Pragmatics and singular reference

I present arguments in favour of the view that the propositions expressed by utterances containing singularly referring terms have modes of presentation of the objects referred to by those terms as constituents. I rely on recent work by Sperber and Wilson, Recanati and other pragmatists, and claim that a Fregean account of singular reference is supported by this work. This is in opposition to Recanati himself, who in his book Direct Reference has argued for a view which is closer to that of some neo-Russellians. In particular, I argue contra Recanati for the truth-conditional relevance of the modes of presentation associated with demonstratives and other referential terms. That is, I argue that these modes of presentation must be seen as part of the truth-conditional content of utterance-tokens containing such terms.