Identifying Reference and Truth-Values
P.F. Strawson · 2017
The materials for this paper are: one familiar and fundamental speech-function; one controversy in philosophical logic; and two or three platitudes. We are to be concerned with statements in which, at least ostensibly, some particular historical fact or event or state of affairs, past or present, notable or trivial, is reported: as that the emperor has lost a battle or the baby has lost its rattle or the emperor is dying or the baby is crying. More exactly, we are to be concerned with an important subclass of such statements, viz. those in which the task of specifying just the historical state of affairs which is being reported includes, as an essential part, the sub-task of designating some particular historical item or items which the state of affairs involves. Not all performances of the reporting task include the performance of this sub-task - the task, I shall call it, of identifying reference to a particular item. Thus, the report that it is raining now, or the report that it was raining here an hour ago, do not. But the statement that Caesar is dying, besides specifying the historical fact or situation which it is the function of the statement as a whole to report, has, as a part of this function, the sub-function of designating a particular historical item, viz. Caesar, which that situation essentially involves. And this part of the function of the whole statement is the whole of the function of part of the statement, viz. of the name ‘Caesar’.