Conference in Santa Barbara (J. Stanley)

Here is a link to what looks like an excellent conference in the philosophy of language in Santa Barbara. I couldn't help but notice, however, the following rather strange proclamation in the conference announcement:            

Despite extreme skepticism and pessimism from some quarters, the theory of meaning—central to the philosophy of language—has shown steady progress since the turn of the previous century. The most important advance in the past 50 years is the idea of what has come to be called direct reference.

The theory of direct reference, for those of you who do not know, involves the thesis that ordinary proper names refer "directly", without mediation by a mode of presentation of their referent. Direct reference theorists believe, among other things, that the only propositional contribution of an ordinary proper name is its referent. So, direct reference theorists spend their days defending theses such as that the proposition expressed by "Mark Twain is Samuel Clemens" is the same as that expressed by "Mark Twain is Mark Twain". Direct reference theory is an interesting if controversial view of the semantics of ordinary proper names and belief ascriptions, and debates about it have occupied a small but lively corner of the philosophy of language (though the theory has had little or no impact in the semantics of natural language). So the declaration in this conference announcement is a little surprising, to say the least. According to its author, the thesis of direct reference constitutes a more important advance in the theory of meaning than any of:

1. Grice's theory of conversational implicature.
2. ALL of Richard Montague's contributions to the theory of meaning.
3. Stalnaker and Lewis's analyses of subjunctive conditionals.
4. Lewis's triviality results for indicative conditionals.
5. Davidson's analysis of action sentences.
6. Kaplan's character-content distinction.
7. Generalized Quantifier Theory.
8. Supervaluational semantics.
9. All work done on cross-sentential anaphora (E-type theories, DRT, dynamic semantics)
10. All work done on the semantics of tense in natural language.

Exhuberance about one's corner of study is a virtue, but still...