Ichikawa, Maitra, and Weatherson Defend a Dogma

Jonathan Ichikawa, Ishani Maitra, and Brian Weatherson have written a short, but dense reply to the work on intuitions about reference. Their paper, In Defence of a Kripkean Dogma, is forthcoming in PPR.

Brian's post and a link to their paper can be found there. 

Comments

[Anon]

What a strange little paper. Do they not understand that you people are attacking a method, and not Kripke's theories per se?

[Paul Rogerson]

One suggestion Ichikawa, Maitra, and Weatherson make in their paper is that experiments about reference should try to test causal and descriptive theories by looking at what people would say about their reference judgments in Godel cases if they were made aware of the truth. The idea is that the way speakers would choose to clarify or amend their original statements once they are aware of the conflict between descriptive and causal factors would provide evidence for one theory or the other, depending on which theory the speaker's choices were consistent with.

I think this is a promising suggestion, and in collaboration with Tania Lombrozo at Berkeley I've been collecting data on an experiment like this for the past few months. We look at both what people would say about their original reference and how they would use the name to refer in the future. Data collection is ongoing, but so far our results seem to strongly support the causal theory.