Reference, Understanding, and Communication

Buchanan, Ray

doi:10.1080/00048402.2013.788526

Cited by 13 publications

(13 citation statements)

References 11 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Recovery of the correct referent is not sufficient. Buchanan [2014] agrees that such cases show that recovery of the correct reference is insufficient for communicative success. However, he argues that this is compatible with the view that singular terms refer directly, as long as one also adopts an independently motivated Gricean view of communication.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 56%

Referential Intentions and Communicative Luck

Peet¹

2016

Australasian Journal of Philosophy

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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.

show abstract

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 56%

Referential Intentions and Communicative Luck

Peet¹

2016

Australasian Journal of Philosophy

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…29) seems to accept RI for at least some utterances, but he rejects Direct Reference. On the other hand, Buchanan (2014) endorses Direct Reference but rejects RI.…”

Section: Loar Casesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This seems to show that something has gone wrong in the exchange, and Jones has not understood. Buchanan (2014) presents an analogous case:…”

Section: Loar Casesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Loar’s Puzzle, Similarity, and Knowledge of Reference

Onofri

2019

Manuscrito

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

In 'The Semantics of Singular Terms' (1976) Brian Loar proposed a famous case where a hearer seems to misunderstand an utterance even though he has correctly identified its referent. Loar's case has been used to defend a model of communication where speaker and hearer must think of the referent in similar ways in order for communication to succeed. This 'Similar Ways of Thinking' (SW) theory is extremely popular, both in the literature on Loar cases and in other philosophical discussions. My goal is to offer a novel argument against this influential model of communication and propose an alternative picture. First, I show how a certain version of SW fails to solve Loar's puzzle. Then I point at a more general problem with SW, arguing that no version of this model can account for Loar-style cases without making the conditions for communication too strict. I then propose an alternative account of Loar cases, analyzing them as cases of luck where the hearer does not know that she has identified the referent correctly. I conclude by contrasting my view with other existing accounts of Loar cases.

show abstract

“…As Buchanan (2014, p. 57) remarks, Loar’s argument in favour of a MOP‐based view of thought and communication depends on the unspoken assumption that understanding an utterance “is simply a matter of recognizing what the speaker asserted”. If one assumes that and agrees that Jones recognized exactly the same singular proposition semantically associated with Smith’s utterance, then it naturally follows that Smith’s utterance must have semantically expressed some other content.…”

Section: Communicative Success and Identity Of Truth‐conditionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Buchanan’s main point is that we can account for what goes wrong in Loar‐case 1 by appealing to an independently motivated account of the role of communicative intentions in conversations – one that is so plausible that everybody is more or less obligated to accept it anyway – and thus completely bypass the idea that the content of thoughts and assertions goes beyond what they refer to. The idea, in a nutshell, is that “the kind of misunderstanding that Loar has called to our attention shows that there is some aspect of the speaker’s communicative intentions that her hearer is failing to recognize” (Buchanan, 2014, p. 64). In other words, Buchanan is suggesting that the failure of Smith and Jones’s communication can be accounted for by the fact that, even though Jones reached a thought with the same truth‐conditions as Smith’s, he did not do so by means of properly recognizing Smith’s communicative intention to refer to the man on the television.…”

Section: Communicative Success and Identity Of Truth‐conditionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

On Successful Communication, Intentions and False Beliefs

Valente

2019

Theoria

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

I discuss a criterion for successful communication between a speaker and a hearer put forward by Buchanan according to which there is communicative success only if the hearer entertains, as a result of interpreting the speaker’s utterance, a thought that has the same truth conditions as the thought asserted by the speaker and, furthermore, does so in virtue of recognizing the speaker’s communicative intentions. I argue, against Buchanan, that the data on which it is based are compatible with a view involving Fregean modes of presentation. In the second part of the article I critically discuss Unnsteinsson’s claim that communicative success depends on the absence of contextually salient false distinctness beliefs about the subject matter of the conversation. I argue that this thesis leads to clearly counterintuitive consequences and that no fundamental role must be given to the presence or absence of false distinctness beliefs in one’s account of successful communication. The upshot is that we should stick with Buchanan’s criterion. I conclude by employing Strawson and Recanati’s concepts of linking and merging to show how the criterion I favour is compatible with the fact that, when subjects hold no relevant false distinctness beliefs, communicative success does not seem to be disrupted by the hearer seemingly failing to recognize the speaker’s intentions.

show abstract

Reference, Understanding, and Communication

Cited by 13 publications

References 11 publications

Referential Intentions and Communicative Luck

Referential Intentions and Communicative Luck

Loar’s Puzzle, Similarity, and Knowledge of Reference

On Successful Communication, Intentions and False Beliefs

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About