| The Causal Theory of Reference | |
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Recommended Reading |
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Primary:
Kripke, S. (1972) ‘Naming and Necessity’.
Putnam, H. (1975) ‘The Meaning of ‘Meaning’’. Secondary: Lycan,
W. G. (2000) Philosophy of Language,
Devitt, M. & K. Sterelny (1987) Language and Reality, Evans,
Gareth (1973) ‘The Causal Theory of Names’ in Schwartz, S. (ed.)
(1977) Naming, Necessity, and Natural Kinds,
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Introduction
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What
we want is a theory about just what it is
that makes a word refer to the thing to which it refers. What is it
– in the real world – that establishes a relationship between those
two things; or, what is the nature of this relationship? Frege proposed a
distinction between senses and references, with the claim that references
were determined by senses. He did not, however, properly clarify what
senses actually were – how we could understand them. One attempt at
clarification was to propose that descriptions could play some of the role
that senses were supposed to play. In description theories the link
between the name and the object is said to be just that the object is the
unique satisfier of that description, but we saw that there are problems
with this proposal. And apart from the problems we’ve already noticed,
definitions must eventually become circular. Just consider what a
description consists of. In the case of Aristotle, for example, the
description would be ‘the teacher of Alexander’, plus a bunch of other
stuff maybe. But this description appeals to terms like ‘teacher’ and
‘Alexander’ which are themselves in need of explanation. Perhaps
‘Alexander’ can be equated to ‘the pupil of Aristotle’, but this
would lead us to an obvious definitional loop. It has been argued that
that we will always get such loops. Consider the definitions in a
dictionary, for example; they are eventually circular in the same way.
Somehow we have to find a non-descriptive way of fixing some references in
order to even get started.
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The
Causal Theory of Reference
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Saul
Kripke has proposed a different approach to getting at references. His
idea is that a name refers to something because there is a special kind of
causal relationship between the
use of the name and the thing to which it refers. It is this causal
relationship that gets to play the role of Frege’s sense. This is
particularly nice because if we’re going to appeal to senses to explain
how language works, we would want some way of explaining them in terms of
the other sorts of things that we accept exist in the world. Physical
causes and histories are just the sort of thing that we’d be looking
for, so a theory that claimed to be able to account for reference in those
terms is well worth looking at. Any
theory of reference of the kind that we’re now considering has to
account for at least two things: in the first place, it has to account for
the manner in which a name first becomes attached to an object; and, in
the second place, it must be able to explain how it is that people not
present at the naming and not acquainted with the object can use the name
to refer to it. So let’s talk about that. a.
Baptism The
event which fixes the reference of a term – typically a new term – is
called its baptism or a dubbing. The theory which tells us how the
baptism/dubbing works is a theory of reference
fixing. We can start by describing the standard form which such an
event takes. Let’s
suppose that we want to name our dog ‘Fido’. In the presence of the
object to be named, the person doing the naming points at the object and
says, ‘this is called ‘Fido’’. We can see that in this case there is some sort of causal link between the object and the term. Just
being present and observing the object involves a causal linkage between
the object and the observer, and the observer seeing the object and
pointing at it and saying ‘Fido’ is a chain of events distinguishable
from other events in terms of the causal links between the observer who
makes this ostensive definition of the term and the object whose name is
being defined, and the utterance of the name term itself. In this
standard/normative case the introduction of the term is by ostension. The
baptism is not only effective for the person doing the actual pointing and
naming. We have to imagine that anyone else who was also present at the
dubbing event, and who has the required linguistic abilities, would also,
in virtue of their observing that event, gain the ability to refer to the
object using the name ‘Fido’. This too is to be understood in terms of
the causal links that exist between the observer of that event and the
participants in that event – she hears the word ‘Fido’, she sees the
object Fido, she sees the pointing of the finger at Fido, and so on. b.
Reference
Borrowing But
what about those people who did not observe the original event? Most of us
here were not present when each of us were given our names (I mean Bob
wasn’t there when Carol was named and Carol wasn’t there for Bob
either) and yet we have no difficulty in using and understanding those
names. What can account for that ability? Apparently, the story goes that
those not at the original baptismal event obtain their ability to refer to
the object using its name from other speakers who already possess this
ability, and the ability of any speaker who uses the name successfully can
eventually be traced back to one of the participants in the dubbing. I can
talk about Napoleon, because I have read about Napoleon in a book, and
I’ve gotten my referring ability via that channel. The author of the
book may have heard about Napoleon from a lecturer. The lecturer may have
heard stories told by his relatives. The relatives will have heard from
other folks. And some of those folks, somewhere along the line, will have
seen Napoleon being pointed to and addressed as Napoleon, and so on …
all the way back to Mrs. Buonaparte saying ‘What a lovely little boy.
I’ll call him Napoleon.’ Each
of those interactions is – we have to suppose – distinguishable as a
causal relationship. In each case the causal linkage is such that the name
use of the name is linked in the appropriate way to the object … and
appropriate here just means that it’s linked in just the right way so
that it does refer. You’ll
notice here that there’s nothing required to be known about Napoleon for
the reference to succeed. The final speaker may have nothing but false
beliefs about Napoleon, but if the causal linkages that are in place are
of the correct sort then he can successfully refer to Napoleon. That’s
very different from the Description Theories.
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Advantages
of Causal Theories of Reference
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With
any theory there are going to be pros and cons. We’ll start by having a
look at the points in favour of this one. a.
Explains
Sense In
the first place, if we take sense to be something like the ‘mode of
presentation’ that Frege generally claimed it to be, then we can
identify it with the causal chain that is attached to each term and links
it to the thing it references. i.
You can see how this would work. Given two names that have the same
reference like ‘Hesperus’ and ‘Phosphorus’ or ‘Tully’ and
‘Cicero’ we can distinguish the two by saying that the causal chain
that links my use of the word ‘”Hesperus’ to Venus and my use of the
word ‘Tully’ to the famous Roman orator are quite different from the
causal chains that link my use of ‘Phosphorus’ to Venus and
‘Cicero’ to the orator. ii.
Furthermore, it was claimed that sense determines reference, and it is
certainly the case that if you have a causal/historical chain that links
the use of a word at one end of it, with an object at the other end, and
this object is supposed to be the reference of the word, then there is a
very definite sense in which the chain determines the referent of the
word. It determines it just by having the word at one end and the object
at the other. iii.
Finally, sense was supposed to be the essential thing for Frege in
understanding the meaning of a word. It’s only if you have some special
cognitive relation to this object ‘sense’ – which Frege called
‘grasping’ it – that you can be said to understand. Or rather, the
very fact of your understanding is said to consist
in your having this relationship with the sense. Well, as far as the
causal/historical linkage goes, you can only be held to understand a word
if your usage is properly placed in a causal chain linking word and
object. It is fairly clear that some part of this chain is going to have
to pass through the brain/mind of the language user. At various places in
the explanation of how the causal/historical story of sense goes we’ve
been mentioning as one of the qualifications that the user involved has to
have a certain degree of linguistic sophistication. You can see why this
is the case if you consider whether the dog that I baptize ‘Fido’ will
perceive this as a baptism and will have the appropriate causal connection
that will account for its use of the word ‘Fido’. I think not. Now,
this ‘linguistic sophistication’ of which I speak, which may also be
thought of as language competence, is the sort of thing that results from
causes in the brain. These causes are therefore essential to the story.
The possession of particular causes of this sort by the word user can be
thought of as constituting his ‘grasping’ of the sense. (It’s like
he’s got hold of a chain somewhere in the middle links, in virtue of
their passing through his head.) b.
Solves
the puzzles of reference We
also need to be sure that the new theory is at least as capable as the
sense theory or the description theory of solving the four puzzles that
are taken as fundamental tests for theories of reference. i.
First, we need to be able to explain why it is that two identifying
statements like Venus
is the evening star Venus
is Venus can actually have different meanings or cognitive
significances while the only difference between them is that different
referring terms are used to refer to the same objects. You’ll remember
that according to Mill these got their meaning from the meaning of their
parts, and the meaning of the parts ‘Venus’ and ‘evening star’ was
no more than their reference, and their reference is identical, and so the
two sentences should mean the same. For Frege, on the other hand, the
referring terms had different senses because they had different ‘modes
of presentation,’ so they contributed different things to the meanings
of the sentences. The same is true of causal/historical chains. The link
from ‘Venus’ to Venus is different from the link from ‘the evening
star’ to Venus, and the different chains make different contributions to
the meanings of the sentences. ii.
Second, we have to be able to explain how it is that we can make
meaningful statements that appear to refer to objects that don’t exist.
How is it that we can say something like Pegasus had a glossy white coat And be in no danger of saying something meaningless?
If the meaning of a sentence is derived from the meaning of its part, and
one of those parts has no meaning because it has no reference, then the
sentence should be meaningless. In this sort of case the causal/historical theory
claims that although there is no actual object to which a causal chain
from ‘Pegasus’ can be attached, this does not mean that there is not a
very similar causal chain attached that can play much of the role of
sense-giver that the designational causal chains play for actually
referring terms. Consider how the name ‘Pegasus’ is introduced:
someone says ‘There is a wonderful creature that is just like a horse
but it has wings and can fly.’ In such an introduction the storyteller
is giving a description which has a meaning and a sense because the
referring terms in it, ie. ‘horse’, ‘wings’, do refer – though
they refer in this case to abstractions, which is another story. In short,
it’s because of this grounding of the introductory description that
‘Pegasus’ can be said to be referentially fixed. iii.
We have to be able to explain how it is that we can make meaningful
statements that appear to deny that something exists. You’ll recall the
problem there for direct reference theories: if your statement denying
that Pegasus exists is true then the statement refers to a non-existent
thing so there is a failure of reference so there is a failure of meaning
so the statement is meaningless. It can only be meaningful if it is false.
Inconceivable! But the same story that explains why reference to
nonexistent fictional creatures is meaningful will suffice to explain why
existence statements that refer to them will be meaningful. The
nonexistent thing being referred to is not at the root of the causal chain
attached to the term ‘Pegasus’, but there is
a chain and it is grounded and so there is a sense-analogue for the term
and so it can be said to be meaningful and so the sentences truly denying
its existence can be meaningful. |
Problems
for Causal Theories of Reference
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Now
for the problems. a.
Change
of reference The
first problem to look at is the problem of change of reference. Here’s a
simple example: Two babies are born, and their mothers bestow names
upon them. A nurse inadvertently switches them and the error is never
discovered. It will henceforth undeniably be the case that the man
universally known as ‘Jack’ is so called because a woman dubbed some
other baby with the name. The
problem is that the dubbing is pointing at one object originally and yet
through various historical events it seems that the reference has switched
to some other object. How can this be the case if the reference is
determined by the original dubbing event? The
standard response to a difficulty such as this is to suppose that the
causal/historical chain that connects a name to its bearer is actually a
whole lot of chains: there are
typically several chains
connecting the object and the term that names it. For example, and most
obviously, every time you are introduced to a new person there is the
equivalent of a dubbing event for that person. If that is the case, then
it’s certainly possible that some groundings may be inconsistent with an
‘original’ dubbing. The baby Jack in Evans’s example is confused
with the baby Jim. The original referential role of the dubbing event upon
the other baby – let’s call it Jim – is transmitted through just one
causal chain, but the large number of subsequent groundings of the name
Jack in that baby are able to overwhelm the referential significance of
that original dubbing so that the baby can really be said to have been
named Jack. b.
The
quâ-problem Another
difficulty, which is not so easily gotten around, goes by the name of the quâ-problem.
Consider this: I point at an object, for example, a dog, and I say
‘Fido!’ I then take it that I have named this object, this dog, Fido.
But what is it that distinguishes this naming event from the naming event
where I point at a dog and say ‘Dog.’ How does it turn out in the
first case that the causal anchor of the referential chain is laid in the
particular dog I called Fido, whereas in the second case the causally
relevant division of the world is all things that are dogs? How, indeed,
did it turn out that in the first instance I was taken to be pointing at
the whole object – the dog quâ
dog – and not at the dog’s nose and had thus named the dog’s nose
‘Fido’, or perhaps the wetness of the left nostril, or perhaps a time
slice of the dog’s passage through the space-time continuum, or etc.? Now,
it is a fact that names don’t typically point at any of those other
things, but it is another fact that they could. We could very easily come
up with names for such things and ground them in what would apparently be
the very same ‘object’. This sort of thing strongly suggests that
there is something about the grounder
himself that is relevant to what is really the object that is being
baptized. The obvious thing that could be different in the person doing
the grounding and responsible for the type of grounding that occurs, is
the thing that we are sure is different in the grounder; that is, the intention of the person doing the grounding, by which I mean their
mental state of intending to refer to the dog rather than to time slices
of the critter. Defenders
of the causal theory admit that this means that there has to be something
like a description involved in the baptismal event. A description is
required to make the claim that one has an intention to point at an object
of a particular kind rather than of some other kind. So the causal theory
really has to have some elements of descriptivism to make it work. c.
Natural
kind terms The
descriptions involved in solving the last problem (if they can solve it)
involve the naming of natural kinds rather than particular individuals –
things like wing, horse, dog, and so on. Unfortunately, such descriptions
are going to be subject to all the same criticisms that were made for the
original ‘pure’ description theories, together with some others.
Kripke and Putnam, for example, make what we call modal
arguments against descriptions: for any such description there is a
possible world in which the description fails. For example, we may
describe a tiger as a wild, striped, feline, but it would still be a tiger
even if it turns out that tigers are only striped because the Freemasons
had painted them that way. A possible world without freemasons would still
have tigers, even if they were no longer striped. Even
worse difficulties arise when it is realized that these descriptions can
be neither necessary nor sufficient for correct use of the terms in
question. Consider necessity first. Putnam makes the point that he cannot
reliably distinguish an elm tree from a beech tree because he does not
have, either explicitly or implicitly, the knowledge in the form of a
description that is needed to identify either tree. Yet when he says that
elms are trees or when he hears others talking about elms in autumn leaf
he is surely referring to elm trees and he is surely being told about elm
trees. Thus identifying knowledge is not necessary for successful
reference and to grasp the meaning of a term. And
consider sufficiency. Devitt and Sterelny give the example of the
discovery of a creature that satisfies all the identifying descriptions of
Pegasus. It’s a real flying horse. Perhaps it was bred by the Freemasons
in a secret gene splicing factory in This is an appropriate point at which to introduce you to the famous Twin Earth argument by Putnam. It may be taken as an argument against the possible adequacy of descriptive theories in the original Russellian sense. Imagine that there is a world far, far away from Earth, but a world in the same universe as Earth – not a merely ‘possible’ world then – and this world is a near duplicate of our own familiar planet. A casual observer would see the same plants and animals and seas and continents, and even the same people speaking the same sentences in the same language. In fact, however, Twin Earth differs from Earth in that whereas water on Earth is made of H2O, what the inhabitants of Twin Earth call ‘water’ is made of XYZ. Now, XYZ is a colourless, odourless, potable liquid and has all the other properties that a seventeenth century Englishman would have given to the thing he called ‘water’. But ‘water’ despite the identity of the descriptions does not mean the same thing on Twin Earth as it does on Earth, because it points to XYZ rather than H2O. This indicates the failure of the description theory to determine reference properly. It also indicates, that the descriptions as instantiated in someone’s head, their thoughts or intentions, can’t be identically referring either; and therefore, because the heads of the speakers are otherwise identical, it appears that meaning cannot be defined entirely in terms that do not reach beyond the mind of the speaker. As Putnam puts it, meanings just ‘ain’t in the head’. |