different career, but stuck at the idea of intralinguistic semantics in my spare time, producing over the years at least three versions of this book. None of them was quite right, and none of them touched on any biblical subject, until my old friend and sparring partner Bill Vallicella published “Do Christians and Muslims Worship the Same God?”2 exactly four years ago as I write. (For complete disclosure, I must say that Vallicella, a philosophical realist, disagrees with practically everything I write, and endorses absolutely no part of the extreme anti-realist position of this book. He has always been supportive of my work, and strengthened it through his steady and inventive challenges, although he certainly disagrees, as he tells me, with the end result.)
While I had used scriptural texts as examples of reference before, the idea of basing a whole book on these examples had not occurred. But it seemed to me that these texts would be the right frame in which to place the intralinguistic picture of reference. The scriptures are a strong counterexample to contemporary theories of reference, which take demonstrative reference as the starting point for reference in general. Pharaoh’s daughter finds a baby in the rushes, then later takes the baby to Pharaoh, pointing to it and saying, “I name this baby ‘Moses.’” According to the standard theory, the demonstrative, “this baby” refers to Moses directly, and at the same time establishes a semantic relation between the proper name “Moses” and the baby referred to, a relation which is somehow preserved when the name is passed to other people, even when the baby is no longer present, and pure demonstrative reference is not available. The standard theory starts with demonstrative reference as the paradigm, and moves to non-demonstrative reference as a particular case. The idea advanced in this book, by contrast, is that we start with reference as we find it in the texts. The people are no longer before us, all we have now is the words, yet we understand the reference. We know that the second book of Exodus refers to Moses, but we have never been acquainted with Moses himself. Why can’t reference start with reference within a text, and move to demonstrative reference as a particular case?
That is the idea of this book, and the book will speak for itself, but there is one confusion that has occurred to practically everyone who has reviewed it, so I shall give due warning at the outset. I say that the truth conditions of a reference statement are intralinguistic. I claim that what makes “‘Frodo’ refers to Frodo” true is the same kind of phenomenon that makes “‘Donald Trump’ refers to Donald Trump” true, so reference is really not a relation between language and the world, but between language and language. Reference is a word-word, not word-world relation, as Brandom puts it. Then practically the same objection occurs to everyone at once: surely the name “Donald Trump” does refer to Trump, so the reference relation cannot be intralinguistic? I reply: yes, “Donald Trump” does indeed refer to Trump, because the reference statement “‘Donald Trump’ refers to Donald Trump” is true. But the relational nature of the statement does not prove the existence of a reference relation. My claim is not that the reference statement is false—for it is true—but I claim that what makes it true is not a relation between language and reality. You can object on various reasonable grounds that my claim about reference statements is wrong, ill-founded, poorly supported, and so forth, but it is not enough to object that some reference statement involving “Trump,” or “Johnson,” or “Merkel” is true, for I do not claim it is false. The question of what makes it true is the core question of this book.
Many people helped me in various ways. The late Jonathan Lowe pointed me to work on similar lines by Charles Chastain and Robert Brandom. Peter Geach told me I had stumbled upon a very deep problem, referring to a chapter in his Mental Acts, but gave no hint of a solution. Although Mark Sainsbury, while editor of Mind, turned down a paper of mine on the subject of fictional reference (also bad), he later followed my work with encouragement and support. It was he who suggested Lexington press.
My late parents were incredibly supportive, sometimes through the darkest of times. I am sad they did not live to see the project through. This book is dedicated to their memory. Thanks go to my long-suffering wife Fiona for putting up with the project for so long (thirty years, to be precise), and to my two children, who did not suffer so long but occasionally (only occasionally mind you) missed a bedtime story due to the siren call of the book. It was my daughter who suggested the example of the naked fugitive (chapter 3), the mystery man who fled from the arrest in Gethsemane without a stitch.
I thank the editors and staff at Lexington, particularly Jana Hodges-Kluck who had the vision to take on this project, and Lenny Clapp who with endless fortitude and patience saw through several versions of the manuscript with his sharp and perceptive comments, despite his initial (and so some extent continuing) suspicion of the core idea. I thank Magali Roques, who provided many helpful comments on early versions of the manuscript, and also David Brightly, who is not a philosopher but whose insightful comments added value in so many places. The customary rider applies.
Finally, I record a very special debt of gratitude to the late Michael Welbourne and the late Peter Alexander for persuading me to return to Bristol as a postgraduate in 1979.
D. E. Buckner, London, 2020
NOTES
1. Ideas, Qualities and Corpuscles, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985.
2. William F. Vallicella, “Do Christians and Muslims Worship the Same God?” Typepad, Tuesday, December 22, 2015, https://maverickphilosopher.typepad.com/maverick_philosopher/2015/12/do-christians-and-muslims-worship-the-same-god.html.
Heresy or Idolatry?
It is recent, yet it is also one of the oldest controversies in the troubled relationship between Christianity and Islam. In December 2015, Wheaton College professor Larycia Hawkins was suspended after pledging to wear a hijab during Advent in support of her Muslim neighbors, and after writing in a Facebook post that Muslims “like me, a Christian, are people of the book, and as Pope Francis stated last week, we worship the same God.” On December 22, the college stated that the suspension resulted “from theological convictions that seem inconsistent with Wheaton College’s doctrinal convictions,” suggesting the action was not due to wearing the hijab. Hawkins was asked to clarify certain “significant theological questions” such as how can Christians worship the same God if Muslims cannot affirm that “God the Father is indeed the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.” On February 6, 2016, the college announced that Hawkins would not be fired, but that she would voluntarily resign in order to close the situation, whereupon she found a new position at the University of Virginia.
The affair reignited a controversy that is as old as Christianity’s first engagement with Islam. What do Christians and Muslims mean when they respectively utter the name “God”? Of course, a Muslim might not utter the English name “God,” but the English is simply a translation from the name used in ancient Hebrew (yhwh)1 or ancient Greek (o theos), and German and French Christians use the names “Gott” and “Dieu” for the same divine being. The question is: Who are they referring to? Are Christians and Muslims referring to the same divine being when they utter the name that corresponds to “God” in their own languages?
If the same, the situation is one of mutual charges of heresy. In his book De Haeresibus, probably written at Saint Sabas monastic community around 724, John of Damascus says that the Muslims call Christians Hetaeriasts, or “Associators,” because Christians introduce an associate with God by declaring Christ to be the Son of God and God.2 John replies, “you speak untruly when you call us Hetaeriasts; we retort by calling you Mutilators of God.” On this account, Muslims and Christians accuse
