Gareth Evans (philosopher)

Evans's book The Varieties of Reference (1982) was unfinished at the time of his death. It was edited for publication, and supplemented with appendices drawn from his notes, by McDowell, and has subsequently been influential in both philosophy of mind and philosophy of language.

Evans concedes that names do not in general have descriptive meanings (although he contends that they could, in some cases), but argues that the proponents of the new theory had much too simplistic a view. He argues for what he calls Russell's principle: that a person cannot be thinking about an object unless he knows, in some non-trivial way, which object he is thinking about. In particular, Evans argues that a person must have a "discriminating conception" of the object (1982, p. 65).

He then claims that a certain version of the new theory, which he calls the photograph model of mental representation (1982, p. 78), violates Russell's principle. According to the photograph model, "the causal antecedents of the information involved in a mental state... are claimed to be sufficient to determine which object the state concerns" (1982, p. 78). (The view is so named because it is similar to the view many people take on how a photograph comes to be about something.) Thus, on the photograph model, contrary to Russell's principle, one may have a thought about some object without discriminating knowledge of that object, just so long as the mental state is caused in the appropriate way (for example, perhaps by some sort of causal chain that originates with the object).

The generality constraint, according to Evans, is intended to capture the structure that there is in thought. As Evans puts it, "The thought that John is happy has something in common with the thought that Harry is happy, and the thought that John is happy has something in common with the thought that John is sad" (1982, p. 100). The generality constraint requires that if one is to have a thought (that John is happy, for example) about an object (John), then one must be able to conceive of the object (John) as having different properties (such as being sad).

He also defends a reading of Frege, derived in part from Michael Dummett's work, according to which Frege's notion of sense is not equivalent to a description, and indeed remains essential to a theory of reference that abandoned descriptivism (1982, §1.3).

He next considers reference to oneself and then reference by way of a capacity for recognition: one's ability to (re-)identify an object when presented with it, even if it is not available at present. Evans famously considers the phenomenon of immunity to error through misidentification—a phenomenon of certain types of judgment in which one cannot be wrong about which object the judgment is about by misidentifying it (see his 1982, especially §6.6 & §7.2). This phenomenon may be exemplified by the incoherence of the following judgment (upon feeling pain): "Someone seems to be feeling pain, but is it I who is feeling the pain?". While this phenomenon has been noticed by philosophers before, Evans argues that they have tended to think that it only applies to judgments concerning oneself and one's conscious experiences, and so they have failed to recognise that it is a more general phenomenon that can occur in any sort of demonstrative judgment. Furthermore, he would charge philosophers such as Ludwig Wittgenstein (in his Blue and Brown Books [1958]) and Elizabeth Anscombe (in her "The First Person" [1975]) for having wrongly concluded that such cases show that the first-person pronoun "I" does not refer to anything.

He died in London in 1980 of cancer at the age of 34. His collected papers (1985) and his major work, The Varieties of Reference (1982), edited by John McDowell, were published posthumously.

A one-page paper on metaphysical vagueness in Analysis, "Can There Be Vague Objects?" (1978), drew dozens of papers in response and is now considered a key work in metaphysics.

The theory of reference prior to the 1970s was dominated by the view that the meaning of an ordinary name is a description of its object: so, for example, Aristotle means the author of De Caelo. This was Russell's view, and was and is taken by many to be equivalent to Frege's view (where the description is what Frege calls a term's "sense"). Following Kripke's Naming and Necessity (1972/1980) lectures, the view came to prevail that names had no descriptive content, or sense: that the referent of a name was not what "fit" its meaning, but whichever object had been the initial cause of the name's being used.

Evans then returned to Oxford, where he was a fellow (1969–1979) and then, from 1979, the Wilde Reader in Mental Philosophy. During this time he also held visiting positions at the University of Minnesota (1971) and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1977–8).

Evans was one of many in the UK who took up the project of developing formal semantics for natural languages, instigated by Donald Davidson in the 1960s and 1970s. He co-edited Truth and Meaning (1976) with John McDowell on this subject. He also wrote a paper, "The Causal Theory of Names" (1973), which heavily criticised certain lines of the theory of reference that derived from Saul Kripke's Naming and Necessity (1972/1980) and work by Keith Donnellan.

Michael Gareth Justin Evans (12 May 1946 – 10 August 1980) was a British philosopher who made substantial contributions to logic, philosophy of language and philosophy of mind. He is best known for his posthumous work The Varieties of Reference (1982), edited by John McDowell. The book considers different kinds of reference to objects, and argues for a number of conditions that must obtain for reference to occur.

Gareth Evans was born in London on 12 May 1946. He was educated at Dulwich College and University College, Oxford (1964–67) where he read Philosophy, Politics and Economics (PPE). His philosophy tutor was Peter Strawson, one of the most eminent Oxford philosophers of the time. Evans became close friends with philosopher Derek Parfit and other prominent members of his academic field such as Christopher Peacocke and Crispin Wright. He was a senior scholar at Christ Church, Oxford (1967–68) and a Kennedy Scholar at Harvard University and University of California, Berkeley (1968–69).