Episode 63: Michael Devitt discusses reference
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What is the central problem that motivates a theory of reference?
Hey, Matt Techman here from Elucidations. Before we get going today, I just thought I'd ask if you're a fan of the show, to maybe go to our iTunes page and leave a rating and or review, and that way more people can discover it. Alright, thanks.
Hello and welcome to Elucidations, a philosophy podcast recorded at the University of Chicago. I'm Matt Tigman.
And I'm Mark Hopwood.
With us today is Michael Devitt, distinguished professor of philosophy at the City University of New York Graduate Center, and he is here to talk to us about reference. Michael Devitt, welcome. Thank you. Very pleased to be here. The theory of reference is a very important branch of the philosophy of language, which studies what it is for a word to stand for something. So for example, the name Matt Teichman stands for me, the person. You know, names of people and names of places are taken to be paradigmatic cases of words referring to things. But why would we need to have a whole theory about reference? I mean, why do philosophers write so many books about how it is that a word can come to stand for something?
Isn't it just pretty simple?
Yes, well, unfortunately it's not really simple, but it isn't all that easy, it seems to me, to motivate it properly. So I'd like to get into this by starting with a question Reference is quite obviously a property of expressions in the language. Now this should raise the question for you, what is a language? What makes it theoretically interesting? I think the only way to un to really answer your question about reference properly is to get some grip on those questions. So let's just think about this and I'm going to start by talking about the animals. Lots of animals have languages, but the languages are mostly very boring, because they're simply expressions of their own inner state. I'm hungry, I'm angry, I want a mate, and so on.
But there are in um the animal world quite a few languages, not as many as you might expect, which are not of that sort, and they're ones that the cognitive ethologists, the people who study uh animals' minds, call referential languages. And these are languages which convey information about the environment from one organism to another organism. So I'd just like to say a word about them to help us with this reference question. And I'm going to deal with the bees. Carl von Frisch spent several decades of his life working on the bees and he won a Nobel Prize for his discovery. Well, what did he discover? He observed the behavior of the bees and he was struck by some very unusual features about this behavior, including the waggle dance.
When bees come back to the hive after being out uh returning from foraging, they do a a waggle dance on the side of the hive. He studied this very, very closely for a long time and came up with the view, extraordinary view and very controversial at the time, that what this waggle dance is constitutes a language. What does that mean? Well, it constitutes a representational system. This representational system obviously plays an extremely important role in their lives, and the role it plays is It's a system which is used by the beast to express the content of some inner state. He figured out that these waggle dances, this language of the waggle dance, conveyed from the sender bee to the receiver bee information about the direction of a food source, the food source the sender bee had just come from, and the distance of the food source.
So that's quite a complicated and obviously very important message. And these receiver bees responded to this message in the appropriate way. which is going there to try and find food. Absolutely extraordinary phenomenon. So we got here Some inner state of the bee, which represents the distance and direction of the food source, and the language is used to convey that information, that content, that message, to another bee. Now we've actually got what the message is. Von Frisch discovered it. But what we then want to know is how to describe it. Well, one way to describe it is to say, well, it's a complex message that refers to notice the use of the word refer, it refers to the distance of the source, the food source, and also the direction of the food source.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is the central problem that motivates a theory of reference?
0:00–4:57
2
How do animal communication systems like the bee waggle‑dance illustrate reference?
4:57–9:24
3
What is the descriptive (Frege‑Russell) theory of reference and how does it work?
9:24–13:57
4
Why do description theories of reference face epistemic and error problems?
13:57–18:04
5
What is Kripke’s causal theory of reference and how does it differ from description theories?
18:04–22:43
6
How does the idea of reference‑borrowing explain how we can refer without knowing all the facts?
22:43–27:03
7
What role does ‘reference fixing’ play in the causal chain of names like Aristotle or Matt?
27:03–32:31
8
What are the broader implications of treating language as a skillful, causal activity rather than a set of known facts?
32:31–38:05
Speakers
2 identifiedMore from Elucidations
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