Specificity and Resolution in the Communicative Use of Singular Terms

Abstract

Abstract This chapter argues for an alternative to what I call the ‘standard view’ of communicative use of singular terms. On this view, communication using a singular term requires that speaker and hearer treat it as standing for the same object, and that their doing so be secured in an appropriately non-lucky way. The first part of the paper uses cases involving ‘felicitous non-specificity’, where communication using a singular term runs smoothly even though participants in the conversation do not have a specific object in mind, to raise an initial challenge to the standard view. The rest of the paper motivates an alternative account of what must go non-luckily right in communicative uses of singular terms, and shows how this account solves the initial puzzle. According to the alternative account, ordinary thinking about ordinary things involves sustaining relations of cognitive focus upon them, and communicative use of singular terms involves engagement in joint cognitive-focus-sustaining activity. But a focus relation has a degree of resolution. So cases of felicitous non-specificity are predicted by the proposal: they are cases where speaker and hearer are engaged in a joint focus-sustaining activity at a degree of resolution too coarse to distinguish one potential referent from another.