Michael Devitt: The Reference Determination of Social Kind Terms

Abstract

According to traditional description theories of reference, a term’s reference is determined by certain descriptions that competent speakers associate with the term. Our experiments tested the description theory of four social kind terms, using the method of truth value judgments.

In Ignorance conditions, where the vignette’s character, Taylor, is unaware of the social role of the referent, our results yielded a substantive conclusion against the description theory. This supports, by inference to the best explanation, the alternative causal-historical theory that speakers can “borrow” the reference of a term from earlier users in communication situations. However, in Error conditions where Taylor was wrong about the social role, our results did not differ from chance.

Our best explanation of this failure, supported by some participants’ explanations of their answers, is that some participants took Taylor to have misunderstood the target term. The possibility of such misunderstanding is intrinsic to causal borrowing. The difficulty of constructing a plausible Error vignette that would make misunderstanding unlikely led us to the methodological conclusion that it may not be possible to find such a vignette. Maybe we will have to rest with tests of description theories in Ignorance conditions.