Abstract
According to predicativism about names, names which occur in argument positions have the same type of semantic contents as predicates. In this paper, I shall argue that these bare singular names do not have the same type of semantic contents as predicates. I will present three objections to predicativism—the modal, the epistemic, and the translation objections—and show that they succeed even against the more sophisticated versions of predicativism defended by Fara and Bach.
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Notes
Stubborn referentialists might argue that since the semantic content of a name is simply its reference for any of its occurrences, the name “Alfred” in (2)–(6) is not literally used. In this paper, however, I shall set aside this possibility, and take for granted that (2)–(6) are literal, predicative uses.
Burge claims that predicativists are free from the burden of analyzing the term “given” or “appropriate way”. He says, “The vague necessary and sufficient application condition for proper names which I have offered may be regarded as a mere stand-in for a full-fledged empirical account of how objects get proper names attached to them. Baptism, inheritance, nicknaming, brand-naming, labeling may all be expected to enter into such an account. Semantics, however, need not await the full returns of sociology.” (Burge 1973: 435)
In the same spirit, Fara suggests, “Kripke’s ‘causal theory of reference’ could well be maintained as an analysis of what it is to be called Michael—to be in the extension of the name ‘Michael’” (Fara 2015a: 73), and do not provide any further analysis of the concept of bearing a name.
I agree with their view that providing a strict necessary and sufficient condition for bearing a name is not predicativists’ task, and shall also remain neutral on a theory of bearing a name, because it does not affect my arguments in this paper.
William Kneale (1966) suggests that a name “N” has the same semantic content as the description “the object called ‘N’”. But Saul Kripke persuasively argues that if “the object called ‘N’” means “the object called ‘N’ by me”, Kneale’s theory violates the non-circularity condition. He says, “We ask, ‘To whom does he refer by “Socrates”?’ And then the answer is given, ‘Well, he refers to man to whom he refers.’ If this were all there was to the meaning of a proper name, then no reference would get off the ground at all.” (Kripke 1980: 70).
However, “the object (appropriately) named ‘N’” does not violate the non-circularity condition. As seen in Sect. 2, this is different from the description “the object called ‘N’ by me”. We can successfully pick out the object that is appropriately named “N” in our linguistic community without any circularity.
The sentence (8) surely has its own false reading when the definite description “the man named ‘Trump’” takes wide scope.
It is controversial whether the proposition expressed by (9) can be knowable a priori at least to the name-giver. [For example, Soames (2003: 408–410) explicitly contends that it cannot be, while Korman (2010) argues against it.] In this paper, however, I shall exclude this special case and assume that the subject is not the person who gave Trump the name “Trump”.
Burge (1973: 437) seems to argue in this way.
To be sure, testimony is not the only process that enables the subject to know it a posteriori. For example, by hearing the shout, “Hey, Trump!” from somewhere, or by finding out the name “Trump” on the class roster, I can correctly infer that there is the man named “Trump” in my linguistic community and know that that very person’s name is “Trump”. Still, these are an empirical justificatory process like receiving testimony. (Thanks to Korman for raising this issue to me.)
Jeshion suggests a possible response for descriptivists to the epistemic objection: “The strong descriptivist has available a story that rebuts the objection. Strong descriptivism maintains that in learning a name for an individual, the speaker associates some salient uniquely identifying conception of that individual with the name. She then comes to take that conception as supplying the content of the name. Such association of the conception with the name does typically employ the services of sense perceptual experience. The speaker does, say observe α or hear things about α by testimony. However, these sense perceptual experiences contribute only to the subject’s acquiring an understanding of the name. The circumstances under which a subject takes semantic content to give the content of a name precede, and are not contributors to, her justification for believing what is expressed by if N exists, N is the F. […] The rebuttal relies upon sharply distinguishing the contributors to belief and meaning acquisition and the contributors to belief justification.” (Jeshion 2002: 341–342).
The point of this response is that we can consider whether justification is a priori or a posteriori only after the speaker acquires all the contents of the words that a sentence consists of. She might acquire the content of a name “N” through experience, but it is not relevant to belief justification. And if the content of a name “N” is given by “the F’, then justifying her belief that if N exists, N is the F can be a priori to her.
The main problem with this response is that if the description “the F” that plays a role of giving the content of the name “N” can be arbitrary across speakers, then it leads to the absurd consequence that we can know any fact about N a priori in principle. Suppose that the semantic content of the name “Aristotle” is given to me by that of the description “the teacher of Alexander the Great”, then the proposition that if Aristotle exist, Aristotle is the teacher of Alexander is knowable a priori. However, if the semantic content of “Aristotle” is given to you by that of the description “the author of Nicomachean Ethics”, then the proposition that if Aristotle exists, Aristotle is the author of Nicomachean Ethics is also knowable a priori. Then it seems to follow that any proposition about Aristotle can be knowable a priori in principle. (Or “Aristotle” simply becomes a name in each one’s idiolect).
Predicativists might bite the bullet and claim that only the description “the man named ‘N”” can play a special role of giving the semantic content of the name “N”, and (9) and (10) in fact express the same proposition about the name “N”, which seems counter-intuitive. Then they have to provide an error theory for explaining this counter-intuitiveness. I will consider Bach’s position for this and criticize it at Sect. 5.
The general idea of the translation test for judging whether two or more sentences express the same proposition originates from Church (1950, 1954) and Moore (1944). Both had mentioned that the basic insight of this test is due to C. H. Langford. (I thank Nathan Salmon for supplying this reference).
For this reason, it is more effective to use a language that consists of letters totally different from the English alphabet.
By contrast, Burge (1973) holds “that”-predicativism. This view is the same as “the”-predicativism except that the unpronounced demonstrative “that” instead of “the” always co-occurs in front of a bare singular name “N”. Therefore, according to the theory, the real structure of (1) is “∅that Alfred is a philosopher.”
Bach (1987) and Rami (2014) criticized “that”-predicativism by pointing out that a bare singular name has its non-demonstrative use. For example, Rami observes, “[T]he reference of a name like “Alfred” can be fixed by different manifest non-demonstrative referential intentions. I might use “Alfred” with the intention to refer to the person I have met at a certain party that bears the name “Alfred” or I might use “Alfred” with the intention to refer to the same object as someone else did by using this name. […] But it would be incorrect to determine the referent of a complex demonstrative in such a non-demonstrative way” (Rami 2014: 850). I agree with his observation, but of course the same criticism is not applicable to “the”-predicativism.
It is ironic for Fara to introduce the name “BASH” to explain this. If the bare singular name “BASH” were also the incomplete description “∅the BASH”, how can it play an explanatory role as distinct from the incomplete description “the party”?
It is much easier to come up with an example of attributive uses of incomplete descriptions like “the mayor”. Fara claims that a definite description containing this relational predicate is not incomplete because it has a hidden contextual variable: [the mayor of x]. But it is unclear why the fact in itself that it has a hidden contextual variable entails that it is complete. It seems that “the mayor of the city” seems still an incomplete definite description. (Thanks to Teresa Robertson for helping me to clarify this issue.)
On this point, we cannot criticize a certain predicativist position simply because it admits that the semantic content of a bare singular name in a sentence is the reference itself. For example, Jeshion criticizes Burge’s “that”-predicativism for this reason. She says, “The chief problem with this [“that”-predicativism] is that complex demonstratives do not themselves make the semantic contribution of predicates to sentences containing them, and thus the predicativist loses the single semantics that is supposed to be the main advantage over the referentialist analysis. That is, for the predicativist, “Alfred” in its apparently referential uses is supposed to make the very same contribution […] as it does when it occurs in the apparently predicative uses [as given by the being-named condition]. But on this analysis, in apparently referential uses, names make the semantic contribution to a sentence that a complex demonstrative makes—which is not given by [this condition]” (Jeshion 2015a: 231–232).
However, predicativists’ claim is only that any occurrence of a name has the same semantic content as that of a predicate. They do not need to claim that a bare singular name itself has the same semantic content as a predicate. It is a possible line of strategy for them that the real structure of a bare singular name is different from its surface one, and the name in the real structure still play a role as a predicate. For example, as we have seen, Fara claims that the real structure of a bare singular name “N” is “∅theN”. Suppose that the semantic content of “∅theN” were simply its reference. Still, “N” in “∅theN” can play a role as a predicate. It is exactly like the role of “table” in “the table”. Even if the semantic content of “the table” were the object itself, “table” is still a predicate.
If we consider a name for a physical object instead of a name for an event such as BASH, our intuition becomes even clearer. Compare the pair of the following two sentences: “The tall guy is tall” and “Tom is tall”. The first sentence obviously seems a priori, while the second sentence seems not (in a context where the incomplete description “the tall guy” denotes Tom).
A similar point was indicated by Salmon (1982: 45 n. 8). We might regard it as the epistemic objection against incomplete definite descriptivism about names.
For clarification, the consideration surely does not entail that incomplete definite descriptions cannot be (pragmatically) used rigidly, but it only suggests that incomplete descriptions are not rigid de jure as names are at the semantic level. Most expressions can be used rigidly with a speaker’s particular intention in a context, but it is irrelevant here.
Unbeknownst to me, Schoubye (2018) also persuasively criticized Fara’s response to the modal objection in a different way. Although most of his arguments seems to be convincing, I believe that it is worthwhile to explain how Schoubye’s arguments are different from mine.
First, Schoubye indicates that Fara’s point must not be whether “∅theN” is complete or incomplete, but whether “∅theN” is normally used referentially (Schoubye 2018: 583–584). I agree with this point and assume that Fara’s claim is that in an ordinary case, “∅theN” is an incomplete description, and an incomplete description is always used referentially.
Second, Schoubye argues that if predicativists hold the view that both uses of definite descriptions are semantically significant and definite descriptions are ambiguous, then they lose some of the virtue of simplicity that the uniformity argument for predicativism is motivated by as we have seen in Sect. 1. Moreover, by holding this ambiguity view of definite descriptions, a number of new problems arise, namely that there would be several facts which seem difficult, if not impossible, to explain (Schoubye 2018: 586–587). By contrast, my aim is to directly criticize the ambiguity view of definite descriptions by appealing to our semantic intuitions and by providing a version of the epistemic argument (although at some points, I also argued that they cannot provide a unified semantics). I believe that both approaches can be complementary.
Lastly, Schoubye criticizes Fara’s view that incomplete descriptions are always rigid by pointing out that there are non-rigid relativized readings of indefinite descriptions (i.e., role-type indefinite descriptions (This term is from Rothschild 2007)). For example, “the party” in the sentence “The party should have excellent wine” is not rigid, because it is presupposed that to satisfy the description is to be the one to play a certain role: it does not denote any particular thing at all. (This example is from Fara herself 2015a: 103–105). Fara replies that her argument is only about particularized incomplete descriptions, but Schoubye contends that it then follows that the rigidity of an incomplete description turns out to be due to its particularization, not due to its incompleteness (Schoubye 2018: 588–589).
At this point, I disagree with Schoubye’s criticism. I think that Fara’s intention is that if we limit our issue to particularized descriptions that denote some particular things, then only particularized incomplete descriptions are always rigid, while particularized complete descriptions still can be non-rigid. I think that Fara’s argument I discussed here is to try to show this, and I have argued against Fara that particularized incomplete descriptions are also always semantically non-rigid.
One possible maneuver for “the”-predicativism is to exploit the rigidified operator “actual”. For example, consider the sentence “The philosopher might not be a philosopher.” It might be suggested that the semantic intuition of the truth of this sentence is explained by the covert operator “actual” (or “present”) that rigidifies the description “the philosopher”.
Likewise, it might be suggested that bare singular names are rigidified incomplete definite descriptions with the covert operator “actual”, while “N” in “the actual N” plays a role as a predicate such as “philosopher” in “the actual philosopher”. (See Plantinga 1978; Stanley 1997) However, this suggestion has also been persuasively criticized by some philosophers (see Salmon 1982/2005: 32–40; Soames 2002: 39–49), and I will not repeat this here but want to point out that it still cannot be a satisfactory answer to the epistemic and the translation objections.
I thank an anonymous referee and Billy Dunaway for indicating this difficulty of applying the translation objection. The anonymous referee also pointed out that nevertheless, the equivalence between “being called N” with “being a bearer of ‘N’” would be a problem for Fara.
That is, the translation argument mainly concerns preservation of meanings and truth conditions of sentences but does not directly concern preservation of logical forms (cf. Church 1954).
In addition, “Alfred라 불리는 사람은 철학자이다” cannot be a correct translation; it is not a translation at all.
A similar problem arises in the following situation: suppose that we introduce a new predicate “mot” as follows: x is a mot if and only if x has the name “Tom”. Now, how can we translate the English sentence “Tom is a mot” into another language? There is no direct way to translate it unless we introduce a new predicate in that language, which has the same meaning as “mot”. The natural indirect way to translate it is simply to translate the equivalent sentence, “Tom has the name ‘Tom’” instead.
Strictly speaking, Bach’s claim must be that the first occurrence of “Aristotle” in (20) is used referentially, while only the second occurrence of “Aristotle” in (20) is used literally. Thus, according to him, the true reading of (20) is still not what (20) literally expresses, which is the proposition that the bearer of “Aristotle” might not have been the bearer of “Aristotle”.
Bart Guerts (1997) also quotes Bach’s Aaron Aardvark example to show that names can take narrow scope.
As mentioned in Sect. 2, being called “N” is a different property from being (appropriately) named “N”. But Kripke’s point has still remained the same about the property of being named “N”.
Rami (2017) recently indicated some weak points in Bach’s argument. According to Rami, if we use the predicate schema “is identical with x” instead of “is x” in the modal argument, then we can simply avoid some unwanted consequence from Bach’s examples. That is, although (20) seems to be true in Bach’s scenario, the sentence “Aristotle might not have been identical with Aristotle” does not seem to be true in any case.
I agree with Rami that by using the predicate schema “is identical with x”, we can get a more reliable test for rigidity (and he provided an even more sophisticated version of the test). However, I disagree with him that the verb “to be” is used as the “is” of predication in (20), and that (20) is literally true. This is because (22) does not seem to be literally true even if the Laptop case has the same structure as Bach’s scenario. I have provided the same diagnosis of both cases by arguing that we are pragmatically conveying something true when we utter (20) and (22), but it seems to be a little far-fetched to provide the same diagnosis to the effect that (22) is literally true as well as (20), if there is no further argument for this.
But I expect that he might embrace the consequence of his position that the sentence (9) is also a priori like (10) and provide a similar objection like the one I addressed in Sect. 3. It is an interesting fact that many predicativists have endeavored to reply to the modal objection, while saying nothing directly about the epistemic objection (as far as I know).
Here my question is about how we translate a certain name into another language that does not yet have any translation in that language at present. However, if there is the origin of a name, then it is surely a matter of etymology, as with “London” in English and “Londres” in French. (Thanks to Salmon for indicating this point).
Bach (2002: 82) simply states that being unfamiliar with particular names does not betray any linguistic deficiency, and learning them does not add to your knowledge of a particular language. However, it is unclear what he has in mind as linguistic proficiency (or deficiency). By this, he does not seem to merely mean syntactic proficiency. According to him, learning lexical items in dictionaries increases linguistic proficiency, but names are not lexical items. Then should we conclude from this that learning the state name “California” does not, but learning the predicate “ailurophile” does make us become more proficient in English? Or should famous names in dictionaries be exceptions to this? It seems that this concept of linguistic proficiency simply has practical criteria. A more natural position, I believe, is that just as long as a certain name consists of the English alphabet, it thereby directly becomes a lexical item in English (and in any language with the same alphabet). Surely, dictionaries do not contain all names, but this is simply because there are too many names to be included in dictionaries, not because they are not lexical items.
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Acknowledgements
For insightful comments and suggestions, I would like to thank an anonymous referee, Sam Cumming, Billy Dunaway, Jinho Knag, and audiences at the 2017 CSPA, the 2018 APA Pacific, and the 2018 SEP meetings. I am especially grateful to Nathan Salmon, Dan Korman, Teresa Robertson, and David Mokriski for extremely helpful discussions and comments on previous versions of this paper.
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Lee, J. Against predicativism about names. Philos Stud 177, 243–261 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-018-1187-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-018-1187-3