Fixing Reference by Imogen Dickie

I can’t do any better than the author herself: ‘This book is about how we manage to represent ordinary objects in thought and speech’ (1). Ordinary objects ‘are all the things you would name if you were giving a non-philosophical and non-facetious answer to the question of which things there are in a room’ (27). This characterization is further developed over the course of several pages until we arrive at the idea that ordinary things are ‘macroscopic objects having boundaries sufficiently precise and unity relations sufficiently strong to determine an equivalence class of … objects indiscriminable relative to the properties attributed by our ordinary thoughts’ (34).