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Full Idea
For Paul Pietroski no expression in natural language is semantically referential. ....Reference to objects occurs not at the level of semantics, but at the level of thought or utterance.
Gist of Idea
No language is semantically referential; it all occurs at the level of thought or utterance
Source
report of Paul M. Pietroski (Events and Semantic Architecture [2004]) by Thomas Hofweber - Ontology and the Ambitions of Metaphysics 07.2
Book Ref
Hofweber,Thomas: 'Ontology and the Ambitions of Metaphysics' [OUP 2018], p.187
A Reaction
Love this. It has always struck me that reference is what speakers do. Try taking any supposedly referential description and sticking 'so-called' in front of it. That seems to leave you with the reference even though you have denied the description.
Related Ideas
Idea 21653 Maybe not even names are referential, but are just by used by speakers to refer [Hofweber]
Idea 21654 The "Fido"-Fido theory of meaning says every expression in a language has a referent [Hofweber]
| 4972 | I may regard a thought about Phosphorus as true, and the same thought about Hesperus as false [Frege] |
| 4570 | Russell assumes that expressions refer, but actually speakers refer by using expressions [Cooper,DE on Russell] |
| 8355 | Expressions don't refer; people use expressions to refer [Strawson,P] |
| 8357 | If an utterance fails to refer then it is a pseudo-use, though a speaker may think they assert something [Strawson,P] |
| 5815 | Whether a definite description is referential or attributive depends on the speaker's intention [Donnellan] |
| 10459 | Context does not create reference; it is just something speakers can exploit [Bach] |
| 10460 | 'That duck' may not refer to the most obvious one in the group [Bach] |
| 10461 | What a pronoun like 'he' refers back to is usually a matter of speaker's intentions [Bach] |
| 10462 | Information comes from knowing who is speaking, not just from interpretation of the utterance [Bach] |
| 10434 | Even a quantifier like 'someone' can be used referentially [Sainsbury] |
| 15182 | Because some entities overlap, reference must have analytic individuation principles [Sidelle] |
| 21650 | No language is semantically referential; it all occurs at the level of thought or utterance [Pietroski, by Hofweber] |