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Preface

Many books, often philosophy books, are a long time in the writing. As an undergraduate in 1974, I was surprised to learn that my tutor, the late Peter Alexander, had been working on his book on Locke for twelve years. The book was published in 1985, twenty-three years after its conception.¹ But this book has been a very long time in the writing. It began with an idea in 1984 that I discussed in a rather bad paper I presented at one of the legendary seminars in room K, chaired by the late Christopher Williams at Bristol University. I write this preface in 2019, exactly thirty-five years and nearly half a lifetime later.

The idea was about what philosophers call reference statements, namely statements that (apparently) say of some word, let’s say the name “Boris,” that it refers to some person, namely Boris himself. In the 1980s, my example would have been “Margaret” referring to Margaret Thatcher, in the 1990s, “Major” referring to John Major, the 2000s, “Blair” referring to Tony Blair, and so on. The number of British prime ministers testifies to the lengthy gestation of this book.

It had struck me that while a reference statement appears to express a relation between a word and a thing, the appearance is misleading. Perhaps a reference statement is true not because of a word-world relation between language and reality, as the grammar suggests, but an intralinguistic or word-word relation. Do not misunderstand: I do not mean that the word “Boris” refers to the word “Boris.” On the contrary, what “Boris” refers to is not the word “Boris,” but Boris the man. The insight was that what makes the reference statement

“Boris” refers to Boris

true is a relation between the term that is mentioned, namely the grammatical subject of the reference statement, the one enclosed in quotation marks, and the term that is used, namely, the grammatical accusative of the sentence, the one without quotation marks. The relation is intralinguistic, not a relation between a word and a person. If that sounds strange, you may enjoy this book.

The idea needed a lot of work. I left teaching and research in the late 1980s for a somewhat different career, but stuck at the idea of intralinguistic semantics in my spare time, producing over the years at least three versions of this book. None of them was quite right, and none of them touched on any biblical subject, until my old friend and sparring partner Bill Vallicella published “Do Christians and Muslims Worship the Same God?”² exactly four years ago as I write. (For complete disclosure, I must say that Vallicella, a philosophical realist, disagrees with practically everything I write, and endorses absolutely no part of the extreme anti-realist position of this book. He has always been supportive of my work, and strengthened it through his steady and inventive challenges, although he certainly disagrees, as he tells me, with the end result.)

While I had used scriptural texts as examples of reference before, the idea of basing a whole book on these examples had not occurred. But it seemed to me that these texts would be the right frame in which to place the intralinguistic picture of reference. The scriptures are a strong counterexample to contemporary theories of reference, which take demonstrative reference as the starting point for reference in general. Pharaoh’s daughter finds a baby in the rushes, then later takes the baby to Pharaoh, pointing to it and saying, “I name this baby ‘Moses.’” According to the standard theory, the demonstrative, “this baby” refers to Moses directly, and at the same time establishes a semantic relation between the proper name “Moses” and the baby referred to, a relation which is somehow preserved when the name is passed to other people, even when the baby is no longer present, and pure demonstrative reference is not available. The standard theory starts with demonstrative reference as the paradigm, and moves to non-demonstrative reference as a particular case. The idea advanced in this book, by contrast, is that we start with reference as we find it in the texts. The people are no longer before us, all we have now is the words, yet we understand the reference. We know that the second book of Exodus refers to Moses, but we have never been acquainted with Moses himself. Why can’t reference start with reference within a text, and move to demonstrative reference as a particular case?

That is the idea of this book, and the book will speak for itself, but there is one confusion that has occurred to practically everyone who has reviewed it, so I shall give due warning at the outset. I say that the truth conditions of a reference statement are intralinguistic. I claim that what makes “‘Frodo’ refers to Frodo” true is the same kind of phenomenon that makes “‘Donald Trump’ refers to Donald Trump” true, so reference is really not a relation between language and the world, but between language and language. Reference is a word-word, not word-world relation, as Brandom puts it. Then practically the same objection occurs to everyone at once: surely the name “Donald Trump” does refer to Trump, so the reference relation cannot be intralinguistic? I reply: yes, “Donald Trump” does indeed refer to Trump, because the reference statement “‘Donald Trump’ refers to Donald Trump” is true. But the relational nature of the statement does not prove the existence of a reference relation. My claim is not that the reference statement is false—for it is true—but I claim that what makes it true is not a relation between language and reality. You can object on various reasonable grounds that my claim about reference statements is wrong, ill-founded, poorly supported, and so forth, but it is not enough to object that some reference statement involving “Trump,” or “Johnson,” or “Merkel” is true, for I do not claim it is false. The question of what makes it true is the core question of this book.

Many people helped me in various ways. The late Jonathan Lowe pointed me to work on similar lines by Charles Chastain and Robert Brandom. Peter Geach told me I had stumbled upon a very deep problem, referring to a chapter in his Mental Acts, but gave no hint of a solution. Although Mark Sainsbury, while editor of Mind, turned down a paper of mine on the subject of fictional reference (also bad), he later followed my work with encouragement and support. It was he who suggested Lexington press.

My late parents were incredibly supportive, sometimes through the darkest of times. I am sad they did not live to see the project through. This book is dedicated to their memory. Thanks go to my long-suffering wife Fiona for putting up with the project for so long (thirty years, to be precise), and to my two children, who did not suffer so long but occasionally (only occasionally mind you) missed a bedtime story due to the siren call of the book. It was my daughter who suggested the example of the naked fugitive (chapter 3), the mystery man who fled from the arrest in Gethsemane without a stitch.

I thank the editors and staff at Lexington, particularly Jana Hodges-Kluck who had the vision to take on this project, and Lenny Clapp who with endless fortitude and patience saw through several versions of the manuscript with his sharp and perceptive comments, despite his initial (and so some extent continuing) suspicion of the core idea. I thank Magali Roques, who provided many helpful comments on early versions of the manuscript, and also David Brightly, who is not a philosopher but whose insightful comments added value in so many places. The customary rider applies.

Finally, I record a very special debt of gratitude to the late Michael Welbourne and the late Peter Alexander for persuading me to return to Bristol as a postgraduate in 1979.

D. E. Buckner, London, 2020

NOTES

1. Ideas, Qualities and Corpuscles, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985.

2. William F. Vallicella, “Do Christians and Muslims Worship the Same God?” Typepad, Tuesday, December 22, 2015, https://maverickphilosopher.typepad.com/maverick_philosopher/2015/12/do-christians-and-muslims-worship-the-same-god.html.