demon of that name, is not the relation that makes it true. “Tobit is referring to a demon” is like “Tobit needs a wife,” which is true precisely because Tobit has no wife.
In chapter 8, I consider the objection that “God” may not be a proper name at all, but a disguised description, such as “The omnipotent omniscient being.” If so, our conception of God would available to anyone who understands the meaning of “omnipotent,” “omniscient,” and of other common ordinary language terms, and so would be transportable as I have defined it, not semantically dependent on some part of a commonly available text. The question is whether such as conception of “God” is the standard one, which I take up in the next chapter.
Chapter 9 is an extension of the co-reference thesis to names that occur in everyday written or spoken communication. This requires resolving a problem suggested by Kripke, namely that we can understand the meaning of two proper names referring to the same thing, without believing that they refer to (or designate) the same thing. I argue that, while communication media do not form a single physical text, they are constructed as though they were a single text: a virtual text. To understand any name requires a context, which requires, in turn, that the appropriate parts of the narrative, or the virtual narrative, are available. We can move from “S assents to p” to “S believes that p” so long as the name that is mentioned in the sentence assented to co-refers with the name used in the “that” clause, and where the test for co-reference involves the rules of disambiguation common to all narratives, not just physical ones.
Chapter 10 is a further extension of the co-reference thesis to demonstrative identification. The forms of reference and identification discussed so far involve an intralinguistic semantic connection between propositions that allows us to identify a character within the framework of a narrative by grasping which individual a character is the same as. All reference is, as it were, relative to some large narrative about some world. How do we know the narrative is about this world? This question prompted Strawson to eliminate story-relative identification by grounding it in some form of demonstrative identification, so that even if an individual cannot itself be demonstratively identified, “it may be identified by a description which relates it uniquely to another particular which can be demonstratively identified.”32 If we can do this, can’t we also identify God in this way, by some form of supernatural revelation? The name “God” may co-refer in some trivial way with tokens of that name in the scriptures, but why can’t it refer in some stronger, non-trivial way, through prayer or meditation, or through God’s direct action in the world? I appeal to Hume’s principle that any objects of perception may be numerically different even though they perfectly resemble each other. Perceptual information, unlike linguistic information has only indefinite content, and there is nothing in our perception of some object that signifies whether it is numerically the same as or different from any other perception. Even if there were some private perception that identified its object (such as direct revelation from God), it would be impossible to communicate the identity using public language.
The final chapter extends the co-reference thesis to thought itself. I turn to the connection between my conception of reference and the concept of worship, in order to discuss a phenomenon that has captured the imagination of philosophers for at least a hundred years: intentionality, the supposed relation of “aboutness” between thought and its object. Just as I have claimed that reference statements are illusory, so I claim intentionality is also an illusion. A reference statement like “the name ‘God’ refers to God” expresses an apparently word to world relation (that “God” refers to God), even though what makes it true is a relation between word and word (the co-reference of the term “God” as I use it, with the same term in the Hebrew Bible). Likewise, “Aashir is praying to God” appears to express a real extramental relation between Aashir and God. This is an illusion, similar to the folk belief that eyebeams are emitted from the eye. We cannot understand the name “God” and we cannot have a singular conception of God without reference to the biblical texts.
Thus, I answer the question of the book, namely whether Jews, Muslims, and Christians worship the same God. All have the same singular conception of God, because the three texts (the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament, the Quran) are in a sense one. Both the New Testament and the Quran complete (and sometimes aim to correct) the text on which they are based, and it is this fact (alone) that provides a common understanding of the proper name “God,” in whatever language it is written.
NOTES
1. Durrant (The Logical Status of “God”), 2ff argues that from actual occurrences of “God” in religious language, citing examples of prayers, such as “Almighty God, the fountain of all goodness, we humbly beseech thee . . .” the term “God” is not a proper name. The main examples I shall use in this book are not from prayer, but rather the three scriptures themselves, but even in this prayer, it seems that “Almighty God” co-refers with “thee,” suggesting that “Almighty God” is a referring term.
2. The Quran opens “bismi al-lāhi al-rraḥmāni al-rraḥīmi,” “In the name of God, the Most Gracious, the Most Merciful.” Transliteration by Ali, The Glorious Qur’an, 6. Note that in the Arabic itself (not the transliteration), the word “God” is not the second word, given that Arabic script reads right-to-left.
3. That is, assuming that the tokens “God” and “Allah” have the same meaning in the identity statement as the same tokens in the original texts. I shall discuss the question of disquotation in chapter 9.
4. In the 1952 edition of Translations from the Philosophical Writings of Gottlob Frege, Max Black and Peter Geach translated “Über Sinn und Bedeutung” as “On Sense and Reference.” The German word Bedeutung actually means “signification” or “meaning.” Peter Long and Roger White were the first to translate it as “meaning” in the English version of Frege’s Posthumous Writings. In the third (1980) edition, Geach and Black changed to “meaning” (thus “On sense and meaning”). However, as Dummett pointed out, the term “reference” could not be dislodged by a quarter of a century of philosophical discussion and commentary on Frege’s work, and the original English usage has stuck.
5. “A proper name [is] a word which answers the purpose of showing what thing it is that we are talking about, but not of telling anything about it” (Mill, A System of Logic, 1. ii. 5, my emphasis). See also Prior, Objects of Thought, 155, Strawson, “On referring,” (Logico-Linguistic Papers), 1–27.
6. Ibid., Antequam musicus esset, Socrates dictus est, vel postquam filius Sophronisci non erit, Socrates dicetur.
7. Devitt, “Against direct reference” (On Sense and Direct Reference: Readings in the Philosophy of Language), 463.
8. The idea that a sentence expresses its truth value can be found as early as Frege’s Grundgesetze §32. He says that a significant sentence determines under which (truth) conditions (Bedingungen) it signifies the truth value True, and that if it does signify the True, it is a sort of name for the True, and the sense of this sentence-name is the thought is that the (truth) conditions are met. Actually the idea can be found much earlier in Buridan’s Treatise on Consequences (King 1985, Book I chapter 1), but it is doubtful that Buridan had any influence on Frege.
9. Evans, The Varieties of Reference, 10.
10. Frege, Posthumous Writings, 174, see also p. 130. Frege’s position here is somewhat muddled by his attribution of “sense” to empty terms, so that proper names can have at least some kind of meaning, as well as a designation or reference. This is irrelevant to the present discussion, but see Evans, The Varieties of Reference chapter 1 for ample Frege exegesis.
11. Geach and Black, Translations from the Philosophical Writings
