The Reference of Proper Names: Testing Usage and Intuitions

Abstract

Experiments on theories of reference have mostly tested referential intuitions. We think that experiments should rather be testing linguistic usage. Substantive Aim (I): to test classical description theories of proper names against usage by "elicited production." Our results count decisively against those theories. Methodological Aim (I): Machery, Olivola, and de Blanc () claim that truth-value judgment experiments test usage. Martí () disagrees. We argue that Machery et al. are right and offer some results that are consistent with that conclusion. Substantive Aim (II): Machery et al. provide evidence that the usage of a name varies, being sometimes descriptive, sometimes not. In seven out of eight tests of usage, we did not replicate this variation. Methodological Aim (II): to test the reliability of referential intuitions by comparing them with linguistic usage. Earlier studies led us to predict that we would find those intuitions unreliable, but we did not. Our results add to evidence that tests of referential intuition are susceptible to unpredictable wording effects.

Reference and the ambiguity of truth‐value judgments

“…The reason why we agree that eliciting truth‐value judgments is a way of testing linguistic usage is neatly explained by Devitt and Porot () . Devitt and Porot say that, given the logical and expressive role of the truth predicate, which is captured by the equivalence schema, the answer “true” (or “false’) means that participants assert (or deny) the proposition that they take Ivy to have asserted.…”

“…We know of very few attempts to test theories of reference against linguistic usage. Devitt and Porot () used elicited production; Domaneschi, Vignolo, and Di Paola () use tasks that mirror elicited production; Cohnitz and Haukioja () used eye‐tracking experiments.…”

Intuitions About the Reference of Proper Names: a Meta-Analysis

“…More generally, the large amount of heterogeneity and lack of uniform explanation may (partly) be due to methodological deficiencies (see Appendix C). We therefore suggest that future research on cross-cultural differences in semantic intuitions extends the range of probes in experiments, in order to avoid that substantial philosophical and psychological conclusions depend (too) much on the specifics of a particular probe (Cf., Devitt and Porot 2018).…”

Intuitions about the Reference of Proper Names: A Meta-Analysis

“…More generally, it is possible that the large amount of heterogeneity and lack of uniform explanation is (partly) due to methodological deficiencies (see Appendix C). We therefore suggest that future research on cross-cultural differences in semantic intuitions extends the range of probes in experiments, in order to avoid that substantial philosophical, psychological or anthropological conclusions depend (too) much on the specifics of a particular probe (see also Devitt and Porot, 2018).…”