Hurford claims that empty variables antedated proper names in linguistic (not merely logical) predicate-argument structure, and this had an effect on visual perception. But his evidence, drawn from proper names and the supposed inability of nonhumans to recognise individual conspecifics, is weak. So visual perception seems less relevant to the evolution of grammar than Hurford thinks.

After a brief review of the notions of necessity and a priority, this paper scrutinizes Kripke's arguments for supposedly contingent a priori propositions and necessary a posteriori propositions involving proper names, and reaches a negative conclusion, i.e. there are no such propositions, or at least the propositions Kripke gives as examples are not such propositions. All of us, including Kripke himself, still have to face the old question raised by Hume, i.e. how can we justify the necessity and (...) universality of general statements on the basis of sensory or empirical evidence? (shrink)

This paper presents arguments in defense of the hypothesis that general proprer names are impossible in the context of Stuart Mill's philosophy of language. My thesis is contrary to John Skorupski's position to this subject. I offer two arguments related, respectively, to two different perspectives: the pragmatic and the systematic. In the first one I analyze the problem of general proper names in the context of natural language. In the second one I discuss this problem in the (...) inner context of Mill's System of logic.O presente artigo apresenta argumentos em defesa da hipótese de que nomes próprios gerais são impossíveis no contexto da filosofia geral de Stuart Mill. Minha tese é contrária à posição de John Skorupski sobre esta questão. Ofereço dois argumentos que representam, respectivamente, duas diferentes perspectivas: pragmático e sistemático. No primeiro, analiso o problema dos nomes próprios gerais no contexto da linguagem natural. No segundo, discuto o problema no contexto interno do Sistema de Lógica de Mill. (shrink)

An identity statement flanked on both sides with proper names is necessarily true, Saul Kripke thinks, if it's true at all. Thus, contrary to the received view – or at least what was, prior to Kripke, the received view – a statement like(A) Hesperus is Phosphorus.

This essay notes a striking parallel between the original Hilbert‐Bernays treatment of definite descriptions and Russell's theory of logically proper names. The formal language for the original theory is laid out and the implications of a theory of vis a vis the statements that qualify as predications in a logically proper definite descriptions sense of the word ‘predication'different from the espoused by Frege, Russell and Meinong.

Saul Kripke in his revolutionary and influential series of lectures from the early 1970s (later published as the book Naming and Necessity) famously resurrected John Stuart Mill's theory of proper names. Kripke at the same time rejected Mill's theory of general terms. According to Kripke, many natural kind terms do not fit Mill's account of general terms and are closer to proper names. Unfortunately, Kripke and his followers ignored key passages in Mill's A System of Logic (...) in which Mill enunciates a sophisticated and detailed theory of natural kind terms that anticipates and is in some ways superior to Kripke's. (shrink)

In this paper, I will focus on the debate between descriptivism and antidescriptivism theory about proper names. In Section I, I will propose an historical reconstruction of the debate, and I will focus in particular on Russell and Kripke's treatments of proper names. Some criticisms will be advanced against Kripke's hypothesis of rigid-designator and, more clearly, against the consequent distinction between the epistemic and metaphysical level that Kripke proposes to explain identity assertions between proper (...) class='Hi'>names. Furthermore, I will argue, that, pace Kripke, Russellian treatment of proper names allows to capture all our semantic intuitions, and also those semantic interpretations which concern context-belief sentences. I will close Section I by focusing on a criticism that Kripke rightly points out against an example that Russell proposes in his On Denoting. Section II will be devoted to Russellian solution: I will show that not only Russell's logical treatment of proper names allows to answer to Kripke's criticism to Russell's example, but also that such treatment can disambiguate and express all our semantic intuitions about Frege's puzzle sentence “Hesperus is Phosphorus”. I will then show that, contrarily, Quinian solution (discussed in Section III) and Kripkian one (see Section IV) are not satisfactory to capture our semantic knowledge about Frege's sentence. Furthermore, in Section IV I will focus on Kripke's distinction between epistemic and metaphysical level to deal with identity assertions between proper names, and I will logically show that such distinction is not plausible. In Section V, then, I will show that Russellian solution allows to explain context-belief sentences, contrarily to what Kripke thinks. In VI, I will summarize what I have argued in the text and I will draw some morals. (shrink)

The predicate view on proper names opts for a uniform semantic representation of proper nouns like ‘Alfred’ as predicates on the level of logical form. Early defences of this view can be found in Sloat (Language, vol. 45, pp. 26–30, 1969) and Burge (J. Philos. 70: 425–439, 1973), but there is an increasing more recent interest in this view on proper names. My paper aims to provide a reconstruction and critique of Burge’s main argument for (...) the predicate view on proper names, which is still used by several current philosophers in defence of this view. I have called this argument the unification argument. I will present a stepwise interpretation and reconstruction of this argument, consider several possible responses to it and defend a specific response to it in detail. (shrink)

I argue that (a) the causal theory of proper names and (b) Kripke's chain of references thesis are logically independent of each other, and that the case for (a) is very weak. I observe that rejecting (a) we lose one powerful reason for treating proper names as rigid designators. I then consider reasons for subscribing to (b), and I argue that (b) is compatible with either a rigid or a non-rigid (descriptive) semantic treatment of (...) class='Hi'>proper names. (shrink)

In this paper, I want to show that, far from being incompatible, a Predicate Theory of proper names and the Direct Reference thesis can be combined in a syncretistic account. There are at least three plausible such accounts – one which compares proper names in their referential use to referentially used proper definite descriptions, another one that compares them in this use to demonstratives, and a third one which, although it is as indexicalist as the (...) second one, conceives proper names in this use as a sui generis form of indexicals, indexinames. Finally, I will try to give both technical and substantive reasons as to why the third account is to be preferred to the other two. (shrink)

Professor Skutsch has convicted me of one error—the inclusion of Eun. 465 in my list on p. 208. I do not feel, however, that he has proved that Phaedria is a dactyl in Terence. The essence of his argument, as I see it, depends on the figures in the last two rows of the first two columns on p. 90, and may be stated as follows: ‘Forms undeniably dactylic, such as Pamphile, are always followed by a disyllabic thesis. The thesis (...) after all critical examples of Phaedria is disyllabic. Therefore “Phaedria is proved to be a dactyl”.’ My objection to this argument is not that it is not a logical syllogism, but that it seeks to establish the prosody of Phaedria without considering the prosody of the other Phaedria-typt1 names in Terence. These are listed on p. 208 of my article . The following cases, I suggest, merit consideration. (shrink)

Kripke’s picture of how people use names to refer to things has been the dominant view in contemporary philosophy of language. When it is mentioned at all, Donnellan’s view of proper names is considered the same as Kripke’s. It is certainly true that both Donnellan and Kripke rejected descriptivism about proper names and appealed to historical facts to determine whom a speaker is referring to by using a proper name. However, the relevant historical facts (...) Kripke and Donnellan appeal to are ultimately quite different. In this paper, I argue that Donnellan’s view of proper name fares better than Kripke’s. (shrink)

The first six chapters of this book present and criticize six views of the nature of proper names, among which are theories that proper names have no meaning or connotation, that proper names have more meaning than other signs or that their meaning is infinite, that ordinary proper names should be analysed into "logically" proper names, etc. This part of the book is the best. One may find in these (...) chapters several well-reasoned arguments which seem to totally demolish the theories under investigation. Chapters seven to nine present the author's own solution to the problem. Sørensen holds that a proper name does have a meaning—otherwise it would not have been a part of language at all. The meaning of a linguistic sign, he argues, is a set of conditions to be satisfied by an extra-linguistic entity, such that this entity may be identified as denoted by the said sign. A proper name is an individual name, and its meaning is a series of necessary and sufficient conditions for the identification of the individual entity which this name is intended to denote. It is Sørensen's view that this series consists of a definite description of final length including space and time indicators. The definiens formula for proper names is thus 'P' = 'the x that... t... p....' The discussion of this proposal is, however, greatly impaired by Sørensen's utter disregard for the rich philosophical literature existing on the subject: no attempt is made to confront his view with the now standard arguments against theories of that type. Even many inner difficulties of the proposed solution are ignored. E.g., one may ask what values do 't' and 'p' take in the definition of 'Zeus'. Or take the following puzzle: are 'The x that taught Aristotle in p at t' and 'The x that studied with Socrates in p at t' both the meaning of 'Plato'? Sørensen's view that "A national register may be looked upon as a dictionary of proper names" suggests a positive answer, but surely R and S cannot be the same meaning. Many similar problems bother the reader of Sørensen's book, but, unfortunately, they are nowhere discussed.—E. M. Z. (shrink)

Charles Peirce's theory of proper names is intimately connected to a number of central topics in contemporary philosophy of language and logic. Several papers have appeared in the past in which Peirce's theory of names has been attested to be a precursor of the causal-historical theory of reference.2 The causal-historical theory in turn has customarily been pigeonholed as the 'new' theories of reference that have been emerging since the 1950s (Devitt 1981; Donellan 1966; Kripke 1980; Marcus 1950; (...) Putnam 1973). Among those who have seen Peirce as such a precursor of the new theory of reference are DiLeo (1997), Hilpinen (1995), Maddalena (2006), Pape (1987), and Thibaud (1987). Related recent publications on the .. (shrink)

In this paper I am concerned with an analysis of negative existential sentences that contain proper names only by using negative or neutral free logic. I will compare different versions of neutral free logic with the standard system of negative free logic (Burge, Sainsbury) and aim to defend my version of neutral free logic that I have labeled non-standard neutral free logic.

Bertrand Russell introduced several novel ideas in his 1903 Principles of Mathematics that he later gave up and never went back to in his subsequent work. Two of these are the related notions of denoting concepts and classes as many. In this paper we reconstruct each of these notions in the framework of conceptual realism and connect them through a logic of names that encompasses both proper and common names, and among the latter, complex as well as (...) simple common names. Names, proper or common, and simple or complex, occur as parts of quantifier phrases, which in conceptual realism stand for referential concepts, i.e., cognitive capacities that inform our speech and mental acts with a referential nature and account for the intentionality, or directedness, of those acts. In Russell’s theory, quantifier phrases express denoting concepts (which do not include proper names). In conceptual realism, names, as well as predicates, can be nominalized and allowed to occur as "singular terms", i.e., as arguments of predicates. Occurring as a singular term, a name denotes, if it denotes at all, a class as many, where, as in Russell’s theory, a class as many of one object is identical with that one object, and a class as many of more than one object is a plurality, i.e., a plural object that we call a group. Also, as in Russell’s theory, there is no empty class as many. When nominalized, proper names function as "singular terms" just the way they do in so-called free logic. Leśniewski’s ontology, which is also called a logic of names can be completely interpreted within this conceptualist framework, and the well-known oddities of Leśniewski’s system are shown not to be odd at all when his system is so interpreted. Finally, we show how the pluralities, or groups, of the logic of classes as many can be used as the semantic basis of plural reference and predication. We explain in this way Russell’s "fundamental doctrine upon which all rests", i.e., "the doctrine that the subject of a proposition may be plural, and that such plural subjects are what is meant by classes [as many] which have more than one term" (Russell 1938, p. 517). (shrink)

In this discussion I take it for granted that proper names are words of a language, are not mere interjections or burps. I also take it for granted that for any proper name “N. N.” there is some general term “A” that gives the relevant criterion of identity; repeated use of “N. N.” involves an intention to keep on saying things about one and the same A, or as I shall put it for short “N. N.” is (...) a name for an A. An intention to keep on referring barely to the same thing is, as lawyers say, void for uncertainty. These theses have been denied, but I think not reasonably. Some very silly arguments have been used recently: e.g. an argument from the logical possibility of Protean change is put up to show that a proper name may attach to a thing no matter what sort it comes to belong to. (shrink)

In this discussion I take it for granted that proper names are words of a language, are not mere interjections or burps. I also take it for granted that for any proper name “N. N.” there is some general term “A” that gives the relevant criterion of identity; repeated use of “N. N.” involves an intention to keep on saying things about one and the same A, or as I shall put it for short “N. N.” is (...) a name for an A. An intention to keep on referring barely to the same thing is, as lawyers say, void for uncertainty. These theses have been denied, but I think not reasonably. Some very silly arguments have been used recently: e.g. an argument from the logical possibility of Protean change is put up to show that a proper name may attach to a thing no matter what sort it comes to belong to. (shrink)

Gottlob Frege may be considered as the first intellectual giant in thePhilosophy of Language. He was the first to raise the issue ofmeaning by formulating an organized theory of meaning for a part ofnatural language as the theory of meaning is at the core of philosophy of language. He emphasizes that the meaning of a sentence directly depends on the meaning of its constituent parts. That is why he has to dissect the internal structure of a sentence or complex expressions (...) provided by a logical syntax, while the truth value of such sentences may be revealed by logical semantics which can be put forward by treating these sentences as a whole. (shrink)