Making Full Use of Heterogeneous Reference Potential
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Thorsteinsson Huginn Freyr
Abstract
The aim of this paper is to develop an account of semantic reference initially put forward by Philip Kitcher that should be of interest to scientific realists. I discuss the motivations behind Kitcher’s proposal and especially how it faces a retrospection problem viz. the beliefs used to fix reference are selected retrospectively but not by the historical actors at the time. In order to sidestep this problem, I look at the idea of partial reference as put forward by Hartry Field and further advanced by Christina McLeish. I discuss the merits of these proposals and will argue that McLeish’s development of the idea leads to a deeply confused semantics for realism. In the last section, Kitcher’s account of heterogeneous reference potential is further developed in light of the issues raised in relation to partial reference and the retrospection problem. I think this raises the prospect of filling in a descriptivist picture of reference for theoretical terms of science.
Acknowledgements
For helpful discussion I thank Alexander Bird, James Ladyman, Sam Nicholson and Finnur Dellsén. I would also like to thank participants, especially Anjan Chakravartty and Timothy Lyons, at the History of Science and Contemporary Scientific Realism conference at Indiana University and Purdue University in 2016 where some of these ideas were put forward. This paper received valuable feedback in Copenhagen at the Nordic Network for Philosophy of Science meeting 2017 and I would like to thank Anthony Ferreira who had prepared comments. Special thanks to the editors of this journal and to an anonymous referee for many constructive comments that greatly improved the article.
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