The reference problem

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When we think about or talk about something, some aspect of extra-mental and extralinguistic reality, what determines what we talk about or think about? Last year's lecture presented (and criticized) the descriptivist answer to these questions.

We have a certain representation of the external world, a mental encyclopedia if you like, comprising representations of the various entities we believe, rightly or wrongly, to be part of the world in question. These representations, internal to the mind, claim to represent entities present in extra-mental reality. In some cases, the representations in question actually correspond to something real, and thus acquire the status of a reference for the mental representation. In other cases, the representations fail to enter into correspondence with anything at all, and the representation is then devoid of reference: it's a representation without an object. The problem of reference boils down to this: what makes a mental representation correspond to a real entity? The descriptivist answer is that a mental representation enters into correspondence with a real entity when it correctly describes that entity, i.e. when there is an entity in the world that conforms to the representation, that "satisfies" it. A representation is without object if there is nothing in the world that conforms to it or satisfies it.

One of the reasons why the descriptivist conception has been abandoned is that it implies something false, namely that in order to think about or talk about something, we must be in possession of a conception of the thing in question that is both correct and singularizing (i.e., appropriate to the thing in question and to it alone). And yet, of all the things we can talk about or think about, there are very many that we are unable to describe in a way that is both singularizing and correct. Often, what we know about a thing applies to other things as well, so that our representation is not singularizing; and just as often, what we think we know about a thing is in fact incorrect, which doesn't prevent us from thinking or talking about it.

According to anti-descriptivists, what determines what we think about or talk about is not how we represent what we think about or talk about, nor are our ideas about them, since these ideas may be incorrect or too vague. To use Hilary Putnam's famous expression, what determines reference is not "in the heads" of the subjects who think or speak: it is external relations between subjects and the entities of the world to which they relate in speech or thought. Externalism is the doctrine, now dominant, according to which reference, what our representations relate to, is determined not by intrinsic characteristics of our mental representations, by their content or an aspect of their content, but, at least in part, by the environment in which these representations are immersed, and by external relations with the entities present in the environment. This first lecture presented the arguments in favor of externalism and the thought experiments on which it is based.