Generations of Christians, Janet Soskice demonstrates, once knew God and Christ by hundreds of remarkable names. These included the appellations ‘Messiah’, ‘Emmanuel’, ‘Alpha’, ‘Omega’, ‘Eternal’, ‘All-Powerful’, ‘Lamb’, ‘Lion’, ‘Goat’, ‘One’, ‘Word’, ‘Serpent’ and ‘Bridegroom’. In her much-anticipated new book, Soskice argues that contemporary understandings of divinity could be transformed by a return to a venerable analogical tradition of divine naming. These ancient titles – drawn from scripture – were chanted and sung, crafted and invoked (in polyphony and plainsong) as they were woven into the worship of the faithful. However, during the sixteenth century Descartes moved from ‘naming’ to ‘defining’ God via a series of metaphysical attributes. This made God a thing among things: a being amongst beings. For the author, reclaiming divine naming is not only overdue. It can also re-energise the relationship between philosophy and religious tradition. This path-breaking book shows just how rich and revolutionary such reclamation might be.

This chapter unpacks the complex stitching that makes up the reference tapestry by reviewing theories of indefiniteness and definiteness and by examining the complex issues of in-/definiteness. The chapter argues that definiteness is a speaker-centred concept, including whether the speaker expects the addressee able to share a sufficiently similar conceptualisation of the referent and that the entire discourse event contributes to the establishment of an entity as definite or not. For this reason, we argue for the separation of reference (function) from the expression (form). An indefinite expression (form) can be used for definite reference (function) and a definite expression (form) can be used for indefinite reference (function). There is no one-to-one relationship between the lexicogrammatical realisation of the expression and its function in an act of reference. The chapter includes discussion of various types of referential choice including lexical expressions, pronouns, and proper names.

This chapter explores referential metonymy as an atypical use of reference. After reviewing relevant literature on referential metonymy, we consider the extent to which it is inherently atypical. Using examples of metonymy from medical discourse contexts, including nurse handover discourse and medical students self-reflections, we situate metonymy as a type of reference, that is, metonymic reference, and examine features which establish its use as atypical reference. We show that typical or atypical uses of metonymic reference depend on a variety of factors. While metonymic reference is essential in some contexts for safe and efficient reference, we also show that in some cases its use can signal stigmatisation of patients and/or difficulties of medical professions in maintaining moral. In these cases, referential choice becomes especially significant.

Stage 6 of the journey addresses various aspects of how information is conveyed and organized in a sentence, beginning with the stubborn problems that led to the development of dynamic semantics (‘donkey sentences’ and cross-sentential anaphora), through properties of expressions that are used to refer (descriptions, proper names, indexical expressions), to the organization of information (presuppositions and projective content, topic, focus, coherence). As such, it is a step to the next stage that concerns utterance meaning.

This chapter presents the referentialist revolution that occurred in 1970 through the new arguments, notions, and theses it introduced in semantics and philosophy. In particular, it introduces modal, semantic, and epistemic arguments against descriptivism, the central concept of a rigid designator, and the theses of semantic externalism and Direct Reference.

This chapter summarises the main lessons gathered in the book. It explains that the arguments developed in the referentialist revolution, when properly understood, show that names have a Millian semantics. The main conclusions are that the metasyntactic interpretation of two-dimensionalism introduced in this book is the only form of descriptivism that remains compatible with this result, and that in turn the metasyntactic account will be compatible with an account of indexical thought inspired by David Lewis.

A central theoretical tension for the semantics of proper names and attitude reports, known as Frege’s puzzle, goes as follows. On the one hand, a simple and attractive theory holds that the sole semantic function of a proper name is to contribute a referent, leading to the prediction that co-referential proper names like Superman and Clark Kent are semantically equivalent.On the other hand, intuition tells us that it could be true to say that Lois Lane believes that Superman is strong while at the same time seemingly false to say that Lois Lane believes that Clark Kent is strong. We survey the three most popular approaches to reconciling this tension: complicating the semantics of proper names (non-rigid designation), complicating the semantics of attitude reports (hidden indexicals), and complicating the pragmatics of attitude reports. We also discuss the related issues of Kripke’s puzzle, as well as Saul’s puzzle concerning substitution of co-referential proper names in simple sentences.

Annotations and “translations” of the seemingly cryptic statements of President Donald Trump have been an ongoing feature of media coverage of his candidacy and the first year of his presidency. Efforts in the media to decipher Trump’s enigmatic references have presented Donald Trump and his campaign as communicating in a language unintelligible to mainstream media audiences. As in Keith Basso’s account of a Western Apache speech genre termed “speaking with names” (1996), the coherence and significance of Donald Trump’s use of proper names and a variety of other expressions often become clear only when linked to a context at a remove from their immediate surround, generally one found in the world of conservative and alt-right media. In providing such clarification, mainstream media annotations of Donald Trump’s words render his speeches a moment of something like language contact between two distinct communicative worlds: the “right-wing” and the “mainstream.” The result is the aggravation of divisions between multiple disconnected communicative “silos” or “bubbles.” Trump’s verbal practices thus bring into question the very existence of something that might be called “the American public.”

This paper revisits Hintikka’s and Thompson’s programs of understanding Kantian intuition in modern logical terms. Presenting and thoroughly examining related textual evidence, found in Kant’s writings and others’, Capozzi shows that Kant has a working notion of a singular concept, and that the objectivity of intuitions doesn’t require assimilating them to logically singular terms.

Chapter 3 provides an overview of two influential pragmatic approaches to reference: Accessibility theory and the Givenness Hierarchy. Both accounts have been claimed to be compatible with relevance theory. However, it has also been claimed relevance theory alone cannot account for the full range of data and that these auxiliary scales of activation are necessary additions. In this chapter these claims are examined, and some objections are raised. The more general objections relate to the nature of the relevance-theoretic approach to utterance interpretation and how scales of encoded activation might fit with this. More specific objections relate to how the activation scale accounts deal with stylistic or so-called special uses of referring expressions. Finally, some examples of proper names in English are briefly discussed to illustrate how highly context sensitive the choices made by speakers can be, and to demonstrate the crucial role played by considerations of style and genre.