Res per nomen 4 : Call for Papers

Sense and reference.
A tribute to Georges Kleiber

The Res-per-nomen conferences have previously dealt with reference in language from the point of view of both linguistics and philosophy. RPN1 (in 2007) took stock of the referential paradigm; RPN2 (in 2009) looked at reference from the point of view of anthropology; and RPN3 (in 2009) examined the question of consciousness and the speaking subject.

Res-per-nomen 4 will look into the many theories of sense and reference. While the philosophical tradition is very rich in such theories, in linguistics, however, reference was explicitly eschewed by the founding fathers of modern linguistics, Saussure and Bloomfield, not because they thought reference did not have its rightful place in the study of language, but because they found it more pressing to concentrate on language as a system of signs. Later, the Saussurean concept of the sign as a signifiant/signifié double entity was adopted more or less explicitly by 20th century linguistics even though it went against a tradition dating back to Antiquity and the Middle-Ages of considering the sign as a triadic entity made up of three elements: res, conceptus and vox.

In France, Reference was reintroduced into linguistics by Georges Kleiber over the last three decades. Res per nomen 4 would like to take stock of his contribution to our understanding of language, particularly with regard to one of his key concepts: names and the naming process (dénomination in French). Linguists are invited to submit papers on sense and reference, from the point of view of Georges Kleiber or of other authors. Philosophers may look into the subject from the perspective of authors such as Wittgenstein, Nietzche, Peirce, Frege, Strawson, Putnam, Russell, Mauthner, Condillac, Taine, Merleau-Ponty, Maine de Biran, Rousseau, Vico, etc. It would be interesting (but not compulsory) to link these theories to Kleiber's.

We are putting a number of Georges Kleiber's papers on line for those, especially in the English-speaking world, who are not familiar with his work.