SINGULAR TERMS, REFERENCE AND METHODOLOGY IN SEMANTICS 1

Names, pronouns, indexicals, and demonstratives (including complex demonstratives—e.g. ‘that dog’) are often conventionally used to designate individuals.2 For ease of exposition, let’s mark this point by calling such expressions singular terms, not intending by so doing to prejudge the question of whether they have anything interesting in common semantically. Some uses of each kind of singular term at least appear to semantically refer to the individuals designated, and so contribute them to propositions expressed (in the contexts in question) by the sentences they occur in. But each kind of singular term has other uses that don’t seem to be referring uses at all; that is, the uses don’t appear to contribute individuals to propositions. The primary question that is the concern of this paper is: what should be our theoretical reaction to the existence of what appear to be these semantically quite different uses of singular terms? For various reasons, I propose to set aside the case of pronouns here. Thus, I propose to concentrate on the other cases mentioned: the cases of names, indexicals and complex demonstratives. I take it that one can easily imagine uses of names, indexicals and complex demonstratives on which the uses seem to refer to the individuals they designate, and hence contribute the individuals to the propositions expressed. Such uses are those that are most discussed in the semantics literature. For the sake of explicitness, let’s consider some paradigmatic examples of uses of this sort.