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History/traditions: Singular Terms

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  1. Mathematical structures, universals, and singular terms.Bahram Assadian - forthcoming - In B. Assadian N. Kürbis (ed.), Knowledge, Number, and Reality; Encounters with the Work of Keith Hossack. London, UK: pp. 203-216.
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  2. A modified Kripkean theory of negative existentials.Chaoan He - forthcoming - Analysis.
    In a 2019 paper, Hausmann raised a new and interesting problem for Kripke’s account of negative existentials. He argued that Kripke’s account leads to the absurd consequence that anybody who has good reasons to believe that there are no propositions also has good reasons to believe that he or she does not exist. In this paper I propose a modified Kripkean theory, which is invulnerable to a Hausmann-like argument. As will be seen, the modified theory can be squarely justified in (...)
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  3. Levels of Ontology and Natural Language: the Case of the Ontology of Parts and Wholes.Friederike Moltmann - forthcoming - In James Miller (ed.), The Language of Ontology. Oxford University Press.
    It is common in contemporary metaphysics to distinguish two levels of ontology: the ontology of ordinary objects and the ontology of fundamental reality. This papers argues that natural language reflects not only the ontology of ordinary objects, but also a language-driven ontology, which is involved in the mass-count distinction and part-structure-sensitive semantic selection, as well as perhaps the light ontology of pleonastic entities. The paper recasts my older theory of situated part structures without situations, making use of a primitive notion (...)
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  4. Substitutional Accounting for Singular Terms: Some Problems and a Slightly More Kantian Solution for Brandom.Micah Lewin - 2022 - Journal of Transcendental Philosophy 3 (1):3-32.
    This article grapples with Robert Brandom’s account of singular terms. I argue that neither Brandom’s answer to the question “What are singular terms?” nor his answer to the question “Why are there any singular terms?” works as they currently stand. Brandom’s substitution-inferential semantic account of what singular terms are fails to distinguish between the semantic role of singular terms and indefinite descriptions, and Brandom’s “expressive transcendental deduction” for why there are any singular terms fails to deciseively show that singular terms (...)
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  5. A linguistic account of singular terms.Ana Clara Polakof - 2021 - Aufklärung 8.
    Vendler discusses how we may linguistically recognize a singular term. Even though singular terms are relevant to Philosophy and not necessarily to Linguistics, it may be enriching to know what we can do to disambiguate such a term. Philosophically, singular terms are seen as singular definite descriptions which may be used to refer to a unique entity in the world. Vendler tried to provide a syntactic account of singular terms, and was not taken into account by philosophers. Linguistically speaking, a (...)
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  6. Loar’s Puzzle, Similarity, and Knowledge of Reference.Andrea Onofri - 2019 - Manuscrito 42 (2):1-45.
    In ‘The Semantics of Singular Terms’ (1976) Brian Loar proposed a famous case where a hearer seems to misunderstand an utterance even though he has correctly identified its referent. Loar’s case has been used to defend a model of communication where speaker and hearer must think of the referent in similar ways in order for communication to succeed. This ‘Similar Ways of Thinking’ (SW) theory is extremely popular, both in the literature on Loar cases and in other philosophical discussions. My (...)
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  7. On the Cognitive Role of Singular Thoughts.Bartłomiej Czajka & Jędrzej Piotr Grodniewicz - 2017 - Review of Philosophy and Psychology 8 (3):573-594.
    This paper offers a critical review of the notion of a “singular cognitive role”, which is central to some recent theories of singular thought. According to those theories, whether a thought is singular depends on the role it plays in the subject’s cognitive activity. We compare the two most developed accounts of this type: Crane’s :21–43 2011, The Objects of Thought2013) and Jeshion’s. Both theories aim to capture the notion of a singular cognitive role in terms of mental files. We (...)
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  8. Descriptions which have grown capital letters.Brian Rabern - 2015 - Mind and Language 30 (3):292-319.
    Almost entirely ignored in the linguistic theorising on names and descriptions is a hybrid form of expression which, like definite descriptions, begin with 'the' but which, like proper names, are capitalised and seem to lack descriptive content. These are expressions such as the following, 'the Holy Roman Empire', 'the Mississippi River', or 'the Space Needle'. Such capitalised descriptions are ubiquitous in natural language, but to which linguistic categories do they belong? Are they simply proper names? Or are they definite descriptions (...)
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  9. Response.John Hawthorne & David Manley - 2014 - Mind and Language 29 (4):499-510.
    We are very grateful to our critics for their kind words and thoughtful engagementwith The Reference Book (hereafter TRB), and also to the editors of Mind & Language for the opportunity to respond. We’ll start our reply by sketching the book’s positive thesis about specific noun phrases and names. In §2 we’ll relate the traditional semantic category we call ‘reference’ to semantic taxonomies given in terms of mechanisms of denotation. In §3, we’ll turn to acquaintance constraints on reference and singular (...)
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  10. Talking about Nothing. Numbers, Hallucinations, and Fictions.István Aranyosi - 2012 - Philosophy 87 (1):145-150.
    If everything exists, then it looks, prima facie, as if talking about nothing is equivalent to not talking about anything. However, we appear as talking or thinking about particular nothings, that is, about particular items that are not among the existents. How to explain this phenomenon? One way is to deny that everything exists, and consequently to be ontologically committed to nonexistent “objects”. Another way is to deny that the process of thinking about such nonexistents is a genuine singular thought. (...)
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  11. Terms, Properties of.Egbert Bos - 2011 - In H. Lagerlund (ed.), Encyclopedia of Medieval Philosophy. Springer. pp. 1250--1258.
  12. Russell vs. Frege on definite descriptions as singular terms.Francis Jeffry Pelletier & Bernard Linsky - 2009 - In Nicholas Griffin & Dale Jacquette (eds.), Russell Vs. Meinong: The Legacy of. Routledge.
    In ‘On Denoting’ and to some extent in ‘Review of Meinong and Others, Untersuchungen zur Gegenstandstheorie und Psychologie’, published in the same issue of Mind (Russell, 1905a,b), Russell presents not only his famous elimination (or contextual defi nition) of defi nite descriptions, but also a series of considerations against understanding defi nite descriptions as singular terms. At the end of ‘On Denoting’, Russell believes he has shown that all the theories that do treat defi nite descriptions as singular terms fall (...)
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  13. The Gray's Elegy Argument: Denoting Concepts, Singular Terms, and Truth-Value Dependence.Andrew P. Rebera - 2009 - Prolegomena 8 (2):207-232.
    In the notoriously obscure “Gray’s Elegy Argument” (GEA) of “On Denoting”, Russell argues against the theory of denoting concepts which he had set out in his earlier work The Principles of Mathematics (PoM). Nathan Salmon has argued that the GEA is intended to demonstrate the falsity of the thesis that definite descriptions are singular terms, a view which he attributes to the Russell of PoM. In a similar vein, Peter Hylton has argued that we can make sense of the GEA (...)
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  14. Bogus singular terms and substitution salva denotatione.Rafal Urbaniak - 2009 - The Reasoner 3.
    This is the third installment of a paper which deals with comparison and evaluation of the standard slingshot argument (for the claim that all true sentences, if they refer, refer to the same object) with the doxastic formulation.
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  15. Innocent statements and their metaphysically loaded counterparts.Thomas Hofweber - 2007 - Philosophers' Imprint 7:1-33.
    One puzzling feature of talk about properties, propositions and natural numbers is that statements that are explicitly about them can be introduced apparently without change of truth conditions from statements that don't mention them at all. Thus it seems that the existence of numbers, properties and propositions can be established`from nothing'. This metaphysical puzzle is tied to a series of syntactic and semantic puzzles about the relationship between ordinary, metaphysically innocent statements and their metaphysically loaded counterparts, statements that explicitly mention (...)
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  16. Unified semantics of singular terms.John Justice - 2007 - Philosophical Quarterly 57 (228):363–373.
    Singular-term semantics has been intractable. Frege took the referents of singular terms to be their semantic values. On his account, vacuous terms lacked values. Russell separated the semantics of definite descriptions from the semantics of proper names, which caused truth-values to be composed in two different ways and still left vacuous names without values. Montague gave all noun phrases sets of verb-phrase extensions for values, which created type mismatches when noun phrases were objects and still left vacuous names without values. (...)
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  17. On the semantic indecision of vague singular terms.Dan López de Sa - 2007 - Sorites 19:88-91.
    Donald Smith (2006) argues that if ‘I’ is indeed vague, and the view of vagueness as semantic indecision correct after all, then ‘I’ cannot refer to a composite material object. But his considerations would, if sound, also establish that ‘Tibbles,’ ‘Everest,’ or ‘Toronto,’ do not refer to composite material objects either—nor hence, presumably, to cats, mountains, or cities. And they can be resisted, anyway. Or so I argue.
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  18. Singular terms, reference and methodology in semantics.Jeffrey C. King - 2006 - Philosophical Issues 16 (1):141–161.
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  19. Complex demonstratives qua singular terms.Eros Corazza - 2003 - Erkenntnis 59 (2):263 - 283.
    In a recent book, Jeffrey King (King 2001) argues that complexdemonstratives, i.e., noun phrases of the form `this/that F, are not singular terms. As such,they are not devices of direct reference contributing the referent to the proposition expressed.In this essay I challenge King's position and show how a direct reference view can handle the datahe proposes in favor of the quantificational account. I argue that when a complex demonstrativecannot be interpreted as a singular term, it is best understood as a (...)
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  20. Singular terms and arithmetical logicism.Ian Rumfitt - 2003 - Philosophical Books 44 (3):193--219.
    This article is a critical notice of Bob Hale and Crispin Wright's *The Reason's Proper Study* (OUP). It focuses particularly on their attempts (crucial to their neo-logicist project) to say what a singular term is. I identify problems for their account but include some constructive suggestions about how it might be improved.
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  21. The Metaphysics and Epistemology of Singular Terms.Emma Borg - 2001 - Philosophical Papers 30 (1):1-30.
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  22. The Simple Sentence Puzzle and Ambiguous Co-referential Names.Tora Koyama & Yasuo Nakayama - 2001 - Annals of the Japan Association for Philosophy of Science 10 (3):127-138.
  23. Brandom on singular terms.Peter J. Graham - 1999 - Philosophical Studies 93 (3):247-264.
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  24. Singular Terms and Reference: Evans and "Julius".Ronald Chrisley - 1998 - Electronic Journal of Analytic Philosophy 6.
    "Let us call whoever invented the zip "Julius"." With this stipulation, Gareth Evans introduced "Julius" into the language as one of a category of terms that seem to lie somewhere between definite descriptions (such as "whoever invented the zip") and proper names (such as "John", or "Julius" as usually used) (Evans 1982: 31). He dubbed these terms "descriptive names"1, and used them as a foil against which to test several theories of reference: Frege's, Russell's, and his own. I want to (...)
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  25. The proper treatment of singular terms in ordinary English.M. B. Kac - 1997 - Mind 106 (424):661-696.
    A free logical analysis of singular terms couched in terms of the semantic theory of Keenan and Faltz is shown to avoid problems with both Frege's and Russell's treatments. At its heart is the proposal of Keenan and Faltz to reverse the usual mode-theoretic conception of individuals and properties, taking the latter as primitive and the former as derived therefrom. A simple extension of the notion 'property' is then shown to enable a parallel treatment of definite generics.
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  26. Walter Burley on the simple supposition of singular terms.Paul Vincent Spade - 1997 - Topoi 16 (1):7-13.
    This paper argues that Burley's theory of simple supposition is not as it has usually been presented. The prevailing view is that Burley and other authors agreed that simple supposition was in every case supposition for a universal, and that the disagreement over simple supposition between, say, Ockham and Burley was merely a disagreement over what a universal was (a piece of the ontology? a concept?), combined with a separate disagreement over what terms signify (the speaker's thoughts? the objects the (...)
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  27. Vacuous Singular Terms.Fred Adams & Robert Stecker - 1994 - Mind and Language 9 (4):387-401.
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  28. Singular terms.Bob Hale - 1994 - In Brian McGuiness & Gianluigi Oliveri (eds.), The Philosophy of Michael Dummett. Kluwer Academic Publishers. pp. 17--44.
  29. Singular terms, quantification, and ontology I.James E. Tomberlin - 1993 - Philosophical Issues 4:297-309.
  30. Dummett's criteria for singular terms.Linda Wetzel - 1990 - Mind 99 (394):239-254.
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  31. Singular Terms and Sentential Sign Designs.Robert B. Brandom - 1987 - Philosophical Topics 15 (1):125-167.
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  32. Aspects of a Theory of Singular Reference: Prolegomena to a Dialectical Logic of Singular Terms.William J. Greenberg - 1985 - New York: Routledge.
    Originally published in 1985. This study concerns the problem of treating identity as a relation between an object and itself. It addresses the Russellian and Fregean solutions and goes on to present in the first part a surfacist account of belief-context ambiguity requiring neither differences in relative scope nor distinctions between sense and reference. The second part offers an account of negative existentials, necessity and identity-statements which resolves problems unlike the Russell-Frege analyses. This is a detailed work in linguistics and (...)
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  33. Are singular terms needed for describing the world?Toomas Karmo - 1985 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 63 (4):419 – 427.
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  34. How Not To Talk About What Does Not Exist.Barry Smith - 1984 - In Rudolf Haller (ed.), Aesthetics. Vienna: Hölder-Pichler-Tempsky. pp. 194-196.
    Defends a view of intentional directedness according to which those seemingly object-directed acts – involved for example in reading works of fiction – which lack existing objects as targets, are not intentional (thus: not directed towards any object). Rather, each such act seems to its subject as if it were so directed because it is associated with a belief of a certain special sort, whose intentional directedness is not towards any putative external object but rather towards the very act itself (...)
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  35. Existence, reference, and definite singular terms.Lauchlan Chipman - 1982 - Mind 91 (361):96-101.
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  36. What is a singular term?W. S. Croddy - 1982 - Logique Et Analyse 25 (98):191.
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  37. Aspects of a theory of singular reference: prolegomena to a dialectical logic of singular terms.William J. Greenberg - 1982 - Dissertation, University of California, Los Angeles
    The difficulties encountered by attempts to treat identity as a relation between an object and itself are well-known: "...the sentence 'The morning star is...the morning star' is analytic and a truism, while...'The morning star is the evening star' is synthetic and represents a 'valuable extension of our knowledge'... But if {the morning star} and {the evening star} are the same object, and identity is taken as a relation holding between this object and itself, then it is impossible to explain how (...)
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  38. Truth, correspondence, and non-denoting singular terms.Ermanno Bencivenga - 1980 - Philosophia 9 (2):219-229.
    The correspondence theory of truth provides standard semantics with a simple scheme for evaluating sentences. This scheme however depends on the existence of basic correspondences between singular terms and objects, And thus breaks down in the case of non-Denoting singular terms. An alternative to the correspondence theory is thus called for in dealing with such terms. The author criticizes various positions discussed in the literature in this regard, And then presents a solution of his own.
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  39. Brian Loar on singular terms.Michael Devitt - 1980 - Philosophical Studies 37 (3):271 - 280.
    In "the semantics of singular terms," brian loar described and criticized a "causal" theory of reference and offered a new "description" theory. It is argued that the particular causal theory described is not to be found in the papers by donnellan and kripke cited as evidence for it, And is a straw man. Further "prima facie", Loar's new description theory fails to meet kripke's noncircularity condition. Should loar attempt to meet it, His theory is likely to run foul of kripke's (...)
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  40. Singular Terms and the Syllogistic.George Englebretsen - 1980 - New Scholasticism 54 (1):68-74.
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  41. Singular Terms and Rigid Designators.Monte Cook - 1979 - Southwestern Journal of Philosophy 10 (1):157-162.
  42. Strawson, Geach and Dummett on singular terms and predicates.Bob Hale - 1979 - Synthese 42 (2):275 - 295.
    In the opening chapter of Subject and Predicate in Logic and Grammar, [1] Professor Strawson develops an explanation of the subjectpredicate distinction on the basis of a supposedly more fundamental distinction or contrast between, on the one hand, spatio-temporal particulars and, on the other, general concepts applicable to such particulars. At a basic level, he argues, these contrasted items occupy a central position in our thought about the world. They form the constituents of a fundamental type of judgment about the (...)
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  43. Naming and referring: the semantics and pragmatics of singular terms.David S. Schwarz - 1979 - New York: de Gruyter.
    I. Introduction As I sketched in my Preface, what frames this discussion is the opposition between the conceptual and the objective approaches to the ...
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  44. Predication and singular terms.Richard E. Grandy - 1977 - Noûs 11 (2):163-167.
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  45. Singular terms in contexts of propositional attitude.Jennifer Hornsby - 1977 - Mind 86 (341):31-48.
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  46. The semantics of singular terms.Brian Loar - 1976 - Philosophical Studies 30 (6):353 - 377.
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  47. Referring, singular terms, and presupposition.David S. Schwarz - 1976 - Philosophical Studies 30 (1):63 - 74.
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  48. Truth and singular terms.Tyler Burge - 1974 - Noûs 8 (4):309-325.
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  49. Singular terms.Michael Devitt - 1974 - Journal of Philosophy 71 (7):183-205.
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  50. Demonstratives, definite descriptions and the elimination of singular terms.C. A. Hooker - 1970 - Journal of Philosophy 67 (22):951-961.
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