Keith Donnellan’s distinction between the attributive and referential uses of definite descriptions has spurred debates
regarding the truth conditions of the utterance “the F is G” with definite descriptions used referentially. In this article,
I present a semantic account of referential descriptions, grounded in the contextual factors of the utterance, including
the speaker’s intention and presupposition as well as the interlocutor’s recognition of them. This account is called the
IPR-semantic …
Read moreKeith Donnellan’s distinction between the attributive and referential uses of definite descriptions has spurred debates
regarding the truth conditions of the utterance “the F is G” with definite descriptions used referentially. In this article,
I present a semantic account of referential descriptions, grounded in the contextual factors of the utterance, including
the speaker’s intention and presupposition as well as the interlocutor’s recognition of them. This account is called the
IPR-semantic account, according to which the speaker’s intention (I), presupposition (P), and the interlocutor's recognition
(R) jointly determine whether “the F” in an utterance “the F is G” is used referentially or attributively, and the meaning
of “the F” is determined by whether it is used referentially or attributively. Moreover, I argue that the meaning of the
referential description “the F” is the intended object e, embodied with a property H that has prompted the speaker to
presuppose that e is F and to intend to use “the F” to refer to e, as well as the interlocutor to recognize the
presupposition and intention. According to the IPR-semantic account, the utterance “the F is G” with “the F” used
referentially expresses a singular proposition, namely, that e is G, and it is true if and only if the intended object e is
G. Additionally, I argue that the IPR-semantic account not only surpasses some alternative semantic accounts but also
outperforms Kripke’s pragmatic account.