Эксперименты, интуиции и проблема референции имен собственных

Философский журнал. 2026. Т. 19. № 2. С. 68–82.

Makeeva L.

The article seeks to assess the philosophical significance of experimental philosophy, which emerged at the very beginning of the XXI century, using, as an example, the prob lem of the reference of proper names, the decisions of which in the descriptive and causal-historical approaches have come into conflict. It is argued that the philosophy of language played a special role in preparing favorable ground for the rise of experimen tal philosophy, insofar as the so-called method of cases became widely used within it and the employment of intuitions as an important means of philosophical justification was effectively legitimized. The experiment conducted by Machery et al., which tested S. Kripke’s argument against the descriptive approach in favor of the universality of intu itions concerning how reference is fixed in his well-known Gödel – Schmidt example, led to the unexpected conclusion that intuitions about the reference of proper names are not universal but rather cross-cultural. Although the experiment by Machery et al. sparked extensive debate about the legitimacy of using intuitions in philosophical practice, it also had significant consequences for the philosophy of language itself. Drawing an analogy with the distinction between the attributive and referential uses of definite descriptions in troduced by K. Donnellan, the author argues that the findings of Machery et al. – which showed that, in people’s understanding, the reference of proper names can be established in two different ways depending on the speaker’s intentions – support the view, shared by many philosophers, that there is a need to develop a new “synthesizing” conceptual framework for the study of language, such as relevance theory.

Keywords: философия языка, интуиция, reference, intuition, референция, philosophy of language, Saul Kripke, Сол Крипке, экспериментальная философия, proper names, experimental philosophy, method of cases, definite descriptions, Keith Donnellan, метод случаев, имена собственные, определенные дескрипции, Кит Доннеллан

Publication based on the results of: Linguistic and cognitive diversity in formal models, computer tools, and educational resources (2025)