ABSTRACT
‘Reference’ is a technical term, so it needs to be defined: many contemporary philosophers of language rely on an intuitive notion of reference (and of ‘aboutness’), but that is as illegitimate as relying on an intuitive notion of force to do physics. Reference is here defined as the primary cognitive dimension of meaning: it is what the understander of an expression has to cognize in order to count as understanding. Ontology, which is correlative with reference, emerges as language-driven, so that objects ‘drop out of’ language. The context principle ensures that objects cannot pre-exist the transcendental possibility of language. This points us towards linguistic idealism, the doctrine that the world is essentially a product or precipitate of language. (The transcendentalism of this position is non-Kantian, because it has no truck with a world of Dinge an sich). Since reference is an aspect of meaning, it shares with meaning the latter’s theoretical status, and referents are therefore theoretical posits. This point is reinforced by an examination of the permutation argument, according to which metalinguistic interpretations of an object-language can be permuted without disturbing the truth-values of object-language sentences. It is to be noted that the distinction between object-language and metalanguage is a distinction between attitudes that speakers can adopt towards a given natural or formal language. One adopts the object-language perspective when one simply communicates with sentences, without taking the theoretical step of asking after semantical questions. Semantical notions are metalinguistic, so questions of meaning, sense, reference, satisfaction and so on only arise when one adopts the theoretical, metalinguistic stance towards a given language, now viewed as object-language. The possibility of a systematic permutation of metalinguistic reference assignments, and the associated indeterminacy of reference, is sometimes taken to point towards scepticism about meaning, but it is argued that this is a mistake. Indeterminacy of reference is a metalinguistic, not an object-linguistic, phenomenon. It leaves object-language communication undisturbed.
