Against Arguments from Reference

It is common in various quarters of philosophy to derive philosophically significant conclusions from theories of reference. In this paper, we argue that philosophers should give up on such ‘arguments from reference.’ Intuitions play a central role in establishing theories of reference, and recent cross-cultural work suggests that intuitions about reference vary across cultures and between individuals within a culture (Machery et al. 2004). We argue that accommodating this variation within a theory of reference undermines arguments from reference. Interest in theories of reference is not limited to the philosophy of language. In fact, assumptions about theories of reference figure crucially in nearly every corner of philosophy, including the philosophy of mind, the philosophy of science, the philosophy of race, and meta-ethics, and it is widely agreed that identifying a correct theory would have far-reaching philosophical implications. In what follows, we focus on arguments that derive philosophically significant conclusions from the assumption of one or another * We would like to thank Elizabeth Harman , Jonathan Weinberg, and Wayne Wu for helpful comments on previous drafts.