TITLE: Probabilistic Arbitrary Reference

ABSTRACT: Arbitrary Reference is the idea that we can refer to individual entities with some degree of arbitrariness. Although there are different accounts of Arbitrary Reference, nearly all of them can be challenged on the basis that they entail the existence of free-floating semantic facts, namely: semantic facts which are not grounded in any non-semantic fact. In this talk I propose a solution. First I argue that the friends of Arbitrary Reference can answer the challenge by appealing to the notion of indeterministic grounding. Then I propose a new account of Arbitrary Reference as a probabilistic phenomenon, and argue that this new account should be preferred over the classical versions of Arbitrary Reference for its ability to build a bridge between cases of canonical and arbitrary reference and the new insights it offers on the phenomenon of semantic vagueness.