Situations And Individuals

In Situations and Individuals, Paul Elbourne argues that the natural languageexpressions that have been taken to refer to individuals -- pronouns, proper names, and definitedescriptions -- have a common syntax and semantics, roughly that of definite descriptions asconstrued in the tradition of Frege. In the course of his argument, Elbourne shows that proper nameshave previously undetected donkey anaphoric readings. This is contrary to previous theorizing and,if true, would undermine what philosophers call the direct reference theory (which holds that thesole contribution of a proper name to the truth conditions of a sentence is an individual) as wellas the related doctrine that proper names are rigid designators.Elbourne begins by addressing donkeyanaphora, relating other concerns about pronouns to the solution of this notorious problem. Hissubsequent argumentation provides a unified semantics for the donkey anaphoric and bound andreferential uses of pronouns and discusses the prospect of unifying the syntax and semantics ofpronouns with the syntax and semantics of normal definite descriptions. Elbourne's aim is not onlyto advance his proposal of a unified syntax and semantics but also to urge linguists andphilosophers dealing with pronoun interpretation to consider a wider range of theories than they doat present, and to test the competing claims of description-based theories and dynamic semanticsagainst the data.