ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on a particular component of meaning, known as reference. Reference is also implicated in downstream philosophical debates, such as the debate about scientific realism. Russell draws the same distinction using the words connotation and denotation. Russell's On Denoting is a paradigmatic instance of analytic philosophy: concise, rigorous, innovative, and rude about Hegelians. Russell's alteration is, in effect, to forge a link between sense and reference, so that they are not as independent as they seem to be in Frege's picture. Kripke's solution introduces the notion of a rigid designator, a term that refers to the same thing in every possible world where that thing exists. Semantic externalism has been extremely influential, but it suffers from its own difficulties. semantic externalism, is one of the most significant conceptual developments of mid-twentieth-century philosophy. Global descriptivism is the view that descriptivism is true of the whole of our language.
