ORIGINAL ARTICLE Reference and the ambiguity of truth-value judgments Filippo Domaneschi 1 | Massimiliano Vignolo 2 1 DAFIST–Philosophical Section, Director of the Laboratory of Language and Social Cognition, University of Genoa, Genoa, Italy 2 DAFIST–Philosophical Section, University of Genoa, Genoa, Italy Correspondence Filippo Domaneschi, DAFIST - Philosophical Section, Director of the Laboratory of Language and Social Cognition, University of Genoa, Via Balbi 30, 7 Floor, 16128 Genoa, Italy. Email: filippo.domaneschi@unige.it Abstract Martí argued that referential intuitions are not the right kind of empirical evidence for testing theories of refer- ence. Machery, Olivola, and De Blanc replied with a survey aimed at providing evidence that referential intuitions are in sync with truth-value judgments and argued that truth-value judgments provide empirical data from linguistic usage. We present the results of a survey indicating that Machery, Olivola, and De Blanc's experiment fails to overcome Martí's objection: The truth-value judgements tested by Machery, Oli- vola, and De Blanc do not provide data relevant for testing theories of reference. KEYWORDS descriptivism, experimental philosophy, experimental semantics, proper names, referential intuitions, theory of reference 1 | INTRODUCTION Genoveva Martí (2009) argued that referential intuitions are not the right kind of empirical evidence for testing theories of reference. She maintained that experimentalists ought to test how people use names instead of what people think about reference. 1 In this paper, we focus our attention on a move that Machery, Olivola, and De Blanc (2009) (henceforth “MOD”) made to overcome the charge of irrelevance raised against experiments on people's referential intuitions. MOD argued that testing truth-value judgments is a way of testing theories of reference against linguistic usage. MOD con- ducted an experiment on truth-value judgments intended to give evidence that referential intuitions 1 Devitt (2011, 2012a, 2012b), too, argues that experimentalists should test theories of reference against linguistic usage, but he does not endorse the same skepticims as Martí's on the methodological role of referential intuitions. Received: 25 September 2018 Revised: 15 January 2019 Accepted: 6 April 2019 DOI: 10.1111/mila.12254 Mind Lang. 2019;1–16. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/mila © 2019 John Wiley & Sons Ltd 1