Realism is not required for reference to work; realism is required to give an account of reference that is more plausible than alternatives. It might be far simpler to accept that to talk about a thing only requires talk and understanding, but that'd cost you in terms of plausibility. In my view, there'd be something fundamental missing in many, many cases.

To talk about apples is to use the word "apples" in conversation; but, importantly, it's not just that in many cases. This is most clear when one talks about some actual, particular apples. When I truly talk about the apples that are in my kitchen, what am I talking about? I certainly don't mean to refer to anything other than the apples themselves. I don't intend to refer to my own thoughts or experiences or words. Are you willing to accept the consequences of your position? Are you willing to accept that intentional reference fails in so many cases, so much of the time?

How do you talk to me about the actual apples on your table? You use certain words which I understand. It seems to me that speech and writing (and the subsequent interpretation) is all that is involved in our conversation.

And I'm not saying that you refer to your thoughts or your experiences or your words. I'm saying that to refer to the actual apples on your table is to speak certain sounds or write certain symbols.

If you think that there is more to reference than this then you need to explain the origin and nature of whatever (meta)physical connection ties particular sounds or ideas to things which aren't these sounds and ideas (or experiences). If you can't then your claim that these other things are required for reference to work seems rather vacuous.

How do you talk to me about the actual apples on your table? You use certain words which I understand. It seems to me that speech and writing (and the subsequent interpretation) is all that is involved in our conversation. — Yahadreas

But what is the conversation about? It's about the apples. And the apples are neither speech nor writing.

I'm saying that to refer to the actual apples on your table is to speak certain sounds or write certain symbols. — Yahadreas

You seem to be forgetting about gesture again.

How can one truly refer to the actual apples on my table if there are none there?

Your reasoning on this is backwards again. The "mind independent" things aren't language independent. That's how we talk about them. What matters to reference is not what language is capable of talking about (language can talk about anything), but rather the distinction between the state of language and the state which language talks about.

Reference is defined in how an instance of language which talks about something is not the thing spoken about. Language "references" because it is a state distinct form what it talks about. Reference is one state (language) pointing to another (what is talked about in language). It doesn't happen just in language. It happens in the world.

The necessary relationship between reference and realism is not a question of "explaining" reference. Reference doesn't need explaining. That's just what language does: it talks about other states. Reference and realism go together, instead, because the mention of something in language does not define its existence. It is because talks of something is separate to the state which is spoken about.

The former does not define the latter. So there is no extra "metaphysical connection" which ties language to the states it talks about (language, itself, is that connection: it needs nothing else). Realism is, instead, necessary because a state talked about is a different in empirical terms to the state of language. Reference doesn't require an extra "metaphysical connection" (i.e. logical) outside language.

Rather it constituted by the difference between an empirical state (the language used) and either an empirical state (in the case of someone talking about a state of the world) or a logical meaning (in the case of imagined worlds).

If you think that there is more to reference than this then you need to explain the origin and nature of whatever (meta)physical connection ties particular sounds or ideas to things which aren't these sounds and ideas (or experiences). If you can't then your claim that these other things are required for reference to work seems rather vacuous. — Yahadreas

I think this is a bit much, you're demanding more than you have supplied yourself. To say that language just refers does not provide any insight in to how it refers. As much as Sapientia needs to supply a theory of reference which shows that it depends on ontology you need to supply one that is independent of ontology.

The former does not define the latter. So there is no extra "metaphysical connection" which ties language to the states it talks about (language, itself, is that connection: it needs nothing else). Realism is, instead, necessary because a state talked about is a different in empirical terms to the state of language. Reference doesn't require an extra "metaphysical connection" (i.e. logical) outside language. — TheWillowOfDarkness

Maybe it doesn't require something outside of language but we still need an account of how language refers. If I asked how a car takes petrol and produces motion, it can't be answered by saying that it doesn't need anything out side of a car, it is something that the car does... Edit: Apart from this relatively minor point, I agree with your post.

I would make the case that both the causal theory of reference and the descriptivist theory do not depend on metaphysics. Lets call this world the medium-sized world, i.e the world which we share. Normally when dealing with metaphysics we are talking about a basis for this medium-sized world, what underlies it or what its made up of etc. When we use language to refer, we are referring to this medium sized world. The descriptivist theory state we are describing the medium sized world and the causal theory that there is a causal connection between what we say and this medium sized world.

If it wasn't like this there would be problems, we would need to say that the ancients failed to refer to objects at all because they didn't know they were constructed out of atoms. More generally it would follow that if there were people with differing metaphysical views, at least some of them would fail to refer to objects.

If I discovered I was in the matrix, it doesn't imply that this whole time I have been unable to refer to apples.

Secondly it suggests that it's impossible to talk about things which aren't mind-independent things (like Frodo, or Hitler winning World War II). — Yahadreas

It suggests only that it's impossible to talk about things that have no correlation to a previous experience of a mind independent thing. That is, I cannot talk about winning, unless you can point me to some prior experience of an occurence that you can compare to winning. We can form new thoughts about prior interactions with the real, but that doesn't equate to me being able to have knowlege without experience of the real.

It is far simpler to accept that to talk about a thing only requires talk and understanding (which requires recognising the relationship between words and either other words or empirical situations). — Yahadreas

An empirical situation is a mind independent thing, so I don't know how that fits into what you're saying.

On the most fundamental level I don't know how we can deny realism if we accept that language exists as a communicative tool. How is it that I hear your utterances if they don't exist apart from me? What am I hearing if there is nothing real outside me other than the echos of my mind?

"Reference" is misguided, The word apple and the thing that is an apple are one and the same. They mean the same thing. They are not merely static neutral particles that form sentences or physical reality respectively. They have an active, synergistic role in the world, and discourse, which makes them meaningful. To talk of them as "mind independent" is nonsense, as it introduces a bifurcation of worlds as the foundation for its sensibility, but the mind hardly ends, or is encompassed by the skull. The word "apple" a drawing of an "apple" or a tasty apple can all be used to convey the same meaning, , as well as being used to convey different meanings, depending on how they're used. The most abstract of concepts are no less deprived of physical counter parts than apples are, in the way of words spoken, gestures made, or written forms. Things are not either in the mind, or external to the mind, it is always both and neither.

Lastly, a thing that is independent of the mind, in the sense of not participating in discourse, or life has no significance in any sense, and by this very stipulation cannot possibly exist.

To take up an old saying of Leibniz, the OP is right in what it denies, but wrong in what it affirms. I think it's more or less uncontroversial that there need not be a 'mind-independent apple' for one to talk about an apple, just as there need not be a 'mind-independent Shoggoth' to talk intelligibly about Shoggoths. Reference in both cases works by inculcating a sense of significance with respect to words and their use in a context: as the OP writes, to speak about apples just is to use the word apple in conversation.

But significance, of course, is trans-linguistic. There are plenty of things in the world which have significance - are meaningful - that do not belong to the order of language. A stovetop reddened by heat would be recognised as a danger to touch, just as a door in a passageway may have significance as a barrier to movement and vision. Language of course, is no different: words are no more special than stovetops and doors, their particular sonorous or graphic presence occasioning responses in no different a way than non-linguistic signifying elements.

What's important here is that while it's true that language does not consist of a doubling of the world (having to 'refer to things out there' in order to have meaning), it is equally untrue to think that this entails any sort of anti-realist conclusion whatsoever. Rather than instituting a divide in which language and the world would occupy two opposing sides, the whole point is that language is of the world. Realism does not require that language refer to 'things out there': it requires instead a recognition of the reality of language, that language is itself an empirical instance like any other, that it's 'self-referentiality' belongs wholly to a worldly order with respect to it's very status as language.

The point is not to look for a realism 'inside of language' - all you will ever find is more language - but to recognise that language as such is already 'worldly'. To "recognise... the relationship between words and either other words or empirical situations" is to respond in a certain way to a linguistic event, just as to move in a certain way to avoid the heat of the stove is to respond in a certain way to a culinary event. Language in this sense is continuous with the world of which it is a part of, and a 'realism' has no need to explicate any mysterious link between sounds and things in order to substantiate itself as realism. Instead, to put it baldly: sounds are things.

So the word "apple" just is an apple? I'm not trying to be facetious here but it seems absurd to suggest that we can eat words.

But what is the conversation about? It's about the apples. And the apples are neither speech nor writing. — Sapientia

Yes, it's about the apples. But how does one talk about the apples? By talking (and understanding), nothing more. The point I am trying to make is that realism is not required to talk about the apples. We can talk about things that aren't words and aren't experiences and aren't ideas even if anti-realism holds.

You seem to be forgetting about gesture again.

I'm not. I mentioned gesturing. When we gesture the act of reference is a visual experience. To gesture at the apple only requires that I see you gesture at the apple. Like above, realism is not required to gesture at the apple. We can gesture at things that aren't words and aren't experiences and aren't ideas even if anti-realism holds.

How can one truly refer to the actual apples on my table if there are none there?

I'm not saying that they're not there. The actual apples can be on your table even if anti-realism holds. Because for there to be actual apples on your table is for "there are actual apples on your table" to be true, and "there are actual apples on your table" can be true even if anti-realism holds (e.g. if the coherence theory of truth is correct).

Yes, it's about the apples. But how does one talk about the apples? By talking (and understanding), nothing more. The point I am trying to make is that realism is not required to talk about the apples. We can talk about things that aren't words and aren't experiences and aren't ideas even if anti-realism holds.

To talk "about" something is to refere to something. When we talk about an apple and we aren't referring to the word "apple", a physical object, an experience of an apple or the concept of an apple , then we aren't talking about anything at all.

I'm busy at work now, but later I'll clarify, and made you eat dem words.

I agree with Yahadreas that reference is metaphysically or ontologically non-committal. This is obvious form the fact that we have (1) actual linguistic markers for talking about non-actual situations even when we're anchored to actual discourse -- linguists call this modality -- and (2) methods of shifting the basis for discourse altogether away from actuality -- fictional discourse. The point is not simply that we can talk about things we would independently consider to have no status as 'real' in the sense the realist is interested in it, but that, in such cases, language seems not to change in its behaviors at all. To put it simply, language works exactly the same way whether you're in the Matrix or not. It seems completely blind to such questions.

Insofar as linguistic 'anti-realism' is a merely negative thesis, then, that the behavior of language provides support against the realist's claims about how language somehow secures or props up reality, I would say that these facts are good grounds for linguistic anti-realism. Certainly, one is not committed to anything like SX's claim, whatever it might mean: the question of whether language itself treats linguistic structures on a par with non-linguistic ones is an interesting one. In some ways, I think it does: all languages have mention mechanisms, for example, that effectively give speakers the ability to form quasi-proper names out of words just by the fact of those words' existence (what we in philosophical discourse use quotations marks to mark), and so do take words to be 'things' as much as they take anything else to be 'things.' But in other ways, language seems curiously blind to itself: it lacks mechanisms for describing its own mechanisms, outside of formal linguistics, where we must use the medium of models. For example, we seem to be unable in natural language to self-reference our own speech acts except in certain 'performative' constructions, which in English often license the adverb 'hereby.' Thus you can say, 'I [hereby] challenge you,' but you can't answer a question like, 'What are you doing?' with 'I'm answering your question.' That is, the descriptive assertion is incapable of itself describing what it is doing; it is forcibly interpreted as a description of something else.

I'm not quite sure on this subject, but my inclination now is to think that because ontology or metaphysics are themselves discursive practices, and the medium they're forced to employ itself refuses to validate the very theses that are made in that medium, there is a sort of incoherence to questions of ontology and metaphysics. Or, at the very least, to the extent one has an ontology or metaphysics, it must be non-linguistic (and I do not rule out that possibility) and the best language could do to illustrate it would be to 'lead people' to that non-linguistic understanding rather than straightforwardly describing 'the way things really are.'

aha it seems I've back myself into a paradoxical corner. The only way I can convince you that we can't eat words is for you to eat your words. :s

You seem to be arguing that the structure of language is such that it intrinsically undermines the possibility of what it also intrinsically sets out to achieve. I think the flaw in your argument is that it must ultimately do the very thing that it attempts to demonstrate to be impossible; namely, describe the structure of language as it "really is" in order to demonstrate what it "really is" capable/incapable of achieving. So it seems to me that there is pragmatic contradiction lurking in the core of your argument, and that the proper response to it would be to provide a better description of the structure of language than you have provided above, and do so in a way that also affirms the possibility of what you have set out to deny. That being said, I am not actually going to attempt to actually do that right here :). I just wanted to outline how one might go about responding.

It doesn't fail in what it sets out to do, except in cases where a discourse tries to set itself aside as asking privileged questions about 'what there is' or how things 'really are.' There is no contradiction in discussing these things in the normal sense: for example, we might argue over whether it is raining, which is a question of the way things really are, or about whether there are knives in the drawer, which is a question about what there is. But metaphysical and ontological discussions do not take themselves to be asking questions of this ordinary sort, but scaffolding questions about the way things are, or the sorts of things that there are in a fundamental sense.

My point was that the argument you provided must do the very thing it says is not possible. In order to show that metaphysical discourse undermines itself in attempting to do the impossible (i.e. immanently describe the structure of thought as it really is) it must offer an immanent description of the structure of metaphysical and non-metaphysical thought as they really are. Do you disagree?

No, the claim itself doesn't take itself to be privileged in the way metaphysical or ontological discourse does. It only shows that the attempt at such a privileging yields a sort of practical contradiction.

We may actually say nothing outside the car and petrol is required. That's true. Such a description merely doesn't tell you anything more about how the petrol and car interact. It merely fails to describe what you want to know.

With reference it is here we need to ask the hard question. When you demand a description of "how" reference works, what are you requesting to know? In the case of the car and petrol what you want to know is obvious: the way the petrol interacts with the car, the mechanical ad chemical system, which functions to move the car. Where are the analogous moving parts and chemical interactions in presence of reference though? There is nothing to be found. At no point are we waiting for a use of language to be engage reference by the burning of fuel and spinning of wheels. Each use of language that references does of by its definition. There is nothing more about it for us to know.

The actual problem with TGW's argument is asking entirely the wrong question. Language isn't a question of validation. It's a question of existence. Uses of language are things which say something. In there presence, there is no question of "justification" nor describing what that particular use of language is doing. Language is not a question go "proving" or "demonstrating" a statement is correct. One merely speaks a statement which has meaning. Whether one makes the correct description, whether in the sense of accuracy or the speaking of statement, is a different question entirely.

Langauge does, indeed, not "validate" anything. To be a meaning spoken or thought doesn't justify any argument as correct.

"Description" is, in fact, "non-linguistic" in that it is not merely a use of language which consists a person understanding something. A use of language has to trigger a particular response in an individual to actually grant them an understanding of a thing, and so form a "description" in language. All language "leads" people to understand. This is what description in language entails. The language is, after all, never the state it describes.

With this the inability of language to describe is dissolved. Since language is the trigger for an individual have experiences, it is no longer the "distant" vessel which must fail to capture what it is like to experience, for it is actually triggering experience. Someone can, for example, use words to describe their emotions and trigger the same feelings in another person. Words can give us the insight of what it means to be another person. There is no "first person"/ "third person" split which renders language incapable of description.

TGW's argument is making a mockery of what language is and does. The "negative thesis of anti-realism" entirely ignores what language is: an existing thing, a "positive" state, which talks about something else, whether rightly or wrongly.

The underlying issue is he thinks reference is a question of "being correct" of "describing the real world." It's not. Statements of falsehood reference all the time. If a say: "TheWillowOfDarkness is the president of the US," my statement still refers to me, even though it is mistaken. TGW is actually correct that reference has nothing to do with describing what is real or not. To say: "this language refers to X" is never enough. It doesn't actually point out whether a statement is true. All it does is say language talked about something.

TGW has reversed to key point of the realist argument. For the realist, language does not prop-up reality. The necessary relationship between realism and reference isn't defined on the basis of language. Rather, it is the reverse: that there are no things to talk about without realism. It is question of things, on the distinction of what is talked about from language, which the realist makes their case on.

If what we talk about is distinct form state of language, then there is more to the world than our language, our discourse. States of the world are defined not on whether they are experienced (i.e. thought about, talked, about), but rather in themselves, regardless of whether anyone thinks or talks about them in any way.

So the word "apple" just is an apple? I'm not trying to be facetious here but it seems absurd to suggest that we can eat words. — aequilibrium

No, the word apple, and an apple are not the same thing, if they were the same thing, there wouldn't be two things at all, there would be one thing. Two different apples are not the same thing. They can, and usually do mean the same thing though.

The problem is, in my view, that people imagine that some sensible, or substantive distinction between the meaning, and the thing can be drawn or made, when it clearly cannot be. First note that no individual apple is ever necessarily referred to, or clarified by the word, and objects designated as such cannot be used to define the meaning or concept, not remotely exhaustively. This invariably leads to reference being about a universal property, or characteristic, or essence of things that is what is truly referred to. It is obviously wrong that "apple" refers to any particular apple, nor gets its exhaustive meaning from any single particular object, which automatically commits one to some form of essentialism in order to maintain a reference based view of discourse. I say that seeing objects, events, and particular things as participating in discourse, as meaningful depending on how they are used in discourse, doesn't require some one to one correspondence, or sign/signified relationship.

But we can refer to specific token apples. The apple in my refrigerator is mostly red with a tinge of green near the top.
The fact that we can also refer to types or things is no argument against correspondence theory of truth.

I never said that we couldn't refer to apples. I argued that meaning isn't based in material referents.

We can talk about to things non material things such as sensations and concepts, but when we talk about material objects like apples, we are necessarily referring to a material object.

As I argue, nothing has non-empirical constituents, in discourse, even the most abstract of notions. The funny thing about your example of referring to the apple in your fridge, is that you give a description of it, as if circumlocution is closer to the real than just telling me "apple", and the description doesn't further refer to the apple, but merely places it as the subject of a sentence. Only if I didn't already know what an apple was would a description help me in any sense, or if you were wishing to distinguish it from other apples in the fridge (but nothing, nothing particularly descriptive of the apple need be said, one could simply say "the one on the right", which would be no less helpful for allowing me to differentiate it than a thorough description of its characteristics), but if I do know what an apple is, then I would entirely ignore your description if it perfectly described some non-apple in your fridge for identifying it as an apple. At best I'd be likely to say "you mean this thing which clearly isn't an apple?"

See how I attempt to explain my reasoning above. Do that rather than just assert that we necessarily refer to a material object when we talk of material objects. Explain in what sense, and address my criticism of this position, and the senselessness of it.

I'm afraid I'm still not a any closer to understanding what you meant " the apple and the word are one and the same".
We can use discourse to discuss the types of things that are apples, and we can talk about specific token apples. However,unless we are specifically talking about the word"apple", we are using discourse to refer to objects that are independent of discourse.

Fair point. I was thinking of the 'how come' questions. I.e how come there are informative identities, how come sometimes I attempt but fail to refer to an object/person. Or, more generally what kind of connection is necessary for me to be able to refer to an object. There are things to be said about reference but they are not the pure 'how' questions as if there was a mechanism working inside of language.
That's all off topic though if we both agree that reference does not have ontological implications.

The word apple and the thing that is an apple are one and the same. — Wosret

I conclude that you either don't mean what you stated or you're obviously mistaken.

That's just quote mining. I go on to clarify that they just mean the same thing, and then further clarify that they can mean the same thing, but can also mean different things. All in the same post. In another post I attempt to clarify this misreading by mentioning the law of the identity of indiscernibles -- or that if two things were truly identical, there wouldn't be two things at all, there would only be one thing. I then point out that two different apples obviously aren't identical either.

The point I'm trying to make is how the meaning is the same, and what is suggested to be references for the meaning rather participate in discourse and meaning, rather than are the sources of it.