Removing Referents from Extension

John Justice
Randolph College

Following Frege and Russell, many theorists have held that the referents of referring terms were also their extensions.  There have been disputes about which terms are genuinely referential, but it has been widely accepted that the referents of such terms are their contributions to the determination of truth-values.  However, the consequences of having referents as extensions are notorious: vacuous referential terms lack extensions, and semantic coordination with other sorts of noun phrase is problematic.  Montague raised the extensions of names to sets of sets containing their referents, but this left vacuous names without extensions and entangled names in the semantic-type mismatches that plague Montague grammar.  I argue that the extension of a noun phrase of any sort is a set whose members are right-sized subsets of a restriction set determined by its sense condition.