The perceptual system estimates distal conditions based upon proximal sensory input. It typically exploits information from multiple cues across and within modalities: it estimates shape based upon visual and haptic cues; it estimates depth based upon convergence, binocular disparity, motion parallax, and other visual cues; and so on. Bayesian models illuminate the computations through which the perceptual system combines sensory cues. I review key aspects of these models. Based on my review, I argue that we should posit co-referring perceptual representations (...) corresponding to distinct sensory cues. For example, the perceptual system represents a distal size using a representation canonically linked with vision and a distinct representation canonically linked with touch. Distinct co-referring perceptual representations represent the same denotation, but they do so under different modes of presentation. Bayesian cue combination models demonstrate that psychological explanation of perception should attend to mode of presentation and not simply to denotation. (shrink)

This paper examines whether realists can explain co-reference without appealing to subjects’ ideal convergence in judgment. This question is particularly pressing in the normative domain, since deep disagreement about the applicability of normative predicates suggests that different speakers may not pick out the same property when they use normative terms. Normative realists, we believe, have not been sufficiently aware of the difficulties involved in providing a theory of reference-determination. Our aim in this paper is to clarify the nature (...) of this reference-fixing task and the challenges that arise for a non-convergentist normative realist. Our focal point will be Richard Boyd’s externalist account, which has been a model for non-convergentist theories of reference in metaethics. A close examination of Boyd’s account of reference and the ways it could be developed or supplemented, we’ll argue, suggests that explaining co-reference without convergence in the normative domain is a more challenging problem than many realists have supposed. (shrink)

This essay joins two themes, both arising from Kripke's inspiring ideas in the theory of reference. The first theme concerns refer-ence in general. The second examines the notion of co-reference and the role it plays in a unified theory of pronouns for naturallanguage.

This article interprets the Advaita of Śaṃkara through the twin lenses of non-action (naiṣkarmya/niṣkriyatva) and grammatical reason exemplified in nominal co-reference, or sup-sāmānādhikaraṇya (tulyanīḍatva in Advaitic parlance). Approaching Advaita as a discipline of sentential analysis (vākyaśāstra), it shows how the core event of self-knowledge (ātmajñāna) is constituted as a set of quasi-grammatical operations. The argument takes the form that the alleged identity of self and Brahman, whose understanding is key to liberation in Advaita, is simply the grammatical identity of (...) nominal co-reference. Co-reference appeals to a distinct model of linguistic meaning challenging the presence and paradigmaticity of what the author identifies as Sanskritic action-centrism (kriyāparatva) in the theoretical apparatus of various philosophers, grammarians, and hermeneuts. This paradigm operates with actional analyses, dynamic relations, futurity, and productivity as the methodological and thematic postulates of theory. It is against such an action-centric paradigm that nominal co-reference carves out an alternative mode of thinking and theorizing the subject and world, replacing actional and predicative relations with identities as the proper subject matter of grammar and philosophy. In other words, action and actional categories constitute the intellectual horizon against which Advaita articulates an alternative grammar of Being construing verbal and sentential meaning in radically new terms. Ultimately its views on co-reference determine its conception of God. Advaita’s philosophical and theological foci may thus be seen as resting on what are primarily grammatical intuitions, but which invert the very premises of Sanskritic action-centrism. (shrink)

The chapter is devoted to discussing an objection which Angel Pinillos raised to the mental file account of _de jure_ co-reference. According to the objection, it is possible for A and B, and for B and C, to be co-referential _de jure_, even though A and C are not. But if the relation of _de jure_ co-reference rested on the identity of the mental files respectively associated with each of the terms, it should be transitive, since identity is (...) a transitive relation. (shrink)

The regulative and semantic ‘distance’ of electronic conferencing may impede the topical alignment and the unambiguous interpretation of messages, hindering collaborative learning processes. Compared to a face-to-face environment, in electronic conferencing this distance may be caused by a reduced strength of online ‘context’. Explicitly defining the context of messages in an electronic environment may increase the writers’ co-intentionality and co-reference. An annotation tool is presented, strengthening the context by providing a document under discussion and enabling users to anchor their (...) messages in specific passages of the document. Preliminary results indicate that the tool does indeed reinforce the context, focusing the online discussion around a certain topic (increasing co-intentionality) and providing a frame of reference for single messages (increasing co-reference). (shrink)

In “Über Sinn und Bedeutung” (1892) Frege raises a problem concerning identity statements of the form a=b and he criticizes the view he holds in the Begriffsschrift (1879, § 8). In building on a suggestion by Perry (2001/12, ch. 7) I will show how Frege’s Begriffsschrift account can be rescued and how Frege’s 1892 criticism of his Begriffsschrift’s position somewhat miss the point. Furthermore, the Begriffsschrift’s view can be developed to account in quite an elegant way to the so-called Frege’s (...) Puzzle without committing to the sense/reference (Sinn/Bedeutung) distinction Frege introduces in “Über Sinn und Bedeutung”. To do so we have, though, to give up the idea that all the relevant information conveyed by the utterance of a simple sentence is encapsulated into a single content. I will show of this can be done in adopting a Perry-style pluri-propositionalist model of communication. (shrink)

This essay examines the syntax of names. It argues that names are a syntactically and not just semantically distinctive class of expressions. Its central claim is that names are a distinguished type of anaphoric device—devices of explicit co-reference. Finally it argues that appreciating the true syntactic distinctiveness of names is the key to resolving certain long-standing philosophical puzzles that have long been thought to be of a semantic nature.

ABSTRACT In this paper, I argue that a number of influential Millian responses to Frege’s puzzle, which consist in denying that Frege’s data apply to natural languages, are not viable if logic is to play its role in legitimizing the logical appraisal of rational subjects. A notion of validity which does justice to the normativity of logic must make room for a distinction between valid inferences and enthymemes. I discuss the prospects of formal, relevant and manifest validity as candidates for (...) a notion which complies with this desideratum. Their success, or failure is argued to hang on the viability of a semantical account of de jure co-reference, which is in tension with standard Millian tenets. I conclude that these Millian theories face the following dilemma: either accept that there is no notion of logical validity which makes logic normative for reasoning, thus jeopardizing our well entrenched practices of rational appraisal; or accept that de jure co-reference is a real semantical relation. (shrink)

Could Christians and Muslims be referring to the same God? Consider Gareth Evans’s causal theory of reference, on which a name refers to the dominant source of information in the name’s “dossier”. I argue that information about experiences, in which God is simply the object of acquaintance, can dominate the dossier. Thus, this "demonstrative" use of names offers a promising alternative avenue by which users of the divine names can refer to the same referent despite having different conceptions of (...) God. (shrink)

Anna Pautz has recently argued that the pretense theory of thought about fiction cannot explain how two people can count as thinking about the same fictional character. This is based on conflating pretending and the serious thought that can be based on pretend. With this distinction in place, her objections are groundless.

This essay joins two themes, both arising from Kripke's inspiring ideas in the theory of reference. The first theme concerns reference in general. The second examines the notion of co-reference and the role it plays in a unified theory of pronouns for natural language.

Following his recently expanded _The Problem of the Essential Indexical and Other Essays,_ John Perry develops a reflexive-referential' account of indexicals, demonstratives and proper names. On these issues the philosophy of language in the twentieth century was shaped by two competing traditions, descriptivist and referentialist. Oddly, the classic referentialist texts of the 1970s by Kripke, Donnellan, Kaplan and others were seemingly refuted almost a century earlier by co-reference and no-reference problems raised by Russell and Frege. Perry's theory, borrowing (...) ideas from both traditions as well as from Burks and Reichenbach, diagnoses the problems as stemming from a fixation on a certain kind of content, coined referential or fully incremental. Referentialist tradition is portrayed as holding that indexicals contribute content that involves individuals without identifying conditions on them; descriptivist tradition is portrayed as holding that referential content does not explain all of the identifying conditions conveyed by names and indexicals. Perry reveals a coherent and structured family of contents — from reflexive contents that place conditions on their actual utterance to fully incremental contents that place conditions only on the objects of reference — reconciling the legitimate insights of both traditions. (shrink)

This paper provides a new solution to the concept horse paradox. Frege argued no name co-refers with a predicate because no name can be inter-substituted with a predicate. This led Frege to embrace the paradox of the concept horse. But Frege got it wrong because predicates are impurely referring expressions and we shouldn’t expect impurely referring expressions to be intersubstitutable even if they co-refer, because the contexts in which they occur are sensitive to the extra information they carry about their (...) referents. (shrink)

(Citation/Reference) Williams, S. H. Lewis Carroll handbook.

Factive predicates (like ‘-matters’, ‘discover-’, ‘realizes-’) take NPs that refer to facts, propositional predicates (like ‘-seems’, ‘believes-’, ‘-likely’) take NPs that refer to propositions, and eventive predicates (like ‘-occurs’, ‘-take place’, ‘-causes-’) take NPs that refer to events (broadly speaking, including states, processes, conditions, ect.). Logically speaking at least two out of the three categories (facts, propositions, and events) can be eliminated. So, if all three kinds of referents turn out to be required for natural language semantics, their postulation is (...) empirically significant since a priori logical considerations do not require all of them.Pronominalization evidence inter alia raises questions about the distinctness of facts, events, and propositions. Two proposals for resolving the pronominalization dilemmas are, first, that abstract elements exist which contain the genuine antecedents for the pronouns (co-reference remaining both syntactic and semantic) and second, that syntactic co-reference is simply distinct from semantic co-reference. The first proposal hardly works at all, since it requires the postulation of many abstract elements and associated unmotivated deletion (or insertion) rules. The second proposal works for all the examples considered. Prior to discussing the two proposals, I show how any two of the three categories can be logically eliminated, a demonstration which also produces some hypothetical abstract elements of use in discussing both proposals. I conclude with some brief remarks on reference versus coreference. (shrink)

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 means of which, if successful, a speaker institutes a practice of referring, and a hearer coordinates by choosing a referent from the domain of discourse. We articulate a metasemantics for this view. On our view, the interlocutors can select a referent randomly, if necessary, motivated by the incentive to coordinate on (...) the use of a name. Moreover, we argue that reference fixed by a performative speech act is ‘thin’, or ‘undemanding’. Finally, we defend the thesis that co-reference might not determinately obtain despite reference being fixed. Performative reference makes sense of ordinary speakers’ practices, who appear to be very liberal and unimpressed by skepticism toward causally inert or epistemically indiscernible objects. (shrink)

The concept of shared mental models refers to the shared understanding among team members about how they should behave in different situations. This article aimed to develop a new shared mental model measure, specifically designed for the refereeing context. A cross-sectional study was conducted with three samples: national and regional football referees (n = 133), national football referees and assistant referees and national futsal referees (n = 277), and national futsal referees (n = 60). The proposed version of the Referee (...) Shared Mental Models Measure (RSMMM) has 13 items that are reflected on a single factor structure. The RSMMM presented good validity evidence both based on the internal structure and based on relations to other variables (presenting positive associations with team work engagement, team adaptive performance, and team effectiveness). Such promising psychometric properties point to an optimistic outlook regarding its use to measure shared mental models in futsal and football referee teams. -/- . (shrink)

One of the most prevailing ideas within contemporary philosophy of language is Representationalism: the idea that there is a word-world relation which plays a key role for explaining how language works. This relation is usually invoked both to explain what our utterances are about – what names and noun-phrases refer to – and what our utterances mean – how they represent the world as being. The topic of this thesis is to critique this idea and explore how we can explain (...) communication in its absence. -/- In the first chapter, I survey the existing theories of this word-world relation in the literature in terms of what they argue establishes that a certain expression represents a particular object. In the second chapter, I construct an argument for why we have no reason to expect that speakers of a language would have a shared understanding of which objects are represented by which expressions and that this prevents a representationalist explanation of how we can communicate. -/- In the latter half of the thesis, I outline the alternative framework which my papers have been building towards. The idea is to start from what it means to understand expressions and utterances and construct an account of communication as a process aimed at mutual understanding. Specifically, I argue that there are as many different ways in which one can understand an expression as there are linguistic functions which that expression fulfil. Further, I argue that the extent to which a speaker and hearer need to agree on what an utterance means in order to communicate depends on the practical purposes of the conversation. This allows the account to avoid the epistemic problems outlined in the first part of the thesis. Further, I present a non-representational framework for modal reasoning in terms of normatively governed belief change and argue that it is both suited for a theory o understanding and as a semantics for modal logic. -/- Finally, I apply these ideas to develop an account of referential communication as what enables interpersonal co-ordination with regards to the world. I argue that referential expressions fulfil two distinct functions – with regards to the co-ordination of information and action respectively – and that these provide different conditions for what it takes to understand utterances of them. I end by sketching how the resulting account can explain common intuitions about how social relations can extend the reach of our referential expressions and when reference is preserved with respect to counterfactual reasoning. (shrink)

Causal theories of reference in the philosophy of language and philosophy of science have suggested that it could resolve lingering worries about incommensurability between theoretical claims in different paradigms, to borrow Kuhn’s terms. If we co-refer throughout different paradigms, then the problems of incommensurability are greatly diminished, according to causal theorists. I argue that assuring ourselves of that sort of constancy of reference will require comparable sorts of cross-paradigm affinities, and thus provides us with no special relief on (...) this problem. Suggestions on how to think about rigid designation across paradigms are included. (shrink)

Frege and quine notwithstanding, Some singular terms in belief contexts have normal reference but do not admit truth-Preserving substitution of co-Referential terms. The conditions of a sentence's being true of a sequence of referents may be partially determined by its singular terms; substitution may change those conditions, While preserving genuine reference. On one reading, 'n believes that f is g' is true iff n believes of the f that it is the f and is g.

There are belief reports such as ‘Michael believes that that masked man is a diplomat’ in which a singular term (‘that masked man’) occurs referentially but substituting a co-referential singular term could produce a belief report with a different truth-value. How is that possible? Using an analogy with Quine’s example ‘Giorgione was so called because of his size,’ Loar explains how the singular term makes two distinct contributions to the belief report’s truth conditions: it refers to the thing the ascribed (...) belief is about and it contributes to what the subject of the report is said to believe about it (e.g., Michael must believe of that masked man that he satisfies the open sentence ‘x is that masked man and x is a diplomat’). (shrink)

Clapp (2023) develops an account for explaining the meaning of later utterances of mythical names called the Conversely Conditional Co-reference proposal (hereinafter cococo-reference proposal for short). According to Clapp, this proposal consists of three components: a complex intention, an intermediary disjunctive content, and a final content. In this essay, I examine the cococo-reference proposal to reveal a flaw in it. I argue that the cococo-reference proposal actually has a fourth component, namely a principle called “the consistency (...) between intention and belief”. This principle is embedded implicitly in Clapp’s argument. Once the consistency principle is uncovered, I combine it with the complex intention and also the intermediary disjunctive content, to reveal that the cococo-reference proposal cannot coherently explain the meaning of a later utterance of sentences such as “Vulcan does not exist”. This is because the explanation offered by this proposal results in a conflict between belief and intention: we will be required to hold intentions that our beliefs prevent us from holdings, and we will be ascribed beliefs that are in conflict with our intentions. Therefore, the explanation of later utterances of sentences such as “Vulcan does not exist” is the Achilles’ heel of Clapp’s cococo-reference proposal. (shrink)

This paper analyzes the concept of truth in terms of an account of Fregean sense as cognitive value. The account highlights the importance of understanding-based knowledge of co-reference for the individuation of senses. Explicit truth attributions, like ‘that I smell the scent of violets is true’ involve an inter-level version of understanding-based knowledge of co-reference in the that-clause concepts of thoughts that they employ: one cannot understand the that-clause concept of the thought in the truth attribution without understanding (...) the thought the that-clause concept is a concept of. This is not a redundancy that eliminates or deflates cognitive value, but an exploitation, by the concept of truth, of the inter-level version of understanding-based knowledge of co-reference in critical reflective thinking. The cognitive value of the concept of truth is to combine semantically with explicit ways of thinking of thoughts to make critical reflective thinking possible. This account of the cognitive value of the concept of truth assigns cognitive value not by construing the concept of truth as a way of thinking about some thing, but by articulating its broader cognitive role. (shrink)

In ‘Fregean Reference Defended’ (1995), Sosa presents a sophisticated descriptive theory of reference, which he calls ‘fregean’, and which he argues avoids standard counterexamples to more basic variants of this approach. What is characteristic of a fregean theory, in his sense, is the idea that what makes a person’s thought about some object, a, a thought about that particular thing, is the fact that a uniquely satisfies an appropriate individuator which is suitably operative in her thinking.1 On his (...) version, (FT), any individuating concept, or definite description, is an appropriate individuator, whether it picks out its referent entirely independently of context, and is therefore absolute (e.g. ), or it picks out its referent only with the aid of a context of use, and is therefore perspectival (e.g. ); and such an individuator, α, may be suitably operative in a person’s thinking in one of two ways. First, she may be thinking, de dicto, a proposition predicating some property φ with respect to α. Second, she may be thinking, de dicto, a proposition predicating φ with respect to another individuator, β, which is a member of a referential conception for her at that time, whose epistemic basis contains α as one of its great preponderance of individually co-referential members. The second possibility is designed to avoid standard counterexamples, in which, insofar as a person is thinking, de dicto, a proposition predicating φ with respect to some individuator, β, she is nevertheless intuitively thinking about something other than the unique satisfier of β, either because there is no such thing, just a near miss, or because, although there is, she is really thinking about something else, which may generally be believed to be the β (e.g. Donnellan, 1966; and Kripke, 1980). For Sosa argues that, in such cases, the intuitive object of thought uniquely satisfies an appropriately related α.. (shrink)

It is often maintained that co-referential terms can be substituted for one another whilst preserving truth-value in extensional contexts, and preserving grammaticality in all contexts. Crispin Wright calls this claim ‘The Reference Principle’. Since Wright defines extensional contexts as those in which truth-value is determined only by reference, it is the assertion about substitution salva congruitate that is significant. Wright argues that RP is the key to understanding how Frege came to hold, paradoxically, that the concept horse is (...) not a concept, and to providing a resolution to the paradox.RP and Wright's application of it to Frege's Paradox have recently been criticized by Oliver. 1 Oliver argues that the syntax of natural languages is too complicated for the failure of two terms to fit into the same forms of speech to indicate a difference in semantic significance: RP is, he claims, an empirical falsehood.I shall argue that, although Oliver's arguments show that RP is false as it stands, a revised version of the principle, employing a more robust notion of substitution, is nevertheless correct. I shall end by outlining the implications of this revision for the appeal to RP and for Wright's resolution of Frege's Paradox.1. Referring terms and referential positionOliver's case against RP appeals to an impressive array of counter-examples. For our purposes it will be useful to regard these as being of three sorts. The first sort can be dealt with relatively swiftly: examples of the second and third sorts are more challenging.The first sort of counter-example involves referring terms that feature as parts of complex referring expressions. Oliver's examples include ‘William’ in the complex expression ‘William the Conqueror’. The substitution of expressions co-referential with ‘William’ into sentences employing the complex referring expression often results in ungrammatical …. (shrink)

The Direct Reference account of the semantics of singular terms is widely assumed to be inconsistent with the traditional Individualist account of psychological states. Because of this assumption, and because of the weight of the evidence for Direct Reference, Anti-Individualism has found supporters despite its counterintuitiveness. In this dissertation, it is argued that Direct Reference and Individualism are not genuinely inconsistent, but that the inconsistency emerges only with the additional assumption of Propositionalism--the orthodox, proposition-based framework for understanding (...) thought and language. Consequently, it is not necessary to endorse Anti-Individualism in order to accept Direct Reference, so long as Propositionalism is accepted only in an attenuated form, if at all. ;It is argued that the best strategy for resolving the inconsistency is to retain all of Propositionalism apart from the Relational Analysis of belief ascriptions. An alternative analysis--the Quantified Relational Analysis --is developed and motivated. According to QRA, an ascription of the form X believes that S attributes the property of believing some member of the class of propositions containing the proposition that S and finer-grained versions of it. QRA is extended also to de re belief locutions. The conjunction of Direct Reference, Individualism, and the remnants of Propositionalism plus QRA is termed Russellian Non-Parallelism. ;Like all Direct Reference theories, Russellian Non-Parallelism has the consequence that co-referring names and other genuine terms are freely substitutable for each other, despite the datum that ordinary speakers intuitively regard such substitutions in belief contexts as suspect. These intuitions are accounted for both pragmatically and semantically. The pragmatic explanation specifies a mechanism whereby the audience sometimes infers from the choice of genuine terms the subject's way of thinking of the objects involved. The semantic explanation motivates an idiomatic reading of ascriptions, on which, under certain circumstances, the choice of co-referring terms in ascriptions literally indicates different belief contents. Russellian Non-Parallelism is then applied to enhanced substitution puzzles and to some other traditional problems, such as the contingent a priori. Finally there is a discussion of pertinent contemporary literature. (shrink)

Previous conversation analytic studies of instruction have observed that instructors use deictic expressions, accompanied by gestures and other body movements, to demonstrate how to complete a task. In most examined cases, these deictic expressions are proximal and refer to the object of the speakers’ (i.e., the instructors’) pointing gestures or their body movements themselves. By contrast, in this study, we focus on uses of the Japanese medial (so-type) spatial deictic pronoun (soko or “that place”) in instructive actions to explore aspects (...) of the organization of instruction and instructed action. We observe that this medial deictic expression refers to the site of the recipient’s (i.e., the novice’s or student’s) specific operation or their current posture. We use conversation analysis to analyze videotaped interactions in instructional settings. We demonstrate that the instructors incorporate the novice’s or student’s action of following a just-given instruction, or its result, into an incipient follow-up or next instruction by using the medial deictic expression. We also discuss some theoretical implications of the demonstration by highlighting the distributed nature of the medial deictic reference and the “co-operative” nature of instruction. (shrink)

Chapter V attempts to provide the elements of a solution to the problem of how terms in theoretical sciences acquire their reference. Its proposal is that a theory of reference-acquisition for theoretical terms should acknowledge the fact that what fixes the reference of a theoretical term is typically the embedding theory as a whole, not an austere causal description like 'the item causally responsible for event E.' It is argued that there are epistemic reasons for the existence (...) of this phenomenon, and an attempt is made to show how, by appealing to these reasons, it is nonetheless possible to understand the reference-determining role of theories in such a way that occurrences of a term embedded in incompatible theoretical frameworks can often be interpreted as co-referential. ;Chapter IV is an interlude. It argues for the relevance of the theory of reference to the topic of intertheoretic reduction. It does this by attempting to demonstrate that intertheoretic reduction in the natural sciences requires intertheoretic identities involving theoretical terms, and that making sense of such identities demands a theory of reference-acquisition for theoretical terms. The chapter also argues that the problem of how mathematical terms secure their reference precludes an obvious extension of this model to examples of reduction in mathematics. It further criticizes attempts to make sense of mathematical reductions in terms of concepts of ontological reduction, and it suggests that much recent work on ontological reduction, especially the attempt to exclude all-out 'Pythagorean' reductions, is flawed through its failure to take referential semantics seriously. ;Chapter II contains exposition and criticism of both the descriptivist account of reference and Kripke's version of the 'causal' account of reference. The latter account is represented as a recursive account, with a base clause specifying how terms initially acquire their reference and a recursion clause specifying how the ability to use a term with a certain reference is transmitted to other users . It is argued that the Kripkean formulation of referential intentions at the reference-transmission stage is flawed, in part because the formulation makes his account unable to capture the dynamics of the way in which a person's use of a term may undergo reference-shifts without these shifts in reference being intended. ;The third chapter suggests an alternative account. It motivates and sketches a mixed causal-descriptivist theory speaker's reference, formulated in terms of first-order referential intentions, and then uses this theory to sketch aspects of a mixed causal-descriptivist account of term reference, formulated in terms of second-order intentions to intend the 'right' object . It is argued that such an account provides a plausible solution to a number of problems confronting Kripke's account, including that of unintended reference-shifts. ;This dissertation consists of five chapters whose unifying theme is the theory of term-reference. The first chapter offers an overview and critical comparison of two opposing approaches to the topic of reference: the semantic holism of Quine-Davidson, and the semantic atomism of those who treat reference as a relation that grounds the assignment of truth-conditions to sentences. The chapter argues that the apparent theoretical importance of referential intentions, emphasised in Saul Kripke's work on reference and argued for in detail in chapter III of the dissertation, provides strong support for semantic atomism, since such intentions are used to explain reference-assignments and, indirectly, truth-conditions. (shrink)

Past research has sought to elucidate how speakers and addressees establish common ground in conversation, yet few studies have focused on how visual cues such as co-speech gestures contribute to this process. Likewise, the effect of cognitive constraints on multimodal grounding remains to be established. This study addresses the relationship between the verbal and gestural modalities during grounding in referential communication. We report data from a collaborative task where repeated references were elicited, and a time constraint was imposed to increase (...) cognitive load. Our results reveal no differential effects of repetition or cognitive load on the semantic-based gesture rate, suggesting that representational gestures and speech are closely coordinated during grounding. However, gestures and speech differed in their execution, especially under time pressure. We argue that speech and gesture are two complementary streams that might be planned in conjunction but that unfold independently in later stages of language production, with speakers emphasizing the form of their gestures, but not of their words, to better meet the goals of the collaborative task. (shrink)

In this paper, presented at an APA colloquium in Boston on December 28, 1994, it is argued that Ruth Barcan Marcus' 1961 article on Modalities and Intensional Languages originated many of the key ideas of the New Theory of Reference that have often been attributed to Saul Kripke and others. For example, Marcus argued that names are directly referential and are not equivalent to contingent descriptions, that names are rigid designators, and that identity sentences with co-referring names are necessary (...) if true. She also first presented the modal argument that names are directly referential, the epistemic argument that names are directly referential, and the argument that there area posteriori necessities. (shrink)

RESUMO A profundidade das ideias de Bakhtin sobre dialogicidade ecoa nas visões da aquisição da linguagem como um processo multimodal, situado, interativo, fundamentado na experiência cotidiana e reverberando as vozes daqueles que cuidam das crianças. Partindo de uma videoetnografia longitudinal de interações pais-criança franceses, em meio familiar, em um período de sete anos, este estudo revela como o desenvolvimento linguístico da criança é coconstruído, por meio de atividades interativas de contar e recontar e de acontecimentos permeados por múltiplas perspectivas. Os (...) excertos do corpus exemplificam como as vozes dos outros moldam a identidade única da criança como falante e cofalante, fundamentada na riqueza de sua vida cotidiana. Através da experiência de assimilação das palavras dos outros, dos enunciados e de cada forma de expressão multimodal, as crianças se apropriam do nosso tesouro comum, a língua(gem), ao passo que também aprendem o poder individual de acentuar suas produções com sua própria voz. (shrink)

This article explores the role of surface ambiguities in referring expressions, and how the risk of such ambiguities should be taken into account by an algorithm that generates referring expressions, if these expressions are to be optimally effective for a hearer. We focus on the ambiguities that arise when adjectives occur in coordinated structures. The central idea is to use statistical information about lexical co-occurrence to estimate which interpretation of a phrase is most likely for human readers, and to avoid (...) generating phrases where misunderstandings are likely. Various aspects of the problem were explored in three experiments in which responses by human participants provided evidence about which reading was most likely for certain phrases, which phrases were deemed most suitable for particular referents, and the speed at which various phrases were read. We found a preference for ‘‘clear’’ expressions to ‘‘unclear’’ ones, but if several of the expressions are ‘‘clear,’’ then brief expressions are preferred over non-brief ones even though the brief ones are syntactically ambiguous and the non-brief ones are not; the notion of clarity was made precise using Kilgarriff's Word Sketches. We outline an implemented algorithm that generates noun phrases conforming to our hypotheses. (shrink)

Concept originalism, recently introduced and defended by Sainsbury and Tye, Tye, and Sainsbury, holds that “atomic concepts are to be individuated by their historical origins, as opposed to their semantic or epistemic properties”. The view is immune to Gareth Evans’s “Madagascar” objection to the Causal Theory of Reference since it allows a concept to change its reference over time without losing its identity. The possibility of reference-shift, however, raises the problem of misleading belief reports. S&T try to (...) tackle the problem by strengthening the sufficient condition for a truthful belief report. We will argue that, first, their solution fails, second, and more importantly, their diagnosis of the root of the problem is misguided, third, two initially appealing ways out of the problem fail, and fourth, the prospect of finding a solution to the problem within CO is dim. The view opens the Pandora’s box of reference-shift, in a wide range of cases, without providing the necessary semantic means to take care of them. (shrink)

The development of narrative skill has been investigated extensively in a wide range of languages, cross-linguistically and in multilingual settings (Berman & Slobin, 1994b; Hickmann, 2004; Severing & Verhoeven 2001, Strömqvist & Verhoeven, 2004). The present study investigates the development of reference realisation in narrative among Indigenous children in a remote urban township in Central Australia. The children, aged between 5 and 14 years, are speakers of a contact language, Wumpurrarni English. Language development is rarely investigated among speakers of (...) minority languages, whose language development is often appraised in the majority language, with little attention to language performance in the speaker’s home variety. The present study addresses this gap through a fine-grained qualitative analysis of the development of reference in narrative, drawing on a complex stimulus and a model of discourse strategy. The results show a) a developmental trajectory similar to that found in other languages, with children aged eight and under producing simpler and less globally organised narratives than older speaker groups, and b) vulnerability to the changing demands of the stimulus among these younger speakers. In addition, a subset of narrations were produced in ‘school variety’, a style more like Standard Australian English, and the results for this set showed that the narrative content and global organisation of the productions by ten- and twelve–year-olds was more similar to the productions of younger children, than like-aged speakers narrating in their home variety. Analysis of speaker responses to two factors of complexity, the stimulus and code choice, illuminated mechanisms for discourse production and development, and suggest that constructing discourse requires co-ordination of an underlying schema and on-line construction of a particular story through the deployment of linguistic devices in a particular narrative context, and that these two skills are tightly interdependent, and indeed co-constructing. (shrink)

Anaphoric reference has been discussed much more by linguists than by philosophers. It should be addressed by philosophers as well, for it raises some interesting questions about the syntax, semantics, and pragmatics of pronouns. The main question concerns the status of the relation of co-reference between a pronoun and its antecedent: is this a semantic or merely a pragmatic relation? An answer to that question depends on the answer to a similar question about antecedency, which seems to be (...) a syntactic relation. But is this relation really syntactic? In other words, do pronouns literally have antecedents? If they do, then anaphoric reference would have a syntactic basis and, since it would be explained at the level of sentence grammar, would have to be regarded as a semantic phenomenon. Otherwise, it would have to be explained pragmatically and be understood merely as a special case of indexical reference. This chapter takes the latter position, which is summed up very simply: being mentioned elsewhere in a sentence is just one way of being salient. (shrink)

Le Verrier’s attempts to use ‘Vulcan’ to refer to an inter-Mercurial planet failed: Vulcan is a mere mythical entity. But, as the previous sentence demonstrates, we now use ‘Vulcan’ not in failed attempts to refer to a planet, but in seemingly successful attempts to refer to a mythical entity. These different uses of ‘Vulcan’ present critical pragmatics with a dilemma. On one horn, my use of ‘Vulcan’ cannot be conditionally co-referential with Le Verrier’s uses, because he failed to refer (to (...) a planet), whereas I (seemingly successfully) refer to a mythical entity. But, on the other horn, such uses of ‘Vulcan’ are not a simple case of nambiguity, because what I say in uttering ‘Vulcan is a mythical entity’ is incompatible with Le Verrier’s assertion of, e.g., ‘Vulcan is hot’. I propose to escape this dilemma by appeal to a different relation between uses of names which I call converse conditional co-reference. (shrink)

Establishing and maintaining reference is a crucial part of discourse. In spoken languages, differential linguistic devices mark referents occurring in different referential contexts, that is, introduction, maintenance, and re-introduction contexts. Speakers using gestures as well as users of sign languages have also been shown to mark referents differentially depending on the referential context. This article investigates the modality-specific contribution of the visual modality in marking referential context by providing a direct comparison between sign language and co-speech gesture with speech (...) in elicited narratives. Across all forms of expression, we find that referents in subject position are referred to with more marking material in re-introduction contexts compared to maintenance contexts. Furthermore, we find that spatial modification is used as a modality-specific strategy in both DGS and German co-speech gesture, and that the configuration of referent locations in sign space and gesture space corresponds in an iconic and consistent way to the locations of referents in the narrated event. However, we find that spatial modification is used in different ways for marking re-introduction and maintenance contexts in DGS and German co-speech gesture. The findings are discussed in relation to the unique contribution of the visual modality to reference tracking in discourse when it is used in a unimodal system with full linguistic structure versus in a bimodal system that is a composite of speech and gesture. (shrink)

The concept of rigid reference frame and of constricted spatial metric, given in the previous work [Class. Quantum Grav. 21, 3067 (2004)] are here applied to some specific space-times: in particular, the rigid rotating disc with constant angular velocity in Minkowski space-time is analyzed, a new approach to the Ehrenfest paradox is given as well as a new explanation of the Sagnac effect. Finally the anisotropy of the speed of light and its measurable consequences in a reference frame (...) co-moving with the Earth are discussed. (shrink)

The Aymara of the Andes use absolute (cardinal) frames of reference for describing the relative position of ordinary objects. However, rather than encoding them in available absolute lexemes, they do it in lexemes that are intrinsic to the body: nayra (“front”) and qhipa (“back”), denoting east and west, respectively. Why? We use different but complementary ethnographic methods to investigate the nature of this encoding: (a) linguistic expressions and speech–gesture co-production, (b) linguistic patterns in the distinct regional Spanish-based variety Castellano (...) Andino (CA), (c) metaphorical extensions of CA’s spatial patterns to temporal ones, and (d) layouts of traditional houses. Findings indicate that, following fundamental principles of Aymara cosmology, people, objects, and land—as a whole—are conceived as having an implicit canonical orientation facing east, a primary landmark determined by the sunrise. The above bodily based lexicalizations are thus linguistic manifestations of a broader macro-cultural worldview and its psycho-cognitive reality. (shrink)

In this paper we consider the potential role of metarepresentation—the representation of another representation, or as commonly considered within cognitive science, the mental representation of another individual's knowledge and beliefs—in mediating definite reference and common ground in conversation. Using dialogues from a referential communication study in which speakers conversed in succession with two different addressees, we highlight ways in which interlocutors work together to successfully refer to objects, and achieve shared conceptualizations. We briefly review accounts of how such shared (...) conceptualizations could be represented in memory, from simple associations between label and referent, to “triple co-presence” representations that track interlocutors in an episode of referring, to more elaborate metarepresentations that invoke theory of mind, mutual knowledge, or a model of a conversational partner. We consider how some forms of metarepresentation, once created and activated, could account for definite reference in conversation by appealing to ordinary processes in memory. We conclude that any representations that capture information about others' perspectives are likely to be relatively simple and subject to the same kinds of constraints on attention and memory that influence other kinds of cognitive representations. (shrink)

_Category constructionists_ share two commitments: they hold that human category terms actually refer to constructed categories, and they hold that these categories are widely but mistakenly taken to be natural kinds. It is not clear that these two commitments are consistent for a serious mismatch between beliefs and underlying nature is often taken to indicate a failure of reference. Reliance on a _causal-historical_ account of reference allows the preservation of reference, but unfortunately, constructionists’ appropriation of causal-historical accounts (...) of reference is beset by difficulties that do not attend natural kind theorists’ appeals to such accounts. Mallon sets out these difficulties, and he argues that they can be answered, allowing terms for apparently natural human kinds to refer to some sort of social construction about which there is significant error. (shrink)

This reflection outlines the development of a Terms of Reference (ToR) for equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) in a 6-year energy transitions research project spanning 11 institutions and involving 100 researchers across science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM), social science, and humanities disciplines. This multi-disciplinary and multi-institutional project involves partnerships with industry and civil society organizations, attempts to center justice-oriented research, and includes communities and users in knowledge co-production in a field of research and practice known for exclusion and (...) marginalization. An EDI ToR is a guiding document that outlines the shared understandings and practices necessary to foster a safe, equitable, and inclusive research environment. Here we describe how 42 researchers across all career stages and 5 time zones co-authored an EDI ToR that reflects the project’s context and goals while attempting to make the writing process inclusive. Using autoethnography, we reflect on the process of developing this ToR and evaluate its effectiveness in meeting project needs, fostering shared values, and supporting the education and training of diverse early career researchers. We found that, given the complexity of the project, our approach offered a valuable pathway for the team to reflect on shared values by encouraging early and continuous dialog and alignment among researchers. The ToR offered a compass to help researchers make decisions ethically and inclusively. Our contribution is to demonstrate how an EDI ToR development process can foster reflexivity and offer space to address the tensions that inevitably arise within research teams and tensions between the team’s needs and justice-oriented energy research in practice. Drawing on our findings, we recommend that other research teams and funders embed EDI goals, benchmarks, and commitments into their grant proposals and that they hold small-group discussions throughout the EDI ToR development and implementation phases to allow for reflection and iteration. (shrink)

I happen to believe that though human experiences are to be characterized as pluralistic they are all rooted in the one reality. I would assume the thesis of pluralism but how could I maintain my belief in the realism? There are various discussions in favor of realism but they appear to stay within a particular paradigm so to be called “internal realism”. In this paper I would try to justify my belief in the reality by discussing a special use of (...) indexicals. I will argue for my indexical realism by advancing the thesis that indexicals can be used as an inter-agentic referential term. Three arguments for the thesis will be presented. The first argument derives from a revision of Kaplan-Kvart’s notion of exportation. Their notions of exportation of singular terms can be analyzed as intra-agentic exportation in the context of a single speaker and theirs may be revised so as to be an inter-agentic exportation in the context of two speakers who use the same indexicals. The second is an argument from the notion of causation which is specifically characterized in the context of inter-theoretic reference. I will argue that any two theories may each say “this” in order to refer what is beyond its own theory. Two theories address themselves to ‘this’ same thing though what ‘this’ represents in each theory turn out to be different objects all together. The third argument is an argument which is based on a possibility of natural reference. Reference is used to be taken mostly as a 3-place predicate: Abe refers an object oi with an expression ej. The traditional notion of reference is constructive and anthropocentric. But I would argue that natural reference is a reference that we humans come to recognize among denumerably many objects in natural states: at a moment mi in a natural state there is a referential relation among objects o1, o2, o3,.., oj, o j+1,.. which interact to each other as agents of information processors. Natural reference is an original reference which is naturally given and to which humans are passive as we derivatively refer it by using ‘this’. (shrink)