Referentialism and Predicativism About Proper Names

C. Penco, A. Negro (eds.), Proceedings of the 2021 Workshop on Context, 21-22 June 2021, online at https://www.finophd.eu/WOC2021/, 2021

The paper considers the hypothesis that proper names are simple demonstratives. In the first part, I provide the general motivation for an indexical treatment of proper names as well as assess the strengths and weaknesses of existing indexical accounts. The second part is devoted to proposing a new account that treats proper names as simple demonstratives which referents are determined by the speaker's referential intention. In my proposal, I use the hybrid approach towards indexical expressions developed e.g. by Wolfgang Künne (1992) and Stefano Predelli (2006). I argue that this approach allows countering many of the problems haunting existing indexical accounts of proper names. I also consider the Humpty-Dumpty objection to intentionalism regarding demonstrative reference (Gorvett 2005) and show, how the proposed approach may counter it. The considerations concerning this problem also demonstrate, how the treatment of proper names as hybrid demonstratives may allow solving the problems posed by the "Madagascar argument" to the causal-chain theory of proper name reference (Evans, Altham 1973) as well as explain the cases of slips-of-tongue and intention-convention reference mismatch.

Philosophy Compass, 2015

The Millian view that the meaning of a proper name is simply its referent has long been popular among philosophers of language. It might even be deemed the orthodox view, despite its well-known difficulties. Fregean and Russellian alternatives, though widely discussed, are much less popular. The Predicate View has not even been taken seriously, at least until fairly recently, but finally, it is receiving the attention it deserves. It says that a name expresses the property of bearing that name. Despite its apparent shortcomings, it has a distinct virtue: It straightforwardly reckons with the fact that proper names generally have multiple bearers and are sometimes used to ascribe the property of bearing a name rather than to refer to a particular bearer of the name. It holds that proper names are much the same as common nouns, both semantically and syntactically, with only superficial differences. They both can be quantified and modified. The main difference, at least in English (and some other languages), is that when used to refer a proper name, unlike a common noun, is not preceded by the definite article. The Predicate View accounts for manifestly predicative uses, but to be vindicated, it needs to do justice to the fact that the main use of proper names is to refer. (1) Nikola Tesla was a brilliant electrical engineer. (2) Salem has always been free of witches. Yet like common nouns, names can also be quantified and modified: (3) Many Nikolas live in Croatia. (4) There are more than a dozen Salems in the United States. (5) An electric car company is named after the brilliant engineer Tesla. (6) The only Salem that is a state capital is the one in Oregon. These examples might suggest that the names 'Nikola' and 'Salem' are ambiguous, meaning one thing when used to refer, as in their bare, unmodified singular occurrences, and meaning something else when used as count nouns. But simply to claim that proper names have two meanings, depending on whether they occur by themselves or as parts of larger phrases, leaves unexplained why they have these two uses. Surely it is not a massive linguistic coincidence. Besides, this view fails to explain why, for example, since Teddy Roosevelt and Franklin Roosevelt were both U.S. presidents, it follows that two Roosevelts were U.S. presidents. So, could proper names each have only one meaning

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.

In this essay, I address the following question posed by Glezakos (after Kaplan): What determines the form of a name-containing identity statement? I argue that uses of names are determined by the specific names uttered and the presence (or absence) of coco-referential intentions of the speaker. This explains why utterances of the form a=a are uninformative or knowable a priori, more generally than utterances of the form a=b. My approach has the additional benefit of providing an account of empty names.

Philosophical Studies, 2013

In this essay I will defend a novel version of the indexical view on proper names. According to this version, proper names have a relatively sparse truth-conditional meaning that is represented by their rigid content and indexical character, but a relatively rich use-conditional meaning, which I call the (contextual) constraint of a proper name. Firstly, I will provide a brief outline of my favoured indexical view on names in contrast to other indexical views proposed in the relevant literature. Secondly, two general motivations for an indexical view on names will be introduced and defended. Thirdly, I will criticize the two most popular versions of the indexical view on names: formal variable accounts and salience-based formal constant accounts. In the fourth and final section, I will develop my own use-conditional indexical view on names in three different steps by confronting an initial version of this view with three different challenges. Keywords Proper names Á Indexicals Á Determination of reference Á Reference to past bearers of a name Á Multiple bearers of a name Á Empty names 1 Setting the stage: Indexical views on proper names Indexicals are linguistic expressions whose semantic reference depends in a certain way on specific parameters of the context of use. Therefore, an indexical expression can have different semantic referents relative to different contexts of use. Prototypical and uncontroversial examples of indexicals are expressions like 'I', 'here', 'now' and 'this'. The view that proper names are indexical expressions is

Although the view that sees proper names as referential singular terms is widely considered orthodoxy, there is a growing popularity to the view that proper names are predicates. This is partly because the orthodoxy faces two anomalies that Predicativism can solve: on the one hand, proper names can have multiple bearers. But multiple bearerhood is (prima facie) a problem to the idea that proper names have just one individual as referent. On the other hand, as Burge (1973) noted, proper names can have predicative uses. But the view that proper names are singular terms arguably does not have the resources to deal with Burge's cases. In this paper I argue that the predicate view of proper names is mistaken. I first argue against the syntactic evidence used to support the view and against the predicativist's methodology of inferring a semantic account for proper names based on incomplete syntactic data. I also show that Predicativism can neither explain the behaviour of proper names in full generality, nor claim the fundamentality of predicative names. In developing my own view, however, I accept the insight that proper names in some sense express generality. Hence I propose that proper names - albeit fundamentally singular referential terms - express generality in two senses. First, by being used as predicates, since then they are true of many individuals; and second, by being referentially related to many individuals. I respond to the problem of multiple bearerhood by proposing that proper names are polyreferential, and also explain the behaviour of proper names in light of the wider phenomenon I called category change, and shown how Polyreferentialism can account for all uses of proper names.

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)

Voprosy onomastiki, 2018

The paper presents an overview of the generativist approaches to the syntactic analysis of proper names which are only very little known in the field of onomastics. The authors start with the general outline of basic theoretical ideas of generative grammar pertaining to the syntactic nature of words and phrases, the nature of the determiner phrase, and the main issues of transformational semantic syntax. The authors further proceed to present the cornerstone theories related to proper names within the generativist paradigm: Giuseppe Longobardi’s idea of proper names as determiner phrase projections, followed by Hagit Borer who elaborated a detailed analysis of nominal functional sequences; Ora Matushansky’s analysis of constructions of naming and nominating, and its critique by Alexandra Cornilescu. The overview leads the authors to conclude that, although generativism does not offer a unified syntactic theory of proper names, in some respects it can be a more promising theoretical framework than constructivism which now constitutes the basis for the modern “pragmatic” theory of properhood. Unlike constructivism, generativism considers proper names as a part of universal grammar seeking for explanations that would have crosslinguistic relevance. However, the approaches discussed in this paper clearly demonstrate the contribution of the syntactic environment to the interpretation of a noun as a proper or common name, which is a strong argument in favour of the “pragmatic” theory of properhood. The authors show that the generativist framework may also be used in the future for creating a more comprehensive description of some specifically proprial syntactic constructions.

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.

Proceedings of the 2006 Annual Conference of the …, 2006