Reply to Hale

Abstract

Frege, notoriously, wrote as though merely syntactic criteria sufficed to discriminate what he called ‘proper names’ from expressions of other categories; equally notoriously, the few such criteria he actually cited were woefully inadequate. In the chapter of Frege: Philosophy of Language in which I discussed this, my chief concern was to determine whether it could be done: whether it was possible to formulate criteria that could plausibly be called ‘syntactic’ that would be satisfied by singular terms and by no other expressions. I hoped that these criteria would throw light on the concept of a singular term; but I principally thought, as Bob Hale also thinks, that a discovery that it was impossible to formulate such criteria would have deep consequences.