Introduction

Reference is a two-place relation. One relata refers, the other is referred to. Candidate referring items include, among others, words, ideas, and maps. Candidate referents include, among others, objects, properties, and states of affairs. Arguments that people can refer to non-mental objects, for example, often parallel arguments that people can know about them. Other times, however, the recasting was quite fruitful. Appeals to reference promise to explain what makes sentences have the truth-conditions that they do and to identify what those truth-conditions are, thereby setting the stage for discovering their truth-values. Noonan discusses Evans’s attempt to solve this problem by holding that a cluster of information may dominantly be of one item even though it contains information whose causal source is different. Noonan concludes that Evans’s proposal faces unmet challenges, and more generally, that opponents of descriptivism have no obvious way to handle reference change.