Abstract
According to Millianism about proper names, what a proper name semantically contributes to the sentence in which it figures is simply its referent; therefore, co-referring proper names are intercheangable salva veritate and salva significatione. In their 2019 paper published in Topoi, Felappi and Santambrogio formulate a thought-provoking argument against Millianism. Their argument aims at establishing that our normal practice of translation shows that Millianism cannot be correct. I argue that Millians can successfully reply. I will address in turn two versions of Felappi and Santambrogio’s argument, focusing especially on the second one, which apparently raises a more challenging problem for Millianism. Finally, I will consider two objections against my own strategy, and I will reply to them.
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Notes
I borrow the phrases “semantically encoded/pragmatically imparted information” from Salmon (2001, p. 586).
An anonymous reviewer rightly suggests that it is not clear that what is involved here is a proper convention, as opposed to a mere regularity. Let me stress that if a mere regularity is involved, my point should still be correct, since mere regularities of use do not have any bearing on the semantics of the name (which is the crucial issue here).
Moreover, the reviewer observes that if a proper convention is actually involved, further arguments are needed to claim that this convention pertains to pragmatics and/or sociolinguistics, rather than to the semantics of the name. Although I agree with the reviewer, I maintain that it is prima facie reasonable to regard this convention as one that cannot be semantic, since, if it were, then (a) any attempt to use “Sue” to name a male would be unsuccessful, and (b) in any possible world in which there are no females, no one could ever be called “Sue”—that is, any such act of naming would be impossible. And both these consequences look quite unattractive.
The same observation applies to “Giorgione and Pepino were so-called because of their sizes”, which can have an equivalent sort of sloppy-identity reading. However, according to an anonymous reviewer, an advocate of the demonstrative account of “so” may deal with this kind of cases by arguing that one demonstrative, associated with one act of demonstration, can refer to two objects. While this could be the case, the burden of proof is squarely on the side of the supporter of this view – for one thing, Kaplan’s (1989) formal system would not allow a single occurrence of a demonstrative to have more than one referent.
Montalbetti (2003, pp. 132–133) notes this and other objections against Crimmins. However, if we could not exclude the demonstrative account of “so”, the only consequence for my discussion would be that the formulation of the criterion I will introduce would be more complicated. But even in that case, all we need to assume would be that “so” can be given an interpretation in (G), but not in (W), on the basis of syntactic information alone. This is true whether “so” in (G) is a logophor or a demonstrative.
Let me mention that an anonymous reviewer is less worried than me as regards the formulation of the criterion and its application to (S). According to the reviewer, even if “so” is a demonstrative, what is relevant for the interpretation of (S) is just that the occurrence of “so”, in the intended reading, denotes syntactic material, rather than the referent of such syntactic material or, more generally, the meaning of such material. After all, if “so” turns out to be a demonstrative, what (S) says depends on the context. Given that in Salmon’s context, “so” is unaccompanied by a pointing, it demonstratively picks out an independently salient object. And any sensible interpretation of (S) makes it the following sentence (that is, some syntactic material), not a proposition (in the last section, I will discuss what happens if “so” picks out a proposition). If all this is correct, then the criterion I will introduce can be seen as providing just a guide to individuate occurrences of “so” that are suitable for being interpreted as denoting some syntactic material that figures in the very sentences containing those occurrences. (Obviously, these remarks apply also to “this way”.).
I thank an anonymous reviewer for drawing my attention to this potential objection.
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Acknowledgments
I would like to thank for their comments on previous versions Stefano Predelli, Giulia Felappi, Jon Robson, Alice Monypenny, Andrea Guardo, the referees for this journal, and my audiences at the workshop “Propositions, Reference and Meaning” and the University of Nottingham Postgraduate Research Seminar.
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Funding was provided by University of Nottingham.
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Raimondi, A. Millianism and Translation. Topoi 39, 1193–1197 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-020-09717-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-020-09717-y