(whose names are on coins), Pontius Pilate (referenced as “prefect of Judea” on a limestone inscription discovered in 1961), and Quirinius (mentioned on a tomb inscription), but this book is not primarily about the historical truth of the Bible, nor the existence of any or all of the biblical characters. It is about how we are able to refer to or identify them. If reference is a relation of some kind between language and reality, what is the nature of that relation? How can there be such a relation if some of the characters do not even exist? How is reference successful, given our limited information about the individuals referred to? In particular, how can we succeed in referring to the same person or being, even when we do not know that we are doing so? How can the writers of the New Testament refer to people in the Hebrew Bible, such as Isaiah and Moses? How can the Quran refer to the same people? What being are they talking about when they use the proper names “God,” “יְהֹוָה” or “ﷲ”?
The central puzzle is what makes the following reference statement true (or false).
The second word of the Quran refers to God.
If we can answer this, we can answer the question of whether Jews, Christians, and Muslims worship the same God. The reference statement contains a mentioning term (“second word of the Quran”), the verb phrase “refers to,” and the referring term “God,” as well as implying the existence of a mentioned term that is not in the statement itself, namely the second word of the Quran, the word we translate as “Allah” or “God,” transliterated as “al-lāhi.”2 Clearly the statement is true when the mentioned term (the second word of the Quran) co-refers with the referring term (“God”). If the second word of the Quran refers to some divine being X, and if “God” in the aforementioned statement also refers to X, the identity statement “God is Allah” is true.3
The thesis of this book is that such co-reference is not an extralinguistic relation between the two terms and an external, extralinguistic object (God), but rather an intralinguistic semantic relation between the terms themselves. Thus, it is true even for atheists that “God” refers to God, and that Jews, Christians, and atheists worship the same God. I call this the intralinguistic thesis. It follows that a reference statement is illusory: its linguistic form purports to express a relation between a mentioned term and an object, but instead is verified by a relation between the mentioned term and the referring term. In this chapter, I shall (i) outline the standard theory of reference which is the main target of this book; (ii) outline some of the problems with the standard theory; (iii) introduce the key points of my non-standard intralinguistic theory of reference; and (iv) set out how the book is organized.
The Standard Theory of Reference
“Reference” has many senses, and a common understanding of the word derives from an early mistranslation of the Frege’s term Bedeutung.4 A common and pre-theoretical definition is that a term refers when it signifies which thing we are talking about in making a statement.5 “Reference” I shall characterize as what happens when we refer, and I shall use the terms “identification” and “designation” as synonymous for the most part with “reference.” Reference is what singular or definite terms do, and what common or indefinite terms don’t. The name “Socrates” in “Socrates is running” tells us which person is said to be running, or (in philosophical jargon) tells us which individual satisfies the predicate “is running.” Singular terms contrast with common terms, which do not specify who satisfies the predicate. “Some philosopher is running” is true if at least one of Socrates, or Plato, Aristotle, and so on is running, no matter which one. Thus, “some philosopher” does not refer. Or suppose it did, for example, to Socrates. Then, “it is not the case that some philosopher is running” would be true when Socrates is not running, even if it is the case that some other philosopher, say Plato, is running, which is absurd.
The standard theory of reference, sometimes called “direct reference,” is primarily a theory about proper names. It involves two assumptions. The first is the nondescription assumption, that a proper name has no connotation or descriptive sense that determines its reference. As Abelard argued, the accidental properties connected with some description can hardly enter into the imposition of the signification of the name, or the name would change its meaning through time. “Socrates was called Socrates before he became a musician, and will be so called after he ceases to be the son of Sophroniscus [i.e., after Sophroniscus dies].”6 More recently, Kripke has said much about this. The second assumption is what Devitt calls the semantic presupposition 7 that there are no other possible candidates for a name’s meaning other than a descriptive meaning, or the bearer of the name itself. If both assumptions are correct, the meaning of a proper name is none other than the bearer itself, that is, the name is merely a tag or label for its bearer, and has no other significance.
These two assumptions (nondescription and semantic presupposition) are of crucial importance to the theoretical framework of classical (i.e., the twentieth century) semantics, entailing as they do that sentences with empty names cannot express propositions. In that framework, the truth conditions or proposition (or information content) expressed by a sentence, relative to a context, are compositionally determined by the semantic values or referents of the terms in the sentence.8 The structure and components of the proposition mirror the structure and components of the sentence expressing the proposition. To understand a sentence we have to grasp its truth conditions: the way the world has to be if the sentence is true, but the truth conditions are determined by the referents of the words in the sentence, including the referent of any proper name. Hence, we cannot understand what is expressed by the sentence unless the words, including any proper names, have a referent. As Evans, in his exposition of Frege, says:
The Proper Name “John” has the role of introducing an object, which is to be the argument to the function introduced by the concept-expression “ξ is wise”—a function which maps all and only wise objects to the value True. Thereby, and only thereby, is the sentence determined as having a truth-value, and, therefore, as having the significance of a complete sentence—something capable of being used alone to make an assertion.9
When a sentence contains an empty name, the name cannot introduce an object as argument to the function, the function has no value, that is, no truth value, and the sentence cannot express a thought or a proposition. Evans again, quoting Frege:
The sentence “Leo Sachse is a man” is the expression of a thought [Ausdruck eines Gedankens] only if “Leo Sachse” designates [bezeichnet] something.10
The standard theory also entails that the existence of a bearer is presupposed, rather than asserted, by a subject-predicate sentence containing a proper name. As Frege argues, the negation of “Kepler died in misery” is not “Kepler did not die in misery, or the name ‘Kepler’ has no significance,”11 that is, “Kepler died in misery” is not a conjunction of the statements that “Kepler” is significant and that Kepler died in misery.12 According to the standard theory, it is presupposed rather than asserted that that the name “Kepler” is significant, hence (because the name signifies the bearer) it must be presupposed that the bearer exists.
A further corollary of the standard theory is that there can be only one reason for a proper name sentence being false, namely that the predicate does not apply to the subject. Hence, on that theory, there can be only one form of negation for proper name subject-predicate sentences, namely wide scope or sentential negation. If “Moses was a prophet” is false, it is because Moses existed but was not a prophet. This corollary is reflected in the standard notation of the predicate calculus: the negation “Fa” is “~Fa.” On the standard theory, proper names are not descriptive, or properly speaking, are not predicable, a predicable being an expression that yields a proposition about something if we attach it to an expression, that is, a singular term, which stands for, that is, designates or refers to, what we are forming the proposition about.13
