relations which will work equally well in “fitting” the language of a particular speaker. So, in a certain sense, there are no word-world relations which play a role in a Davidsonian theory of meaning. Meaning comes into being only at the level of sentences, and, as the Slingshot shows, there is nothing to which a sentence could refer except to the universe as a whole. In which case the relation “X refers to the universe” can just as easily be treated as a one-place predicate, more perspicuously written as “X is true”. Reference is simply a matter of the satisfaction relation one choses, for which there are always equally good incompatible alternatives; there is no fact of the matter about what a word refers to.

Now, causal interactions with the world are relevant to what an interpreter takes a given speaker to be reacting to. But one doesn’t react by having one’s terms refer, in the Fregean sense; one reacts by behaving in a rationally explicable manner. I determine what so-and-so reacts to by understanding what so-and-so is doing, not by determining the references of her words, or the causal history of her various states.

“For Davidson object O causes in the the mind of some person P an idea I. Reference is the relation of I to O.”

Davidson explicitly rejects this approach. What is caused “in the mind of P” is the belief that things are such-and-such (which is not a “representation” which P entertains). Which, being a sentence, has no “reference”, as shown above. It is simply true or false. And its being true or false is not a function of its causal history, or of anything else. Truth and falsity are brute; Sentences of the form “”Snow is white” is true-in-L IFF snow is white”, said in language L, give the complete extension of the truth predicate in a language, and a Tarski-type theory of truth suffices for a theory of meaning for a language, and so gives the truth-conditions for all of the sentences of a language. “Reference” drops out of the picture as unimportant, in addition to inscrutable. It is not needed to “anchor” language to the world. So, the weird semiotic twirling Pierce gets into is a needless side-tangle.

Davidson explicitly rejects this approach.

He certainly does. Even as early as 1977, in the helpfully entitled “Reality without Reference,” we get:

“We don’t need the concept of reference; neither do we need reference itself, whatever that may be [because of indeterminacy, as Daniel says].”

Davidson takes himself to be extending this basic Quinean notion: when we perform the recommended shift w/r/t the fundamental concept of our account of language (from meaning to truth), “we can recover a structure of sentences as made up of singular terms, predicates, connectives, and quantifiers, with ontological implications of the usual [i.e. Quinean] sort. Reference, however, drops out. It plays no essential role in explaining the relation between language and reality.” [quotes from pp. 224-5 of Inquiries]

And when reference (in the problematic sense!) drops out as an explanation of this relation, then so do both of the relata. With “fixed” reference go correspondingly “fixed” referents.

OK, I can see I was misreading Davidson there. And I can see why you were objecting to the reference – causal theory of meaning connection.

Let me reread the relevant Davidson and rethink this.

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