The Reference Principle: a defence

Dolby, David

doi:10.1093/analys/anp017

Cited by 8 publications

(3 citation statements)

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“…25 I discuss one proposal in the ''Appendix'', and explain why I think it will not work. 26 In an earlier paper (Trueman 2012a), I criticised Dolby's (2009) attempt to develop an account of substitution via quantification. I objected that Dolby's account was circular: in order to understand the quantificational moves that Dolby wanted to make, we already need the very notion of substitution that Dolby was trying to develop.…”

Section: A Final Remark About Sensementioning

confidence: 99%

Substitution in a sense

Trueman

2017

Philos Stud

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The Reference Principle (RP) states that co-referring expressions are everywhere intersubstitutable salva congruitate. On first glance, (RP) looks like a truism, but a truism with some bite: (RP) transforms difficult philosophical questions about co-reference into easy grammatical questions about substitutability. This has led a number of philosophers to think that we can use (RP) to make short work of certain longstanding metaphysical debates. For example, it has been suggested that all we need to do to show that the predicate '( ) is a horse' does not refer to a property is point out that '( ) is a horse' and 'the property of being a horse' are not everywhere intersubstitutable salva congruitate. However, when we understand 'substitution' in the simplest and most straightforward way, (RP) is no truism; in fact, natural languages are full of counterexamples to the principle. In this paper, I introduce a new notion of substitution, and then develop and argue for a version of (RP) that is immune to these counterexamples. Along the way I touch on the following topics: the relation between argument forms and their natural language instances; the reification of sense; the difference between terms and predicates; and the relation between reference and disquotation. I end by arguing that my new version of (RP) cannot be used to settle metaphysical debates quite as easily as some philosophers would like.

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Section: A Final Remark About Sensementioning

confidence: 99%

Substitution in a sense

Trueman

2017

Philos Stud

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“…(S SC ) Grammaticality is preserved under the appropriate intersubstitutability of co-referential expressions (Wright, 1998;Dolby, 2009;Nebel, 2019).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

That-clauses and propositional anaphors

Elswyk

2019

Philos Stud

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“…SeeBach (1997),Hofweber (2007),Rosefeldt (2008), and van Elswyk (forthcoming) for very di erent diagnoses of how the evidence is not probative goes awry. 17 For discussion of intersubstitutibility, seeWright (1998),Dolby (2009),Trueman (2012), and Nebel (2019.18 See especiallyMoltmann (2003).19 SeeKing (2002) andNebel (2019) for di erent versions of this response.20 Nebel (2019) provides this rejoinder rather forcefully.…”

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The Linguistic Basis for Propositions

Elswyk¹

2022

The Routledge Handbook of Propositions

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Penultimate draft ⋅ Forthcoming in Routledge Handbook of PropositionsPropositions are traditionally regarded as performing vital roles in theories of natural language, logic, and cognition. This chapter o ers an opinionated survey of recent literature to assess whether they are still needed to perform three linguistic roles: be the meaning of a declarative sentence in a context, be what is designated by certain linguistic expressions, and be the content of illocutionary acts. After considering many of the relevant theoretical choice-points, I suggest that there remains a linguistic basis for propositions, but not for some of the traditional reasons.1 A question to raise is whether we should be realists about propositions as unobserved entities. See Simchen (forthcoming) for a defense of instrumentalism about structured propositions, Armour-Garb and Woodbridge (2012) for a pretense-based ctionalism, and Ball and Rabern (2018, §1.2.2) for a survey of anti-realist attitudes towards meanings generally. In §3, I identify some initial problems with non-realist views.

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The Reference Principle: a defence

Cited by 8 publications

References 1 publication

Substitution in a sense

Substitution in a sense

That-clauses and propositional anaphors

The Linguistic Basis for Propositions

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