Analysis of Referential and Attributive Uses Based on Indirect Speech Acts

One of the important questions about definite descriptions is the difference between referential and attributive uses of these descriptions. Donnellan objects Russell and Strawson's theories of definite descriptions because they both fail to explain referential use, but nowhere do they give us a set of necessary and sufficient conditions for distinguishing any use. Kripke also believes that the difference between referential and attributive uses is in fact the difference between the speaker's reference and the semantic reference. The speaker's reference and the semantic reference coincide in attributive use, but in referential use, they may be different. According to the theory of speech acts, Kripke's account may not be quite correct, however, the difference between speaker's reference and semantic reference is similar to the difference between the speaker's meaning and the meaning of the sentence, although Kripke adopts a strange way of expressing it, because reference, contrary to meaning, is a speech act. But Searle's solution is based on his theory of indirect speech acts; That is, the speaker says something, he means what he says, but he also means something else. In Searle's account, the speaker's primary illocutionary act which is not literally expressed in his utterances, is done indirectly by performing his secondary illocutionary act which is expressed literally. According to Searle, all Donnellan's referential uses are mere uses where the speaker uses a definite description that expresses the secondary aspect under which the reference is made.