I'm sure most didn't find the topic that interesting, but the recent discussion over at LDS-Phil on God and descriptions did end up getting into the whole issue of the relationship between descriptions and reference. Now as I said (here and here) I found the whole approach to the problem rather contrived. I think that if we're trying to get at issues related to descriptivism there are better approaches. I'll not bore everyone repeating that discussion. What I want to go over though is an interesting new paper up on descriptivism. (Thanks to Brian Weatherson's Recent Online Papers in Philosophy)
The paper is "Against Causal Descriptivism" by Panu Raatikainen. It's basically an extended critique of both causal descriptivism and nominal descriptivism - especially as found in Putnam. Now causal descriptivism is the idea that when I make a reference, my referring isn't just in terms of of my description or my understanding of it. Rather my environment in part determines the reference of my description. It makes a lot of sense against say Russell's theory of descriptions which is basically just quantifier logic. (i.e. there exists a person who has these properties picks out all those persons who fit those properties and thus refers to them) Causal descriptivism basically says that the entity named in a description determines the reference of the name. This is possible because what is named has a causal relationship to the name. Thus if I speak about Einstein my use is related causally to the actual person Einstein. Often this is generalized to some basic relation between the name in a description and some entity.
A related view is nominal descriptivism. This is basically just the idea that names directly refer to a specific entity. As I recall Searle goes through this theory in Speech Acts. (I have to confess it's been a long time since I read it last) The idea, as I recall, is that using a name identifies a particular entity.
As Raatikainen points out, the real issue is less speaker meaning (what I intend when I utter a sentence) than conventional linguistic meaning (what Searle calls corporate meaning). That's partially why I'm not entirely sure this is relevant to the issue Dennis raised about the definition of God. There is a difference between the convention meaning and the speaker's meaning and I think his question would at best only work in the former.
Of course, one might ask if conventional meaning refers.
The problem is that when I know the meaning of a statement, what goes on? This takes us to the old internalism/externalism debate. If I know the meaning of a statement, presumably it is just a psychological state and thus purely internal to me. It can't depend on any external entities. The causal descriptivist would deny this (or a related claim). However the counterargument is that causal descriptivism requires that one be familiar with an awful lot of external entities so as to understand the meaning of sentences. After all to know the meaning of a sentence we must also correctly know exactly what it refers to. The argument is that this is too extreme a position to require since intuitively we can understand sentences without knowing the reference. Then there are the problem of sentences that intend a reference but there is no real reference. What are we to make of these?
The biggest complaint against causal descriptivism is that it seems to entail that different speakers or hearers will have different meanings for the same sentence. That's because of what are called indexicals. (In their most simple form pronouns like "I" or "you" but also phrases like "my outfit.") It seems very hard to conceive that shared meaning with indexicals is possible if their reference is causally fixed.
The basic complain then is that causal descriptivism can't be a theory of meaning because it can't deal with that shared sense of language - what we all have in common.
All of this ends up being related to a few topics that have come up this week. Not just he problem of reference and meaning, but also the issue of internalism and externalism. Indeed, Putnam, who is one of the main forces behind causal descriptivism, also provides a lot of the main arguments for externalism. Next I'll provide a few possible solutions to this via Peirce that I think quite relevant.
hello, i have some questions to ask you if you wouldnt mind of course, first can u please explaini to me the meanings of nominal theology and real theology and the differences? they seem the same, and another thing, can u please explain why mormons, are traveling nowadays? i'd appreciate it if you would reply to my email address ataylor_1989@yahoo.com thank you very much
-alicia
I'm afraid I don't quite understand your question.
I've closed comments in order to avoid spam since I don't check this older blog as much anymore.
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