Filippo DOMANESCHI: Testing the causal theory of reference

Seminar at the Center for Logic, Language, and Cognition (LLC), University of Turin (15 November 2018).

ABSTRACT. Machery et al. (2004) launched an attack on Kripke's refutation of descriptivism with an experiment on laypersons’ referential intuitions. Martí (2009) contended that referential intuitions are not the right kind of empirical evidence for testing theories of reference. She maintained that experimentalists ought to test how people use names instead of what people think about reference. Machery, Olivola, and De Blanc (2009) replied with a survey intended to show that referential intuitions are in sync with truth-value judgments and argued that truth-value judgments provide evidence from linguistic usage and not from referential intuitions. I argue that the truth predicate in truth-value judgment tasks generates some ambiguities and therefore truth-value judgments are not reliable evidence for testing Kripke’s refutation of descriptivism.