Folk Ideas About Reference and Specific Indefinites

Informal discourse about specific indefinites often employs ideas such as ‘the individual the speaker had in mind’. Although this kind of discourse most often seems to proceed coherently, many semanticists are sceptical about theoretical or formal accounts employing these notions. In this paper, we argue that folk ideas about reference are central to semantics, figuring in the truth conditions of some specifically used indefinites. We adapt some proposals found in Perry (2001) to clarify what these ideas might be. We further argue that while discourse containing specific indefinites may make reference to speaker’s referents, the indefinite forms themselves are never directly referential, rather they are attributive. Finally, we aim to provide a taxonomy of specific indefinites by assuming only an analysis of indefinites as existential quantified noun phrases (QNPs), and by assuming other independently motivated mechanisms such as contextual restriction of quantifier domains. Stalnaker’s (1998) proposal for specific indefinites found in discourses like (1) is similar to Kripke’s proposal about referentially used definite descriptions. For Stalnaker, the first sentence just has a meaning which determines an existential proposition, but at the utterance level, the first sentence introduces a ‘speaker’s referent’ to which reference is subsequently made with the pronoun.