Mr.

Pfeifer on Questions of Reference

Author(s): Jerrold J. Katz
Source: Foundations of Language, Vol. 2, No. 3 (Aug., 1966), pp. 241-244
Published by: Springer
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25000228
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 JERROLD J. KATZ

MR. PFEIFER ON QUESTIONS OF REFERENCE*

Mr. Pfeifer has recently claimed that our work in semantics fails to solve the
very problems which we formerly criticized other philosophers for failing to
solve.' This is, in a sense, true, but not at all damaging to us. The philoso
phers that we criticized for failing to handle certain questions about reference
were philosophers who set out to deal with philosophical issues on the basis
of a theory of language that took the notion of reference as one of its central
concepts. For them to offer little in the way of clarification of this notion
implies serious difficulties in the approach they advocate for dealing with
philosophical issues. However, we proposed to develop a theory based on
the concept of meaning, not on the concept of reference, and so for us the
failure to handle the same problems about reference is of no more conse
quence than our failure to handle problems about morality and religion.
Mr. Pfeifer goes on to claim that we "...commit a graver error in side
stepping the issues that philosophers are attempting to solve".2 In part, we
can give the same answer as above: not all the issues philosophers are at
tempting to solve are ones that we need to treat. Beyond this, however, it is
worth pointing out that Mr. Pfeifer is curiously silent on those issues which
we explicitly take up, e.g. semantic ambiguity, anomaly, synonymy, para
phrase, analyticity, entailment, and so on. Whatever Mr. Pfeifer thinks of
our proposed treatment of these issues, we cannot be accused of side
stepping them. Does Mr. Pfeifer believe that these are not issues that philoso
phers are attempting to solve?
Let us take a look at the four problems about reference that Mr. Pfeifer
thinks our semantic theory should treat and is somehow deficient for not
treating. First, there is the problem he refers to as the problem of referential
and non-referential use of a term. The sentence "I want to meet the Pope" is
a paraphrase of "I want to meet the man who is the bishop of Rome",

* This work was supported in part by the Joint Services Electronics Program (Contract
DA36-039-AMC-02300(E)), the National Science Foundation (Grant GP-2495), the
National Institutes of Health (Grant MH-04737-05), the National Aeronautics and Space
Administration (Grant NsG-496) and the U.S. Air Force (ESD Contract AF19(628)-2487);
also by a grant from the National Institutes of Health (MH-05120-04) to Harvard Uni
versity, Center for Cognitive Studies.
1 Pfeifer, D. E., 'The Question of Reference in the Writings of J. A. Fodor and J. J. Katz',
Foundations of Language 2 (1966) 142-50.
2 Ibid., p. 142.

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Foundations of Language 2 (1966) 241-244. All rights reserved.

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 JERROLD J. KATZ

whereas the sentence "I want to be the Pope" is a paraphrase of "I want to
be the bishop of Rome". A clue to this difference in meaning is given by the
difference in their syntactic structure. Both sentences are, roughly, of the
form subject-verb-object, where the subject is "I", the verb "want", and the
object a nominal pro-form, say "it". However, there is object complemen
tation in each case, and in the former the complement is the sentence "I meet
the Pope" while in the latter it is the sentence "I am the Pope".3 The problem
for semantics is to provide appropriate interpretations for these relevantly
distinct syntactic structures. The problem is far from solved but it is squarely
within semantics, whatever its referential implications may be.
However, Mr. Pfeifer, although he mentions this case, does not develop
his formulation of the problem of referential and non-referential use of a
term with respect to it. Rather, for some strange reason he shifts to another
example, saying, "A better example is: "The Pope is here" and "'Pope' has
four letters"." 4 His claim that our theory would not treat such a case is based
on an unfortunate oversight. He says that we would regard the latter sen
tence as semantically anomalous. This, however, is false. He fails to see that it
is not just the use of 'Pope' that is crucial here but also the use of quotation
marks, or some equivalent device such as an expression like 'The word',
which will have a dictionary specification. This being so, the latter sentence
will indeed refer, but to the word (or perhaps its orthographic realization),
not to the man who is bishop of Rome, as the former sentence does. Ac
cordingly, Mr. Pfeifer's own example for the problem of referential vs. non
referential uses is not even a case in which referential use contrasts with non
referential use.
Second, there is what Mr. Pfeifer calls the problem of Referential Ambi
guity. Here he claims that contextual information is required for the correct
interpretation of an ambiguous sentence to be determined, by which I take
him to mean that such information is needed in order for speakers to decide
which of its senses is the appropriate one on the given occasion.5 Now, we
took great pains to argue that such contextual resolution of semantic ambi
guity is not something that a semantic theory ought to try to deal with. Thus,
it strikes me as somewhat strange for Mr. Pfeifer to criticize us for not doing
what we explicitly argue should not be done. Moreover, he does not offer
any reason for believing that it is a mistake for semantic theory to relinquish
this problem of resolution! His remarks in this connection remind me of the

3 Cf. Rosenbaum, P. S., The Grammar of English Predicate Complement Constructions,

Ph. D. Dissertation, M.I.T.
4 Pfeifer, D. E., op.cit., p. 147.
5 He cannot mean that such information is needed in order to obtain all the readings for
an ambiguous sentence.

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 MR. PFEIFER ON QUESTIONS OF REFERENCE

man who criticized a friend who had proposed a short route to their office on
the grounds that the friend had not solved the problem of finding a short
route to the beach.
Third, there is what Mr. Pfeifer calls the problem of Referential Presuppo
sition. He says that we say nothing about presupposition. Quoting him,
"such questions never arise, for, according to their semantic theory, sen
tences are simply given readings..." 6 Now, in the first place it is just not true
that we have completely neglected this question. In my book with Postal, An
Integrated Theory of Linguistic Descriptions 7, Mr. Pfeifer will find some dis
cussion of presupposition, but, of course, not the whole story. What leads
him to think that we cannot treat this matter is, as the above quotation
shows, that he fails to consider the role of definitions of semantic properties
and relations, which characterize them in terms of formal features of se
mantically interpreted phrase markers. Naturally, one will not find presuppo
sitions indicated as such in readings, but readings assigned to phrase markers
provide the formal features that enable the definition of presupposition to
mark presuppositions, as the definition of entailment marks entailments. In the
case with which Mr. Pfeifer is concerned, the analysis of the presupposition,
which I would agree has to be in terms of the truth of the statement that
there is a king of France at the time of utterance, cannot be carried out
without an analysis of the structure of the definite article, which is compli
cated by the fact that, at present, there is no adequate analysis of the syntax
of the determiner system. Therefore, our theory does treat presupposition,
but the treatment is far from completed.8 This, however, is not an uncommon
situation in science, since virtually no scientific theory has provided a final
solution for each of the problems that falls under it.
Fourth, there is Referential Vagueness. Here Mr. Pfeifer's criticism is
based on an unreasonable demand. Let us grant that sentences such as
those he cites, "Smith is middle-aged" and "Smith is bald", are vague. I
suppose what he means is that they are sentences where there are borderline
cases for which it is quite difficult to decide whether they are true or not. His
criticism of us is that such vagueness cannot be resolved on our theory. But
why is it a problem for semantic theory to resolve such vagueness, a vague
ness which is inherent in the meaning of words like "middle-aged" and
"bald"? What possible sense can it make for Mr. Pfeifer to ask that we
improve on English when we only seek to describe English as it is?

6 Pfeifer, D. E., op.cit., p. 149.

7 Katz, J. J. and Postal, P., An Integrated Theory of Linguistic Descriptions. M.I.T. Press,
Cambridge, Mass., 1964, p. 117.
8 Cf. my paper with Herzberger, 'The Concept of Truth in Natural Languages' (in
preparation).

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 JERROLD J. KATZ

In conclusion, Mr. Pfeifer says, "The devastating blow to this theory is

found in the fact that [its readings] are in no way connected with what lan
guage expresses".9 That is, according to him, there is no statement of the
way in which language relates to things in the world. True, there is no such
statement, but why is this a valid criticism? Again, Mr. Pfeifer's criticism
is valid only if it is applied to a theory that is concerned primarily with
reference. But the conceptual side of language can be studied and semantics,
as I conceive it, is concerned with the conceptual content that languages
express. The connection between readings and what language expresses, in
the semantic as opposed to the referential sense, is that the former constitute
the linguistic representation of the structure of the latter. Semantics, in this
sense, can be pursued without also tackling all the problems of reference,
too. This is not to neglect those problems but to narrow down a subject so
that it can be dealt with in a systematic manner. Mr. Pfeifer's obsession with
reference prevents him from realizing this elementary strategy of scientific
research technique.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

9 Pfeifer, D. E., op.cit., p. 149.

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