co-reference, where it is clear simply from the meaning of two statements that if one statement asserts (or denies) that some thing is such and such, then the other statement asserts (or denies) that the same thing is so and so. The paradigm is pronominal back-reference. It is part of our understanding of pronoun use that if “Herod realized that he had been outwitted, and he was furious” is true, then the first part of the sentence says that someone had been outwitted, and the second part says that the same person was furious. When I talk about “co-reference,” I shall always mean this form of anaphoric co-reference. Pronouns are a paradigm, but clearly different tokens of the same proper name can co-refer in the same way, for example, the first and second occurrences of “God” at the beginning of the book of Genesis.
In the beginning God (‘ĕ-lō-hîm, ὁ θεὸς, Deus) created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God (‘ĕ-lō-hîm, θεοῦ, Dei) was hovering over the waters.
I claim that there is nothing philosophically difficult about explaining co-reference. That is not to say that the explanation, which is a scientific and technical matter, is not complex and difficult, but rather that it is a task for computational linguistics, not philosophy. It is non-philosophically difficult to explain the exact rules by which we determine co-reference in all cases, which I will discuss in the next chapter, but it seems clear that in the natural and obvious reading of the passage given earlier, the two tokens of “God” have a common referent, if they have a referent at all, and so there is no philosophical difficulty. The philosophical difficulties are whether co-reference implies reference (I argue that it does), whether reference implies reference to something (I argue that it does), and whether, if so, reference to something implies that there is (or there exists) something such that it is referred to (I argue that it does not, but this raises some difficult questions that I defer until chapter 7).
The second claim, the reference thesis,26 is that the semantic value of a proper name consists solely in its anaphoric co-reference with its antecedents in a chain of co-referring terms, and that the truth of a reference statement depends upon such co-reference, even if no referent exists.
As stated earlier, a reference statement contains a mentioning term, such as “second word of the Quran,” a mentioned term, a token available in some antecedent text or utterance, and a used term. For example:
• In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.
• The fourth word of the previous sentence refers to him.
The mentioning term is “The fourth word of the previous sentence,” the mentioned term is “God,” and the used term is “him.” On the standard theory, the truth of a reference statement depends (i) on an external relation between the mentioned term and an external referent, in this case, God, and (ii) on the same relation obtaining between the referent and the term in the reference statement itself. Thus, on the standard theory, the relation must obtain twice: between the proper name “God” and the pronoun “him.” The reference statement must have an external truthmaker, in this case God.
On the reference thesis, by contrast, no extralinguistic truthmaker is required. The conditions for the reference statement to be true are, first, that the mentioned term (“God”) anaphorically co-refers with the used term (“him”). This is clearly so in the above example, hence the reference statement must be true whether or not “God” has an external referent at all, so cannot express a relation between “God” and an external referent. The second condition is that the mentioned term must have some antecedent in a chain of co-referring terms. If a story begins “There was a young man called ‘Mark,’” then we can say truly that “Mark” refers to the young man, for the mentioned term “Mark” has the antecedent “a young man,” which co-refers with “the young man” in our reference statement. But we cannot say that “a young man” refers to Mark, for “a young man” cannot be an anaphor term, given that the whole purpose of an indefinite term is to block any kind of back-reference. An indefinite term a cannot locate any previous term b such that it is clear simply from the meaning of the statements containing them that if one is true of a thing, the other, if true, is true of the same thing also. Some writers (such as Sommers) have claimed that indefinite terms, such as “a young man,” have a sort of non-identifying reference. This is a mistake, which I shall discuss in chapter 3.
Thus, according to the reference thesis, a reference statement is illusory: it purports to express a relation between a mentioned term and an object, but such a relation is not what makes it true. What makes it true is a relation that is intralinguistic, although its grammatical form misleadingly suggests the relation is extralinguistic. On this hypothesis, co-reference is primary, reference is secondary. The thesis has wide ranging implications (e.g., for received logico-philosophical principles such as the necessity of identity).
I will not argue for the thesis at length now, except to say, and to avoid any confusion, that I am not claiming that one term refers to another. I am not, for instance, saying that “God” refers to the word “God,” or that the name “Moses” refers to the expression “the man who led the Israelites out of Egypt.” On the contrary, “Moses” refers to a man, not an expression. That is to say, it is true that “Moses” refers to a man. However I claim that what makes it true is not some external reference relation between “Moses” and that man, but rather an internal relation between the reference statement and some textual or uttered antecedent. Nor does the name refer to the concept of Moses, for the noun phrase “the concept of Moses” does that.27 Nor do I claim that there are intentional objects or non-existent things. I shall argue (see chapter 7) that the name “Asmodeus” refers to Asmodeus, so the name “Asmodeus” refers to something. I shall argue that we can truly think of Asmodeus hence, in thinking of Asmodeus, be thinking of something. But the grammatical objects of intentional verbs like “refer to,” “think of” do not require that there be anything that satisfies them. The fact that “Asmodeus” refers to something does not entail that there is (or exists) something which is the referent of “Asmodeus,” nor that “Asmodeus” has a referent, for the non-intentional verb, phrase “has a referent” does not function in the same way as the intentional verb phrase “refers to.” I say this to avoid all confusion about my use of that verb phrase in the text that follows.
The third claim, the dependency thesis, is that communicating with proper names is dependent on the availability of a common text such as the Hebrew Bible, which uses those names (“Moses”) within a narrative, rather than a dictionary, which contains mostly general names (“prophet”) and which merely makes the names without using them.
Any theory of proper names must explain why names for our relatives, friends and neighbors are generally not in dictionaries, and why learning how to use them is not in any sense a prerequisite for learning the language, whereas common names like “red,” “round,” “person,” “house,” and so on are found in all dictionaries, and are in some sense necessary for understanding the language. Somewhere in between, there are proper names, such as “Caesar” and “Moses,” which are found in some dictionaries, but are not in any sense necessary for understanding English, as opposed to understanding history or theology.
Any theory must also explain why there is a proper name/common name distinction, and a local/national distinction between proper names. Locke explains the first on the assumption that in order to understand a proper name, we must be acquainted with its bearer, so that we have “the idea in my mind” of it, and in order to communicate using the name, the other person must also be acquainted with the bearer.28 Common terms, by contrast, signify “general ideas,” which are separated from the circumstances of time and place, “and any other ideas that may determine them to this or that particular existence.” Since we use language to communicate our thought by combining general ideas, language for the most part consists of general
