A defense of lexical reference

This dissertation defends the intuitive idea that words refer to extralinguistic things. More precisely, I defend the claim that reference, thought of as a binary relation obtaining between individual word-types and real-world entities is a real, genuine, and objective relation. Call this thesis lexical referentialism. If lexical referentialism is true, then word-types are genuine representational devices: they stand for, or are about, the various entities that populate the universe. If words refer in this sense, then we can use the notion of reference as the central notion in a philosophical theory of meaning. That is, we can explain the core semantic properties of natural language expressions in terms of their correspondence to entities in the world. We can, for instance, explain why sentences encode truth-conditions: because words represent bits of the world, when you put them together in the right way in a sentence, you get something that represents the world as being a certain way, and this representation is true if the world is as represented, and not true otherwise. However, lexical referentialism has recently come under heavy fire, and with it also the idea that sentences have truth-conditions. The main challenge comes from the phenomenon of polysemy. To many linguists and philosophers, polysemy is kryptonite to lexical referentialism. The main idea is that, given polysemy, words cannot be said to refer; by extension, sentences cannot be said to have truth-conditions. But there is also another serious challenge to lexical referentialism. It naturally springs from the idea that we have to explain meaning in terms of communication. Many people who subscribe to this view think that sentences are the fundamental bearers of meaning, and that word meaning is derivative. Call this thesis Sentence Priority. But, if Sentence Priority is true and the Permutation Argument proposed by Quine, Putnam and others is sound, then word meaning is indeterminate. Hence, reference cannot be a real relation obtaining between words and things. It is a useful fiction perhaps, but a fiction nonetheless. The goal of this dissertation is to defend lexical referentialism from these two challenges. It has two main parts. In the first part, I argue that polysemous words can be said to refer, and hence polysemy does not threaten lexical referentialism. To do that, I argue (i) that the polysemy challenge is highly overstated; (ii) that genuinely polysemous words have only two referential senses; (iii) that these two referential senses can account for the problematic data. In the second part, I deal with Sentence Priority. I argue that at least some words have to be primitive bearers of meaning, otherwise we cannot explain how unused sentences have the meanings that they do. Put differently, I argue that Sentence Priority is incompatible with the explanatory role of the principle of compositionality. Since we need compositionality, Sentence Priority must go. If I am right, then maybe lexical referentialism is not so off the mark after all.