Disimplicature

Speranza

It is fairly widely accepted that Saul Kripke, Keith Donnellan, and Grice showed that proper names, in particular uses by speakers, can refer to things free of anything like the epistemic requirements posited by Gottlob Frege and Bertrand Russell. 

Grice separates two aspects of the Frege-Russell view of name reference: 

(i) the metaphysical thesis that names in particular uses refer to things in virtue of speakers thinking of those things and 

(ii) the epistemic thesis that thinking of things requires a means of determining (in the sense of figuring out or identifying) which thing one is thinking of. 

Grice's question is whether the Kripke-Donnellan challenge should lead us to reject (i), (ii), or both. 

Contrary to a popular line of thinking that sees practices or conventions, rather than singular thinking, as determinative of linguistic reference, Grice's answer is that we should reject only the epistemic thesis, not the metaphysical one.