Causal Theory of Reference - Criticisms of The Theory

Criticisms of The Theory

• Gareth Evans argued that the causal theory, or at least certain common and over-simple variants of it, have the consequence that, however remote or obscure the causal connection between someone's use of a proper name and the object it originally referred to, they still refer to that object when they use the name. (Imagine a name briefly overheard in a train or café.) The theory effectively ignores context and makes reference into a magic trick. Evans describes it as a "photograph" theory of reference.

• The links between different users of the name are particularly obscure. Each user must somehow pass the name on to the next, and must somehow "mean" the right individual as they do so (suppose "Socrates" is the name of a pet aardvark). Kripke himself notes the difficulty, John Searle makes much of it.

• Mark Sainsbury argued for a causal theory similar to Kripke's, except that the baptised object is eliminated. A "baptism" may be a baptism of nothing, he argues: a name can be intelligibly introduced even if it names nothing. The causal chain we associate with the use of proper names may begin merely with a "journalistic" source.

• The causal theory has a difficult time explaining the phenomenon of reference change. Gareth Evans cites the example of when Marco Polo unknowingly referred to the African Island as "Madagascar" when the natives actually used the term to refer to a part of the mainland. Evans claims that Polo clearly intended to use the term as the natives do, but somehow changed the meaning of the term "Madagascar" to refer to the island as it is known today. Michael Devitt claims that repeated groundings in an object can account for reference change. However, such a response leaves open the problem of cognitive significance that originally intrigued Russell and Frege.

• East-Asians are more likely than Americans to have intuitions about reference in line with descriptivist theories.