The so-called theory of reference evolved throughout the twentieth century, forming the backbone of analytic philosophy, from the founding contributions of Frege and Russell at the turn of the century to the "new theory of reference" promoted in the 1970s. But the theory of reference, while at the heart of analytic philosophy, is not its only interest. In the so-called primo-phenomenological tradition, that of Brentano and his pupils, the theory of reference is also at the heart of reflections on the central theme of this philosophical tradition: the relationship between thought and its objects. After giving some indications of the relationship between these two traditions, we point out a difference between them concerning the notion of reference.
In the analytic tradition, reference is thereal object to which a representation refers, whereas in the Brentanian tradition, reference is the intentionalobject that is projected by the representation itself, but does not necessarily exist outside it. The notion of intentional object is, in a sense, the most fundamental, since it is the one that the theory of reference ultimately aims to elucidate. The interest of the other conception of reference, the one we might call " realist ", is that it makes the referential relation a genuine relation between two entities that both exist in reality, namely the representation on the one hand and the real object on the other. A reasonable strategy - the one adopted in this lecture - is to start from this non-mysterious notion and try to approach or reconstruct the other notion, the one being explained, from it. So it's no longer simply a question of opposing, as Brentano seems to do, two domains: the natural world, where there are real relations, causal and spatio-temporal, those that imply the existence of relata, and the mental world, with its quasi-relations between mental representations and objects that may exist only in the representation. Instead of opposing these two domains and leaving it at that, we consider the natural world, with its true relations, as more fundamental than the other in the order of explanation, and attempt to analyze the constitutive quasi-relationship of mental intentionality on the basis of true relations between real entities.
An example of such a "naturalistic" strategy, briefly presented at the end of the lecture, is provided by the book by the American philosopher Fred Dretske, Explaining Behavior. He defines the notion of representation (possibly false or without a real object, though always endowed with an intentional object) on the basis of the more fundamental notion of indication, which implies the simultaneous existence of the sign and its real object (e.g. smoke and fire).
