The Routledge Handbook of Linguistic Reference

This Handbook offers students and more advanced readers a valuable resource for understanding linguistic reference; the relation between an expression (word, phrase, sentence) and what that expression is about. The volume’s forty-one original chapters, written by many of today’s leading philosophers of language, are organized into ten parts:

1. Early Descriptive Theories
2. Causal Theories of Reference
3. Causal Theories and Cognitive Significance
4. Alternate Theories
5. Two-Dimensional Semantics
6. Natural Kind Terms and Rigidity
7. The Empty Case
8. Singular (De Re) Thoughts
9. Indexicals
10. Epistemology of Reference

Contributions consider what kinds of expressions actually refer (names, general terms, indexicals, empty terms, sentences), what referring expressions refer to, what makes an expression refer to whatever it does, connections between meaning and reference, and how we know facts about reference. Many contributions also develop connections between linguistic reference and issues in metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of science.

Stephen Biggs is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Iowa State University. He researches and teaches in philosophy of mind and language, epistemology, and cognitive science.

Heimir Geirsson is Professor and Chair of the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Iowa State University. He works primarily in philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, epistemology, and metaethics, and is the author of Philosophy of Language and Webs of Information (2013).