The Reference Book

John Hawthorne and David Manley wrote an excellent book on the many issues surrounding the twin notions of reference and singular thought. The book is divided into two parts corresponding to two main objectives. In Part I, which is titled " Against Acquaintance " and includes Chapters 1-3, they present a first case in favour of what they call liberalism — the view according to which neither reference nor singular thought are constrained by a special relation of acquaintance — and they consider and reject various arguments against it. In Part II, which is titled " Beyond Acquaintance " and includes Chapters 4-6, they challenge the current semantic rift between definite descriptions , indefinite descriptions, demonstratives and names. The hypothesis they defend is that specific indefinites, definite descriptions and demonstratives make the same contribution to truth-conditions while they differ in their presuppositional profile. Names, on the other hand, should be treated somewhat differently but their pre-dicative uses and their referential uses would be strictly related. In the " Afterword " at the end of the book the authors recapitulate the main line of argument and expose some doubts on the very notion of reference and on the existence of linguistic expressions from natural language that are really referential. Chapter 1 offers an introductory critical review of the central notions of reference, singular thought and acquaintance as they have been characterised in the contemporary debate. The authors survey the themes that are standardly associated with the notion of reference , including object-dependence, exhaustiveness, rigidity and the similarities between the semantic behaviour of referential terms and that of variables whose meaning is fixed relative to an assignment function. They further introduce the existent characterizations of singular thought in terms of singular content, mental files, and re-lational object-representations as opposed to satisfactional representations. And they distinguish two main notions of acquaintance in terms of discriminating knowledge, which they call epistemic acquaintance , and in terms of a causal relation to the object, which they call causal acquaintance. In section 1.6, titled " Should auld acquaintance be forgot? " , Hawthorne and Manley present a series of examples 123 Book reviews