Ontology, Modality and the Fallacy of Reference

Download or read book Ontology, Modality and the Fallacy of Reference written by Michael Jubien and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1993-08-27 with total page 152 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a book about the concept of a physical thing and about how the names of things relate to the things they name. It questions the prevalent view that names 'refer to' or 'denote' the things they name. Instead it presents a new theory of proper names, according to which names express certain special properties that the things they name exhibit. This theory leads to some important conclusions about whether things have any of their properties as a matter of necessity. This will be an important book for philosophers in metaphysics and the philosophy of language, though it will also interest linguists concerned with the semantics of natural language.