Reference and the Rational Mind

Referentialism has underappreciated consequences for our misunderstanding of the ways in which mind, language and world relate to one another.

In exploring these consequences, this book defends a version of referentialism about names, demonstratives and indexicals, in a manner appropriate for scholars and students in philosophy or the cognitive sciences.

To demonstrate his view, Kenneth A. Taylor offers original and provocative accounts of a wide variety of semantic, pragmatic and psychological phenomena, such as empty names, proportional attitude contexts, the nature of concepts, and the ultimate source and nature of normativity.