Background
Evans, Gareth was born in 1946 in London.
Evans, Gareth was born in 1946 in London.
University College, Oxford University, 1964-1967. Senior Student of Christ Church, Oxford University, 1967-1968. /nfls.-Gottlob Frege and Bertrand Russell.
Kennedy Scholar at Harvard University, 1968-1969. Fellow of University College, Oxford University, 196879. Wilde Reader in Mental Philosophy, Oxford University, 1979-1980.
In his short career Gareth Evans made original and significant contributions to the literature on reference and intentionality. His early work in the philosophy of language can be viewed as an attempt to construct a truth-conditional semantic theory for natural languages. These essays range over topics including proper names, pronouns, predication and indeterminacy, and logical form and entailment. ‘The causal theory of names (1973) is aimed at reconciling description and causal theories of reference. In the essay’s analysis of reference change Evans argued that speakers’ intentions play a crucial role in determining and transmitting reference. Evans’s work on reference was further developed and combined with his mentalist philosophy of mind in The Varieties of Reference (1982), which was unfinished at the time of his death. Much of the book is devoted to the relations between various kinds of ‘particular-thoughts’, or thoughts about objects, and the ways in which we understand singular terms. The position he developed combines elements from the work of Frege and Russell. Evans attempted to give an account of the conditions under which a mind can think of an object. He attacked the ‘Photograph Model’: Kripke’s causal theory of linguistic reference extended to encompass the intentionality of thought. On this model a causal connection between a thinker and an object is sufficient for a thought to be about that object, even if the thinker is considerably confused about the identity and nature of the object. He rejected this sufficiency claim, and argued instead for what he calls ‘Russell’s Principle’: thought about an object requires that the subject know which object his thought is about.