Draft of the chapter on proper names of the book Philosophical Semantics to be published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
Appendix to chapter 1
How do Proper Names Really Work?
(Cutting the
Gordian Knot)
Die Probleme, die durch ein Mißdeuten unserer Sprachformen entstehen,
haben den Charakter der Tiefe. Es sind tiefe Beunruhigungen; sie wurzeln so
tief in uns wie die Formen unserer Sprache, und ihre Bedeutung ist so groß wie
die Wichtigkeit unserer Sprache.
[The problems arising through a
misinterpretation of our forms of language have the character of depth. They
are deep disquietudes; their roots are as deep in us as the forms of our
language and their significance is as great as the importance of our language.]
Wittgenstein
As Wittgenstein once said, our aim
in teaching philosophy should not be to give people the food they enjoy, but
rather offer them new and different food in order to improve their tastes. This
is my intention here. Personally, I am strongly convinced that I have a better
explanation for the mechanisms of reference that characterize proper names; but
to convince others seem to be the really difficult task. This difficulty is
greater because I am swimming against the mainstream – in this case, the
externalist-causalist anti-cognitivist view regarding the reference of proper
names.
There is a further reason why the neodescriptivist theory of proper
names that I intend to summarize here is particularly hard to accept. It is
because the question of how proper names refer has always been the touchstone
for theories of reference. More than forty years ago, when Saul Kripke, Keith
Donnellan and others rejected descriptivism for proper names, they also opened
the doors for externalist, causalist and potentially non-cognitivist views, at
least concerning the reference of indexicals and general terms. Now, if I reach
my goal, which is to re-establish a form of descriptivism regarding proper
names, once more the doors will be open to re-establishing
descriptivist-internalist-cognitivist views regarding other terms and language
in general. This means that we will once more have to change the whole
topography of our philosophy of language. However, since the new orthodoxy is
already well-entrenched – it has led a good life for the past forty years – and
a myriad of good and bad arguments have been developed in its favor, the
challenge is naturally huge. If I limited myself just to answering the most
relevant arguments, I would still need to write an entire book to make a
persuasive case for a descriptivist approach to proper names. But if I consider
the potential disorder that pure neodescriptivism may produce in all these
‘well-established’ views about reference, a thousand-page book answering all
the relevant arguments and trying to restate the
descriptivist-internalist-cognitivist perspective would still be considered insufficient.
Keeping this warning in mind, in what follows I offer a short summary of my own
view on proper names.[1]
A meta-descriptive rule for proper names
According to descriptivism proper
names are abbreviations of definite
descriptions. And according to the most developed formulation of descriptivism
for proper names – the cluster theory as presented in the work of John
Searle – a proper name abbreviates a cluster of definite and even indefinite
descriptions, which constitutes its whole content. The different senses we can
give to a proper name we are using result from our having in mind some not
previously determined sub-cluster of a whole cluster of co-referential
descriptions (Searle 1958).[2] Thus, as Frege already saw,
I can mean ‘the greatest disciple of Plato and the tutor of Alexander’ with the
name ‘Aristotle’, while you can mean by it ‘the tutor of Alexander who was born
in Stagira’; moreover, we will both know that we are referring to the same
person, since we share at least one description.
In my view, the problem with this formulation of the cluster theory is
not that it is wrong, but that it is too vague, what limits its explanatory
power. The most serious problem is that the descriptions belonging to the
clusters remain completely disordered.
How important this is becomes apparent when we remember that the descriptions
belonging to these clusters are what Wittgenstein called ‘expressions of
rules’: description-rules that should in some way aid us to
identify the bearer of a proper name. So, the problem with cluster theory is
that it gives us no method to decide which description-rules belonging to a
cluster have more relevance for the identification of a name’s bearer. I think
that the most serious handicap of the traditional formulations of cluster
theory is that they do offers us devices to adequately account for this.
This said, my working-hypothesis was that speakers of our language
implicitly appeal to some kind of meta-descriptive rule. This rule should tells us the conditions necessary for the
relevant descriptions belonging to the proper name’s clusters to be satisfied
so that we can apply the corresponding proper name. I intend to show that this
addition is possible and that it greatly enhance the cluster theory of proper
names.
The first thing to do is to find the relevant descriptions. My proposal
is inspired by J. L. Austin’s method of quasi-lexicographic examination of
ordinary language, which I here understand as an examination of what
encyclopaedias have to tell us about the proper names figuring in them. The
result is that we can clearly distinguish two kinds of description-rules that
help us to identify the bearer of a proper name, which I call the auxiliary and the fundamental descriptions.
I begin by examining auxiliary descriptions.
They can be defined as those that are only accidentaly
associated with a proper name. Regarding the name ‘Aristotle’, they can be
exemplified by: ‘the master of those who know’ (as a metaphorical description
used by Dante); ‘the greatest disciple of Plato’, ‘the teacher of Alexander’,
‘the founder of the Lyceum’ and ‘the man called “Aristotle”’ (as accidental,
but well-known descriptions); ‘the lover of Herphyllis’ and ‘the grandson of
Achaeon’ (as accidental and relatively unknown descriptions); ‘the philosopher
mentioned by the professor in the last class’ (as a contextually dependent,
adventitious description).
Some of these auxiliary descriptions were often mentioned as examples by
the old descriptivists. But this is misleading, since they can be of negligible
semantic relevance. An indication of this secondary role is given by
encyclopaedias. They typically begin by presenting what I call fundamental descriptions: those non-accidental descriptions that usually tell
us the ‘when’, the ‘where’ and the ‘why’ of the bearers of proper names. We can
define the fundamental descriptions as being of the two following types:
(A) Localizing description-rule:
the description that localizes an object in space and time, identifying its
spatio-temporal career.
(B) Characterizing description-rule:
the description that indicates what we regard as the most important aspects of
the object, presenting the reasons we have for applying the proper name to it.
Indeed, encyclopaedias standardly give us first the spatio-temporal
location and then the main reason why we use a proper name; only later do they
give a more detailed exposition in which auxiliary descriptions can be found.
Having found what seem to be the two most fundamental kinds of
description-rules, and after considering different alternatives, I came to the
following meta-descriptive rule for establishing the conditions of application
of any proper name:
MD-rule for the application of proper names:
In any possible world in which a
proper name ‘N’ has a bearer, this object must belong to some most proximally
relevant class C, so that it sufficiently and more than any other object
satisfies the conditions set by its localizing description-rules and/or its
characterizing descrition-rules. (Auxiliary descriptions may be added to
this).
I will illustrate my suggestion with the name ‘Aristotle’. The most
proximally relevant class C to which Aristotle belongs is that of a human being
(C serves to narrow the scope of referents to be considered, so that he cannot
be a star or a computer). The condition of type (A) for Aristotle can be
summarized in the definite description ‘the person born in Stagira in 384 BC,
who lived the most productive part of his life in Athens, visited Lesbos and
died in Chalcis in 322 BC…’ The condition of type (B) for Aristotle can be
summarized in the definite description ‘the philosopher who developed the great
ideas belonging to the Aristotelian opus…’[3] (That these conditions are
the most basic is supported by any reliable encyclopaedia). Thus, by applying
the general meta-descriptive rule to the cluster of descriptions summarized
under the name ‘Aristotle’ we finally get what we may call its specific identification rule. (We can also read
the MD-rule simply as the form that
each identification rule for a proper name must take in order to give it a
referential function). Consider this:
RI-Aristotle: In any possible world
where there is a bearer of the name ‘Aristotle’[4], this object is the human
being who sufficiently and more than any other person satisfies the conditions
of having been born in Stagira in 384 BC, lived the main part of his life in
Athens and died in Chalcis in 322 BC and/or been the philosopher who developed
the great ideas of the Aristotelian opus. (With the possible addition of
auxiliary descriptions...)
The same can be done with the clusters of descriptions associated with
the most varied proper names, such as ‘Paris’, ‘Tower of Pisa’, ‘Amazon River’,
‘Uranus’, ‘Sweden’, and, of course, also with the many proper names of unknown
people, although in the last case in a more dispersive way (we can call any
identification rule a instantiation of the form of the identification rule).
The application of the meta-descriptive rule to the name ‘Aristotle’ in
order to obtain its identification rule allows us to answer Kripke’s modal
objection, according to which descriptivism is false, since no description is
warranted to apply to any existing bearer of a proper name. As he states, there
could be possible worlds where Aristotle lived 500 years later or where he died
as a child, never writing anything about philosophy (Kripke, 1980, pp. 62 f.).
However, these possibilities are no threat to the rule stated above, since this
rule is based on an inclusive disjunction. Aristotle could have lived
500 years later in Rome, as far as he sufficiently satisfied the characterizing
description related to his work, for instance, writing the whole Aristotelian
opus in Greek. And he could have died as child insofar as he sufficiently
satisfied the localizing description, for instance having been born in Stagira
in 384 B.C. as the son of the court physician Nicomachus.
Since our identification rule for Aristotle demands only sufficient
satisfaction of an inclusive disjunction of the two fundamental descriptions
(which does not establish any precise amount of anything), the two above
considered possibilities are easily conceivable as satisfying the rule of
identification.
Indeed, there are even proper names designed to satisfy only one
description-rule of the disjunction, like the names ‘universe’ (understood as
all that exists) and ‘Z’ (understood as the arbitrary name of the center of a
circle), or to satisfy one term of the disjunction more than the other, as in
the case of a numbered planet of the solar system. The only inconceivable
alternative is that neither the localizing nor the characterizing
description-rule is to any degree satisfied. Such a case was playfully conceived
by John Searle in the following example:
If a classical scholar claimed to
have discovered that Aristotle was no philosopher and wrote none of the works
attributed to him, but was in fact an obscure Venetian fishmonger of the late
Renaissance, then the ‘discovery’ would become a bad joke. (Searle 1967, p.
490)
Certainly, no sane person would agree with Searle’s classical scholar.
Such an illiterate man could not be our Aristotle. And the obvious reason is
that the fishmonger does not satisfy in any acceptable degree the two
fundamental descriptions.
Two important elements of the MD-rule for proper names need some
clarification. They are what we could call the conditions of sufficience and predominance.
Consider first the condition of sufficience. We can imagine a possible
world where Aristotle was born in 384 B.C. in Stagira… but died when he was
seventeen, because his ship sink while he was crossing the Aegean on the way to
study with Plato in Athens; he may have been an unfulfilled Aristotle, but we
feel that he was still our Aristotle! The reason is that the identification
rule is satisfied, insofar as the localizing condition is at least sufficiently
satisfied, the fact being irrelevant that the other term of the disjunction
isn’t satisfied at all. The opposite case would be that of a possible world
where the only Aristotle were born 500 years later in Rome and wrote only the Metaphysics and the Nicomachean Ethics: we would still tend to identify him as our
Aristotle.
The second condition, predominance, shows its purpose when we imagine
that in Stagira Nicomachus, the court physician, in 384 B.C. fathered two twin
sons, both baptized with the same name: ‘Aristotle’. The first Aristotle went
to Athens when he was seventeen in order to study philosophy with Plato, and he
wrote the entire Aristotelian opus. The second Aristotle had a less happy
fate... He became a physician like his father and accompanied Alexander on his
military campaigns, succumbing from hunger and thirst in the desert while they
were returning from the East. Who would be our Aristotle? Of course, the first
one. And the reason is that more than the second Aristotle he satisfies the
fundamental conditions of the identification rule for Aristotle. The condition
of predominance excludes the possibility that more than one referent satisfies
the identification rule. If there is more than one referent that satisfies the
identification rule to the same degree, even if in differently ways, our
criterial device for the application of a proper name will break down. So, for
example, if in a possible world there is a human being with two heads who was
born in 384 B.C. in Stagira… both having inevitably a similar life and career
and both having written the whole Aristotelian opus together, it would be
senseless to ask who is our Aristotle, since proper names by definition apply
to only one bearer.
The inclusionof the condition of predominance has already the advantage
of explaining why it is intuitive for us that a Twin-Earth Aristotle (who is
qualitatively identical to our Aristotle) is not the ‘true’ Aristotle in a way
that works better than Searle’s attempt of explanation (1983, pp. 254-5). The
reason for this intuition is that our earth’s Aristotle better satisfies the
condition of predominance. Although both satisfy the characterizing
description-rule (both wrote the Opus
Aristotelicum), because the spatial
surroundings are similar, the Twin-Earth Aristotle also appears to satisfy the
localizing rule. But beyond this, only the earth-Aristotle really satisfies the
localizing description-rule, since he lived in the Greece of our earth, and not in the far distant
Twin-Earth Greece. Because both earths belong to one and the same space, the
localizing description-rule refers to a spatial location on the first earth and
not to its copy on the Twin-Earth, notwithstanding the similar local surroundings.
One could ask if the auxiliary descriptions have some role regarding the
predominance. The answer seems to me double. No in the case in which the
auxiliary descriptions are irrelevant, like ‘the man called the master of those
who know’ or ‘the grandson of Achaeon’. But in the case of relevant auxiliary
descriptions like ‘a great disciple of Plato’ they seem to count. And the
reason is that the border between fundamental descriptions and auxiliary
descriptions is blurred, particularly when we are handling with trivial proper
names like mine and presumedly your.
Finally, the trivial significance of the auxiliary descriptions comes to
the fore when we consider the case of someone who satisfy them but does not
satisfy the fundamental conditions, e.g., the millionaire Greek shipping
magnate Aristotle Onassis (1906-1975). He could not be our Aristotle, even
supposing that he satisfied auxiliary descriptions like ‘the man called
“Aristotle”’, ‘the tutor of Alexander’ and ‘the lover of Herphylis’. And the
reason is that although he is a man called ‘Aristotle’, this Aristotle could
not be the greatest philosopher of the ancient Greece; even if he taught his
son Alexander (who really had this name), because this Alexander could not be
the greatest conqueror of Antiquity; and even if he had a mistress called
Herphylis (he had many love affairs), she would not be a concubine from ancient
Stagira. It does not matter how many auxiliary conditions this proper name
satisfies, they will never suffice to identify him as the Stagirite. We well see
them as irrelevant and strange coincidences, showing that auxiliary
descriptions can only be helpful when the fundamental descriptions are already
applicable.[5]
Objection of vagueness
At this point one could object that
the identification rules derived from the MD-rule (or instantiating it) are too
vague, particularly because they do not establish precisely how much of the
inclusive disjunction must be satisfied in order to be sufficient, and because
it is not precisely established how much more a possible competitor must
satisfy the disjunction so that it would with certainty disqualify any other.
In order to answer this question we need to begin by remembering that
vagueness does not mean (as is shown e.g., by the sorites paradox) the disappearance of boundaries. After all, it is
quite easy to conceive of a possible world where we cannot quite know whether
or not our Aristotle ever existed. This would be the case, for example, in a
possible world where the Aristotelian philosophy was never developed, and in
Stagira a court physician named Nicomachus in 384 BC fathered an anencephalic
fetus who died soon after birth, a child he had planned to call ‘Aristotle’...
Would he be our Aristotle? We cannot tell.
Having this in mind, the answer to the objection is easy. Our natural
language is vague; if the semantic rules we discover could be truly applicable
in empirically possible worlds, they must leave room for vagueness. And this is
precisely what our identification rules do. Thus, far from being a deficiency,
the vagueness of our identification rules is a merit. It is an evidence of
their correctness, since all that their vagueness does is to mirror the
semantic vagueness of our natural language. This is shown by our example of the
anencephalic Aristotle in which the condition of sufficiency breaks down
because of its unavoidable vagueness.
Saul Kripke correctly classified proper names as rigid designators,
defined as applicable in any possible world where the bearer of the proper
names exists. This is an insightful idea. But since in some possible worlds
there are cases in which we cannot know whether the bearer of a proper name
exists, we must redefine the rigid designator as the term that applies in any
possible world where its reference definitely
(unambiguously) exists. So understood, the identification rule makes again the
proper name a rigid designator – a point to which we will return later.
Signification
The proposed neodescriptivist theory
of proper names allows us to gain a better understand of the meaning of proper names. Abstracting for
now what can be meant by individual speakers when they use a name, which is
variable, we can say that the core meaning
(sense) of a proper name is given by its fundamental description-rules, since
jointly with the whole identification rule they are able to singularize the
meaning of the name by identifying its sole bearer. These fundamental
descriptions must be conventions sufficiently known, at least by what we may
call privileged speakers (in many cases ‘specialists’), understood as those able to
apply them. So, if you know that Aristotle was ‘the philosopher who wrote the Metaphysics’ and that he was ‘the person
born in Stagira in 384 B.C. and who lived most of his life in Athens’, you
already have some decisive informational meaning.
Now, what about auxiliary descriptions? They are still able to give an aura of meaning to a name, which sometimes becomes visible, as in the case
of ‘Plato’s greatest disciple’. Nonetheless, someone who only knows some
complementary description conventionally associated with a proper name, like
‘Alexander’s teacher’ in association with ‘Aristotle’, whom he saw in a movie
about the life of Alexander, does not really know anything relevant about the
meaning of the name Aristotle. This is so, even if he knows something
meaningful about him and can with its help already manage to insert the name
correctly in some vague discourse, making what I would call a parasitical kind of reference. Auxiliary
descriptions have an auxiliary role of pointing to, of guiding the speaker
within a linguistic community to the fundamental descriptions and in this way
to identify the bearer.
Finally, one
should not here confuse cognitive with emotive meaning. The cluster of
descriptions associated with a proper name, particularly regarding the
fundamental descriptions, gives its informative or cognitive content – what
Frege called its sense (Sinn) – which
has a conventional ground that is in some way implicitly or explicitly
established as something able to be shared between speakers. However, there are
also things like memory-images, feelings, smells, which can be associated with
a proper name (for instance ‘the Pietà’, ‘Christ’, ‘Stalin’, ‘Majdanek’…) but
cannot be easily rescued by descriptions. We could say that they belong to the
emotive dimension of meaning, which would be based on the often shared
regularities of our psychological reactions instead of our implicitly
established conventions. Frege called them illuminations
(Beleuchtungen). I suppose that the
disseminated idea that not all our cognitive meaning can be linguistically
translated in the form of descriptions originates from a failure to distinguish
emotive from conventional meaning. By having conventional grounds, cognitive
meaning is conventional and consequently always able to be expressed by
descriptive means.
Ignorance and error
Possessing this general explanation
of the meaning of proper names, we are prepared to give an answer to Kripke’s
counterexamples of ignorance and error. They concern people who associate an indefinite description with a proper
name, such as ‘a physicist or so’ with the name ‘Feynman’, and people who
associate erroneous descriptions with
a proper name, such as ‘the inventor of the atom bomb’ with the name ‘Einstein’
and ‘the creator of Peano’s axioms’ with the name ‘Peano’ (while in fact these
axioms were first discovered by Dedekind and then refined by Peano). (Kripke
1980, pp. 81-89).
My answer is that the speaker is able to endow proper names like these
with a merely parasitical or borrowed referential role. For this it suffices to
know a very marginal and insufficient description, insofar as one is confident
that through its privileged users the linguistic community possesses the
necessary knowledge of the fundamental description-rules to really apply the
identification rule. This means that the speaker who knows such descriptions is
already able to insert the word into discourse in a way that he expects can
associate the name with its bearer somewhere in the communication network.
Important for the work of this parasitical way of reference is that the
description known by the speaker enables him to insert the proper name in an understandable way into sufficiently vague discursive contexts.
This is the case of the Kripkian counterexamples presented above. One can
correctly insert names associating them with indefinite or even erroneous
descriptions into some discourse, insofar as at least the following two
conditions are satisfied:
(a) The description known by the speaker
is convergent, that is, it is a
description that at least in a sufficiently precise way correctly classifies
the owner of the name (class C of the identification rule).
(b) The speaker implicitly knows the MD-rule of proper names – this
means that he must at least be aware that he does not know more than a bit of
the meaning, which will make him careful enough when inserting the name in the
discourse (he knows how little he knows).
To give an easy example: I know almost nothing of the cognitive meaning
of the abstract name ‘string theory’, since I am no physicist. But I know how
little I know, and because of this I could even fool my students by giving some
vague information about superstrings as incredibly small dancing filaments of
energy producing all the matter and forces of the universe by means of the
different frequencies of their vibrations… The ordinary context allows this,
although in fact I am far away from understanding the mathematical details that
are at the centre of this theory. This is why in a really demanding context,
for instance, in a discussion between physicists, I would not wiser not to say
a word. Furthermore, without these privileged speakers and their adequate
knowledge of meaning, my insertion of the word ‘string theory’ into the
discourse would be vacuous, because no parasitical reference would have nothing
to parasite.
Consider now Kripke’s counterexamples. A person can insert the name
‘Feynman’ in sufficiently vague discourses, as far as her use is convergent –
Feynman is correctly classified as ‘a physicist or so’ and therefore as a human
being – insofar as she is implicitly aware of the MD-rule. A person can also
use the names ‘Einstein’ and ‘Peano’ correctly in vague discursive contexts,
maybe expecting to receive more information or even correction, as far as she
satisfies conditions (a) and (b), correctly classifying Einstein as a
researcher and Peano as a mathematician and both as human beings.
On the other hand, when proper names are associated with divergent descriptions, being therefore
incorrectly classified, the referential thread is apt to be lost. Thus, if
speakers associate the name ‘Feynman’ with the divergent description ‘a brand
of perfume’, the name ‘Einstein’ with the divergent description ‘a precious
stone’, and with the name ‘Peano’ the divergent description ‘a musical
instrument’, they will probably not be able to correctly insert these names
into any discursive context, vague as it may be. We will not say that in using
the name they are able to refer to its bearer, even in a borrowed or parasitical
way.
Curiously enough, the same applies to general terms. If a fisherman
means by a whale a great marine fish, this is incorrect, as the whale is a
mammal, but convergent, since he classifies the whale correctly as a sea
animal, which already enables him to insert the word in a colloquial discourse.
But if a child believes that whale is the name of some mountain in the
Appalachians, this is incorrect and divergent, making it unable to adequately
insert the word into a discourse.
Rigidity
The most decisive point against
Kripke’s view is that our neodescriptivist theory explains in a non-mysterious
way why proper names are rigid designators, while definite descriptions are
non-rigid designators.
For us proper names are rigid designators, because their identification
rules apply in any possible world where the proper name’s bearer exists. This
is the real reason why they satisfy Kripke’s condition, according to which ‘a’
is a rigid designator if and only if it is false that some ‘a’ might not have
been ‘a’. However, we have a descriptivist explanation for this. For us what
this relly means is that it is impossible that the bearer of a name does not
satisfy the identification rule for this bearer, for this rule simply defines what
this bearer can be in any possible world. The identification rule establishes
all the possible combinations of singularized properties that a referent must
have in order to be the only bearer of its proper name.
To clarify this point we can express the proper name’s identification
rule by means of a definitional
identity sentence able to identify the bearer of the proper name through a
complex associated definite description. For example:
‘Aristotle’ (Df) = the name that in
any possible world in which it has a bearer applies to a human being who
satisfies sufficiently and more than any other competitor the condition that he
was born in Stagira in 384 B.C… dying in Chalcis in 322 B.C. and/or was the
author of the relevant ideas of the Aristotelian opus…
This expression of the
identification rule for Aristotle is an analytically necessary a priori
statement, containing the complex definite description ‘the name that in any possible world…’ which not only defines what
is meant with the name but is also a rigid designator.
The upshot is that, unlike the old descriptivism, the meta-descriptivist
view does not risk destroying the rigidity of proper names; on the contrary, it
explains their rigidity descriptively, since it explains under what conditions
a possible world may be home of the bearer of a name, so that if it satisfies certain
conditions, the name necessarily applies to it. The reference occurs by means
of singularized properties as far as they satisfy, we could say, criterial
configurations generated by the rule – configurations that are seen as
sufficient for its application. But these singularized properties and
respective criterial configurations can change in multiple and varied ways,
exempting essential properties understood as necessary and sufficient ones.
It is true that a proper name can suffer partial changes in its
meaning (usually the amount of information we have increases; think about
autobiographies). So, for some time, which we can call ∆t1, David Hume was
better known as a Historian. Thus in a possible world w where there were two Humes with similar localizing descriptions,
but one was only a Historian, while the other has only written the Treatise, one would identify in time ∆t1
the first Hume of w as our Hume,
although in time ∆t2 one would identify
the later Hume as our eminent philosopher. This seems to compromise our claim
of rigidity. However, this would bring a similar trouble to Kripke’s view,
though hidden by his course grained analysis: for by what means he would choose
our Hume in w, except if by implicitly
considering the writer of the Treatise,
namely, our Hume of ∆t2? The problem is solved if we consider the rigidity of a
name as being given by the way it is conventionally understood and in this way
fixed by the members of some community of ideas, in the case our own.
Another example illustrating thispoint is that
of the name ‘Madagascar’ suggested by Gareth Evans against the
causal-historical view (Evans 1973). Madagascar was in initially the name of
the oriental region of Africa. Marco Polo went to the great Island of
Madagascar and called it erroneously Madagascar. Today, because of Marco Polo
we all call Madagascar the Island. But if the baptism theory were correct we
should still name Madagascar the oriental region of Africa. Kripke tried to
answer this problem suggesting that there is a new social intention to refer to
the island that overrides the former intention, what approaches dangerously to
the recognition of the necessity of new descriptions to identify the island
(Kripke 1980, p. 163). From our perspective the case is easily settled. We
would admit that this is a case of homonimity, since we have a forsaken Madagascar-1
of East-Africa, with a localizing and a characterizind description, and the well-known
Madagascar-2, the island, with a different localizing and characterizing
description.
Names versus descriptions
Our approach also explains the
contrast between the rigidity of
proper names and the accidentality/flaccidity
of definite descriptions. According to Kripke, differently from proper
names, definite descriptions can have different bearers in different possible
worlds. So, while the name Benjamin Franklin always refers to the same person
in any possible world in which this person exists, the description ‘the
inventor of bifocals’, which refers to him in our world, could refer to another
person or even to no person in a different possible world. For Kripke this can
only show that the ways reference is satisfied in names and descriptions are in
some mysterious form essentially different.
For me the forgotten relevant point to be noted is that definite
descriptions are accidental only in their
relationship with proper names. The consequences of this can be shown first
intuitively and then using Wittgenstein’s distinction between symptoms and
criteria.
Intuitively, the reason why most definite descriptions are accidental
designators (such as ‘the inventor of bifocals’) is that when we apply them we
associate them semantically in a contingent
way with the identification rule of
some proper name (such as ‘Benjamin Franklin’). Indeed, this association isn’t
established by identification rules (and by our MD-rule) as necessary.
Consequently, we can easily imagine possible worlds in which there is a mismatch between the objects possibly
referred to by proper names and the objects possibly referred to by the
definite descriptions attached to them, particularly when these descriptions
are merely auxiliary ones (for example, in a world where Sam invented bifocals
and Benjamin Franklin didn’t exist).
We can elaborate this explanation of the distinction between the
rigidity of proper names and the accidental character of descriptions with the
help of Wittgenstein’s distinction between symptoms
and criteria. According to this
distinction, a criterion, once accepted as given, warrants the application of a
word, while a symptom, once accepted as given, makes this application only more
or less probable. In their association with proper names, definite descriptions
typically give us only symptoms for their application, even when they are not
only auxiliary but fundamental. This explains why these descriptions are not
applicable in all possible worlds where the bearer of a proper name exists. By
contrast, what the complex definite description expressing the rule of
identification of a proper name is able to generate in a multiplicity of ways
are criteria for the identification
of our Aristotle in different possible worlds, like those that I have several
times exemplified. One can say that in different possible worlds the bearer of
a proper name can satisfy the same identification rule in different ways, by
means of many different possible criterial configurations.
There is a way to prove that my reasoning is correct, explaining a
phenomenon that the causal-historical view is unable to explain. All that must
be done is to find definite descriptions that are not semantically associated with any proper name. For in this case
they will be expected to behave as rigid designators, applying to only one
object in any possible world where this object exists. I call then autonomous definite descriptions. Three
of them are the following:
1. the 52nd Regiment of Fot,
2. the last Neanderthal man to die,
3. the assassination of Austrian
Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo in 1914.
These descriptions name respectively
a social institution, a human being, and an event. Important is that they are
all easily recognized as rigid designators. We can imagine possible worlds
where the 52nd Regiment of Fot had a different organization and time
of existence, where the last Neanderthal man to die survived the whole human
race, where the Archduke was strangled by a group of insurgents instead of
being shot by Gavrilo Princip. Even so, these descriptions, if applicable, will
always be applicable to the same bearer. These definite descriptions
are rigid designators, because the identification rules at least partially made
explicit by them (with their localizing and/or characterizing description-rules[6]) and always able to pick
out the same referent, without the danger of mismatching with referents picked
out by the identification rules of corresponding proper names. The Kripkean
view has no explanation for this phenomenon, except the ad hoc claim that all
these descriptions are nothing but disguised proper names.
Autonomous definite descriptions
Finally, it is worth noting that the
same MD-rule that we apply to the clusters of proper names should be applied in
the case of autonomous definite descriptions, as far as they are seen as rigid
designators and singular terms independent of proper names. The difference is
that usually not just part of the rule belongs to its explicit content (as a
‘connotation’), but also that these rules are often less complex. I can give as
an example the identification rule for the ‘the 52nd Regiment of
Fot’. It has the following (summarized) localizing rule:
The highly regarded 52nd Regiment
of Fot existed from 1757 to 1881, having seen active service, particularly
during the American War of Independence, in the Anglo-Mysore wars in India, and
in the Napoleonic Wars.
And the identification rule of the 52nd
Regiment of Fot has the following (summarized) characterizing rule:
It was a regiment whose troops were
drawn chiefly from Oxfordshire, forming one or two battalions of light
infantry, each comprising approximately 1,000 men.
Of course the descriptions need to be only sufficient and predominantly
satisfied in any possible world where ‘the 52nd Regiment of Fot’
exists. Auxiliary descriptions are also present, for instance ‘the regiment
that was never surpassed in arms since arms were first borne by men’. Similar
would be the case of other free definite descriptions.
On the other hand, definite descriptions like ‘the inventor of bifocals’
or ‘the Alexander’s tutor’, which are employed in association with proper names,
are seen as only auxiliary descriptions to be considered because of their
‘connotations’ as a poor complement to the identification rule of the
associated proper names.
Some modal objections
The idea that the meta-descriptivist
rule must be applied to the cluster of descriptions associated with any given
proper name in order to build their proper identification rule is a powerful one.
It enables us not only to surpass the causal-historical sketch but also to
rehabilitate descriptivism and to give a more satisfactory answer to the
objections against it. This is shown by its capacity to answer Kripke’s modal
objections, according to which descriptivism is condemned since any description
or group of descriptions can fail to refer, while proper names as rigid
designators never fail to refer to their bearers. For discussion here I choose
only three modal counterexamples.
The first is Kripke’s memorable Gödel counterexample (1980, pp. 83-84).
Suppose that Mary knows nothing about Kurt Gödel, except the description ‘the
discoverer of the incompleteness theorem.’ Then suppose that in the Vienna of
the thirties an unknown Viennese logician named Schmidt wrote the first paper
to describe the incompleteness theorem, but died soon afterwards. Subsequently,
his friend Gödel stole his manuscript and published it under his own name.
According to Kripke, if the descriptivist theory is correct, Mary should
conclude that ‘Gödel’ means the same as ‘Schmidt’. But it is obvious that Gödel
remains in fact Gödel! And the reason, according to Kripke, is that the
reference is fixed by the baptism of the baby Gödel, followed by a causal-historical
chain in which each hearer repeats the name with the intention to refer to the
same person referred to by the speaker from whom he has heard it, until the
outcome of Mary’s utterance…[7]
However, this objection poses a threat only to Kripke’s own caricatured
formulation of descriptivism. Our characterizing description-rule for the name
‘Kurt Gödel’ can be summarized as:
a great logician who made some major
contributions to logic, particularly the incompleteness theorem.
This is already more than what Mary knows,
since this description also points out to Gödel’s other contributions to logic.
Moreover, Kripke does not even consider the localizing description, which is:
the person born in Brünn in 1906,
who studied in Vienna, emigrated to the USA in 1940 via the trans-Siberian
railway, and worked at Princeton University until his death in 1978.
As a competent speaker of the English language, Mary must unconsciously
know the MD-rule; she must be tacitly aware that in order to conclude that
Gödel was Schmidt, she would have to know much more than just attribute the
discovery of the incompleteness theorem to Schmidt. Consequently, she refrains
from concluding that Gödel is Schmidt.
Moreover, for a privileged speaker Gödel cannot be Schmidt, because even
if Schmidt satisfies part of Gödel’s characterizing description, Gödel
continues to satisfy the whole localizing description and at least part of the
characterizing description, satisfying in this way the condition of
predominance. Nevertheless, we can perceive that something from the meaning of
the name ‘Gödel’ was really transferred to the name ‘Schmidt’, which is made
clear when someone hears a mathematician who, scandalized by this finding hyperbolically
claims: ‘No! The true Gödel was Schmidt!’
Furthermore, there are
ways in which Gödel really could be Schmidt. Suppose that for some reason
Schmidt murdered Gödel when he was a teenager and assumed his identity. Then
Schmidt studied mathematics in Vienna, conceived and published the
incompleteness theorem, married Adele, emmigrated to the USA in 1940 and worked
at Princeton University until his death in 1978. In this case, we would all
agree that Gödel was in fact Schmidt, the unscrupulous murder. And the famous
photo of Gödel with Einstein is in fat the photo of Schmidt with Einstein. But
for what reason? Our answer is clear: because Schmidt now satisfies the
condition of predominance. He sufficiently satisfies the fundamental
descriptions for the name ‘Gödel’ much more than the unfortunate teenager whose
name he stole. For Kripke, however, it seems that we should continue to refer
with the name ‘Gödel’ to the person who was baptized with this name at the
beginning of the causal-historical chain, namely, the true Gödel, and not Schmidt,
independently of the fact that he does not sufficiently satisfy the main
descriptions. But this runs counter to our intuitions. We see how a
counterexample can rebel against its own creator.
Consider now the case of semi-fictional names like Robin Hood. For us,
if these names are really semi-fictional, it seems that they must be associated
with some descriptive content really applicable to the object along with the
merely imagined descriptive content later added, although we are unable to
definitely distinguish one from the other. – If they didn’t have any real
content that we suspected to be applicable, they would be called ‘purely
fictional names.’ So, our situation with these names is that of uncertain,
insufficient knowledge. In the case of Robin Hood we suppose that the vague
descriptions ‘a person who lived in England around the XIII century’ and ‘a seemingly
righter of wrongs’ corresponds respectively to part of the content of the
localizing and the characterizing descriptions.
According to Kripke the story is different. It doesn’t matter whether a
semi-fictional name has any trace of true descriptive content in it. Important
is that the name met Kripke’s own causal-historical requirement of being at the
end of an external causal-historical chain linking it with the baptism of its
reference. Hence, independently of any cluster of descriptions known by us, the
reference of the semi-fictional name remains warranted.
Our answer is intuitively more balanced. As descriptivists, we would
admit that what we hold as a semi-fictional name can in fact be purely
fictional.[8] We guess that the name has
a reference, since something suggests that it is derived from a real person.
However, this issue isn’t necessarily unsolvable. Suppose that someone
discovers documents about a person named Robart Hude, who was an outlaw who
championed the weak against the powerful and who lived in forests near
Nottingham at the beginning of the 13th century, showing how his biography has
given rise to the legend of Robin Hood. With this in mind, we will gain enough
descriptions to implement both the correct localizing description – early 13th
Century, near Nottingham – and the correct characterizing description – the
outlaw who took from the rich and gave to the poor, originating the legend of
Robin Hood. This would give us an improved descriptivist confirmation of the
origins of Robin Hood as a real semi-fictional character, while the
causal-historical ‘explanation’ would not be able to change anything.
We can also find cases that leave the Kripkian explanation wanting.
Imagine that someone discovers that in fact there was someone who inspired the
first medieval writer who wrote the legend of Robin Hood, but that it was
someone to whom none of the descriptions apply, namely, a loyal hound named
Robin, who accompanied the bard on hunting trips in Sherwood Forest. Inspired
by the nobility of his dog, always prepared to act loyally, the bard invented
the story of Robin Hood. In this case it seems that a Kripkian should conclude
that Robin Hood is the dog’s name, appealing to the historical chain beginning
with the act of baptism of the puppy and the common intention of hearers to
refer to the object first referred to by the bard using the name. But this
would be senseless. On the other hand, our MD-Rule allows us to explain the
case more clearly. This rule would show that in this case Robin Hood is
discovered to be a purely fictional character, having nothing to do with the
dog, since according to the identification rule the bearer of the name ‘Robin
Hood’ should at least belong to the class C of human beings.
To conclude, I want to briefly analyze an instructive counterexample
proposed by Keith Donnellan (1972, pp. 373-5). Suppose, as he writes, that
someone finds out that Thales was actually no philosopher, but a wise
well-digger of Millet, tired of his profession, who once said ‘I wish all where
water so I wouldn’t have to dig these damned wells’, having this sentence
handed on equivocally to Herodotus, Aristotle and others as the view of the
first Greek philosopher Thales that water is the principle of all things.
Donnellan also adds to the story that the idea that all is water was indeed
held by a hermit who lived in a time so remote that neither he nor his doctrines
had any historical connection with us. We wouldn’t say that the hermit was
Thales, even if he really satisfied the description. And the reason, according
to Donnellan, is clear: Thales was at the beginning of the causal-historical
chain and not the hermit.
The answer offered by our neodescritivist view is that in some cases the
description of the causal history is so important that it must be included in
the characterizing description-rule. This is precisely the case of Thales,
because what we find important in him is that he was at the start of Western
philosophy, for outside this historical context the affirmation ‘Water is the
principle of all things’ would be simply ridiculous. So, the real
characterizing definite description belonging to the identification rule for
Thales could be summarized as:
the person who originated the
doxography found in Aristotle and others, which describes him as having been
the first Greek philosopher, arguing that water is the principle of all things,
that everything is alive, etc.
As for the localizing description,
we know at least that Thales was:
the Milesian who lived from 624 to
547-8 B.C., and probably visited Egypt.
In view of this, if we return to
Donnelan’s example we will conclude that according to our version of
descriptivism the hermit could not have been Thales. And the reason is that
Thales the well-Digger better satisfies both fundamental conditions, satisfying
in this way the condition of predominance. Just compare the two cases. The
hermit does not satisfy anything of the localizing description; all that he
satisfies is an incomplete portion of the characterizing description. On the
other hand, Thales the well-digger completely satisfies the localizing
description, because he lived in Miletus from 624 to 547-8 BC. And regarding
the characterizing description, even if Thales was not a philosopher and never
said that the principle of all things is water, he remains the person wrongly
described in the doxography as the first Greek philosopher who said that all is
water. Hence, despite everything, our Thales satisfies the fundamental
descriptions much better than the hermit, being therefore the right bearer of
the name.
Aside from that, one should not forget that depending on the details
that are added to or subtracted from this example, our intuitions can change,
leading us to the conclusion that our Thales didn’t really exist and even to
the conclusion that the hermit was the true Thales.
The failure of the causal-historical
view
Finally, one word about the
causal-historical view. I am not denying that there is often a direct
causal-historical relation between the utterance of a name and the first tags
of a name’s bearer. Even descriptivists like P. F. Strawson did not deny this.
After all, we live in a causal world and a true referential link must have some
causal dimension.[9]
What I deny is the explanatory relevance of this. No one uses it as a form of
explanation. If someone asks me who Aristotle was, I cannot answer: ‘All that
you need is to continue my causal-historical chain without forgetting to have
the intention to refer to the same Aristotle refered by myself.’ Indeed, in
themselves the causal-historical links are inscrutable, except if in searching
for them we appeal to something like correlative cognitions and therefore to
descriptions; in this way we explained why Donnellan’s Thales wasn’t the
hermit. If we had, for instance, a cerebroscope showing that always when a
speaker says the name ‘Aristotle’ really knowing about whom he is speaking
there is a recognizable neurophysiological pattern in his brain, we could
identify it as a link of the external causal-historical chain. But since we
would need to appeal to the speaker’s cognition, we would be implicitly
appealing to descriptions, which shows that finding the causal-historical chain
commits a petition principii by
presupposing descriptivism. To make things worst, Kripke’s view of baptism is
miraculous, since it cannot be really based on any property of the referent. If
it were, the property would be cognized as a thought or intention and
consequently able to be descriptively translated. Philosophically challenging
as much of what he wrote, if taken in its face of value the causal-historical
view is nothing but an original fantasy that begs the question. As someone once
said, for any complex problem there is always a simple answer, which is
inequivocally wrong.
[1] This is nothing but a bare-bones summary. A more complete formulation
can be found in a much longer paper entitled ‘Outline of a Theory of Proper
Names’ (2014, ch. 2).
[2] I adapted the
synoptical formula from Susan Haack’s commentary.
[3] To be more
precise, C is the nearest most relevant class that does not merge with the
characterizing description. This is why C for the name Aristotle must be the
condition of being a human being and not of being a philosopher.
[4] I place the name
in commas to indicate that it must be possible to be misleading about the true
symbolic form of a proper name. Suppose that in a possible world there is only
one philosopher who satisfies the fundamental conditions for being our
Aristotle, but who is called ‘Pitacus’. We would after all identify him with
our Aristotle! Indeed, even in the actual world we cannot completely exclude
the possibility that Aristotle was in fact called Pitacus… The description ‘the
man called “Aristotle”’, popular in the so-called metalinguistic theory of
proper names, is only a well-known (accidental) auxiliary rule.
[5] One could ask if we would attribute no role to
causality. Though I believe now that causality has some role in naming, it is
usually presupposed. Imagine the
causal role of a fortune teller, who looking at a christal ball bet always
correctly the name of a visitor? More than real magic we would assume some
occult causal determination. Suppose that I dream by coincidence that there is
a beautiful Vulcan covert of snow called Ozorno in South of Chile. Since this
is true, isn’t my reference a purelly coincidental
one? Or is a purelly coincidental reference rather a mocking reference?
[6] In the case of
‘the last Neanderthal man to die’, what really counts is whether the
characterizing description applies. The localizing description is only the
indication of a space and time that is unknown and variable in different
possible worlds.
[7] Note that this
intention cannot have cognitive content, otherwise we would fall back into
descriptivism. It can be nothing but a desire,
a bet on the sameness of reference.
[8] For example: the
supposed semifictional name originally used by Kripke was of the prophet Jonas
(1980 pp. 67-68). But most Bible scholars believe that he was in fact a purely
fictional character.
[9] Though I believe now that causality has
some role in naming, it is usually presupposed.
Imagine the causal role of a fortune teller, who looking at a christal ball bet
always correctly the name of a visitor… Today, more than real magic we would
assume some occult causal determination. Suppose that I dream by coincidence
that there is a beautiful Vulcan covert of snow called Ozorno in South of
Chile. Since this is true, isn’t my reference a purelly coincidental one? Or is a purelly coincidental reference rather a mocking
reference?
