engleski

A Perspective for Semantically Relevant Referential Descriptions

The way Donnellan characterised the referential/attributive distinction and the way which, according to him, determines, for a occurrence of description, whether it is used referentially or attributively – namely the appeal to context of utterance and speaker’s intentions – contributed to standard qualication of the distinction as a pragmatic one ; thus not really relevant for determining of propositional content and truth-conditions. But if it could be argued that there is an evidence for the distinction which does not so heavily rely on a way sentences embedding descriptions are used in particular contexts by particular speakers governed by particular intentions, it appears we would have a case for Donnellan’s distinction as not only pragmatically relevant. e idea is this: If a sentence S which embeds a description D forces us to take D referentially, the way D is used in S ašects its propositional content and truth-conditions. In my paper I want to examine this line of argumentation. I discuss whether we can nd some evidence for semantically relevant Donnellan’s distinction which primarily does not rely either on context in which a sentence that embeds description is uttered or on speaker’s intentions (as Donnellan’s original argumentation for the distinction relied). So my main concern is whether there are such sentences and would they support a semantic signicance of Donnellan’s distinction.

referential descriptions; referential use; attributive use; Donnellan; context of utterance

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