Empirical Investigations Into The Reference Of Proper Names:A Cross-Cultural Perspective

Previous work has repeatedly shown systematic differences between Americans’ and Chinese’s intuitions about the reference of proper names.While Americans tend to share Kripke’s causal-historical view of reference,Chinese are more likely to endorse Fregen-Russellian descriptivism.Influential as this growing body of research is,it has nonetheless raised some important questions.First,it is unclear whether the cross-cultural patterns are task dependent.Second,it is yet unknown what cause(s)the systematic differences in referential intuitions.Third,the question as to how proper names are linked up with entities in the non-linguistic world still remains mystical.The present dissertation aims to address these issues empirically by means of four experimental studies.Study 1 examines whether there are genuine cross-cultural differences in referential intuitions,and if yes,what the developmental trajectory looks like.With the aid of a novel truth-value judgment task(i.e.,TVJ task),the previously reported cross-cultural differences are replicated among adult participants from the United States and China.When fixing the reference of proper names,American adults are more likely to respond as causal theorists do,whereas Chinese adults tend to give responses conforming to the descriptivist theory.Interestingly,the same cultural pattern in referential judgments is found in seven-year-old English-speaking and Chinesespeaking children.It is also noticed that the test probes elicit somewhat inconsistent response patterns from the Chinese participants,for they appear causal-historical in one story but descriptivist in the other.Study 2 looks into why the two supposedly analogous test probes elicit different response patterns from the same cultural group.For this purpose,the suspected factor,i.e.,the moral valence of actions described in the test stories,is manipulated across the English-and Chinese-speaking participants,hence creating the innocent condition and the guilty condition.It is discovered the cross-cultural differences show up in the innocent condition only.Within each culture,the status of moral valence is found to have no major influence on participants’ judgments.Additionally,numeric comparison between stories under each moral condition reveals that Americans are inconsistent in the guilty condition,whereas the Chinese are not consistent in the innocent condition.These findings preliminarily suggest that moral valence is largely irresponsible for the variation between test probes and,by inference,for the cross-cultural differences.Studies 3 aims to investigate the effect of perspective taking on referential intuitions via a priming technique.Thus a set of spatial perspective taking trials are designed to train two groups of English-speaking participants to either insist on their own spatial perspective(i.e.,self-condition)or to take another person’s perspective(i.e.,othercondition),with these trials being then followed by the previously designed TVJ task.It surprisingly turns out that the Americans are strongly causal-historical in their responses to the vignettes in both conditions despite the training in the initial stage of experimentation.In view of the unexpected results from Study 3,Study 4 directly manipulates the relevant epistemic perspective across participants.In one condition,the epistemic perspective is ambiguous between the narrator’s and that of the embedded speaker(i.e.,the original condition).In another condition,subjects are instructed to read the probes from the embedded speaker’s perspective(i.e.,the internal condition)while in still the other condition participants are supposed to respond from an outsider’s perspective(i.e.,the external condition).It is found when the pertinent epistemic perspective is ambiguous,Americans are inclined to reason from their egocentric viewpoint whereas the Chinese are more likely to adopt the other person’s perspective.However,when the perspective is disambiguated,folks from both the American and Chinese cultures could generally respond as intended by following the specified epistemic perspective.Since the G?delstyle probes typically involve the epistemic asymmetry mentioned above,the crosscultural differences discovered therein may be attributable to the distinct perspective taking strategies favored in different cultures.In brief,the aforementioned experimental studies produce four major findings.First,the cross-cultural differences in referential intuitions are replicated via an arguably more naturalistic TVJ task,suggesting the cultural patterns are by and large taskindependent.Second,by age seven,the English-speaking and Chinese-speaking children have already developed a culturally specific theory of reference.The fact that there is no evidence of development from age seven onward partially constrains explorations of the causes of the cultural patterns in that formal schooling and late socialization appear to be irrelevant.Instead,whatever triggers the differences in referential intuitions are more likely to take place in early childhood.Third,moral valence generally exerts moderate effects on folks’ intuitive judgments about reference,thus playing little role in causing the variation in referential intuitions.Fourth,the cultural relativity in Americans’ and Chinese’s referential intuitions is largely reflective of the distinct perspective taking strategies.The Chinese are more descriptivist-like because they tend to take the other’s epistemic perspective while the Americans appear causal-historical because they are inclined to insist on their egocentric viewpoint more often than not.These experimental results altogether afford a fresh construal of the notion of reference and a pluralist account of the referential mechanism of proper names.It is argued that reference is a three-place cognitive relation residing in the conscious mind rather than the external world.The systematic cross-cultural and intra-cultural variation in referential intuitions constrains the project of theorizing about reference of proper names.It is probable that people are not restricted to a singular theory of reference,but rather they have access to both the descriptivist and the causal-historical theory.The relevant descriptive information and causal-historical chains could both play a role in reference fixing.In a word,as the first systematic attempt to trace the developmental pathway and explore the underlying causes of the cross-cultural differences in referential intuitions,the present research has made some novel contributions towards the literature of proper names.On the one hand,it has extended the body of research on reference;on the other hand,it has narrowed down the list of factors causing the variation in referential intuitions across cultures.Additionally,the empirical investigations reported in this dissertation have important implications for the project of theorizing about reference and for the philosophical studies of language more broadly.It is suggested that ordinary folks are capable of providing reliable and replicable intuitions that could be utilized to delve into reference and other language-related issues.