Thought and Reference: Meaning and Reference

According to Kent Bach there are three main domains of reference: (1) semantics, (2) pragmatics, and (3) epistemology. An example that Bach gives is proper names. Proper names would fall under the pragmatic and epistemic categories. Take the name 'John', we can use 'John' to refer to John the Baptist or John Smith. This is what makes it a pragmatic useage of the term 'John'. Also, which John that 'John' refers to seems to be an epistemic category. Hence, this seems to be the explanation that Bach would give as to why proper names fall under the (2) and (3) domains of reference.

To better understand philosophers of language from the 20th century Bach claims that we need to divide facts into three categories. First, there are facts about language. Second, there are facts about language use. Third, there are facts about the thoughts of language users.

For Bach there are two different types of reference, linguistic reference and speaker reference. This correspond with the semantics and pragmatics distinction. Pragmatics is concerned with communication, speaker meaning, and speech acts. Whereas semantic features of an utterance give the meaning of an utterance that a competent user of a language can understand about an utterance, apart from the context in which it was uttered. Semantics is concerned with types, pragmatics with tokens.