Practice theories are a genus of causal theories of reference. They claim that the semantic referent of an utterance of a name is determined by features of a practice of using that name to speaker-refer to, or coordinate actions around, a certain object. Practices might extend beyond the utterance, so the reference of some utterances is determined by future events. This entails no commitment on when facts about these future events are themselves determined; one might say they are determined as they happen (and are indeterminate beforehand) or that they are determinate at all times (including beforehand). The practice theory entails unacceptable consequences on either view. On the first, some utterances will have their referent determined once after some future events, then determined again, differently after further events: one utterance may have different semantic referents at different times. This entails similar, unacceptable, consequence for truth and epistemic status. On the second, there are cases of systematic and consistent semantic error which are indistinguishable from cases of systematic success. These are common and imperceptible enough that for all we know, this phenomenon may be very widespread, suggesting we should be sceptical of our knowledge of the semantics of our utterances.
Vague names, like “Everest” and “Belle Epoque” seem to refer to objects without clear boundaries. Supervaluationism claims that this vagueness is a feature of language, not of the objects referred to; vagueness in names is just ambiguity between many possible referents. This general idea admits of two more specific versions. Both give similar treatments of standard uses of vague names, but have very different results for other cases, such as reference achieved by descriptions including mentioned names. Considering two examples, I show neither variant of supervaluationism can account for the truth of all types of sentences about those names themselves. If I am right that these types exhaust supervaluationism, the theory is shown to be false. This problem closely resembles others in the super-valuationist literature about disquotation failure for truth. Treatments of vague truth and vague reference come apart though, and I show that the two problems are different enough that none of the popular solutions will succeed for reference. I consider—and reject—several specific objections, and two more general ways to recover supervaluationism following my arguments. I conclude that supervaluationism is at best a useful formalism for some kinds of vagueness reference, but fails as a general account.
Some thoughts have ‘objects’—things those thoughts are about. Answers to questions about the relation between thoughts and their objects often appeal to a distinction between singular and general thoughts. Singular thoughts are supposed to have somehow more particular or specific objects, general thoughts less so. I argue that no such distinction exists, and that though one could be constructed this would not be philosophically useful. §1 surveys views on the nature of the singular/general distinction. §2 lists three problems with this distinction. Consideration of these problems leads to a finer-grained distinction between singular and general concepts in §3, and I motivate this with examples and methods of argument from literature in §4. In the last section I consider a possible objection. I argue that though there is a sense in which it is technically correct, it does not achieve anything philosophically useful.