Singular Reference: A Descriptivist Perspective

Francesco Orilia studied philosophy at the university of Palermo (M.A., 1979) and then, after being granted a Fulbright grant, at Indiana University, Bloomington (Ph.D., 1986), where he was a student of Hector-Neri Castañeda, Nino B. Cocchiarella and J. M. Dunn. From 1987 to 1994 he was a researcher in artificial intelligence at the Olivetti research lab in Pisa and from July 1994 to July 1997 a researcher/lecturer in theoretical philosophy at the University of Cagliari. Since August 1997 he has been with the university of Macerata where he is currently professor of philosophy of language. He also had visiting positions at Indiana University, Bloomington (1986), University of Paris IV (2005), University of Iowa at Iowa City (2006), Cambridge University (2008). In the period 2000-2003 he was a member of the selection committee of the E. W. Beth Dissertation Prize for logic, language, and information and he is now in the editorial board of Metaphysica. He has written or co-edited a few books and published many papers in international journals such as Dialectica, Journal of Philosophical Logic, Journal of Symbolic Logic, Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic, Minds and Machines, Synthese, Topoi.

"This book advances a contextualist descriptivist account of singular reference, along the lines of "token-reflexive" and "causal-descriptivist" proposals already in the literature. The book is very clear, economical and well-structured; the view, which Orilia defends from criticisms with clear-headed arguments, is certainly one worth having as consistently articulated here in the theoretical landscape; and the author argues for the comparative strength vis-a-vis the different explanatory burdens of such an account in a very compelling way." Prof. Manuel Garcia-Carpintero, Department of Logic, History and Philosophy of Science, University of Barcelona "The foundation of any philosophy of language is its account of singular reference. All attempts to understand how language and mind connect to the world must focus on singular reference to ourselves and to the ordinary objects that surround us. Philosophers such as Frege, Russell and Reichenbach offered descriptivist approaches to singular reference. But the alternative referentialist approaches of Donnellan, Kripke, Kaplan and others have won wide support. This book investigates the motivations and resources available to both approaches and reveals that referentialist theories remain inadequate to the problems that arise in connection with propositional attitudes and empty singular terms. The book proposes a new theory which incorporates central aspects of a descriptivist approach while avoiding the errors pointed out by referentialists. The theory offers a uniform treatment of the semantics and pragmatics of (anaphoric and non-anaphoric uses of) determiner phrases, definite descriptions, proper names and indexicals. This work will be of interest to researchers in philosophy of language, philosophy of mind and theoretical linguistics. The wealth of information provided in it and its detailed explanations make the book an ideal resource accessible to graduates and upper level undergraduates." Professor G. Landini, Department of Philosophy, University of Iowa

• Introduction: Referentialism vs. Descriptivism.- Background Notions.- Why Descriptivism Was So Successful.- Why Referentialism Is So Successful.- Definite Descriptions and Proper Names.- Indexicals.- Tense, Temporal Indexicals and Other Miscellaneous Issues.- Conclusion: Accounting for the Referentialist DataReferentialist data .