Abstract
According to Scott Soames, proper names have no descriptive meaning. Nonetheless, Soames maintains that proper names are typically used to make descriptive assertions. In this paper, I challenge Soames’ division between meaning and what is asserted, first by arguing that competent speakers always make descriptive assertions with name-containing sentences, and then by defending an account of proper name meaning that accommodates this fact.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
‘In order to be a competent user of a linguistically simple name n of an object o ... one must have acquired a referential intention that determines o as the referent of n. This may be done by picking up n and intending to use it with the standard meaning-reference it has already acquired in the language due to the baptisms, authoritative stipulations, and referential uses of others’ (2005). In addition, one must realize that to assertively utter a sentence like ‘Aristotle was a philosopher’ is to say of Aristotle that he was a philosopher. Soames initially claimed that to say of Aristotle that he was a philosopher is simply to assert the singular proposition that attributes philosopher-hood to Aristotle (2002). His (2005) offered a modification–competent speakers ‘construct their assertions’ around ‘the skeleton’ of a bare singular proposition (which they need not assert)–but inclusion of a name’s referent in the proposition that one uses the name to assert remained as a necessary condition of competence with a name.
In his (2006), Soames characterizes his (2002) discussion as ’...the attempt to use pragmatic descriptive enrichment to reconcile semantic Millianism with seemingly anti-Millian intuitions about how substitution of (linguistically simple) coreferential names in sentences can change their ‘cognitive values,’ and with the apparently different truth values of attitude ascriptions containing such sentences.’
Identifying–let alone accounting for–speaker judgments about necessity and necessary truth is a difficult matter. A speaker who is asked: ‘Is it necessary that Aristotle taught Alexander?’ may have conflicting intuitions. She may find herself answering in the affirmative to the question reframed in one way - ‘Could Aristotle, the teacher of Alexander, have failed to be the teacher of Alexander?’-and in the negative with a different framing: ‘Could the teacher of Alexander Aristotle have failed to be the teacher of Alexander?’
Though Soames acknowledges that he has not fully articulated ’...constraints on what constitutes a proper pragmatic enrichment of the semantic content of a sentence’ (2008), his examples of proper descriptive assertions all involve what speakers know about referents (‘Many speakers would know something about his philosophy...some would know what he looked like at a certain age,’ etc.; ‘Because of this, different uses of the sentence...will result in somewhat different assertions...’ (2005). Thus, I take a proper descriptive assertion to be one in which the proposition expressed by the speaker contains both the referent of the name that she has uttered and descriptive information that is true of that referent. My characterization of competence therefore amounts to the claim that someone is a competent user of a name N if and only if she uses N to make proper descriptive assertions.
It is worth considering whether we should recognize as competent a speaker who associates with N the descriptive information called ‘N’. On my account, descriptive information is not involved in determining reference; thus, a speaker’s associating called ‘N’ with N would not raise the spectre of circularity. Furthermore: a speaker who accompanies his use of N with only called ‘N’, and not also by a referential intention sufficient to specify o, would, by my criterion, be counted among the incompetent.
Let us suppose, however, that a speaker uses the name ‘Aristotle’ with an appropriate referential intention, and that the only descriptive information that he associates with the name is called ‘Aristotle’. It is true that such a speaker would be of rather limited use to anyone who asked: ‘Who is Aristotle?’ But he would have recourse to a particular difference in content to justify a verdict that ‘Aristotle was a philosopher’ and ‘Aristotelis was a philosopher’ differ in meaning, (since, presumably, the name ‘Aristotle’ would, on occasions of her use, contribute propositional content different from what would be contributed by a use of ‘Aristotelis’). Thus, I do not see a reason to exclude called ‘N’ from the descriptive information that a competent speaker might associate with a name. (I thank an anonymous reviewer for raising the question of whether the association of descriptive information like called ‘N’ suffices for competence.)
References
Braun, D., & Sider, T. (2006). Kripke’s revenge. Philosophical Studies, 128, 669–682.
Kripke, S. (1980). Naming and Necessity (revised and enlarged edition). Oxford: Blackwell.
Soames, S. (2002). Beyond rigidity: The unfinished semantic agenda of naming and necessity. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Soames, S. (2005). Naming and asserting. In Zoltan Szabo (Ed.), Semantics vs. pragmatics (pp. 356–382). New York: Oxford University Press.
Soames, S. (2006). Reply to critics. Philosophical Studies, 128, 711–738.
Soames, S., (2008). The Gap between Meaning and Assertion: Why What We Literally Say Often Differs from What Our Words Literally Mean. In Philosophical Essays, Volume 1: Natural Language, What it Means & How We Use It (pp. 278–297). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Acknowledgements
Thanks to an audience at the 2009 meeting of the North Carolina Philosophical Society and to an anonymous referee for their useful comments.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Glezakos, S. The Propositions We Assert. Acta Anal 26, 165–173 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12136-009-0072-2
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12136-009-0072-2