Abstract
A widely accepted thesis in the philosophy of language is that natural language proper names are rigid designators, and that they are so de jure, or as a matter of the “semantic rules of the language.” This paper questions this claim, arguing that rigidity cannot be plausibly construed as a property of name types and that the alternative, rigidity construed as a property of tokens, means that they cannot be considered rigid de jure; rigidity in this case must be viewed as a pragmatic and not a semantic property.
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Notes
See especially the Preface, pp. 48–9, and pp. 76–8 of Kripke (1970/1980).
Here I am alluding to the type/token distinction that is commonly made in philosophy and linguistics. The distinction is between expressions considered as abstract entities (types) or as concrete instances (tokens). For example, the sentence “The book is on the table” contains two instances or tokens of the word “the;” these are tokens of one English word, “the,” considered abstractly as a type. This paper is neutral with respect to the metaphysics of types and tokens.
Compare (Récanati 1993, Sects. 1.2, 1.3).
The contrast is with “rigidity de facto”: an expression is rigid de facto if it just happens to be the case, metaphysically, that the expression cannot but denote a particular object. One of Kripke’s examples is the definite description “the smallest prime.” This expression is held to be rigid de facto, since, metaphysically speaking, no other entity but the actual smallest prime—the number two—can be the smallest prime number and thus satisfy that description.
It might be argued, too, that what Chomsky says of “denote,” “refer,” and “true of” seems apt in the case of “rigidity” as well: “there can be no intuitions about these [technical] notions, just as there can be none about ‘angular velocity’ and ‘protein’” (2000, p. 130).
Notice that the reason given by Kripke for the rigidity of “Nixon”—viz. “no one other than Nixon might have been Nixon” (p. 48)—needs to be supplemented with the (tacit) premise—“and ‘Nixon’ has no other bearer than Richard Nixon, the US president”—in order for the conclusion to go through; otherwise it seems a non-sequitur: the (pretty uncontroversial) metaphysical fact that no other entity than Nixon could have been Nixon seems irrelevant to whether an English expression has a certain posited property (rigidity) or not.
Kaplan (1990) has also advocated this one bearer/one name view of names, which he calls the “common currency” view, and explicitly draws the analogy with “bank” to justify it.
Katz seems here to be attributing a Direct Reference view of names to Kripke, a view according to which a name’s “meaning” is simply its bearer. The attribution would not be entirely without justification, as Bach (1987/1994, p. 137, fn. 6) observes. However, Kripke has explained in recent talks that his view is not as close to Direct Reference as the passages quoted by Bach would make it seem. He does not consider himself a Direct Reference theorist.
The view that proper names have metalinguistic meanings was first seriously advocated by Kneale (1962, p. 630), though Russell (1919, p. 171) also alludes in passing to the possibility of interpreting names in this way. Authors who have more recently defended or explored the view include Loar (1976), Bach (1987/1994a, Chap. 7, 2002), Katz (1990, 2001), Récanati (1993, Chaps. 8–9), Geurts (1997), and Justice (2001).
See also (Neale 1990, pp. xii–xiii) for the distinction’s twentieth century lineage.
See also (Bach 2007).
Following Neale (1990, pp. 49–50, fn. 1, 2010, forthcoming, p. 139), by an object-dependent proposition (whether conceived in Fregean or Russellian terms—no position on propositions is assumed in this paper), I understand a proposition whose existence essentially depends upon the existence of a particular object. Put in terms of utterances and truth conditions, an utterance has object-dependent truth conditions if they include a particular object.
Again following Neale, I take an object-independent or general proposition to be a purely qualitative or descriptive proposition, a proposition whose existence is not dependent on the existence of any one particular object, but rather on certain properties an arbitrary object may have; and correspondingly, an utterance has object-independent truth conditions if no specific individual is included among these truth conditions.
An expression that possesses natural gender encodes the information that the things to which the expression applies are sexed. Natural gender must be distinguished from “grammatical” gender, a morphological feature of words of certain languages. A word’s having grammatical gender is unrelated to the question whether the word applies to sexed things.
Normally a natural language name would be rendered in logical notation as a constant. However, this would not be accurate for an attributively interpreted name, which is interpreted as predicating certain properties of a random object. This random object is better represented by a variable.
Here we are being completely neutral as to what sorts of things may be considered properties. From our perspective, the property of being an Adam Smith is a perfectly legitimate property, and on a par with the property (also encoded by “Adam Smith”) of being male, for example.
If one is willing to leave the realm of the “literal,” it becomes apparent that names may be taken to express all sorts of things of a non-objectual nature. Consider the following example, due to Clark (1992), in which a name is used as a verb to express a relation derived from a property associated with its bearer: “He Houdini’d his way out of a locked closet.” Here the speaker is alluding to Houdini’s legendary abilities to escape from confinement and ascribing similar abilities to the person he is referring to.
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Acknowledgments
I am grateful to Stephen Neale and Michael Levin for their comments on an earlier draft of this paper.
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Baumann, P. Are Proper Names Rigid Designators?. Axiomathes 20, 333–346 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10516-010-9100-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10516-010-9100-5