Metaphysics and Epistemology Group (Tuesday - Week 2, TT25)

Abstract: Radical indeterminacy of reference is the thesis that there is no fact of the matter as to which objects singular terms refer to, and which sets of objects are in the extensions of predicates. The indeterminacy of reference elicits an incredulous stare, partly because of its interaction with aboutness: if the proposition that Hegel swims is about Hegel rather than Kilimanjaro, there must be a fact of the matter that determines that ‘Hegel’ refers to Hegel, and not to Kilimanjaro. I argue that in attempting to account for aboutness, the referential indeterminist cannot rely on hyperintensional resources such as Russellian propositions or semantic truth-makers. However, they can still account for the notion of a coarse-grained proposition being about a particular object while maintaining the referential indeterminacy of the expressions purporting to refer to it.