Chulmin Yoon

Semantic relationism is the view that there is a semantic relation between representations that is not determined by sameness or difference in their local or intrinsic content. Following Fine (Semantic relationism, Blackwell, Oxford, 2007 ), let us call this semantic relation _coordination_. One apparent challenge for semantic relationism is that, in cases in which there is only a single occurrence of a name, it seems unclear what representation the name is coordinated with. Fine (Philos Phenomenol Res 81(2):475–484, 2010 ) suggests a solution to this problem by introducing the notion of a “token individual.” Pinillos (in: Bianchi (ed) On reference, Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp 322–334, 2015 ) argues against Fine’s suggestion based on a case in which coordination is not transitive across speakers. In this paper, I argue that an example of the sort that Pinillos uses does not undermine Fine’s proposal. In particular, I argue for the following claims. First, I argue that Pinillos’s conclusion is too hasty, since alternative readings, on which inter-personal coordination _is_ transitive, are available to semantic relationists. I present two such alternative readings. Second, and more importantly, I argue that there are reasons in favor of one of the two alternative readings. In doing so, I present an important difference between intra- and inter-personal coordination, which is often overlooked by semantic relationists.

In this article, I present different characteristics of de jure coreference, including an epistemological one and a logical one. Then, I present the semantic relation of coordination as what explains or grounds the phenomenon of de jure coreference. And I compare two theories of relational semantics, Fine’s (2007) and Taschek’s (1995a, 1995b, 1998), with respect to two famous puzzles in the philosophy of language, Frege’s puzzle and Kripke’s puzzle about belief. Lastly, I briefly discuss coordination between empty terms.

De jure coreference in a discourse is typically understood as explicit coreference that speakers are required to recognize in order to count as having correctly understood the discourse. For example, in an utterance of the sentence ‘Tom went to the market because he needed soy milk’, the two underlined terms are typically coreferential in a way that appreciating their coreference is required to fully understand the utterance. Often, de jure coreference is understood as an equivalence relation, so in particular it is thought of as a transitive relation. However, Pinillos (Philos Stud 154(2):301–324, 2011) provides examples that apparently challenge the transitivity of de jure coreference. In this paper, I argue for two claims. First, while it is inconclusive whether the relevant terms in Pinillos’s examples satisfy his third condition, it is much clearer that they fail to satisfy his first two conditions. Given that Pinillos’s conditions capture important characteristics of de jure coreference, his examples do not successfully show the non-transitivity of de jure coreference. Second, I present an alternative account of his examples, one that shows which representation the anaphoric pronoun in an example of the sort that he presents is de jure coreferential with.