Rather than being alienated by new instances of self-referential language in practice, students, too, should be lovin' it.
With visual language, McCandless can cut through the noise in information overload, uncover the insights locked within data, and decode the self-referential language that pervades knowledge.
Similar consequences follow from a referential theory of language.
K. Anthony Appiah (1996) argues that racial ascriptions are problematic whether one adopts an ideational or a referential theory of language.
In either case, a referential theory of language that claims that we know what a gender is when we know what in the world corresponds to or causes our talk of gender would seem to be in trouble.
Kumārila's confidence in the genuinely referential nature of language is also reflected, finally, in his characteristic arguments for the idea that it is an enduring ātman ("self") that is the underlying subject of all of our actions (and that therefore stands to realize, in the future, the fruits of Vedic practices).
None of this is to undermine the idea that some expressions of natural language are referential and others quantificational, but it is to suggest that the role of the words 'the' and 'a' (and their counterparts in other languages) may be less robust than philosophers in the one hundred years since Russell have imagined.
Since functional programming languages were designed with referential transparency in mind, these languages offer a lot of support when writing immutable data structures and side-effects free code.
Remember, again, that we are talking of the expressive dimension of language, not the referential dimension (about which more in a moment).
Scala is not a pure functional programming language that enforces referential transparency through its type system (this can be achieved by using the effect system provided by scalaz though; see below), but programming in a pure manner as well as the use of immutable data structures are strongly encouraged and facilitated by the language.
Some philosophers think the simulation theory may shed light on issues in traditional philosophy of mind and language concerning intentionality, referential opacity, broad and narrow content, the nature of mental causation, Twin Earth problems, the problem of other minds, and the peculiarities of self-knowledge.
