Gareth Evans (philosopher)
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Gareth Evans (12 May 1946 – 10 August 1980) was a British philosopher at Oxford University during the 1970s.
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[edit] Life
Gareth Evans studied Philosophy, Politics and Economics (PPE) at University College, Oxford (1964–67). His philosophy tutor was Peter Strawson. He then became a senior scholar at Christ Church, Oxford (1967–68) and a Kennedy Scholar at Harvard University and University of California, Berkeley (1968–69). He died in 1980 of lung cancer at the age of 34, "a serious loss for British philosophy" according to the Oxford Companion to Philosophy. His collected papers and a book, The Varieties of Reference, edited by John McDowell, were published posthumously.
[edit] Work
In his brief career Evans made substantial contributions to logic, metaphysics, philosophy of language, and philosophy of mind. Aside from Strawson, Michael Dummett and John McDowell were important influences on his work.
Evans was one of many in the UK who took up the project of developing formal semantics for natural languages, instigated by Donald Davidson in the 1960s and 1970s. He co-edited Truth and Meaning with John McDowell on this subject. He also wrote a paper, The Causal Theory of Names which heavily criticized certain lines of the theory of reference that derived from Kripke's Naming and Necessity and work by Keith Donnellan.
A one-page paper in Analysis, "Can There Be Vague Objects?", drew dozens of papers in response and is now considered a key work in metaphysics.
[edit] Varieties of Reference
Evans's book The Varieties of Reference, was unfinished at the time of his death. It was edited for publication, and supplemented with appendices drawn from his notes, by McDowell, and has subsequently been influential in both philosophy of mind and philosophy of language.
[edit] Background
The theory of reference prior to the 1970s was dominated by the view that the meaning of an ordinary name is a description of its object: so, for example, Aristotle means the author of de Caelo. This was Russell's view, and was and is taken by many to be equivalent to Frege's view (where the description is what Frege calls a term's "sense"). Following Kripke's Naming and Necessity lectures, the view came to prevail that names had no descriptive content, or sense: that the referent of a name was not what "fit" its meaning, but whichever object had been the initial cause of the name's being used.
[edit] Evans's project
Evans conceded that names did not in general have descriptive meanings (although he contended that they could, in some cases), but argued that the proponents of the new theory had much too simplistic a view. He argued for what he called Russell's principle, that a person cannot be thinking about an object unless he knows, in some non-trivial way, which object he is thinking about. He then claimed that a certain version of the new theory, which he called the Photograph Theory of meaning, violated this, since people could obviously be confused as to which object had caused their beliefs.
From Russell's work Evans also drew the point that some of the thoughts one has (thoughts about objects one is perceiving, for example) are such that if their object did not exist it would not be possible to think that thought at all. These he called Russellian thoughts. He also defended a reading of Frege, derived in part from Michael Dummett's work, according to which Frege's notion of sense was not equivalent to a description, and indeed remained essential to a theory of reference that abandoned descriptivism.
Evans argued that any "causal theory" had to be restricted in certain ways: it would be necessary to consider, one by one, the various kinds of Russellian thoughts people could have about objects, and to specify in each case what conditions must be met for them to meet Russell's principle--only under those conditions could they have a thought about a specific object or objects (a singular thought).
[edit] Kinds of reference
The bulk of the text considers three kinds of reference to objects, and argues for a number of conditions that must obtain for reference to occur.
He considers first demonstrative reference, where one speaks or thinks about an object visible in one's vicinity. He argues that these presuppose, among other things: having a correct conception of the kind of object that it is; the ability to conceive of it and oneself as located in an objective space, and to orient oneself within that space; that one must move smoothly through time and space and be able to track the object's movements continuously in perception.
He next considers reference to oneself and then reference by way of a capacity for recognition: one's ability to (re-)identify an object when presented with it, even if it is not available at present.
[edit] Language issues
In the last third of the book Evans turns to problems with reference to objects that actively depend on the use of language. Here he treats the use of proper names, which do not seem to presuppose as much knowledge on the part of the speaker as demonstrative or recognition-based identification. One can refer to an object one has never encountered using a name if the name was received in the right sort of linguistic (social) practice--even, apparently, if one has no true beliefs about the object. He also considers problems of reference to objects in fictions and hallucinations, and to the meaning of saying that something exists which doesn't. (Here he draws explicitly on Kripke's never-published John Locke Lectures, Reference and Existence.)
[edit] Reference
- Davies, Martin, Gareth Evans (12 May 1946 – 10 August 1980). In Donald M. Borchert (editor), The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2nd edition. Macmillan Reference, USA.
