300 The subjectivity of utterance

all sorts of everyday situations in which, out of politeness or for other reasons, we refer to people, animals or things by means of descriptions that we know or believe to be false. For example, x, who knows or believes that z is the offspring of an extramarital affair between y's wife and some third person (a fact of which y may or may not be ignorant), may none the less successfully refer to z with the phrase ' y's son' (or 'your son' when x is talking to y). In short, the actual truth or falsity of the descriptive con­tent of a referring expression is not directly relevant to its success. Normal human interaction is governed by a set of culturally determined conventions, amongst which truthfulness is often very properly moderated by politeness. The Gricean maxim of quality ("say only what you believe to be true") does not operate in all contexts (see 9.5).

What I now want to emphasize is that definite descriptions -more obviously than proper names — are context-dependent. Their use as referring expressions cannot be satisfactorily accounted for solely within the framework of sentence-based , truth-conditional semantics. When speakers employ a definite . description, they indicate by means of the referential part of the expression that they are performing an act of reference, and, in doing so, they tacitly assure the addressee that the descriptive part of the expression will contain all the information that is required, in context, to identify the referent. Various qualifica­tions and elaborations would need to be added in a fuller treat- ment. But this is the central point.

Definite descriptions are only one of many subclasses of noun- , headed noun-phrases used as referring expressions. Another, of course, is that of indefinite descriptions (in certain contexts and used with what is called specific, though not definite, reference): 'a man', 'a certain girl', etc. A third, which has been the object of a good deal of discussion and research, is that of so-called , quantified noun-phrases: 'all men', 'every girl', etc. All sorts of previously unsuspected problems have arisen in recent attempts to formalize the notion of reference and put it on a sound theore- tical footing. Here I will mention just one such problem, since it is closely related to the principal concerns of this chapter and

10.1 Reference 301

has been extensively discussed in philosophical semantics: the problem of referential opacity.

A referentially opaque context is one in which the substitution of one referring expression for another expression with the same reference does not necessarily hold constant the truth-conditions of the sentence in which the substitution is made. (I have stated the principle in respect of sentences and truth-conditions. With the necessary adjustments it can also be stated for utterances and truth-values.) I have already illustrated this phenomenon in section 7.6. I pointed out, it will be recalled, that

(2) 'I wanted to meet Margaret Thatcher' and

(3) 'I wanted to meet the first woman Prime Minister of Great Britain'

do not necessarily have the same truth-conditions. There are two reasons why this is so. The first, of course, is that the proper name 'Margaret Thatcher' (like 'Napoleon' and most proper names in some, though not all, cultures) is not constant in its reference: therefore there are (presumably) many persons in Great Britain and elsewhere who currently bear this name to whom the descriptive content of 'the first woman Prime Minis­ter of Great Britain' does not apply. The fact that the reference of almost all noun-phrases, including proper names, is context-dependent has been emphasized throughout this chapter. How­ever, it is the second reason why (2) and (3) do not have the same truth-conditions which is of primary concern to us here. This is that 'the first woman Prime Minister of Great Britain' can be given either a straightforward extensional interpreta­tion, in which it serves to identify a particular person (in the way that has been outlined in this section) or an intensional interpretation, in which - to make the point rather crudely and perhaps tendentiously for the moment - what counts is not the actual person that the locutionary agent has in mind, but some concept that fits the descriptive content of the expression. This kind of intensionality is traditionally identified by means of the Latin phrase de dicto ("about what is said"), contrasted