Few ideas have held philosophy captive as long as the idea of reference.
How, it is asked, do words connect to the world? How do sounds or marks come to stand for things? What anchors language to reality rather than letting it drift free as an autonomous system?
These questions feel unavoidable if language is assumed to be representational. If words mirror the world, then reference must explain how the mirror is aligned.
But once representation is set aside, the problem of reference changes shape entirely.
The Representational Picture of Reference
On the familiar picture, reference is a mapping relation: words correspond to objects, names latch onto things, predicates pick out properties. Successful reference occurs when the mapping is correct.
This picture immediately generates puzzles.
How do names continue to refer when objects change? How do abstract terms refer at all? How can different speakers refer to “the same thing” despite divergent perspectives? Why does reference appear to shift with context, intention, and practice?
These puzzles are usually treated as technical problems to be solved within the representational framework.
But the framework itself is doing the damage.
Reference as a Relational Achievement
If language is a grammar of possible construals, then reference cannot be a static link between word and thing. It must instead be something achieved in use.
Reference is a relational accomplishment sustained across situations. It depends on shared histories of interaction, patterned expectations, and stabilised ways of taking something as salient.
When speakers successfully refer, they are not pointing to an object already carved out of the world. They are coordinating a construal: making it possible for participants to orient to a relation in roughly the same way.
This is why reference works even when boundaries are vague, identities are fluid, and descriptions are partial. The success lies not in precision, but in coordination.
Objects as Stabilised Cuts
On this view, objects are not the primitives of reference; they are its outcomes.
What we call “a thing” is a relatively stable cut through a web of relations—stable enough to be tracked, talked about, and re-identified across contexts. Language participates in making such cuts available, but it does not invent them arbitrarily.
Nor does it discover them ready-made.
Objecthood emerges where relational patterns hold sufficiently for practical purposes. Reference rides on that stability, rather than grounding it.
This is why disputes about what a term “really refers to” often persist without resolution. The question presupposes that there must be a single, privileged cut where multiple workable cuts exist.
Context Is Not an Add-On
Representational theories often treat context as a supplement: a corrective layer added when literal reference fails.
From a relational perspective, context is not optional. It is constitutive.
Every act of reference presupposes a situation: speakers, purposes, histories, expectations. These do not distort reference; they make it possible. Remove them, and nothing remains for words to latch onto.
This is why indexicals, demonstratives, and so-called “context-dependent expressions” are not marginal cases. They reveal what reference always depends on, even when that dependence is hidden.
Why the Puzzles Dissolve
Once reference is understood as a relational achievement, many traditional puzzles simply dissolve.
There is no mystery about how reference survives change: the relations stabilise differently, not incorrectly. No mystery about abstract reference: relations need not be material to be coordinated. No mystery about disagreement: different construals can sustain different but overlapping reference practices.
The expectation that reference must be exact, fixed, and object-bound is a residue of representational thinking.
Language does not fail to meet that expectation.
It never had it.
Reference After Representation
Abandoning representation does not leave language floating free of the world. It situates language more deeply within it.
Reference is how speakers navigate and stabilise relations within ongoing activity. It is practical, situated, and revisable. Its success is local, sufficient, and contingent.
Language does not hook onto a pre-partitioned reality.
It participates in making reality tractable by carving paths through relational space.
In the next post, we will push this further by examining one of the strongest remaining temptations of representational thinking: the idea that meaning is exhausted by truth conditions.
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