On the status of proper names in the grammar

Journal of Semantics, 1997

The Importance of Being Called Ernesto. Reference, Truth, and Logical Form, 2016

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.

Linguistics and Philosophy, 2006

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)

Dialectica, 2000

This paper embeds a theory of proper names in a general approach to singular reference based on type-free property theory. It is proposed that a proper name “N” is a sortal common noun whose meaning is essentially tied to the linguistic type “N”. Moreover, “N” can be singularly referring insofar as it is elliptical for a definite description of the form the “N” Following Montague, the meaning of a definite description is taken to be a property of properties. The proposed theory fulfils the major desiderata stemming from Kripke's works on proper names.

In this paper I present a way of formally representing proper names in accordance with a description theory of reference–fixing and show that such a representation makes it possible to retain the claim about the rigidity of proper names and is not vulnerable to Kripke’s modal objection.

Erkenntnis, 2014

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. 1 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 (bundle of) definite description(s). The satisfier, if any, of the definite description(s) that provide(s) the meaning of a proper name is its referent. Descriptivists can allow for empty proper names that are meaningful. They also have an initially plausible account of true informative identity statements ('Marilyn Monroe is no one other person than Norma Jean Baker'). Their informativity is grounded in a difference in meaning-giving descriptions.

SCHOLE, 2017

According to Aristotle spoken words are signs of impressions, and those words which are used as names have conventional meanings. This theory of meaning poses a problem because it is unclear how exactly impressions which are essentially subjective may be assigned to names conventionally, i.e. due to certain interactions between different persons. In the following article the nature of the problem as well as the most prominent notions of conventions are analyzed: it is shown that considering the ways by which conventions about meanings should be established according to them the problem cannot be eliminated. It is also claimed that this is the problem not only for the particular Aristotle's theory of names, but also a problem for a much wider set of theories of meaning and interpretation