Roads to Reference: An Essay on Reference Fixing in Natural Language

How is it that words stand for what they stand for? Mario Gomez-Torrente tackles the difficult task of describing the conventions which lead certain words to refer to what they do. These words include proper names, demonstrative pronouns, nouns for ‘natural kinds’ such as ‘water’ or ‘tiger’, numerals, and others. In Roads to Reference, Gomez-Torrente provides novel answers to the multitude of problematic philosophical questions that are thrown up through the process of outlining these conventions. He defends the idea that the conventions in question do manage to pick out certain appropriate things with very specific natures, going against the view that many of those words do not stand for things of any kind.