Recently concern for reference has come under attack. Richard Rorty, who takes himself to be championing the cause of Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Dewey, Quine, Davidson and Derrida, 1 writes that the problem of reference is a successor of "outworn philosophical projects" that only make sense "in the context of the seventeenth century image of the mind as the Mirror of Nature". 2 In this image ideas are "a veil between subject and object" and thus how ideas can come to represent reality is a live issue. Parallel issues about language will hardly be exciting "unless we can re-invent something like the seventeenth century gap between two kinds of reality', a For Rorty, of course, there is no such gap between language and reality; sentences are not akin to ideas, the veil that separated seventeenth century minds from their objects. 9 But this disinterest in reference is based on a confusion. Rorty is confusing an epistemological issue with a metaphysical one. If a word, an idea, or anything else always manages to get between reality and us, then how we are to know that part of reality veiled from us by words, ideas, etc. is a problem that, as Rorty correctly points out, does become uninteresting once the veil drops. Although the epistemological issue might vanish, the metaphysical issue remains. Even if the veil is down and for some reason reality is fully disclosed, it remains to be explained how one thing in this disclosed reality comes to refer to another. This is not a concern with the conditions under which one can know that one thing refers to another, but under what conditions one thing refers to another. This latter concern remains even in a naked world.
These two concerns can be separated quite nicely with the help of Descartes. Due to the separation between our ideas and the world, Descartes needs a guarantor for the correspondence of our ideas to the world. God, of course, is Descartes' guarantor. Descartes has an idea of God and this idea supposedly guarantees its own correspondence to God, and God in turn guarantees correspondence for all the other clear and distinct ideas Descartes Philosophical Studies 47 (