The Roots of Reference: The Paul Carus Lectures

Arranged in three parts the specific concern of this work is reference to concrete and abstract objects: what such reference consists in, and how we achieve it.

Part I is a statement of general psychological presumptions regarding perception and learning. The under-lying notions of cause and disposition are examined in a philosophical spirit.

Part II comes firmly to grips with the nature of reification and reference. Stages of reification – rudimentary to full-fledged _are sorted out. The full phase is heralded by the use of the relative clause with its relative pronoun and subsidiary pronouns. It is these pronouns that recur in logical notation as the bound variables of quantification.

Part III concludes with a conjectural sketch of the development of reification in the race and the individual.

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How much do our children have to learn of our language before we can reasonably interpret them as making objective reference as we do to different colors, bodies, and so forth, whether or not we could also interpret them in other ways? Quine presents his

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