Referring as Requesting

The essence of the argument is as follows: First, I consider Searle's definition of the propositional act of referring {which I term the PAA, for Propositional Act Account). This definition is found inadequate to deal with various ut terances in discourse used for the sole purpose of referring. Although the relevance of such ut terances to the propositional act has been defined away by Searle, it is clear tha t any comprehensive account of referring should t reat them. l develop an account of their use in terms of a speaker 's requesting the act of referent identification, which is to be understood in a perceptual sense. This itlocutionary act analysis (IAA) is shown to satisfy Searle's conditions for referring yet captures ut terances tha t the PAA cannot. The converse positif)n is then examined: Can the IAA capture the same uses of referring expressions as the PAA? If one extends the perceptuallybased notion of referent identification to include Searle's concept of identification, then by associating a complex propositional a t t i tude to one use of the definite determiner, a request can be derived. The ]AA thus handles the referring use of definite noun phrases with independently motivated rules. Referring becomes a kind of requesting. llence, the propositional act of referring is unnecessary.