Post
I'm thinking about Hanks' discussion of empty names in 'Propositional Content' (which I highly recommend).
Hanks is committed to acts of referring that are not acts of referring to anything. I find that hard to accept.
I have been thinking about an analogy with marrying. Getting married is an act (type). Necessarily, someone who does it gets married to someone. Saying that Alex got married but denying that they got married to someone is bizarre.
We can 'export' in those cases. 'Alex married Chris' entails 'there is someone that Alex married'. I think that we always can.
I want to suggest that that's the natural thing to say about referring too. And that this follows from a general claim about acts that involve objects, like referring to and marrying.
Does that sound reasonable?
Another question that I have. I don't want to deny that there is an act type of referring and an act type of marrying. I just think that you cannot perform them without performing some more specific act. One thing that I am wondering is whether I also think that about, e.g., marrying Alex and marrying Alex in Cardiff/joyfully. Can you do the former without doing one of the possible more specific things? If you can, can I be confident about my initial judgement?
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