Referential Intentions and Communicative Luck

ABSTRACT

Brian Loar [1976] observed that communicative success with singular terms requires more than correct referent assignment. For communicative success to be achieved, the audience must assign the right referent in the right way. Loar, and others since, took this to motivate Fregean accounts of the semantics of singular terms. Ray Buchanan [2014] has recently responded, maintaining that, although Loar is correct to claim that communicative success with singular terms requires more than correct referent assignment, this is compatible with direct reference approaches, as long as one also endorses an independently motivated Gricean view of communicative intentions. This paper argues that Buchanan's Gricean view cannot account for the full range of Loar cases. In doing so, it aims to explicate the structure of Loar's cases and thus to clarify the conditions that a theory must meet in order to adequately meet his challenge.

KEYWORDS:

• Reference
• communication
• luck
• singular terms
• communicative success
• pragmatics

Notes

¹ Thanks to an anonymous referee for suggesting Heck's cases. Similar cases are discussed by King [2014a, 2014b].

² Pritchard [2005] argues that the lesson we should draw from Gettier cases is that knowledge is incompatible with certain kinds of luck. One's true belief that p counts as knowledge iff, given one's evidence, it is not a matter of luck that one's belief is true. This is explicated in terms of a safety condition on knowledge. One's belief is safe iff not easily could one's belief have been false (if formed via the same method).

³ I would like to thank two anonymous reviewers and the editor (Stephen Hetherington) for helpful comments.