An experimental defense of the causal-historical theory of reference for proper names
[eng] This dissertation champions the causal-historical theory of reference for proper names by using experimental methods, engaging with the debate that Machery, Mallon, Nichols, and Stich raised in 2004 with their widely influential article “Semantics, cross-cultural style”. Machery and colleagues...
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| Tipo de recurso: | tesis doctoral |
| Estado: | Versión publicada |
| Fecha de publicación: | 2024 |
| País: | España |
| Institución: | Universidad de Barcelona |
| Repositorio: | Dipòsit Digital de la UB |
| OAI Identifier: | oai:diposit.ub.edu:2445/212514 |
| Acceso en línea: | https://hdl.handle.net/2445/212514 http://hdl.handle.net/10803/691376 |
| Access Level: | acceso abierto |
| Palabra clave: | Noms propis Referència (Lingüística) Mètodes experimentals Filosofia del llenguatge Proper names Reference (Linguistics) Experimental methods Philosophy of language |
| Sumario: | [eng] This dissertation champions the causal-historical theory of reference for proper names by using experimental methods, engaging with the debate that Machery, Mallon, Nichols, and Stich raised in 2004 with their widely influential article “Semantics, cross-cultural style”. Machery and colleagues challenged Kripke’s refutation of descriptivism in Naming and Necessity, by presenting the “Gödel Case” to Westerners and East Asians and concluding that referential intuitions vary intra and cross-culturally. Chapter 1 delves into the two major criticisms against Machery et al.’s work. The first concerns the ambiguities in their final prompt; the second asserts that scholars should test theories of reference against linguistic usage and not referential intuitions, as these have a meta-linguistic nature. Chapter 2 explores the major linguistic-usage studies in the literature. While the linguistic-production data with USA participants support the causal-historical theory, the linguistic-comprehension data, based on truth-value judgments of sentences and involving both Westerners and East Asians, are less conclusive due to an epistemic ambiguity. Scholars tried to address the ambiguity with follow-up questions, which however reintroduce meta-linguistic reflections. Chapter 3 discusses two truth-value judgment studies: Experiment 1, with Chinese and Italian participants, conducted in collaboration with Litman Huang, and Experiment 2, with Italian participants. These works aim to resolve the epistemic ambiguity by focusing on the “Jonah Case”, and corroborate the causal-historical theory. Chapter 4 presents an eye-tracking study on the Gödel Case, Experiment 3, conducted with Filippo Domaneschi, Massimiliano Vignolo and Camilo Rodríguez Ronderos. The eye-tracking methodology, bypassing explicit judgments from participants, provides direct linguistic-usage evidence and supports the Kripkean theory. Moreover, the truthvalue judgment data of this experiment differ from the eye-tracking results. This divergence raises questions about the reliability of truth-value judgments and suggests the need for further research. The dissertation concludes with Chapter 5, which summarizes the arguments and develops additional considerations on the role of empirical data in the philosophy of language. |
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