Antonio Capuano

This chapter focuses on what it takes for someone to think about an individual, for instance Aristotle. It contrasts two different pictures of thinking about an individual, i.e., the inside-out and the outside-in pictures. The former picture can be traced back to some theses of Frege and Russell that, it is argued, are still popular in contemporary philosophy of mind. This chapter suggests that Donnellan and Kripke’s observations about the use of proper names and some common nouns put a lot of strain on the inside-out picture of cognition. Inspired by these observations, Capuano tries to offer an orthogonal approach to what it takes to think about an individual. In his view, thinking about an individual is analogous to perceiving an object. In both cases, an object comes to us by initiating an informational chain. Although the focus is cognition, the contrast between the inside-out and the outside-in picture has important consequences for understanding reference.

This chapter compares two different conceptions of and foundations for semantics. Ultimately the two conceptions and foundations go back to ideas of Frege and Russell. To put it in a nutshell: for Frege, at the ground zero of semantics there is _denotation_; for Russell, instead, at the ground zero of semantics there is _reference_. _Reference_ and _denotation_ are two distinct semantic relations that one should not confuse. The first, that of reference, is grounded in _natural-historical processes_ flowing from objects; the other, that of denotation, is grounded in the _logical_ relations of _truth_ and _satisfaction_. In the past thirty years, most philosophers of language have agreed with Kripke against Donnellan. The prevailing view has been that Donnellan’s distinction between referential and attributive uses of a definite description belongs to pragmatics. Semantics, in fact, deals only with conventional rules of denotation. The chapter suggests that one can look at what Donnellan is doing from a different perspective. Instead of pursuing Frege’s denotation-based semantic project, as Kripke in the end seems to do, Donnellan—distinguishing between referential and attributive uses of definite descriptions—is reviving Russell’s approach to semantics.

In ‘A Puzzle about Belief’ Kripke holds a simple thesis: ‘the puzzle is a puzzle’ (1979: 125). My main thesis is also a simple one: Kripke's is not a puzzle. It is a positive finding about the limits of the language of indirect discourse in describing the cognitive life of thinkers. In particular, the true report ‘Peter believes that Paderewski has musical talent, and that Paderewski does not have musical talent’ does not distinguish between someone like Peter who is rational but does not realize that there are not two individuals called ‘Paderewski’ and someone like Peter* who realizes that there is only one individual called ‘Paderewski’ but is irrational.

In “On Referring” Peter Strawson pointed out that incomplete descriptions pose a problem for Russell’s analysis of definite descriptions. Howard Wettstein and Michael Devitt appealed to incomplete descriptions to argue, first, that Russell’s analysis of definite descriptions fails, and second, that Donnellan’s referential/attributive distinction has semantic bite. Stephen Neale has defended Russell’s analysis of definite descriptions against Wettstein’s and Devitt’s objections. In this paper, my aim is twofold. First, I rebut Neale’s objections to Wettstein’s and Devitt’s argument and argue that Neale’s attempt to provide an account of referential descriptions within a Russellian framework fails. Second, contra Devitt and Wettstein, I argue that the problem posed by incomplete descriptions shows that Donnellan was right in believing that referential descriptions refer even if the definite description fits nothing.

In ‘Reference and Definite Descriptions', Keith Donnellan claimed that Bertrand Russell and Peter Strawson ignored referential uses of definite descriptions. The intense debate that followed Donnellan's paper focused on the contrast between Donnellan and Russell, leaving Strawson aside. In this paper, I focus on the contrast between Donnellan and Strawson. By focusing on this contrast, my aim is, first, to clarify the nature of Donnellan's distinction between referential and attributive uses of definite descriptions and, second, to argue that a proper understanding of referential uses holds the key to a proper understanding of direct reference. Contrary to the standard view, the crucial issue is not the nature of the proposition expressed (singular versus general) but how a speaker comes to talk about an object.

Kripke’s picture of how people use names to refer to things has been the dominant view in contemporary philosophy of language. When it is mentioned at all, Donnellan’s view of proper names is considered the same as Kripke’s. It is certainly true that both Donnellan and Kripke rejected descriptivism about proper names and appealed to historical facts to determine whom a speaker is referring to by using a proper name. However, the relevant historical facts Kripke and Donnellan appeal to are ultimately quite different. In this paper, I argue that Donnellan’s view of proper name fares better than Kripke’s.