Meaning and Reference

Peter Babiak teaches English at the University of British Columbia.

From a commonsense point of view, the statement “this book is good”
means that this collection of essays is intellectually satisfying or, at
the very least, that it is worth the paper on which it is printed. But
the theories of meaning and reference that underly this assumption raise
all sorts of slippery issues about truth, intentionality, knowledge, and
the like, many of them subtly dissected in this supplement to the 1997
issue of Canadian Journal of Philosophy.

What is in fact “good” about these eight essays is that they
refamiliarize us—albeit in the specialized and sometimes unfamiliar
language of analytical philosophy—with the names of thinkers like
Willard Quine and Saul Kripke, logicians whose investigations into the
philosophy of language have fallen out of fashion among fuzzy-minded
postmodernists.

Quine’s attack on “modal logic”—particularly his hostility to
meanings and propositions—figures prominently in John Burgess’s
“Quinus ab Omni Naevo Vindcatus,” an aptly titled vindication of the
philosopher’s work. To those philosophers and tinkerers who believe
Quine’s critique has been answered by the development of a
“direct” theory of reference for names, Burgess correctly points out
that they have not fully understood Quine’s nuanced understanding of
modality. Mark Richard defends Quine on similar grounds, arguing that
his theory of “inscrutability,” the notion that it is indeterminate
what the terms of a language refer to, is in no way settled by appealing
to a “causal theory” of reference, the belief that reference is
grounded in causal contacts between applications of words and objects
referred to.

As for Kripke, his work is most effectively—though critically—taken
up by Scott Soames in “Skepticism about Meaning.” The
philosopher’s assertion that what we mean by a word is not exhausted
by the cases in which we use it is appealing, Soames concedes, but
“the burden of proof is on those who wish to persuade us to adopt a
radically skeptical attitude toward our ordinary semantic notions.”
The warrant Soames supplies for his inarguable refutation is simply
that, if we mean anything by a word, then something must determine this
meaning, “for otherwise we would be free to apply the word in new
cases in any way we liked,” and “surely we are not free to do
this.”