Blackwell Reference Online

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“Bill Clinton” refers to the man, Bill Clinton, and “Paris” refers to the city, Paris. In philosophy of language, the term “reference” is sometimes used only for naming relations like these, but sometimes it is used more broadly to include other relations, such as the relation that holds between a kind term (e.g., “cats”) and its extension (all cats) or between a predicate (“red”) and a property (redness). In philosophy of mind, the term “reference” is usually used in the broader sense. On a representational theory of thought, my thought that cats are excellent hunters, or my thought that cats make me sneeze, involves a mental representation of cats, and cats are said to be its reference (or its referential or extensional content). Most broadly, a theory of reference is an attempt to describe the relation between a representation and what it represents. That is, it aims to describe what it is about the former in virtue of which it represents the latter.Naturalism is an approach to philosophy that involves using science, ultimately physics, as our guide to the fundamental ontology of the universe. In practice, with respect to theories of reference, this amounts to not admitting such things as moral norms, mental states or semantic properties as fundamental, so that any appeal to them in an analysis of the reference relation must eventually be accounted for in other terms. Three alternatives ... log in or subscribe to read full text