Maverick Philosopher

Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

A Reference Puzzle

Ed submits the following:

Suppose I am looking at a crowd of people and cry ‘there is a man in the crowd!’. Well very likely, and clearly I have some man in mind. But the predicate ‘is a man in the crowd’ is not just true of him, but of every man in the crowd. So what I have said is true of each of the men, at least in one sense of ‘true of’. 

Yet on the other hand. I go on to say ‘he is wearing a red scarf’. And suppose three men are wearing red scarves. So what I say is true of just three men, but still more than one. Finally I say ‘the man is carrying a poster of Che’, and suppose only one red scarved man is carrying such a poster. So it is now clear who I am talking about. But wasn’t I talking about the same man all along? So in another sense of ‘true of’, my initial statement ‘there is a man in the crowd’ was true of just one man, namely the one in the red scarf, carrying the Che poster.

Difficult. It is this sort of consideration that led Sommers (and Brandom and Chastain and probably others) to suppose that some existentially quantified sentences ‘refer’. Geach disagreed, he had a famous and very bitter dispute with Sommers in the TLS, although I haven’t been able to find this.

You see a man in a crowd, wearing a red scarf, and carrying a poster of Che. You don't see some man or other, but a definite man, one and the same man singled out in a series of visual perceptions.  You exclaim, 'There is a man in the crowd' and your utterance is true. Not only is it true, it records (part of) the content of your perception.

The problem, I take, it is to find a way to avoid the following contradiction: 'There is a man in the crowd' is about any man in the crowd and yet it is about exactly one man. (We are assuming that there is more than one man in the crowd.) 

Perhaps something like the distinction between speaker's reference and semantic reference will help. I say to you: 'The man in the corner with champagne in his glass is the new dean.' I have managed to refer, successfully, to a particular man and draw your attention to him. Moreover, I have supplied you with a bit of correct information about him. And yet there is no man in the corner with champagne in his glass. For what there is in his glass is acqua minerale.

The reference has failed, and yet the reference has succeeded. Contradiction. Solution? The distinction just mentioned. The definite description 'The man in the corner with champagne is his glass' lacks a semantic referent which is to say: the definite description considered apart from the speaker and his intentions does not refer to anything since nothing satisfies it. But the description does have a speaker's (and a hearer's) referent.

Similarly, we can say that the existentially general sentence 'There is a man in the crowd,' considered by itself apart from the perceptual situation in which the speaker visually singles out a man with a red scarf holding a Che poster, is not about any particular man such as Manny Manischewitz. For it could just as well be about Kasimir Bonch-Osmolovsky or Giacomo Giacopuzzi.  (All three gentlemen are in the crowd.) Absent this abstraction from the perceptual situation, however, the existentially general sentence is about the one definite man in the red scarf, etc. 

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Bill Vallicella

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7 responses to “A Reference Puzzle”

  1. The London Ostrich Avatar
    The London Ostrich

    A man is in the crowed. He is wearing a red scarf. The man is carrying a poster of Che.

    The terms ‘a man .. he .. the man’ form what Chastain and Brandom call an anaphoric chain. Consider what happens when we replace the definite terms with indefinite ones.

    A man is in the crowed. A man is wearing a red scarf. A man is carrying a poster of Che.

    Each indefinite description initiates a fresh anaphoric chain which can be picked up by subsequent anaphor sentences.
    Anaphor licenses inferences which bundle the predicates. Thus from the first narrative we can infer ‘a man in the crowd, wearing a red scarf is carrying a poster of Che’. From the second one, we can’t.
    >> Similarly, we can say that the existentially general sentence ‘There is a man in the crowd,’ considered by itself apart from the perceptual situation in which the speaker visually singles out a man with a red scarf holding a Che poster, is not about any particular man
    Contra: I can perfectly well say that the sentence ‘The man is carrying a poster of Che’ is about the man in the red scarf. Note that my use of ‘the man in the red scarf’ is itself a part of, and extends the anaphoric chain begun in the narrative above.

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  2. The London Ostrich Avatar
    The London Ostrich

    1. There is a man in the crowd
    2. He is wearing a red scarf
    Sentence (1) is true if and only if a man is in the crowd, and also true if the man is in the crowd. But not true only if the man is in the crowd. Perhaps the man is not in the crowd, but some other man is.
    Sentence (2) by contrast is true if and only if the man is wearing a red scarf. The definite article, or a pronoun or any other properly singular term gives us the ‘only if’ condition. Put another way, a sentence whose subject is ‘the F’ implies the corresponding sentence with ‘an F’. But doesn’t work the other way round.

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  3. David Brightly Avatar
    David Brightly

    I was struck by Bill’s ‘You don’t see some man or other, but a definite man, …’
    If there is a puzzle here isn’t it captured in the phrase ‘a definite man’, which is itself indefinite!?

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  4. BV Avatar
    BV

    Hi David,
    That is indeed a puzzle and its has bugged me all my philosophical life. The problem is that one can’t quite SAY what one MEANS. One can’t see a man without seeing a definite man, a particular man, but every man is a definite man or a particular man.
    More generally, there are many particulars. So ‘particular’ is a general term. But each particular is a *particular* particular. But I cannot put into words what makes this particular particular the particular that it is.
    The *thisness* (haecceity) of a particular cannot be conceptualized or put into words. We say it is ineffable. Individuum qua individuum ineffabile est.
    Some say that the ineffable, precisely because it is a-rational and inexpressible, does not exist, is nothing at all. (Hegel)
    Wittgenstein says, *Es gibt allerdings das Unaussprechliche.* But we must remain silent about it.
    I am looking at a man in a crowd containing several men. I say, truly, ‘There is a man in the crowd.’ Can I write a sentence that expresses the content of that very perception, a sentence containing a term that singles out the one man I am looking at and distinguishes him from every other actual and possible man?
    I say No. So it seems all reference must be in some sense general.

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  5. The London Ostrich Avatar
    The London Ostrich

    >>If there is a puzzle here isn’t it captured in the phrase ‘a definite man’, which is itself indefinite!?
    Like.

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  6. BV Avatar
    BV

    Like? You may be spending too much time on Facebook, Ed.

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  7. The London Ostrich Avatar
    The London Ostrich

    In Translations from the Philosophical Writings, Frege denies there can be a variable number. A number cannot vary, for a cube cannot turn into a prime number, an irrational number never becomes rational. So we do not have proper names for variable numbers. Nor can there be an indefinite man. Is the number nindefinite? No, for we are not acquainted with the number n, nor is ‘n’ the proper name of any number, definite or indefinite.
    We write the letter ‘n’ in order to achieve generality. We may speak of ‘indefiniteness’, but this is not an adjective of the number, but rather an adverb of the way it is signified.

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