Reference, speakers and hearers
Sense seems clearly to be a property of linguistic expressions: it is words and sentences which have senses. Even though we grasp senses with our minds, the question of what sense a given expression possesses is not, for Frege, under the speaker’s control (see text box). Reference, however, is quite different. Unlike sense, reference is under the speaker’s control. It is not words which refer, but speakers. Searle (1969: 82) gives the following two necessary conditions for accomplishing an act of reference:
1. There must exist one and only one object to which the speaker’s utterance of the expression applies.
2. The hearer must be given sufficient means to identify the object from the speaker’s utterance of the expression.
Clearly, since the hearer can be given any number of means to identify the intended object, the reference of a term in a particular context depends on the speaker (and also of course, if it is successful, on the hearer), not on the term itself. Codes are perhaps the most obvious example of the fact that it is the speaker, not the expression itself, which refers. A code is a speech-style in which speaker and hearer have agreed to reassign conventional referents (and senses). There are many others, however. In Warlpiri, for example, a particular style of speech called Jiliwirri, used by men during initiation ceremonies, replaces the conventional referents of words with their antonyms (opposites) (Hale 1971). For example, to express the idea ‘I am sitting on the ground’ in Jiliwirri, the Warlpiri sentence ‘Someone else is standing in the sky’ is used; similarly, the sentence ‘I am short’ conveys in Jiliwirri the idea ‘you are tall’:
One might, of course, say that in this sort of situation it is also the words’ senses which have changed. Under that description, Jiliwirri would constitute a separate language with its own repertoire of senses: a language which happened to have a very close relation to standard Warlpiri in phonology, morpho syntax and in much of the vocabulary, but in which certain crucial semantic differences existed. Another example of the variability of reference may often be found in people’s kitchens. Imagine a kitchen in which rubbish was placed in a plastic bag hanging on hooks behind the door of a cupboard under the sink. We can easily imagine that this might be referred to as the bin, even though the sense of the noun bin is in no way simply that of a plastic bag. (Of course, if the sense of bin is ‘receptacle of any kind for rubbish’, then bin will be being used here in a way compatible with its sense.)
The variability of reference is even more deep-seated in language than these examples suggest. If we reflect on real discourse, which along with ‘literal’ uses of languages also contains metaphors, ironical statements, exaggerations and many other types of non-standard reference, to say nothing of simple mistakes, it will soon become obvious that the referential scope of words is extremely large – that, given the right conditions, any word can be used to refer to any referent. This poses a considerable challenge to the theory of sense. For if a word’s reference is determined by its sense, then the range of reference that any word may have is extremely wide – in fact, indefinite. As a result, the characterization of sense will have to be broad enough to accommodate all the referential possibilities.
If a given word can refer to any referent, we need to distinguish its typical, expected referents from its atypical, unexpected ones. We take this problem up in Chapter 7. More importantly, we need to distinguish between successful and correct acts of reference. If an act of reference is successful, it succeeds in identifying the referent to the hearer. If it is correct, it refers to the referent in a way which conforms to an assumed standard. Thus, to take up the example of the bin, if I say the bin is under the sink, then I may well successfully refer to the rubbish-bag in which I expect the hearer to put their rubbish; but I do not correctly refer to it, on our usual understanding of the sense of the word bin.
