Reflexive content and the presuppositional account of referential failure in situations of scarcity of information and fiction

Abstract

This work presents a presuppositional solution to the problem of vacuity of reference for demonstratives and names. The denominations vacuity of reference and no-reference problem refer to the same philosophical concern: explaining the content of utterances with singular terms that systematically or occasionally fail to refer. For referentialists, such problem entails two unwanted consequences: 1) they are forced to accept that singular terms that fail to refer have no content; and 2) as a result, there is a gap in the truth-evaluation of utterances that contain them. The present work is an attempt to avoid consequence 1) and explain consequence 2), on the one hand, by arguing that utterances with demonstratives and proper names that fail to refer express reflexive content. Such content is about the utterance itself and the linguistic conventions it carries. In what concerns the problem of truth-value gaps, on the other hand, the proposed solution is presuppositional. Truth-value gaps occur for a pragmatic reason: if presupposed conditions on referential success namely, the truth of the existential presupposition, for names, and the truth of the presupposition of salience, for demonstratives are not satisfied. In what concern fictional names, specifically, I offer a pretense account that explains mixed intuitions of truth-value for statements about fiction and in fiction.