Names

This paper addresses some data put forward by Geurts (1997) in support of his metalinguistic or quotation theory of proper names, according to which a name N means ‘the individual named N’. The data illustrate ten linguistic behaviours claimed to be shared by proper names and definite descriptions. I argue that in some cases the behaviours have a common explanation which is based on a property independent of Geurts' analysis, and that in the remaining cases the behaviours are not actually (...) shared. Thus these behaviours do not actually support the metalinguistic theory. (shrink)

The view of names that plantinga advances in "the nature of necessity" seems to have unacceptable consequences for names in propositional attitude contexts. In this paper, I argue that he is unsuccessful in his attempt to avoid these consequences.

Available from UMI in association with The British Library. Requires signed TDF. ;Two elements in Kripke's notion of "rigid designation" are distinguished: "genuine reference", which has to do with the semantic function of a singular term, and "rigid designation", which has to do with the behaviour of a singular term in modal contexts. Accordingly, the discussion is divided into two parts. ;In Part I, arguments from functionalism against "genuine reference" are considered and rejected, but it is claimed that certain Cartesian (...) arguments constitute a formidable objection against this notion. Therefore, while descriptivism must be rejected "genuine reference" is too strong as an alternative. "Weak reference" is suggested as the required notion, and some of its characteristics are delineated. ;In Part II, the problems concerning the contingent a priori and the necessary a posteriori arising from the second element in Kripke's notion are discussed, depending on whether the names involved are ordinary proper names, or "descriptive" names. Evans' arguments concerning descriptive names are considered, and it is argued that, because of a new distinction between deep vs. superficial rigidity, Davies and Humberstone fail in formulating them more exactly; but the informal arguments, though inconclusive, are intuitive. As for ordinary proper names, and on the basis of conclusions reached in Part I, the case for contingent a priori truths involving such names is undermined. In the case of necessary a posteriori truths involving ordinary proper names, the strategies of denying the necessity or the a posteriority of the examples are discussed, and found wanting. However, since there are reasons from other areas for denying the coincidence of the necessary and the a priori, Kripke's examples do not call for a radical departure from currently held views. (shrink)

One dimension of a comprehensive semantic and semiotic theory is its explanation of how a wide-variety of linguistic expressions designate singular objects (e.g., pronouns, demonstratives, definite descriptions, etc.). The bulk of scholarship on Peirce's theory of proper names has aligned his theory with the so called new theory of reference by drawing connections between proper names qua rhematic indexical legisigns (a kind of sign in Peirce's 10-sign typology) and various aspects of Kripke's theory of names.2 Recent scholarship has navigated away (...) from indexing Kripke-Peirce affinities and has begun the process of articulating a semiotic or pragmatic theory of names that is distinctly Peircean. For example .. (shrink)

Aristotle begins the third chapter of book VIII of the Metaphysics by claiming that sometimes it is not clear whether a name refers to the composite substance or to the actuality and the form, for instance whether «animal» refers to the soul in a body or simply to the soul. In solving this problem, Aristotle states that the name «animal» can refer to both, not, however, in one and the same sense but rather by expressing two different senses which are (...) nonetheless related to each other . Nevertheless, Aristotle does not say anything concerning which of these two senses the name «animal» primarily expresses. This text of the Metaphysics gives to the medieval Latin commentators the occasion to deal with the topic of the signification of substantial names and, more particularly, to assess Averroes’s interpretation of Aristotle’s semantics. In the paper I attempt to reconstruct some important patterns of argument elaborated by thirteenth- and fourteenth-century commentators on the Metaphysics in their endeavor to solve the problem and to explain Averroes’s interpretation. (shrink)

This book is the first systematic account of the syntax and semantics of names. Drawing on work in onomastics, philosophy, and linguistics the author examines the distribution and subcategorization of names within a framework of syntactic categories and considers how the morphosyntactic behaviour of names connects to their semantic roles in a range of languages.

Michael Durrant’s rejection is examined of Frege’s and Wittgenstein’s thesis that a name has meaning only in the context of a proposition (the Context Principle). Durrant argues that in two ways the Context Principle makes it impossible for a hearer to determine the meaning of a name, for such identification would involve both an infinite regress and a vicious circle of reasoning. I reply that a finite (rather than infinite) set of propositions could suffice; and that making corrigible assumptions allows (...) people to believe propositions and thus to understand names ahead of knowing what the propositions are about. Durrant’s arguments, then, are inconclusive. Since, however, names can be bestowed and their meanings learned in and through acts of nonpropositional naming, then, unless special senses of ‘name’ and‘proposition’ are intended, the Context Principle is false. (shrink)

The Millian view that the meaning of a proper name is simply its referent has long been popular among philosophers of language. It might even be deemed the orthodox view, despite its well-known difficulties. Fregean and Russellian alternatives, though widely discussed, are much less popular. The Predicate View has not even been taken seriously, at least until fairly recently, but finally, it is receiving the attention it deserves. It says that a name expresses the property of bearing that name. Despite (...) its apparent shortcomings, it has a distinct virtue: It straightforwardly reckons with the fact that proper names generally have multiple bearers and are sometimes used to ascribe the property of bearing a name rather than to refer to a particular bearer of the name. It holds that proper names are much the same as common nouns, both semantically and syntactically, with only superficial differences. They both can be quantified and modified. The main difference, at least in English, is that when used to refer a proper name, unlike a common noun, is not preceded by the definite article. The Predicate View accounts for manifestly predicative uses, but to be vindicated, it needs to do justice to the fact that the main use of proper names is to refer. (shrink)

Proper names seem simple on the surface. Indeed, anyone unfamiliar with philosophical debates about them might wonder what the fuss could possibly be about. It seems obvious why we need them and what we do with them, and that is to talk about particular persons, places, and things. You don't have to be as smart as Mill to think that proper names are simply tags attached to individuals. But sometimes appearances are deceiving.

This study offers a ckomprehensive new interpretation of one of Plato's dialogues, the _Cratylus_. Throughout, the book combines analysis of Plato's arguments with attentiveness to his philosophical method.

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. (shrink)

In this study of events and their places in our language and thought, Bennett propounds and defends views about what kind of item an event is, how the language of events works, and about how these two themes are interrelated. He argues that most of the supposedly metaphysical literature is really about the semantics of their names, and that the true metaphysic of events--known by Leibniz and rediscovered by Kim--has not been universally accepted because it has been tarred with the (...) brush of a false semantic theory. (shrink)

The immediate purpose of this note is to provide counterexamples to François Recanati’s claim in Direct Reference that descriptive names (a name whose reference is fixed by an attributive definite description) are created with the expectation that we will be able to think of the referent nondescriptively at some point in the future. The larger issue is how to reconcile the existence of descriptive names with the theoretical commitments Recanati takes direct reference to have. The point of the claim about (...) the expectation of future knowledge of the referent is to make it plausible that uses of descriptive names are not literal, since a literal use ought to express a singular proposition rather than one involving a descriptive mode of presentation; it is argued that this route to reconciliation will not work. (shrink)

This dissertation is addressed to the question of proper name reference, a topic prominent in contemporary philosophy of language. My aim here is not to defend nor to endorse any particular "theory" of reference. Rather, my purpose is to initiate a calling into question of the project of arriving at such a "theory"--at least as this project most commonly has been conceived. ;Recent attacks, by Kripke and others, upon "description" theories of name reference have forced the recognition that names commonly (...) have reference within a community of speakers. An individual may "borrow" upon the communally-established reference of a name--he refers thanks to his co-reference. But what is it that makes for such "borrowing", for community-membership of this sort? I argue that a purely causal-theoretic account is unsatisfactory as an answer to this question, and thus as a theory of co-reference. We are left, by this account, with no way of distinguishing cases in which reference is preserved, as a name is passed on, from those in which a shift of reference occurs, despite causal connection with antecedent usage. ;Drawing upon suggestions from the work of Kripke, Putnam and Dummett, I propose an account which promises to provide us with sufficient and necessary conditions for co-reference. This is the "linguistic authority account", which takes as central the speaker's own recognition of and deference to other users of a name. But I argue that this approach, too, fails to yield non-circular conditions for the obtaining of co-reference. ;I conclude by exploring the possible lessons to be derived from these failures, in particular the suggestion that the ineliminable circularity of these "theories" reveals there to be no genuine semantic facts to be accounted for. This suggestion, in the end, I reject; but I agree that the upshot of these failures is their forcing us to re-construe the task of theorizing about reference. Such theorizing had best be viewed as the attempt to codify our practice of reference-ascription; it cannot, I argue, sensibly be construed as the attempt to justify that practice, nor to get at those semantic facts which underlie the practice. (shrink)

This article systematically challenges Kripke's modal argument and Soames's defence of this argument by arguing that, just like descriptions, names can take narrow or wide scopes over modalities, and that there is a big difference between the wide scope reading and the narrow scope reading of a modal sentence with a name. Its final conclusions are that all of Kripke's and Soames's arguments are untenable due to some fallacies or mistakes; names are not “rigid designators”; if there were rigid designators, (...) description(s) could be rigidified to refer fixedly to objects; so names cannot be distinguished in this way from the corresponding descriptions. A descriptivist account of names is still correct; and there is no justification for Kripke's theory of rigid designation and its consequences. (shrink)

Recently, several philosophers of language have claimed that, at least in some respects, Peter Geach proposed a view about proper names that anticipated important features of the causal theory (or historical chain theory) that was later set forth by Saul Kripke and others. Quentin Smith, for example, in his essay, "Direct, Rigid Designation and A Posteriori Necessity: A History and Critique," says explicitly that "Geach (1969) ... originated the causal or 'historical chain' theory of names" (1999). In his entry on (...) "Proper Names" for the Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Graeme Forbes speaks of the "Geach-Kripke historical chain account" of proper names. In this paper, I suggest that, while there are very clear affinities between Geach's view on proper names and that of Kripke, there are several important differences, differences that are significant enough for me to claim that Geach and Kripke do not share a single account of proper names. (shrink)

One reason why we find the causal theory of reference so interesting is because it provides an account of de re necessity. Necessity is not only predicated of statements but also of objects. It is not only discovered by means of linguistic analysis but also by means of empirical investigation. And this means that truths we once described as contingent turn out to be necessary after all. We may think that this account of de re necessity is due to the (...) causal theorists' open acceptance of essentialism. Certainly essentialism provides an account of de re necessity. The problem, however, is that the causal theorists do not prove essentialism so much as presuppose it. Nevertheless, they still provide an account of de re necessity - an account of de re necessity that owes nothing to essentialism. And it is this account of necessity that I plan to discuss in this paper. (shrink)

There is a tension within Ockham's theory of mental language between its claim to being a semantics for conventional languages and its claim to being a model of concept acquisition and thought. In particular, the commitment to a redundancy-free mental language which serves to explain important semantic relations such as synonymy and ambiguity conflicts, _prima facie, with the possibility of opaque belief contexts. I argue that it is preferable to treat the theory of mental language as an idealized theory of (...) cognitive competence than to forfeit, as Jerry Fodor does, the commitment to conceptual parsimony. (shrink)

Recent literature contains influential arguments for variabilism, the view that we should understand proper names as analogues not of constants but of variables. In particular, proper names are said to sometimes take semantic values that are not referential but purely general. I present a counter-example to this view.

Terms designating substances and kinds function grammatically much like proper names of individuals. This supports Ruth Millikan's theory, but it also poses the question of how we can understand the reference of kind terms when the ontological status of the kind term is uncertain or disputed.

Hurford claims that empty variables antedated proper names in linguistic (not merely logical) predicate-argument structure, and this had an effect on visual perception. But his evidence, drawn from proper names and the supposed inability of nonhumans to recognise individual conspecifics, is weak. So visual perception seems less relevant to the evolution of grammar than Hurford thinks.

Kripke´s work on names and identity continues to be subject of intense critical scrutiny. The Kripkean message, briefly statet, is that names are rigid designators and that identy statements formulated in terms of names are, if true, necessarily true. Recently Micheal Jubien developes a revisionist line that denies that names serve a referential role but allows, nonetheless, that Kripke´s fundamental insight can be preserved. In my paper, I critically examine Jubien´s proposal for preserving the Kripkean insight that "deserves to be (...) preserved". (shrink)

This paper addresses a dilemma arising from the linguistic behaviour of arithmetical expressions in two basic ways: they occur, either as singular terms in identity statements or as predicates of concepts in adjectival statements. However, those forms of syntactical behaviour give rise to opposite accounts of the ontological status of natural numbers. The substantival use of arithmetical expressions is associated with the interpretation of natural numbers as abstract particulars while the adjectival use of arithmetical expressions ordinarily supports the interpretation of (...) natural numbers either as properties of physical collections or as properties of sortal concepts, i.e. as second-order properties. Both types of interpretation are taken under consideration and the special difficulties of each position are sketched, in view of recently discussed aspects of the ‘arithmetical platonism’ issue. The interpretation of numbers as abstract particulars by the neo-Fregean program presupposes the discrimination of singular terms from other categories of expressions. However, to achieve the alleged syntactical distinction by means of an appropriate set of criteria is considered as a very ambitious task which has not yet been met in an adequate way. On the other hand, interpretations of natural numbers as (1st or 2nd-order) properties face difficulties which, to a large extent, are taken to arise from the fact that those interpretations do not offer a satisfactory account of arithmetical identities. In particular, the paper takes in account Maddy’s approach according to which natural numbers are properties of sets. Then it investigates the reasons why interpretations of numbers as properties often result in an extensional treatment of those properties. Then the paper tries out a reduction strategy to investigate the relationship between the substantival form ‘ ’ and the adjectival form ‘ ’ and determine, if possible, the most fundamental of the two accounts. Hence, it presents three options. The first option is to examine whether the substantival form is reducible to the adjectival form, by an attempt to undermine the semantic role of arithmetical terms as genuine singular terms. The second option is to apply the converse reduction strategy. The third option is to take the substantival form to be equivalent to the adjectival form. In particular, the paper focuses its attention on the third option. To articulate the proposal about the alleged equivalence between the two forms of syntactical behaviour of numbers, it embarks on a discussion of Ramsey’s argument that no essential difference between particulars and universals can be asserted at least on syntactical grounds. Then the paper moves on to present the reasons why the third option appears to be the most prevalent of the three. To highlight this claim, it presents an account of how an equivalence principle can actually be settled among the two forms of arithmetical syntactical behaviour. The paper concludes with suggestions about possible ways by which we can construe the alleged equivalence, considering the substantival and the adjectival account as the two sides of the same coin. (shrink)

I defend what I believe to be a new variation on Kripkean themes, for the purpose of providing an improved way to understand the referring functions of proper names. I begin by discussing roles played by perceptual perspectives in the use of proper names, and then broaden the discussion to include what I call cognitive perspectives. Although both types of perspectives underwrite the existence of intentional intermediaries between proper names and their referents, the existence of these intentional intermediaries does not (...) entail that a Kripke-inspired view of direct reference must be abandoned. At the same time, the existence of these intermediaries can be seen to play illuminating roles as regards the referring functions of proper names in the following types of cases, among others: (a) where different names pick out the same subject; (b) where names are empty. Along the way, I argue that perspectival views are not something inside the head of language users as intended by Putnam in his well-known discussion of meaning. (shrink)