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A case for animal reference: beyond functional reference and meaning attribution
Reference is a basic feature of human language. A much debated question in the scholarship on animal communication and language evolution is whether...
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Can Gupta Secure Singular Reference?
Empirical thought would be impossible without singular reference in presence, that is, when the reference is anchored by an experience through which...
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Reference in Context
In this paper, I offer some considerations on the contextual dimension of reference and, then, I expatiate on the possibility that referential NPs...
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Performative reference
Reference may be fixed by stipulation through a speech act, just like bets and marriages. An utterance of Let n refer to an/the F is a speech act by...
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An unjustly neglected theory of semantic reference
There is a simple, intuitive theory of the semantic reference of proper names that has been unjustly neglected. This is the view that semantic...
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Consumer-side reference through promiscuous memory traces
What fixes the referents of episodic memories? While developed theories are lacking, it is generally assumed that the causal production of a memory,...
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Normative Reference as a Normative Question
Normative naturalism holds that normative properties are identical with, or reducible to, natural properties. Various challenges to naturalism focus...
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Reference in remembering: towards a simulationist account
Recent theories of remembering and of reference (or singular thought) have de-emphasised the role causation was thought to play in mid- to...
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The epistemology of “On Sense and Reference”
This paper sheds light on an epistemological dimension of Frege’s “On Sense and Reference.” Under my suggested reading of it, one of its aims is to...
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Reference Magnetism Does Not Exist
In the last 35 years many philosophers have appealed to reference magnetism to explain how it is that we mean what we mean. The idea is that it is a...
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Varieties of Self-Reference in Metamathematics
This paper investigates the conditions under which diagonal sentences can be taken to constitute paradigmatic cases of self-reference. We put forward...
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Intention, Convergence and Indexical Reference
The day to day experiences of answering machine messages, written notes, postcard messages, etc. and our intuitions regarding these seem to...
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Defending the pure causal-historical theory of reference fixing for natural kind terms
According to the causal-historical theory of reference, natural kind terms refer in virtue of complicated causal relations the speakers have to their...
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The Elimination of Direct Self-reference
This paper provides a procedure which, from any Boolean system of sentences, outputs another Boolean system called the ‘ m -cycle unwinding’ of the...
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The deep neural network approach to the reference class problem
Methods of machine learning (ML) are gradually complementing and sometimes even replacing methods of classical statistics in science. This raises the...
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Reference by proxy
Formal semantic theories are generally thought to make contact with pre-theoretic semantic notions of aboutness and reference. The nature of that...
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Osteoporosis and risk of fracture: reference class problems are real
Elselijn Kingma argues that Christopher Boorse’s biostatistical theory does not show how the reference classes it uses—namely, age groups of a sex of...
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A Reply to Haze’s Argument Against Arbitrary Reference
This paper is a response to Haze’s brief argument for the falsity of the theory that instantial terms refer arbitrarily, proposed by Breckenridge and...
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Reference the untouchable. On the limits of revising concepts using the method of cases
The paper investigates to what extent the method of cases can be interpreted as either a descriptive or a normative enterprise. I demonstrate that...
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Sortals, bodies, and variables. A critique of Quine’s theory of reference
Among the philosophical accounts of reference, Quine’s (
1974 ) The Roots of Reference stands out in offering an integrated account of the acquisition...