Reference and Reflexivity, 2nd Edition

In this second edition of Reference and Reflexivity, John Perry develops his reflexive-referential theory of indexicals, demonstratives, and proper names and further illuminates the distinction between semantics and pragmatics. Responding to ideas from both the descriptivist and referentialist traditions, Perry reveals the essential truth behind these competing philosophies—a coherent and structured family of contents, from reflexive contents that place conditions on their actual utterance to fully incremental contents that place conditions only on the objects of reference—thus reconciling the legitimate insights of both traditions.