Eli Hirsch

I would expect many readers of my book to want to agree with either Mark Heller or Alan Sidelle. The very idea of “rational constraints on lexicons” will immediately suggest to many people that either the constraints are of a purely pragmatic nature or there really are no such constraints. I can take some cold comfort in the fact that many philosophers will join me in rejecting, and many others will join me in rejecting, but since I have nothing to offer in place of these positions—except mystification—I’m afraid that few will join me in rejecting both of them.

We can describe languages in which no words refer to objects. Such languages may contain sentences equivalent to any sentences of English, and hence may allow for as much objectivity as English does. It is wrong to try to deal with such languages by claiming that there are more objects than those accepted by common sense ontology. The correct move is rather to acknowledge a sense in which the concept of an object might have been different. A consequence of this position is that we cannot have a general semantics applicable to every describable language in which words are referentially connected to objects. The point here is not that reference may be inscrutable, but that different concepts of ‘referring to an object’ may be required for different languages.