Jessica Pepp
University of California, Los Angeles

The aim of this paper is to set out two pictures of reference and to bring to the surface the question of which picture should figure in semantic investigations of natural language. I aim to show that there is a substantive question as to which of the two pictures I will discuss is a better picture of “semantic reference,” to use Saul Kripke’s famous phrase. In one of the pictures to be discussed, semantic reference is a relation determined by truth. An expression (perhaps relative to a context) is determined to refer to an object in virtue of some condition associated with the expression being true of that object. Contextual parameters may figure into this determination, but the determination of reference---semantic reference---is distinct from the causal background of the speaker’s utterance of the expression. In the other picture, semantic reference is a relation by cognition, and in particular by cognition originating in perception. Semantic reference is not a feature of abstract expressions, but a feature of actual utterances. An utterance refers to an object because the object has been involved in affecting (directly or indirectly) the speaker’s perceptual system in a way that led to the utterance. The aim of the paper is to show that in investigating the semantics of natural language, it is at least plausible to take the relevant notion of semantic reference to be that of the perceptual-cognitive picture.