This paper has two purposes: the first is to critically examine Kripke’s well-known arguments against Descriptivism and suggest that they are not as decisive as many have thought; the second is to argue that proper names do encode descriptive information of various kinds, that such information may be truth-conditionally significant, and hence that a name’s truth-conditional contribution is not limited to its referent.

This paper takes issue with the predicativist’s identification of proper names and common count nouns. Although Predicativism emerges precisely to account for certain syntactic facts about proper names, namely, that they behave like common count nouns on occasions, it seems clear that proper names and common count nouns have different properties, and this undermines the thesis that proper names are in fact just common count nouns. The predicativist’s strategy to bridge these differences (...) is to postulate an unpronounced determiner to go with names when they appear to function as singular terms, making them effectively a concealed determiner phrase. In this paper I revisit these differences and argue that the predicativist’s strategy is not well justified and worse, it does not help make proper names and common count nouns unified; rather, it makes proper names exceptional as count nouns. I also discuss the referentialist’s take on names qua predicates and make some suggestions about how the syntactic difference between proper names and count nouns should be understood. (shrink)

Just how foundational metaphor is to cultural understanding has been a matter of considerable debate, manifested in the question of whether cultural models are, at bottom, based on conceptual metaphors (Gibbs 1994; Lakoff 1993; Lakoff and Johnson 1999; Quinn 1991). This paper revisits this debate by examining a new set of metaphorical expressions involving proper names, which are widespread in Singapore society. These expressions indicate that Singaporeans tend to describe local entities in terms of American ones, thus reflecting (...) what might be called a cultural model of modernity. The paper shows that no conceptual metaphor can be plausibly said to ground this model. It then goes on to develop the other possibility: that the model is non-metaphorical and that the expressions are chosen because of their fit with the modernity model. (shrink)

In an article in Cognition, Machery, Mallon, Nichols, and Stich [Machery et al., 2004] present data which purports to show that “East Asian” native Cantonese speakers tend to have descriptivist intuitions about the referents of proper names, while “Western” native English speakers tend to have causal-historical intuitions about proper names. Machery et al take this finding to support the view that some intuitions, the universality of which they claim is central to philosophical theories, vary according to (...) cultural background. Machery et al hypothesize that the differences in intuitions about reference stem from general psychological differences between Eastern and Western subjects. Machery et al conclude from their findings that the philosophical methodology of consulting intuitions about hypothetical cases is flawed vis ` a vis the goal of determining truths about some philosophical domains. To quote Machery et al, “our data indicate that philosophers must radically revise their methodology” because “the intuitions philosophers pronounce from their armchairs are likely to be a product of their own culture and their academic training” ( [Machery et al., 2004] pp.B9). “The evidence suggests that it is wrong for philosophers to assume a priori the universality of their own semantic intuitions” ( [Machery et al., 2004] pp. B8). In the following study, I present data incompatible with Machery et al’s results. Native Cantonese-speaking immigrants from a Cantonese diaspora 1 in Southern California do not have descriptivist intuitions about the referents of proper names when presented with a Cantonese story and Cantonese questions about reference and truth-value. This data raises questions about the quality of Machery et al’s study and the conclusions they draw from it. (shrink)

This essay explores a proper Confucian vision on genetic enhancement. It argues that while Confucians can accept a formal starting point that Michael Sandel proposes in his ethics of giftedness, namely, that children should be taken as gifts, Confucians cannot adopt his generalist strategy. The essay provides a Confucian full ethics of giftedness by addressing a series of relevant questions, such as what kind of gifts children are, where the gifts are from, in which way they are given, and (...) for what purpose they are given. It indicates that Confucians should sort out different types of enhancement and bring them to the test of the Confucian values in terms of both Confucian virtue principles and specific ritual rules. It concludes that Confucians can accept some types of enhancement but must reject others. (shrink)

In this response to Steven Jensen’s ACPQ review essay of Martin Rhonheimer’s The Perspective of Morality, its author argues that Jensen failed to understand the proper subject matter, the inner logic, and the methodology of the book. As a result, he misread key passages while passing over others, with the result that his criticisms miss the mark. Correcting these misreadings provides the occasion to explain some key features of the book, namely its idea of integrating in a single ethical (...) theory eudaimonistic ethics and its theory of happiness with action theory, anthropology of action, a theory of practical reason, an account of the moral virtues, a doctrine of natural law, of prudence, of conscience, and of moral norms, disproving thereby Jensen’s misleading claim that the book rejects nature as a standard of ethics. (shrink)

Stefano Predelli defends a semantics of proper names which has simplicity and common sense in its favour: proper names are non-indexical devices of rigid and direct reference. He grounds this view in accounts of the shape and form of names, and of their introduction within language use, and he responds to widespread misconceptions and objections.

Numerous studies have focused on the understanding of rapid automatized naming, which can be applied to predict reading abilities and developmental dyslexia in children. Eye tracking technique, characterizing the essential ocular activities, might have the feasibility to reveal the visual and cognitive features of RAN. However, traditional measures of eye movements ignore many dynamical details about the visual and cognitive processing of RAN, and are usually associated with the duration of time spent on some particular areas of interest, fixation counts, (...) revisited fixation counts, saccadic velocities, or saccadic amplitudes. To cope with this drawback, we suggested an entropy-based method to measure eye movements for the first time, which first mapped eye movements during RAN in a time-series and then analyzed the time-series by a proper definition of entropy from the perspective of information theory. Our findings showed that the entropy was more sensitive to reflect small perturbation of eye movements, and thus gained better performance than traditional measures. We also verified that the entropy of eye movements significantly deceased with the age and the task complexity of RAN, and significantly correlated with traditional eye-movement measures [e.g., total time of naming ] and the RAN-related skills [e.g., selective attention, cognitive speed, and visual-motor integration]. Our findings may bring some new insights into the understanding of both RAN and eye tracking technique itself. (shrink)

Since Kripke introduced rigid designation as an alternative to the Frege/Russell analysis of referential terms as definite descriptions, there has been an ongoing debate between 'descriptivists' and 'referentialists', mostly focusing on the semantics of proper names. Nowadays descriptivists can draw on a much richer set of linguistic data (including bound and accommodated proper names in discourse) as well as new semantic machinery (E-type syntax/semantics, DRT, presupposition-as-anaphora) to strengthen their case. After reviewing the current state of the (...) debate, I argue for a referentialist semantics that incorporates some modern insights from the side of the descriptivists in order to account for the new data in a principled fashion. (shrink)

Kaplan’s solution to the indexical version of Frege’s Puzzle in terms of the character of linguistic expressions has been greatly influential and much discussed. Many philosophers regard it as being correct, or at least as being on the right track. However, little has been said about how character is supposed to apply to proper names, and how it could account for the name version of the Puzzle. In this paper I want to fill this gap. I sketch some (...) solutions to the name version of Frege’s Puzzle in terms of character, and argue that all of them are flawed in some way: they are either semantically implausible or fail to account for all relevant phenomena. (shrink)

An intuitive view is that creativity involves bringing together what is already known and familiar in a way that produces something new. In cognitive science, this intuition is typically formalized in terms of computational processes that combine or associate internally represented information. From this computationalist perspective, it is hard to imagine how non-representational approaches in embodied cognitive science could shed light on creativity, especially when it comes to abstract conceptual reasoning of the kind scientists so often engage in. The present (...) article offers an entry point to addressing this challenge. The scientific project of embodied cognitive science is a continuation of work in the functionalist tradition in psychology developed over a century ago by William James and John Dewey, among others. The focus here is on how functionalist views on the nature of mind, thought, and experience offer an alternative starting point for cognitive science in general, and for the cognitive science of scientific creativity in particular. The result may seem paradoxical. On the one hand, the article claims that the functionalist conceptual framework motivates rejecting mainstream cognitive views of creativity as the combination or association of ideas. On the other hand, however, the strategy adopted here—namely, revisiting ideas from functionalist psychology to inform current scientific theorizing—can itself be described as a process of arriving at new, creative ideas from combinations of old ones. As is shown here, a proper understanding of cognition in light of the functionalist tradition resolves the seeming tension between these two claims. (shrink)

Two basic answers have been given to the question whether proper names have meaning, the negative by Mill and later developed by Kripke and the affirmative by Frege and later developed by Searle. My aim is to integrate the two apparently irreconcilable theories by distinguishing the two aspects of the issue. I claim that, roughly speaking, whereas Kripke’s No Sense View provides a good answer to the question, “How are proper names linked to their referents?”, Searle’s (...) Sense View provides a good account of the issue “What do we do when we use a proper name?”. Furthermore, I claim that the speakers attend to the referent of the proper name both in virtue of Kripkean chain of communication and in virtue of Searlian occasion-relative sense. Ordinarily, the chain of communication and the Searlian sense yield the same result, i.e. lead to the same referent. In cases of conflict, which are very rare, my intuition sides with the former against the latter. It would seem, therefore, that the only necessary and sufficient condition for a successful reference with a proper name is the existence of the Kripkean chain which links it with its referent. (shrink)

This paper studies the uses of proper names within a communication-theoretic setting, looking at both the conditions that govern the use of a name by a speaker and those involved in the correct interpretation of the name by her audience. The setting in which these conditions are investigated is provided by an extension of Discourse Representation Theory, MSDRT, in which mental states are represented as combinations of propositional attitudes and entity representations . The first half of the paper (...) presents the features of this framework that are needed to understand its application to the account of names that follows. N-labelled entity representations, where N is a proper name, play a pivotal part in this account: A speaker must have an N-labelled ER in order to be in a position to use a name N, and the interpreter must either have such a representation, or else construct one as part of his interpretation. The paper distinguishes different types of name uses in terms of what they presuppose about the role of N-labelled ERs on the side of the interpreter. (shrink)

Ordinary judgments about personal identity are complicated by the fact that phrases like “same person” and “different person” have multiple uses in ordinary English. This complication calls into question the significance of recent experimental work on this topic. For example, Tobia (2015) found that judgments of personal identity were significantly affected by whether the moral change described in a vignette was for the better or for the worse, while Strohminger and Nichols (2014) found that loss of moral conscience had more (...) of an effect on identity judgments than loss of biographical memory. In each case, however, there are grounds for questioning whether the judgments elicited in these experiments engaged a concept of numerical personal identity at all (cf. Berniūnas and Dranseika 2016; Dranseika 2017; Starmans and Bloom 2018). In two pre-registered studies we validate this criticism while also showing a way to address it: instead of attempting to engage the concept of numerical identity through specialized language or the terms of an imaginary philosophical debate, we should consider instead how the identity of a person is described through the connected use of proper names, definite descriptions, and the personal pronouns “I”, “you”, “he”, and “she”. When the experiments above are revisited in this way, there is no evidence that the differences in question had an effect on ordinary identity judgments. (shrink)

According to proponents of the continuity hypothesis, metaphors represent one end of a spectrum of linguistic phenomena, which includes various forms of loosening/broadening, such as category extensions and approximations, as well as hyperbolic interpretations. The continuity hypothesis is used to establish that the inferences derived from the set of linguistic expressions mentioned above result from the same or nearly similar pragmatic processes. In this paper, we want to challenge that particular aspect of the continuity hypothesis. We do so based on (...) considerations and analysis of an understudied linguistic phenomenon that we call the metaphorical uses of proper names (MPNs). We first explain how MPNs represent a unique linguistic class distinguishable from, for example, nicknames. In addition, we offer some remarks on how MPNs can be understood against the background of current debates between referentialists and predicativists about names. Our discussion leads us to conclude that MPNs are categorically different from literal interpretations of proper names. We spell out the consequences that the results of our analysis have for the continuity hypothesis. (shrink)

Saul Kripke's thesis that ordinary proper names are rigid designators is supported by widely shared intuitions about the occurrence of names in ordinary modal contexts. By those intuitions names are scopeless with respect to the modal expressions. That is, sentences in a pair like (a) Aristotle might have been fond of dogs, (b) Concerning Aristotle, it is true that he might have been fond of dogs will have the same truth value. The same does not in (...) general hold for definite descriptions. If one, like Kripke, accounts for this difference by means of the intensions of the names and the descriptions, the conclusion is that names do not in general have the same intension as any normal, identifying description. However, this difference can be accounted for alternatively by appeal to the semantics of the modal expressions. On the account we suggest, dubbed 'relational modality', simple singular terms, like proper names, contribute to modal contexts simply by their actual world reference, not by their descriptive content. That account turns out to be fully equivalent with the rigidity account when it comes to truth of modal and non-modal sentence (with respect to the actual world), and hence supports the same basic intuitions. Here we present the relational modality account and compare it with others, in particular Kripke's own. (shrink)

Gareth Evans adduces a case in which a proper name apparently undergoes a change in referent. ‘Madagascar’ was originally the name of a part of Africa. Marco Polo, erroneously thinking he was following native usage, applied the name to an island off the African coast. Today ‘Madagascar’ is the name of that island. Evans argues that this kind of case threatens Kripke ’s picture of naming as developed in Naming and Necessity. According to this picture, the name, as used (...) by Marco Polo, referred to a part of the African mainland, since he was connected to the latter by a historical chain of communication. Since we are historically connected to Marco Polo, the name, as it is used today, still refers to the African mainland. But it doesn’t. The aim of the present paper is to give a conclusive account of the phenomenon adduced by Evans, which is compatible with Kripke ’s picture. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 41.3 (2003) 413-414 [Access article in PDF] Katerina Ierodiakonou, editor. Byzantine Philosophy and its Ancient Sources. New York: Oxford University Press, Clarendon Press, 2002. Pp. vii + 309. Cloth, $55.00.Talking about, let alone writing on "Byzantine Philosophy" within the English-speaking philosophical community could cause embarrassment. It is only recently that this field has gained a few notable entries in philosophical works of reference (...) like the Routledge Encyclopedia or the Oxford Dictionary—but still it cannot make its way into the histories of medieval philosophy, not to mention the general histories of philosophy. Byzantine Philosophy aims at providing good reasons for changing that tendency and seeks to "persuade [us] that Byzantine Philosophy is worth investigating" (13).The book contains eleven articles, plus Ierodiakonou's introduction and Linos Benakis's review of the current research, read in part at a Conference held in Thessaloniki, Greece in 1997, but it is more than a mere collection of conference papers. Written both by well-established and younger scholars from diverse disciplines, the volume focuses on the explicit or implicit dialogue of Byzantine thinkers with ancient Greek philosophy, one of the two ingredients of Byzantine Philosophy (the other being patristic thought).Ierodiakonou in her introduction prefers to make a few—but penetrating—remarks on the nature of Byzantine Philosophy and its proper study. Her arguments are presented in a non-conclusive form and they are intended to serve as guidelines to further research. While a longer discussion of the issues involved would be welcome by the less-specialized reader, her choice seems reasonable as long as one thinks—rightly in my opinion—that it is premature to embark on general methodological suggestions about how to investigate Byzantine Philosophy, or believes that scrutinizing the texts themselves is a more promising approach at this relatively early stage of research (as perhaps always).With one exception, each article deals at length with a special issue spanning from metaphysics to political philosophy and concentrates on individual thinkers from the patristic era to the Renaissance; the absence of philosophical theology is surprising. Expectedly the presence of Aristotle can be traced in logic: in an eleventh-century humble handbook (thoroughly analyzed by Jonathan Barnes); in Psellos's Paraphrase on Aristotle's De Interpretationeand in the anti-logical movement in the fourteenth century (Ierodiakonou); as well as in John of Damascus's discussion of will (Michael Frede). On the Christian-neoplatonic tradition are founded a nominalistic position of Basil of Caesarea concerning the semantics of proper names (Paul Kalligas); a sixth-century treatise On Political Science (Dominic O'Meara); Psellos's conception of philosophy (John Duffy); and the peculiar case of Chaldaean Oracles and their commentators (Polymnia Athanassiadi). The last article on the Renaissance controversy between Plethon and Scholarios over the primacy of Plato or Aristotle (George Karamanolis) brings the volume appropriately to an end.That Platonism and Aristotelianism nearly monopolize the contributors' concerns is justified but this must not give the simplified impression that Byzantine Philosophy can be exclusively explained against this background. Other Greek philosophical traditions, such as Stoicism, are mentioned as well, and the fourteenth-century interest in skepticism is densely discussed (Börje Bydén on Metochites). The first essay is an informative outline of the Greek-Latin Philosophical Interaction (Sten Ebbesen), whose inclusion in the volume makes a similar survey of ancient Greek-Byzantine philosophical interaction more warranted.The contributors do not confine themselves to resolving specific problems of a Quellenforschung, by identifying parallel texts or recurring arguments in order to establish the obvious dependence of Byzantine thought on Greek Philosophy. In fact, as many articles show, it is the very analysis of patristic and Byzantine texts that makes us return to their ancient sources and also makes clear how this revisiting can deepen our understanding of the texts and the philosophical problems they are trying to present or to solve. When doing philosophy, Byzantine thinkers have ancient Greek concepts in their minds, and quite often have ancient texts in their hands. Now it is up to us to evaluate... (shrink)

Fictional names present unique challenges for semantic theories of proper names, challenges strong enough to warrant an account of names different from the standard treatment. The theory developed in this paper is motivated by a puzzle that depends on four assumptions: our intuitive assessment of the truth values of certain sentences, the most straightforward treatment of their syntactic structure, semantic compositionality, and metaphysical scruples strong enough to rule out fictional entities, at least. It is shown that (...) these four assumptions, taken together, are inconsistent with referentialism, the common view that names are uniformly associated with ordinary individuals as their semantic value. Instead, the view presented here interprets names as context-sensitive expressions, associated in a context of utterance with a particular act of introduction, or dubbing, which is then used to determine their semantic value. Some dubbings are referential, which associate names with ordinary individuals as their semantic values; others are fictional, which associate names, instead, with sets of properties. Since the semantic values of names can be of different sorts, the semantic rule interpreting predication must be complex as well. In the body of the paper, I show how this new treatment of names allows us to solve our original puzzle. I defend the complexity of the semantic predication rule, and address additional worries about ontological commitment. (shrink)

I provide a novel semantic analysis of proper names and indexicals, combining insights from the competing traditions of referentialism, championed by Kripke and Kaplan, and descriptivism, introduced by Frege and Russell, and more recently resurrected by Geurts and Elbourne, among others. From the referentialist tradition, I borrow the proof that names and indexicals are not synonymous to any definite description but pick their referent from the context directly. From the descriptivist tradition, I take the observation that (...) class='Hi'>names, and to some extent indexicals, have uses that are best understood by analogy with anaphora and definite descriptions, that is, following Geurts, in terms of presupposition projection. The hybrid analysis that I propose is couched in Layered Discourse Representation Theory. Proper names and indexicals trigger presuppositions in a dedicated layer, which is semantically interpreted as providing a contextual anchor for the interpretation of the other layers. For the proper resolution of DRSs with layered presuppositions, I add two constraints to van der Sandt's algorithm. The resulting proposal accounts for both the classic philosophical examples and the new linguistic data, preserving a unified account of the preferred rigid interpretation of both names and indexicals, while leaving room for non-referential readings under contextual pressure. (shrink)

Proper names play an important role in our understanding of linguistic ‘aboutness’ or reference. For instance, the name-bearer relation is a good candidate for the paradigm of the reference relation: it provides us with our initial grip on this relation and controls our thinking about it. For this and other reasons proper names have been at the center of philosophical attention. However, proper names are as controversial as they are conceptually fundamental. Since Kripke’s seminal (...) lectures Naming and Necessity the controversy about proper names has taken the form of a debate between two main camps, descriptivists and non-descriptivists like Kripke himself.The lectures were given in Princeton in 1970 and published in book form as Naming and Necessity .Descriptivists hold that there is a close connection between proper names and definite descriptions: the meaning or sense of a proper name can be given by a definite description. Th .. (shrink)

There is a fairly general consensus that names are Millian (or Russellian) genuine terms, that is, are singular terms whose sole semantic function is to introduce a referent into the propositions expressed by sentences containing the term. This answers the question as to what sort of proposition is expressed by use of sentences containing names. But there is a second serious semantic problem about proper names, that of how the referents of proper names are (...) determined. This is the question that I will discuss in this paper. Various views consistent with Millianism have been proposed as to how the semantic referents of proper names are determined. These views can be classified into (1) description theories and (2) causal theories, but they can also be classified into (3) social practice theories, on which a name’s referent is determined by a social practice involving the referent, and (4) individualistic theories, on which the referent of the use of a name is determined by the speaker’s state of mind. Here I argue against social practice theories of the sorts proposed by Kripke and Evans and in favor of an individualistic approach to name reference. I argue that social practice is irrelevant to determining name reference and that, as a consequence, names have no meanings in natural languages. In the second part of the paper I motivate and propose a new form of individualistic theory which incorporates features of both description theories and Evans’s social practice theory. (shrink)

This is review essay of Mark Sainsbury's Reference without Referents. Its main part is a critical discussion of Sainsbury's proposal for the individuation of proper name using practices.

This paper revisits Donnellan’s distinction between referential and attributive uses of definite descriptions and argues that it is not exhaustive. Donnellan characterizes the distinction in terms of two criteria: the speaker’s intentions and the type of content the speaker aims to express. I argue that contrary to the common view, these two criteria are independent and that the distinctive features may be coinstantiated in more than two ways. This leaves room for nonattributive and nonreferential uses of definite descriptions. Kripke’s notions (...) of general and specific intentions provide a framework that accommodates such cases. Additionally, it proves useful for the analysis of the use of proper names with specific nonsingular intentions. The paper also discusses how the interpretation of the use of definite descriptions as attributive or referential (or neither) is sensitive to which theory of singular thoughts one adopts. (shrink)

This paper is a contribution to the debate concerning the kind of philosophical conclusions that can (or cannot) be derived from systematic empirical studies of intuitions about the reference of proper names. The focus of the paper is the famous study by Machery et al. (2004) in which intercultural differences in semantic intuitions between American and Chinese participants were observed. Machery et al. used the obtained results to question the usefulness of intuitions in philosophical discussions concerning the reference (...) of proper names. In this paper, I present the results of my own philosophical-experimental studies aimed at analyzing methods used in research dedicated to the problem of reference rather than semantic intuitions as such. These results indicate a significant instability of responses regarding the reference of proper names and their susceptibility to the impact of philosophically insignificant factors. Based on the collected data, I argue that methods used in experimental studies concerning the reference of proper names conducted to date do not guarantee the assessment of intuitions of the desired kind. (shrink)

Direct reference theorists tell us that proper names have no semantic value other than their bearers, and that the connection between name and bearer is unmediated by descriptions or descriptive information. And yet, these theorists also acknowledge that we produce our name-containing utterances with descriptions on our minds. After arguing that direct reference proponents have failed to give descriptions their due, I show that appeal to speaker-associated descriptions is required if the direct reference portrayal of speakers wielding and (...) referring with public names is to succeed. (shrink)

The question of transtemporal identity of objects in general and persons in particular is an important issue in both philosophy and psychology. While the focus of philosophers traditionally was on questions of the nature of identity relation and criteria that allow to settle ontological issues about identity, psychologists are mostly concerned with how people think about identity, and how they track identity of objects and people through time. In this article, we critically engage with widespread use of inferring folk judgments (...) of identity from study participants’ use of proper names in response to experimental vignettes. We provide reasons to doubt that using this method one can reliably infer judgments of numerical identity over time and transformations. We also critically examine allegedly-Kripkean justification of this method and find it lacking. Merely assuming that names are rigid designators will not help. A study participant’s use of proper names can be taken to track the participant’s identity judgments only if supported by the participant’s belief that names used in the scenario are used rigidly. (shrink)

This paper develops a new account of reference-fixing for proper names. The account is built around an intuitive claim about reference fixing: the claim that I am a participant in a practice of using α to refer to o only if my uses of α are constrained by the representationally relevant ways it is possible for o to behave. §I raises examples that suggest that a right account of how proper names refer should incorporate this claim. (...) §II provides such an account. (shrink)

Experiments on theories of reference have mostly tested referential intuitions. We think that experiments should rather be testing linguistic usage. Substantive Aim (I): to test classical description theories of proper names against usage by “elicited production.” Our results count decisively against those theories. Methodological Aim (I): Machery, Olivola, and de Blanc (2009) claim that truth-value judgment experiments test usage. Martí (2012) disagrees. We argue that Machery et al. are right and offer some results that are consistent with that (...) conclusion. Substantive Aim (II): Machery et al. provide evidence that the usage of a name varies, being sometimes descriptive, sometimes not. In seven out of eight tests of usage, we did not replicate this variation. Methodological Aim (II): to test the reliability of referential intuitions by comparing them with linguistic usage. Earlier studies led us to predict that we would find those intuitions unreliable, but we did not. Our results add to evidence that tests of referential intuition are susceptible to unpredictable wording effects. (shrink)

When “Sinning Against Frege” was published in 1979 I thought it should have given a real turn in the discussion on Frege’s ideas. Actually the impact was less then I imagined, and the problem was that – at the end of the story – Tyler Burge’s interpretation should have posed a shadow on the direct reference theories and the Millean criticism of descriptivist theories of proper names, based on the criticism of the identification of Frege’s notion of sense (...) with linguistic meaning or connotation1. In fact Burge (1979) claims that the identification of Frege’s notion of sense with the notion of linguistic meaning is a «basic misunderstanding» of Frege’s work2. This claim implies that Fregean senses are not like Mill’s connotations; therefore many direct-reference criticisms against Frege, which are grounded on Mill’s claims that proper names have no connotation, lose their efficacy. Burge, in giving specifications3, apparently accepts at least the idea that sense is an aspect of meaning, in particular «the aspect of meaning relevant to fixing the truth value of sentences». This feature is the “harmless” part of the assimilation of sense and linguistic meaning; but this assimilation becomes dangerous when context dependence is concerned. Revisiting Burge (1979), after more than two decades of debate on indexicals, may help to better understand the originality and the limitation of his claims. (shrink)

The article deals with the problem of coining terms and nomenclature signs with proper names illustrated by the example of the English language legal terminology. The article begins with the discussion of the problems of intersection of two linguistic areas and differentiation between terms and nomenclature signs. It is observed that linguistic units with proper names possess a cultural specificity in the legal English as compared to the Russian terminological system of law. Linguistic and extra-linguistic factors (...) influencing language units’ formation with the help of proper names in legal English, their structural and semantic specificity are revealed. The latter is considered from the point of view of the two-level semantics of language signs. The authors come to the following conclusions: structural variability of the units under consideration especially strongly manifest in formation of legal nomenclature; systemic linguistic oppositions of terms and nomenclature signs with proper names determine the semantics of these units; the basis of the meaning of a term and a nomenclature sign is a notion, its essential components being included into the definitions; differential semes of the meanings are assigned to the proper name elements of terms; all semes of nomenclature signs with proper names constitute an inseparable whole and are not assigned to any specific elements of these units; the meanings of nomenclature signs with proper names specify those of the terms in the hierarchical structure of the terminological system and in particular legal situations. (shrink)

Charles S. Peirce’s theory of proper names bears helpful insights for how we might think about his understanding of persons. Persons, on his view, are continuities, not static objects. I argue that Peirce’s notion of the legisign, particularly proper names, sheds light on the habitual and conventional elements of what it means to be a person. In this paper, I begin with an account of what philosophers of language have said about proper names in (...) order to distinguish Peirce’s theory of proper names from them. Then, I present Peirce’s semiotic theory of proper names, followed by some ways in which his theory can be applied to practical concerns, such as first impressions, name changing, identity, and temporary insanity. (shrink)

This paper is concerned with the semantics of proper names from two different points of view. As everyboy knows, there is a standard account of the semantics of proper names - it is Kripke's account, essentially. And there is a certain amount of neuropsychological research on proper names, or on the mental representation, or processing of proper names -not too small an amount, at this point. There is a certain amount of evidence, (...) and there are a few theories, none of them regarded as definitive, if I read the state of the art correctly. It may be thought that such neuropsychological work is simply irrelevant to the concerns of semantics, and vice-versa. For semantics is concerned with the truth conditions of sentences per se, and neuropsychology has nothing to say about that; neuropsychology, on the other hand, is concerned with several mental performances involving proper names -retrieving them from memory, or using them as cues to a person's face- and with their place within semantic memory, and semantics has nothing to say about that. The truth conditions that semantics is after are defined on the ground of a metaphysical notion of truth, whereas the only notion of truth that can be relevant to psychology is an epistemological notion: i.e. psychology may be interested in, and may have something to say about the procedures by which we come to regard a sentence as true, not about the conditions on which it is "objectively" true. (shrink)

The central aim of this paper is to argue against Evans’ hybrid theory of reference. I will show that Evans’ theory makes false predictions in the case of some thought-experiments. The paper has two sections. After providing a short presentation of Evans’ theory in the first section, I will move on to criticize it in the second section.

There is evidence that children learn both proper names and count nouns from the outset of lexical development. Furthermore, children's first proper names are typically words for people, whereas their first count nouns are commonly terms for other objects, including artifacts. I argue that these facts represent a challenge for two well-known theoretical accounts of object word learning. I defend an alternative account, which credits young children with conceptual resources to acquire words for both individual objects (...) and object categories, and conceptual biases to construe some objects (notably people) as individuals in their own right and most other objects as instances of their category. (shrink)

Several philosophers including Kripke have contended that fictional entities do exist as abstract objects, and fictional names refer to such abstract entities. Kripke and Thomasson compare fictional entities to existing social entities. Kripke also reflects on fictions inside fictions to support his view. Many philosophers appeal to the apparent fact that we quantify over fictional entities. Such arguments in favor of the existence of fictional entities are critically scrutinized. It is argued that they are much less compelling than their (...) proponents suggest and involve various obscurities. (shrink)

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)