Reference and Description
The Case against Two-Dimensionalism
Chapter One
THE TRADITIONAL DESCRIPTIVIST PICTURE
The modern discussion of reference begins with the reaction of Gottlob
Frege and Bertrand Russell to an initially attractive but overly simple
conception of meaning and reference. The conception is based on
the observation that the most important feature of language is our
ability to use it to represent the world. Different sentences represent
the world as being different ways, and to sincerely accept, or assertively
utter, a sentence is to believe, or assert, that the world is the
way the sentence represents it to be. The reason sentences are representational
in this way is that they are made up of words and phrases
that stand for objects and the properties we take them to have-physical
objects, people, ideas, institutions, shapes, sizes, colors, locations,
relations, and the rest. What it is for language to be meaningful is for
it to have this representational capacity. But if meaning is essentially
representational, it would seem that the mea ... read full excerpt from Reference and Description: The Case against Two-Dimensionalism ebook
