AGAINST KRIPKE'S PROTO-REFERENTIALISM (2 de 5)

 This is a draft of a chapter of the book "How do Proper Names Really Work?" (De Gruyter 2023)

 

II

CAUSAL-REFERENTIALISM

 

 

In 1970, Saul Kripke gave lectures at Princeton that were recorded and subsequently published as Meaning and Necessity. This extraordinarily original text contains an enormously influential assault on descriptivist theories of proper names. It also contained (among other things) the outline of an innovative referentialist or causal-referentialist conception of proper names, in its principles influenced by J. S. Mill’s direct reference view, though also extending it to include terms applicable to natural species. Since then, the old descriptivist orthodoxy in vogue from Frege to John Searle was gradually eclipsed by referentialist or causal-referentialist views of reference, which for many specialists became the inherited wisdom (See Raatikainen 2020).

   While recognizing that these new ideas have definitively transformed the landscape of the discussion, making it more complex, intricate, and disorienting, I am convinced that they are not in themselves sustainable. Besides introducing the new orthodoxy, the main purpose of this chapter is to reveal its most serious shortcomings.[1]

 

1. Three arguments against descriptivism

I begin my presentation didactically, by exposing and showing the limitations of three well-known arguments against descriptivist theories of proper names, extracted from Kripke’s text.[2] Although in no way exhaustive, they give us a point of departure. They have been called (i) the modal argument (objection of rigidity), (ii) the semantic argument (objection of ignorance and error), and (iii) the epistemological objection (objection of unwanted necessity). I will limit myself here to a very short critical examination of these arguments, leaving aside a more detailed discussion of important counterexamples, since it will make use of the neodescriptivist theory to be explained in the next chapter.

   Let’s start with (i): the modal objection of rigidity (Kripke 1980: 53; 61-63; 74-76). Before presenting this objection, I need to introduce Kripke’s concept of the rigid designator, which he finds distinctive for proper names. I prefer to define a rigid designator as a term that designates the same object in every possible world where this object exists and does not designate anything in any possible world where this object does not exist (Kripke 1971: 173; 1980: 48). A rigid designator contrasts with a non-rigid or accidental designator, which does not have this property (Kripke 1980: 48; 1971: 145-146). In simpler terms, a rigid designator would designate the same object in any actual or counterfactual circumstance in which this object exists. The important point of Kripke’s distinction can be seen when we compare the behavior of proper names (which are the primary models of rigid designators), with the usual behavior of definite descriptions, which are typically non-rigid, accidental, also called flaccid, designators.

   The difference between rigid and accidental kinds of designators is made evident by means of examples. Compare the proper name ‘Columbus’ with the definite description ‘the first European navigator to set foot on Hispaniola’.[3] The name Columbus would still refer to the same person in a near possible world, even if in this world it wasn’t Columbus, but rather Vasco da Gama who discovered the Island of Hispaniola, and Columbus instead preferred to lead an uneventful life as a merchant in his Italian hometown of Genoa. The reference of the proper name Columbus, however, remains the same. According to Kripke, the reference of ‘Columbus’ does not change in different possible worlds, because Columbus is a proper name, and proper names are rigid designators. But in the above considered possible world, the reference of the definite description ‘the first European navigator to set foot on Hispaniola’ changed from Columbus to Vasco da Gama, since this is an ordinary empirical definite description, and such descriptions are accidental. The definite description is also applicable in a possible world where Columbus didn’t even exist, insofar as Vasco da Gama or some other European had discovered Hispaniola. On the other hand, if Columbus existed, the proper name ‘Columbus’ would still refer to Columbus, even if an unexpected cosmic cataclysm had prevented any European from setting foot on Hispaniola, eschewing the application of the definite description.

   Beyond these comparisons, Kripke proposed an intuitive test for the identification of a rigid designator (1980: 48), which can be explained as follows:

 

Ask yourself whether it is true that:

Something other than x might have been x. Or: ask yourself whether x might have been other than (different from) the thing that is in fact x.

In addition to these, Christopher Hugues suggested his own incremented test (2004: 20): ask yourself whether it is true that:

 x could have existed without being x.

If the answers are negative, then x is a rigid designator.

 

Applying the test to the above definite description, we could ask if the following statements are true: “Someone other than the first European to set foot on Hispaniola might have been the first European to set foot on Hispaniola.” Or, more clearly: “The first European to have set foot on Hispaniola might have been other than the one who was in fact the first European to have set foot on Hispaniola.” The answer is in the affirmative: it could have been another person. Finally, “The first European to have set foot on Hispaniola could have existed without being the first European to have set foot on Hispaniola” can be accepted as obviously true. Hence, the given definite description must be an accidental designator.

   However, the proper name ‘Columbus’ does not behave like the description above. Are the following sentences true? “Someone other than Columbus might have been Columbus”, or “Columbus might have been other than the person who is in fact Columbus”. Certainly not, they must be false. Finally, “Columbus could have existed without being Columbus” is obviously also false. Hence, ‘Columbus’ is a rigid designator. It is worth considering this point because the theory of proper names to be developed in Chapter III furnishes a neo-descriptivist demystifying way to explain rigidity that makes it clear why proper names pass the test while corresponding definite descriptions fail to pass.

   There is also controversy concerning those possible worlds where the bearer of the name does not exist. In the case where the bearer is a so-called abstract object like the number 2, it seems easier to conceive the bearer as existing in any possible world (for this reason it is also called an obstinately rigid designator). But this is not so easily accepted in cases of ordinary empirical names like ‘Columbus’. In his original presentation of the notion of a rigid designator, Kripke acknowledged this point:

 

When I use the notion of rigid designator, I do not imply that the object referred to necessarily exists. All I mean is that in any possible world where the object in question does exist, in any situation in which the object would exist, we use the designator in question to designate that object. In a situation where the object does not exist, then we should say that the designator has no referent and that the object in question so designated does not exist. (1971: 173)

 

This is surely the most reasonable view regarding our robust common sense, for it is a basic conceptual rule of our language that we can use a word to refer only when its object of reference exists, otherwise not (Stroll 1996). Consequently, in counterfactual situations where the object does not exist, we cannot use the proper name to refer to its bearer. If a name could refer to non-existent objects, then I could invite 1,000 non-existent persons to a party in my small apartment, and all of them would find enough free space to be well accommodated.

   Unfortunately, Kripke spoiled his useful tool by making the concept unreasonably complicated. In his 2019 talk “Naming and Necessity Revisited” he emphasized again that in his most important book, Naming and Necessity, there are two notions of the rigid designator: (i) a de facto definition in the main text of the book, according to which: “a designator is rigid iff there is an object a that it designates with respect to every possible world in which a exists, and (he now adds) “never designates another object with respect to any world”, intending “to be neutral about whether the term designates with respect to worlds where the object does not exist”. On the other hand, there is (ii) a de jure rigidity, for which “the main thing is that a name designates an object independently of other considerations”, having as a corollary that it “designates that object with respect to every world” (see also 1980: 21n).

   However, the only lesson one can learn from this de jure definition is trivial: the best it can significantly mean is that a proper name is made (has the job) to designate something in every possible world, even if it does in fact designate (refer) only in those possible worlds where its designatum exists.

   Since this merely curious issue will have no impact on our further arguments, I prefer to ignore the question about a sense in which a proper name could possibly refer to an object in a possible world where this object does not exist. Henceforth, I will understand a rigid designator as what is called a persistent rigid designator, namely, a term that only refers in possible worlds where its object of reference actually does exist (Salmon 1980: 34).

   Now we are in position to understand (i): the modal argument caused by the rigidity of proper names in contrast to that of descriptivism. The point is that if proper names are always rigid designators, and definite descriptions are typically not, proper names cannot be equated with definite descriptions or even with clusters of definite descriptions. Since definite descriptions are typically accidental designators, designating contingent properties, and only possibly referring to the same object in counterfactual situations, proper names and descriptions have different modal profiles. Implicit is the suggestion that the mechanism by which a proper name refers must in some way be intrinsically different from the one by which a definite description usually refers: they cannot mean the same thing.

   Indeed, it seems that for any definite description that we choose as the constituent of a proper name, it is always possible to imagine cases in which the object exists, but the description applies to another object or simply does not apply to any object. As Kripke wrote against Searle’s version of cluster theory:

 

It just is not, in any intuitive sense of necessity, a necessary truth that Aristotle had the properties commonly attributed to him (1980: 74). (…) It would seem that it is a contingent fact that Aristotle ever did any of the things that we attribute to him today, any of these great achievements that we so much admire (1980: 75).

 

In fact, we can imagine a near possible world where Aristotle existed but died in adolescence. In this world, he does not satisfy the definite descriptions of having been the founder of the Lyceum, nor the preceptor of Alexander, nor the person who wrote the great philosophical texts for which his name is remembered. Even descriptions containing his place and date of birth are not guaranteed. We can perfectly well imagine, as Kripke did, a possible world where Aristotle lived five hundred years later but could still be recognized as our own Aristotle (1980: 62).

   However, the modal objection of rigidity applies only to descriptive theories that identify the meaning of a proper name with a definite description or even with some precise set or sub-set of definite descriptions – a cluster supposedly shared by all the competent speakers of a language. For those who read the previous chapter, it must have been clear that Frege’s view implies that proper names might have different senses according to the descriptions or sub-sets of descriptions their users have in mind, which relativizes the modal objection. Moreover, Russell explicitly understood that the descriptions in our minds can vary from speaker to speaker, forming vague masses of historical knowledge, which also contrasts with the inflexibility demanded by the modal objection. Finally, a theory such as Searle’s explicitly appeals to the relation between a changeable variety of descriptions a speaker can have when using a proper name and an open cluster of descriptions, which allows flexibility. This last theory is in an explicit way immune to the modal objection, by emphasizing that no specific description belonging to the cluster necessarily must be satisfied, although a sufficient yet unspecified number of them must necessarily be satisfied. Against such interpretations, the modal objection of rigidity is impotent, since the cluster theory does not require any description or combination of descriptions to be applied in any possible world where the bearer of the proper name exists.

   Furthermore, even if it is possible to imagine, as Kripke did, that Aristotle does not necessarily satisfy the vast majority of descriptions attributed to him, or any chosen description, it is crucial to see that it is not possible to imagine that he does not satisfy any of the descriptions belonging to the cluster’s name. It is not possible to imagine that he is a prime number, that he is a waiter in the restaurant where Searle usually had his meals, or that he was not a philosopher, but instead, a famous Greek shipping magnate who lived in the twentieth century, seduced Maria Callas, and married Jacqueline Kennedy, or even, taking Searle’s example, an illiterate fishmonger who lived in Venice in the Renaissance, since these persons certainly could have nothing to do with our Aristotle.[4] Even an Aristotle who in a near possible world lived 500 years after the Aristotle who was born in our world should have at least something relevantly “Aristotelian” about him to be recognized as our Aristotle. For instance, he could have written the Nicomachean Ethics… In sum: under a more careful view, the modal argument of rigidity is unable to warrant that proper names and ordinary definite descriptions are semantically incompatible.

   Notwithstanding, the modal argument leaves a serious question lurking in our minds: how could a descriptivist theory warrant the intuitive rigidity of proper names? The answer is that in the present stage of descriptivism even Searle’s cluster theory does not have the resources to answer this question. This is, however, one of the questions our neodescriptivist theory will decisively answer in the next chapter.

   Now, I will consider (ii): the semantic argument (e.g., Kripke 1980: 79-85).[5] According to this argument, whether a proper name refers to an object does not depend on its satisfaction of definite descriptions. This is well exemplified by cases of ignorance and error. Concerning ignorance, Kripke shows that even when we associate a single indefinite description with a proper name, we are still able to refer with it. This is the case with the name ‘Feynman.’ Many people associate this name only with the indefinite description ‘an American physicist’. Only a few would be able to answer by saying that he was the originator of quantum electrodynamics, and still fewer would be able to explain in detail his main contribution to micro-physics. Even so, people are sometimes able to refer to Feynman by uttering only that indefinite description. An indefinite description, however, is incapable of warranting the singularity of the reference. Therefore, descriptivism must be a faulty theory. As for the problem of errors, Kripke noted that in his time there were people who associated the description ‘the inventor of the atomic bomb’ with the name ‘Einstein’. Although the description is wrong, those people were referring to Einstein even though they had a wrong description in mind. Now, if so, then it seems that descriptions have little to do with the relevant way proper names refer to their bearers.

   To this kind of objection, Searle would answer that what matters most is the content that the members of the linguistic community to which the speaker belongs see as relevant to the object’s designation (1983: 253).[6] Thus, for Searle a person may utter the name ‘Einstein’, while having in mind a description such as ‘the individual my community calls Einstein’. This may suffice to neutralize the inadequacy of the content.

   Nonetheless, the answer offered by Searle cannot be satisfactory. If it were, we could appeal to the same stratagem to warrant the reference of any proper name whose reference we do not know. A better proposal would be that a description like ‘Einstein was the inventor of the atomic bomb’, although erroneous, remains convergent in the sense that it already classifies him correctly as a human being and a scientist, as much as the use of ‘Feynman’ as ‘an American physicist’, since the bearer is correctly classified as an American and a physicist. Based on these vague convergences, hearers are already able to recognize the speaker as having the intention to identify someone who satisfies the descriptions they also associate with these names. This is not only true for the hearer who really knows a lot of the cluster of descriptions typically associated with the names Einstein and Feynman, but also for the many hearers who know only generalities about these names and see that the given description falls under those generalities. They are all able to guess whomever the speaker is trying to refer to. Consider, for instance, the many hearers who only know about Einstein that he was a great German physicist who originated relativity theory, or that Feynman was an American physicist who did research on microphysics at Caltech. These vague uses of the proper name parasitically echo the effective reference that could only be made by the most competent users of the name; and the less competent are free to borrow the reference from the last ones, insofar as they assume their existence. If this answer does not seem very satisfactory to you now, a more complete answer will be given in the next chapter.

   Now we will consider (iii): the epistemic objection of unwarranted necessity (e.g., Kripke 1980: 86-87). It is different from the semantic argument. The semantic argument says that it need not be the case that the name’s referent satisfies the intended description. The epistemic argument, on its side, says that even if the referent satisfies the associated description, we do not know it a priori, even if from the descriptivist perspective we should.[7] If the name Aristotle replaced the description ‘the author of Metaphysics’, such descriptions should be known a priori in the analytical sense of conveying information known solely by reflection on the concepts involved, and without resort to sensory experience.[8] However, we can be wrong about this accomplishment attributed to Aristotle. Even if the name Aristotle replaced a cluster of descriptions, at least some of them should be known a priori about him, though this is also in no way guaranteed. After all, one can be totally misled concerning what one thinks is the reference of a proper name.

   However, even the epistemic objection hardly refutes a cluster theory of descriptions such as Searle’s, which does not require an a priori or necessary satisfaction of any individual description or of any particular group of descriptions belonging to the cluster to allow the application of the proper name to its bearer. The only necessity that must be supported by a cluster theory is that at least a previously unspecified minimal number of weightier definite descriptions belonging to the cluster is necessarily satisfied by the named object, in cases where this object exists. Hence, there is no requirement of a specific description or even of a conjunction of descriptions to be analytically a priori satisfied by the proper name’s bearer. If we think in this way, then Searle’s cluster descriptivism can still be seen as allowing – though not explaining – the treatment of the proper name as a kind of rigid designator. In the next chapter, we will develop a more complex form of cluster theory and show that, surprisingly, it implies and explains rigidity.

   As already noted, it is difficult to find any decisive objection to a formulation of the descriptivist theory of proper names such as that developed by Searle. The reason for this is that it was presented in a non-simplifying and sufficiently vague way. But, as will become clear later, this advantage is also its greatest weakness, because, due to its own vagueness, this theory lacks the resources to provide more effective and complete answers to a variety of counterexamples and objections.

   There are other challenging and revealing objections to descriptivism, particularly in the form of examples. But before dealing with them we need to develop a more complex descriptive theoretical apparatus, which allows us to answer objections in depth. Hence, I ask you to wait until Chapter IV to read what I regard as the most convincing and, in fact, only answers. However, the few considerations offered above are already able to suggest that Kripke’s objections to descriptivism do not seem as decisive as his most convinced supporters would like us to believe.[9]

 

2. Kripke on individuation and trope-theory

Kripke’s critique of descriptivism is attractive in part because it is complemented by a challenging conception of the mechanisms of reference – a conception that is in ways similar to the view introduced by J. S. Mill. Before explaining it, I will consider more carefully the phenomenon of the rigidity of proper names compared with the accidentality of definite descriptions.

   A proper name like Columbus applies to the same referent in any possible world where Columbus exists, differently from the description ‘the first European to set foot in Hispaniola’. But how can we explain this curious phenomenon? For those sympathetic to the solution attributed to Mill, the explanation is obvious. It comes from the idea that descriptions refer indirectly, by connoting attributes of objects, while proper names refer directly to their bearers as if they were labels that had been pinned to them. This fact makes the references of proper names independent of the many descriptively representable properties of their bearers. It seems as if the act of referring were a kind of sorcery by means of which an object could be directly connected to its name.

   Kripke thinks in kindred but more sophisticated ways. As in Mill’s case, proper names also refer to their objects without connotative intermediaries like descriptions of identifying properties. This alone should explain why, unlike definite descriptions, the objects of reference of proper names remain the same in any possible world. There is, however, an ontological question to be considered here. Which would be the specific entities to be used as identifiers for the reference of proper names? Kripke considers two possible alternatives, creating what he considers a false dilemma. As he writes:

 

What I deny is that a particular is nothing but a ‘bundle of qualities,’ whatever that may mean. If a quality is an abstract object, a bundle of qualities is an object of an even higher degree of abstraction, not a particular. Philosophers have come to the opposite view through a false dilemma: they have asked: are these objects behind the bundle of qualities, or is the object nothing but the bundle? Neither is the case: this table is wooden, brown, in the room, etc. It has all these properties, and it is not a thing without properties, behind them. But it should not therefore be identified with the set or ‘bundle’ of its properties, nor with the subset of its essential properties. (1980: 52)

 

Indeed, the dilemma as he poses it isn’t acceptable: individuals (particulars) are neither bundles of abstract properties without possible individuation criteria, nor bare particulars, which should be accepted as unknowable naked substrates. But in the end, Kripke rejects the dilemma simply by assuming that there is no matter of fact in it: individuals are simply given to us like the brown wooden table in the room. Accepting that there is no alternative, he just asks us to accept that we identify individuals as what they are without requiring any further ontological explanation: it simply happens.

   Kripke’s solution, however, sounds like a clear shortcut: a magical way to justify reference, which solves the problem by rejecting its existence without giving sufficient reasons.[10] It defies our more commonsensical way to avoid magic, which would be the search for an explanation that assumes that the identification of individuals happens in some way by our usually tacit recognition of the right object-identifying spatiotemporally located properties, whatever they may be. Indeed, when we think that there might be criterial identification rules descriptively ordering the valid combinations of object-identifying properties, we begin to see that not all doors are closed.

   If there were no other ontological alternative, Kripke’s answer would be admissible, and our dissatisfaction with it could be qualified as an anthropological, rather than an ontological problem. However, there is an alternative! It consists in adopting the emerging ontology of tropes. This seems clearly the most reasonable way to avoid the dilemma, and, although this ontology was already present at the time Kripke developed his ideas, but only today is it more widely appreciated.[11] Since it will be useful later, as an explanation for the applicability of criterial rules attached to definite descriptions, I will make a short digression, explaining the essentials of an ontological view that might be the most important ontological alternative after more than a thousand years of endless realist and nominalist discussions.

   Trope theory is a radically new empiricist one-category ontology, first introduced by Donald Williams.[12] According to him, “any possible world, and hence, of course, this one, is completely constituted by its tropes” (2018: 28). But what are tropes? Tropes are what Williams called abstract particulars: they are what is left behind when we sort out one or more spatiotemporally given properties of an individual, separating them from all the others (2018: 27). Thus, the redness, the smoothness, the shape, and the fragrance of a rose picked up by me are tropes. But the rose is not a trope, since it is an individual, a concrete particular: it is constituted by its tropes. The too obvious existence of tropes is made clearer by the fact that they are objects of selective attention: if you are on the beach, you can pay attention to the colors of the sea, the forms of the waves, their sounds, the local temperature, and these are all tropes (Loux 1988: 81). As Williams also wrote, not only are physical qualities, geometrical forms, and relational properties tropes, but also events and processes, like a smile, a sneeze, a scream, a cold snap, a storm, a conspiracy… a musical performance… and, as he also wrote, not only Mary’s figure but also her complexion and digestion… There are also psychological tropes, like an acute pain, feelings of love, sorrow, and pleasure, as much as mental acts, thought-processes, dispositions, beliefs, moral decisions, desires, purposes... Socrates’ wisdom and Mary’s beauty, he wrote, are all tropes. And there are also mixed tropes (partly conscious and partly behavioral) such as a love affair, an act of constriction, or a piece of impudence. (Williams 2018: 30-38) Abstract particulars or tropes are to be contrasted with concrete particulars, the wholes that are the individuals, most often material objects, which he sees as also totally constituted by their tropes. Thus, for Williams the rose, Socrates, Mary, a household, a nation, the humanity, are not tropes (2018: 38).

   Like many theorists, I prefer to define “abstract particulars” or tropes as any spatiotemporally localizable properties in the widest sense of the word, since this understanding gives more clarity to the ubiquitous ontological goals of trope ontology. All the above-given examples of tropes can be viewed as properties, insofar as we can predicatively attach them to individuals. Thus, Socrates’ wisdom and Mary’s beauty are non-relational properties of these persons, a musical performance and a conspiracy can be respectively seen as processual properties of an orchestra and a society. A love affair is a relational causal property between two human beings, and a psychological process of thought can be seen as a property of a person.

   The decisive difference between trope theory and traditional realist two-category ontologies is that according to (Platonic or Aristotelian) realism a property is an abstract, general, non-spatio-temporal entity, able to be instantiated in many spatiotemporally existent individuals while strangely remaining one and the same, whereas for a trope theorist a property-trope is usually a spatiotemporally localizable constituent of a spatiotemporal individual. A decisive difference between trope theory and nominalism is that according to the first one predicates have proper references, which are tropical properties. Considering tropes as spatiotemporally localizable properties, we can easily extend the view to the basic forces of nature, which can be seen as dispersed localizable properties.[13] This is not so easy when we consider things apparently abstract in the Platonic sense, like numbers. But even in this case, considering that numbers are experientially learned in applied mathematics, they can possibly also be seen as tropes. Consider, for instance, a book that I take from a shelf. I see that it is just one book. It is true that I cannot see this applied number one. But I reach this conclusion by means of sensory-perceptual experience, and this number one seems to be localizable when I ask you how many books I am holding. If on a dark night someone looks at the Via Lactea and says, “I am looking at the Three Sisters, Alnitak, Alnilam, and Mintaka… maybe they still exist”, the applied number three results from counting and seems to be localizable there and not elsewhere. Therefore, it also seems possible to treat an applied number one as a higher-order non-sensible but localizable property or trope, though depending upon sensible properties, in a way that recalls the Frege-Russell treatment of the property of existence. If a similar view could be extended to abstract mathematics, we could solve an old puzzle, which is the possibility of applying abstract mathematics to the physical world, since they would not be categorially distinct. (For a sketch explaining how we could reduce abstract numbers to tropes, see the Appendix of the present book).

    It is clear to me that trope theory is an attempt to salvage our common-sense concept of property, which can be seen as having for too long been corrupted by philosophers. Consider the following: When asked what a property is, ordinary persons will not point to abstract properties; they will naturally begin by pointing to things belonging to their surroundings, like the hardness of the table or the blueness of the sky, and not by mentioning some directly cognizable abstract entity, assuming that this is possible.[14] For this reason, in this book tropes will also be called tropical properties, t-properties, or simply properties.

   Trope theory has its own ontological ways to build material objects and universals. Accordingly, individuals such as physical-material objects no longer need to be identified with sets of abstract properties. These objects are diversely organized compositions of concurrent (i.e., suitably co-temporal, co-located) tropical properties (Williams 2018: 28-29).[15] Such tropes have nothing to do with the problematic abstract-general properties (building those ‘still more abstract bundles of qualities’) targeted by Kripke’s criticism since trope theory identifies universals with sets or classes of tropes precisely similar (qualitatively identical) to each other (Williams 2018: 29). It is true that this last suggestion from Williams was criticized because it could possibly multiply tropes by adding tropes of precise similarity between two tropes of precise similarity, since they are also precisely similar to each other, and so on infinitely (Campbell 1990: 32 f.). However, in my view, as it stands Williams’ suggestion is inadequate for another reason, namely because we usually do not have any cognitive access to such sets or classes of tropes, which can have immense and changeable sizes, while universals have no magnitude and no size. To circumvent the demand for cognitive access to immense and changeable sets of tropes and other difficulties, I prefer to think that from the viewpoint of trope theory the universal can be seen as consisting of any randomly chosen trope T, or any other trope precisely similar to T (Costa 2018: 165). From this operation, we could derive sets, of course, though this is not necessary when we consider a property as something enabling us to say one of many, which is the cognitive-linguistic function of the universal. We do not need to stuff our heads with innumerable samples of red when thinking of the universal of redness.

   Trope ontology is a metaphysical theory. But from a linguistic perspective tropes, complexes of tropes, and the bundles of tropes constituting material objects could in principle be identified by means of criterial identification rules able to be expressed by means of descriptions, so that spatiotemporally given properties of individuals could satisfy the criteria demanded by those rules.[16] Therefore, at least in principle, we have in our hands the instrument for an auspicious response to the Kripkian objection that there is no set or sub-set of essential properties to be identified with the object.

   A trope-theoretical ontological alternative would also fit very well with what Kripke should mean in the quoted passage where he identifies a table as (having the spatio-temporally located properties of) “being wooden, brown, in the room, etc.”. Kripke could not consider trope theory, because in the 1960s, when he developed his ideas, this theory was still largely ignored. Moreover, it would have been of no value to his theory of reference, since trope theory seems to conform much better to some version of descriptivism that picks out properties based on their satisfaction of criterial rules expressed by definite descriptions. After all, if the object referred to by a proper name is something like a more or a less organized composition of compresent tropes, it seems that the way a proper name refers to it must be by identifying changeable appropriately chosen tropes or combinations of tropes by means of which a singular object can be selected by us and distinguished from all others. These variable individuating tropes and their combinations, in turn, would eventually be able to satisfy the criterial conditions required by the identification rule (Ernst Tugendhat’s Identifikationsregel) belonging to the proper name and in some way able to be expressed by definite descriptions. We will see in the next chapter how this kind of rule can be effectively constructed.

 

3. Baptism and the causal-historical chain

The next question is how Kripke explains the attribution of names to their bearers without the intermediation of descriptions connoting their individuating properties (1980: 88-97). The answer he offers is based on his picture[17] of the referential relation, according to which a proper name gains its reference to its bearer through an appropriate causal-historical and communication chain. Here is how he presented his view[18]:

 

A rough statement of a theory might be the following: An initial ‘baptism’ takes place. Here the object may be named by ostension, or the reference of the name may be fixed by a description. When the name is passed ‘from link to link’ the receiver of the name must, I think, intend when he learns it, to use the name with the same reference as the man from whom he heard it. If I hear the name ‘Napoleon’ and decide it would be a nice name for my pet aardvark, I do not satisfy this condition. (My italics) (1980: 96)[19]

 

There are two stages here: first that of reference fixing, then that of reference maintenance and transmission.[20] The reference fixing of the proper name is obtained by a process that he calls baptism. There are two kinds of baptism: (i) by ostension, that is, the baptizer indicates the object he is naming by means of acquaintance; (ii) the baptizer refers to the object he is naming by means of a description. The two kinds of baptism often occur together, for instance, “this newborn, the son of Nicomachus, will be called ‘Aristotle’”, accompanied by a gesture.

   There are proper names that are introduced by a descriptive baptism without an acquaintance, as Kripke himself acknowledged. He considered the case of the proper name of an inferred object, such as the planet Neptune. The astronomer Le Verrier calculated that there should be a previously unknown planet located in a certain region of space, which would be responsible for deviations in the orbital axis of Uranus. Le Verrier called this planet ‘Neptune’ even before he located it in the sky, keeping in mind descriptions corresponding to its approximate location and mass (1980: 79). Kripke also notes that the definite description used to fix the reference does not commit us to descriptivism, since it does not need to be synonymous with the name (1980: 96). It is even possible to be a wrong description, insofar as it picks out the right bearer of the name.

   After baptism, a process begins that may be called reference maintenance and transmission: the name of the referred object is transmitted from speaker to speaker in a causal-historical-communication chain.

   Kripke’s causal-historical view has major implications. It means that if I now write the name ‘Aristotle’ it is because this name appears at the end of an immensely complex causal-historical chain that began when someone for the first time baptized the newborn Aristotle with that name in 384 BC in Stagira. If my writing of the name ‘Aristotle’ now came at the end of a causal-historical chain that began with the naming of the shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis, this would be the wrong chain, and I would not be speaking of the philosopher Aristotle. The condition for the correct reference of a proper name must be its belonging to the right causal-historical chain, which must have as a criterion the intention of speakers to refer to the same object referred to by the baptizer. Finally, we should note that for Kripke the first link of the causal-historical chain isn’t the bearer, but the baptism. After all, a causal-historical chain can begin even with empty names that were not ultimately caused by any bearer.

   An important question concerns the role of causality. Kripke assumes that the historical chain that begins with the act of baptism is causal. However, concerning the relationship between the object of reference and the act of baptism, Kripke avoids a full commitment to causality, since he accepts mathematical entities like the number p as non-causal bearers of proper names, along with inactualia like Lauranda, the hypothetical girl who could have been born if the sperm that fertilized the egg from Laura had fertilized the egg that generated her sister Amanda. (See Hugues 2004: 45; Burgess 2013: 32).

   Some have tried to deflate the more controversial causal element by emphasizing the historical-communicational web (e. g., Burgess 2013: 33). However, it is clear that the historical-communicational chain must also be causal, since any communication chain is causal, as much from the cognitive as from the physical viewpoint.[21] Moreover, it remains defensible that the relation between the baptizer and the object of reference is also causal. Cognitive causality is a form of causality like any other.[22] An informational-historical chain is also, physically considered, a causal chain since there is no information without any physical correlatum. And the relation between the first speaker, the baptizer, and the bearer of the name can be plausibly always causal. It is true that if the baptizer is having a hallucination, he is failing in referring to anything. But even if he were baptizing his hallucination, it would be because of the causal effect of the hallucination within his mind. Moreover, the potentially infinite number 3.141592… can be always further calculated and thought, and this can already be a causal mental factor in the production of the name p.[23] Furthermore, there is no problem in constructing the imaginary Lauranda, who would then be a mental causal factor in our choice of her name. Consider, finally, the case of the discovery of Neptune. It was the awareness of the change in the axial orbit of Uranus, along with the knowledge of the laws of gravity that causally produced in the mind of Le Verrier and others the hypothesis that the planet is attracted by another planet, one that he called ‘Neptune’. It is not the kind of direct causation that involves observing Neptune through a telescope, but it is, notwithstanding, a series of causal relations. Even if causal input from the referent does not need to be considered the first link of the causal chain (we will see that there are real causal chains produced by empty names like Vulcan), some form of causality must be involved in the formation of any non-empty proper name.

 

4. Some attempted counterexamples

John Searle (1983: 238 f.) has pointed out several difficulties in causal-historical theory by means of counterexamples, showing that in some cases a causal-historical chain isn’t even necessary. Here I am a bit more on Kripke’s side. Causality is an unavoidable element of naming. In what follows, I will discuss some of these counterexamples, since I find their exploration instructive.

   A first counterexample concerns names that do not seem to have any causal relationship with their references. I want to start by considering two examples given by Searle, for whom the cause of the proper name’s utterance by its bearer does not seem to exist. First, knowing that there is a 5^th Avenue, we can infer that there is also a 4^th Avenue, thus referring to a street in New York that we have never heard of and that consequently cannot be at the causal-historical origin of our utterance. The second example concerns Pharaoh Ramses VIII. All we know about this hypothetical Pharaoh is that his name would have to occupy the space after Ramses VII and before Ramses IX. But with this information, we can already infer that Ramses VIII did exist, without any causal-historical chain having reached us from his baptism.

   To these examples, it is possible to respond considering that what we call an efficient cause is only what we see as a more relevant element of a distinctive set of causal factors that constitutes a situation, a state of affairs, and even an unified process, many of these factors being such that they can be inferred as existing.[24] Thus, knowing that 5^th Avenue is the effective causal factor that is at the origin of the causal chain that allows us to name it, and knowing that parallel avenues are usually consecutively numbered, we infer that a 4^th Avenue must be part of an unified state of affairs constituted by a sequence of numbered avenues assumed as associated causal factors, and, consequently, that a 4^th Avenue should probably also exist. Along with this, we also conclude that 4^th Avenue could potentially be a baptized cause of our referential use of this name by means of acquaintance (which is not only irrelevant to the theory of Baptism but can also be a false hypothesis). Likewise, Ramses VII and Ramses IX are part of an unified causal process of succession of pharaohs that of course should include Ramses VIII. This last pharaoh, though unknown to us, is an element of the unified causal process that contains the causal chains beginning with Ramses VII and Ramses IX, which effectively reach us, allowing us to recognize Ramses VIII as an associated unknown causal factor. It doesn’t matter that such causal factors are not part of the efficient causal factors that reached us, like those initiated with the baptism of 5^th Avenue or of Ramses IX; important is that they must have been part of the respective state of affairs and process that formed the main complexes of causal factors that initiated the causal-historical chains that have come down to us.

   Other examples are baptisms of things that will only exist in the future, such as the hurricane called ‘Katrina’, which received this name before it came into existence. The question is how it is possible to baptize something that will occur in the future? For Kripke this would not be a problem since he does not demand a causal relationship between the act of baptism and the reference. Anyway, we still could find, as with the case of the planet Neptune, present causal circumstances enabling us to predict the hurricane. I could add to this the example of the planned city called ‘Brasília,’ which received this name in 1823, a name given by José Bonifácio de Andrada e Silva, who was the first to propose moving the capital of Brazil to the dry and almost uninhabited interior of the country. Only in 1956, by decision of President Juscelino Kubitschek, did work begin on the new capital with the name Brasília. Causal circumstances seem to be here out of question regarding the visionary idea of José Bonifácio. But there is in fact no problem. The real name Brasilia was simply borrowed from José Bonifácio, and the real causal circumstances were the decisions and plans of Kubitsheck and his government to build the so-called new capital. We can consider, finally, the baptism of things belonging to the remote past, for instance, the ‘Snowball-Earth’. Geophysicists think that 650 million years ago the Earth was totally covered by an icecap many hundred meters deep. Existing geological evidence, combined with knowledge of laws causally lead scientists to the conclusion that the earth was once frozen in a glacial ice age lasting for millennia, and the baptismal name ‘Snowball-Earth’ was given by such causal reasons, which generated a causal-historical chain preserving the name. Even if, unlike the cases above, it is physically impossible to have any immediate, direct physical acquaintance with something that occurred in the past, we can still speak – in divergence from Kripke – of causal acts of baptism.

   Another type of objection is one that results from the elaboration of imaginary situations in which a causal-historical chain does not exist. Searle envisioned a small linguistic community in which each proper name is established indexically in the presence of all other speakers so that no causal chain needs to develop (1983: 240).[25] His argument demonstrates that under special circumstances a causal-historical chain could be unnecessary. However, it does not prove that baptism has no point, or that no external causal relation is necessary for the constitution of the referential function of proper names.

   It seems plausible to conclude that Kripke’s positive doctrine ends up by being reduced to two causal conditions regarding non-empty names: (i) the causal condition of acquaintance with the bearer of the name, valid even for the so-called abstract entities reconsidered by trope theory. (ii) the condition of having circumstances causally producing a baptism. Both conditions can be united in the following causal condition for the introduction of a proper name, followed by some causal-historical-informational network (considering that there is more than one only chain):

 

C-condition:

Effective referential introduction of a proper name is only possible if:

(i) a baptism occurs as the consequence of some kind of acquaintance producing a shared causal factor or a causal-historical-informational network that preserves its name.

And/or if

(ii) there are circumstances somehow involving a possible object of the name’s reference as something conceived; these circumstances causally produce the awareness that would allow us to name an object of reference, initiating a causal-historical-informational network that allow us to give and preserve the name. In many cases (ii) can give place to (i).

 

Once we assume the ontology of tropes, C-condition seems to be the most plausible way to think about what is true in Kripke’s idea of an act of baptism and the subsequent causal-historical chain. It starts causally and ends causally. However, the admission of C-condition has a crucial limitation regarding our real goals: it does not mean the acceptance that such causal network is able to give any useful or even principled explanation or justification of proper names’ references, as will be made gradually obvious in the sequence of this chapter.

   We can still ask if there are more resistant difficulties with the causal-historical view, concerning references of proper names that turn out to be causally inexplicable.

   It seems we can imagine situations where the successful referential use of a proper name is possible, even without C-condition. Let’s say there is a fortune-teller called Wanga who, gazing into her crystal ball, can guess proper names she has never heard before, and inform us of all sorts of things about their reference. She peers into her crystal ball and exclaims ‘Kamchatka!’, referring to the many volcanoes on this remote peninsula. She looks again and exclaims ‘Tom Castro!’, going on to talk about the life of this notorious villain. If, after making all the conceivable tests, we did not discover any trick, we would begin to suspect that she can tell all these details without knowing them beforehand and without having to resort either to causal-historical chains or to any circumstances that would enable her to infer the causes for her assertions as to the existence of the bearers of the proper names. By peering into the glass, she effectively refers (even if she resorts to descriptions to prove her reference).

   The problem with this thought experiment is that even so, we would not abandon our assumption that a name requires a causal connection with its reference to use it referentially. Even if the causal relationship of what she sees is never clarified by means of causal chains, this does not prove that they do not exist. A final objection against this example is its extreme lack of plausibility when we consider our known physical laws.

   We can try to conceive of an extreme situation: a possible world endowed with pre-established harmony, in which people live like Leibnizian monads; they do not need to learn the senses or references of proper names and communicate them to each other to teach and learn their uses. Each person would have proper names popping up in his or her mind, with an inexplicable agreement between the senses and references that each person gave to each name; one person would utter a proper name only to communicate something (apparently) contingent about its bearer that other people still do not know. Nevertheless, this hypothesis seems still more implausible than the last one. This is not how we use proper names to refer in our world, nor are we able to imagine how that would occur in any possible world where proper names could be used. We are interested in explaining the reference of our proper names and not in the reference of something called ‘proper names’ in a wildly improbable Leibnizian world.

   It seems that none of the objections considered so far is strong enough to discredit the causal-informational or causal-historical aspect of naming’s attribution as presented by the C-condition, even though this condition, as will be clear later, must be interpreted in ways that considerably weaken Kripke’s original semantic intuition of it as the royal road to explain reference. In fact, the C-condition will be unmasked as a philosophical elaboration of the almost trivial idea that the referential use of proper names invariably involves causal relation, notwithstanding how indirect.

 

 

5. Coincidental reference

There are still possible examples that at first glance seem to resist the idea that the C-condition is indispensable to their reference: they concern what we might call purely coincidental references.

   Consider the following imaginary case of a proper name with no causal relationship to its reference. In an insane asylum in Georgia, an inmate dreams that there is a volcano named Osorno on the border of a lake in southern Chile. He even draws a picture of a snow-covered volcano and is convinced of its existence. Indeed, as a matter of fact, there is a beautiful volcano called Osorno with those characteristics in that region. But suppose that there is absolutely no causal relationship between the name that appeared in the dream and the volcano. This would be a case of merely coincidental reference.

   To give a more detailed example, let us say that a teenager called Jaime, who likes to play childish games, knows a girl named Elaine very well. Suppose now that he creates a name, ‘Ivny,’ for a crockery doll he imagines belongs to Elaine, adding to his story that the doll was given to her when she was younger and that she has stored it in the back of a wardrobe. By mere guesswork, Jaime has already produced a considerable group of merely invented descriptions which he associates with the name ‘Ivny.’ Let’s just suppose that by an incredible coincidence his guesses turn out to be correct. In that case, could we say that Jaime has referred to Ivny? Shouldn’t we admit that he has referred to that doll, even if only by an absurd coincidence? It seems it would be possible to claim that the name ‘Ivny’ has a descriptive meaning, a Fregean sense, and that therefore it would even be possible to determine its reference in this way. In this case, the conclusion seems to be that, although there is no causal chain between the object and the utterance of its name, there is a coincidental reference, and this reference is authentic.

   This phenomenon seems to be even more convincing if it is found in indexical utterances. Suppose that Mary is blindfolded and tries to guess what was placed on the table in front of her by saying:

 

1.     There is a flowerpot on this table.

 

Suppose that by pure chance she hits on the truth: a flowerpot was placed on the table. Does Mary, when guessing, thinking, and saying the sentence (1), correctly refer to the flowerpot on the table? Favoring this conclusion, it should be remembered that the sentence is true; since it is true, Mary seems to have truly referred to the flowerpot.

   Nonetheless, an advocate of an indispensable causal relation between the act of naming and its reference might with good reasons reply that in these cases there is confusion. In the case of the mentally disturbed inmate of an asylum, his judgment is impaired, and one can find neither internal nor external reasonable justifications for his application of the name in a true statement. In the case of Jaime, the name gains reference only for those who already know there is a doll in the wardrobe and only afterward for Jaime, since his guess wasn’t backed by any justification; this is the only reason the name ‘Ivny’ seems to have reference in the mouth of Jaime before Elaine’s agreement with its truth. And in the case of Mary, she herself does not know that the sentence is true, because although the thought expressed by the sentence is in fact true, it is only true for witnesses, for example, an interpreter who hears the sentence and compares the thought it expresses with the corresponding fact, verifying its truth, which gives us the illusory impression that Mary could be successful in referring.[26] It might be that we have the impression that in this case, as in the previous one, the reference is made, albeit in a purely coincidental way. But this impression would be nothing beyond the kind of linguistic puzzlement often pointed out by Wittgenstein as a philosophical trap (1984b sec. 116-133).

   In the face of these considerations, we conclude that a non-causal purely coincidental reference is merely an illusory form of reference. It is as unreal as a name engraved on a stone in an isolated region, which by chance is the same as the name of a traveler who happened to find and read it. A representational process is causal in nature, however indirect this relationship may be. Reference is an association we make between the word and the world, and this association must inevitably involve some form of causation from world to word and, as one could complementarily add, some form of intention from word to world.

 

7. Internal problems

Now I want to move on to a critical analysis of the Kripkian approach, beginning by considering some internal difficulties of his causal-historical theory of reference.

   The first problem concerns what we could call intentional emptiness. In the passage where Kripke introduces his idea of the causal-historical-communication chain, he explicitly resorts to at least one intention, which is “to use the name with the same reference as the man from whom he heard it.” This intention serves to select and preserve the object referred to in the communication link of the causal-historical chain as being the same, both for the speaker and for the hearer (Kripke 1980: 91, 96).[27] However, there is a problem here. It seems unavoidable that the intention to use the name with the same reference must include cognitive contents to preserve this same reference. It must have some more intentional content. If a hearer uses the name ‘Aristotle’, preserving the intention of referring to “the baby born in 384 BC, son of Nicomachus, the physician of Macedon’s court”, this makes sense. Furthermore, the degree to which this intention succeeds in preserving the same reference must correspond to the degree to which it includes relevant cognitive contents associated with the name. If I say, for instance: “I will use the name of Aristotle, preserving your intention to refer to the person who was born in 384 BC in Stagira, son of Nicomachus, the physician in the court of Amyntas II, who crossed the Aegean Sea to meet Plato in Athens and later wrote the Aristotelian opus”, I will have a much better chance of preserving the same referent than if my intention were only to refer to someone born in 384 BC. These considerations seem to lead directly to a falling back into descriptivism, simply because these intentional contents are already those that, to be interpersonally accessible and efficient, must be expressed through descriptions. But if so, descriptivism emerges from the heart of the Kripkian causal-historical view, ruining the supposed advantage of his picture.

   One can try to circumvent the problem of intentional emptiness by suggesting that the relevant intention is only one of preserving the same reference independently of being able to conceive anything like tropical properties externally or internally associated with its intentional object. Nonetheless, if the hearer does not need to have any idea of what the speaker’s intention might be, then the intention of referring to the same object with the same name is reduced to an arbitrary wager. It would be as if someone says, “I am going to buy the same things you bought, but you don’t need to tell me what you bought” – which expresses an empty intention that serves no purpose. Or suppose that an inebriated gambler says before placing his bet in playing roulette: “I do not know the number you chose when you won, but now I have the intention to bet on the same number, whatever it may be!” Such a statement would be a blunder, since the intention to refer to the same thing without knowing anything about it is empty, and its explanatory power is null (another term for this could be ‘wishful thinking’). Moreover, if “to have the same intention” means an intention empty of content, this cannot prevent all kinds of errors concerning the right referent: I can intend to refer to the same Aristotle you are referring imagining that Aristotle is the name of a prime number. It would not be of any help if, asked who Aristotle was, someone gave the answer: “You, follow the same causal chain I am following when I utter the name ‘Aristotle’... but don’t forget to have the intention of referring to the same person I am referring to”.[28] An empty intention is no intention.

   The conclusion is that if Kripke wished to be fully consequential in his anti-descriptivism, he should drop the demand of intentionality. This means that his causal-historical chain should be solely what Searle called an external one, in the sense of a third person accessible physical chain.

   A minor but telling difficulty concerns change in reference. Gareth Evans formulated an interesting counterexample to the causal-historical view, which concerns the proper name ‘Madagascar’ (Evans 1973: 11). According to him, the name ‘Madagascar’ was once used to refer to the easternmost region of the African continent. But when Marco Polo visited that region, an incorrect translation led him to think that Madagascar was the name of the great island situated near the east coast of Africa. Later, due to Marco Polo’s accounts, people came to call the island itself Madagascar, forgetting the original reference. Certainly, if the name’s reference were fixed only by appeal to an initial baptism, this change could not have occurred. Marco Polo surely also intended to refer to the same thing as the person from whom he first heard the proper name and not to introduce a new reference for the same name; but since the intentional content was misleading, the reference changed.

   An answer to this type of objection was suggested by Michael Devitt. According to him, the meaning of a proper name does not have to do with the reference itself, but with the ability to designate an object. (1981: 2.1-2.3) This ability, or habit, is seldom acquired from a single baptism, but more often from many, in a process called by him multiple grounding. Thus, the name Madagascar had been fixed through multiple baptisms as an eastern region of the African continent, until it was inadvertently renamed by Marco Polo. If Polo and his auditors subsequently referred again and again to the island, the multiple grounding came into effect, forming a new habit of referring, and thereby giving a different sense to the name.

   This appeal to multiple grounding which creates a habit or custom seems in some cases to really occur. Consider the case of an encampment of diamond seekers that is called ‘tents’ because people standing on the mountains around it could only see the many tents below. With the passage of time, the encampment grew into a village, which then received the official name of ‘Tents’ (a kind of postponed baptism). However, this cannot be generalized. We can suppose that Marco Polo confused Madagascar with the island and, later, when he was in prison, he dictated this error to the writer of the book Il Milione. They didn’t afterward need any multiple grounding to spread the new name. Aristotle also, after his baptism, would not have it reinforced by having his name repeated. Repeating is not like renaming.

   Kripke himself (1980: 163, Appendix) gave the most convincing answer. For him, an intention, in this case, Marco Polo’s intention to refer to an island, overcomes the intentions of past users of the name and establishes a new social practice. His intention gave the proper name a new meaning and a new reference. The change of reference, therefore, turns out to be a mere case of homonyms. Although this response may be more appropriate, it inevitably suffers from camouflaged descriptivism by reflecting a new element of cognitive intention. After all, Marco Polo’s intention to refer to the island must be able to be expressed by a definite localizing description such as ‘the great sub-equatorial island near the eastern coast of the African continent’, since he could have had something like that in mind.

   A descriptivist would have no difficulty with Evans’ example. There were indeed two occasions on which identifying-localizing descriptions were created. The first is the reference to ‘Madagascar’ as ‘the eastern region of Africa,’ which could have been maintained and increased by local people over a long period of time. On the second occasion, Marco Polo unwittingly called ‘the great sub-equatorial island near the eastern coast of Africa’ ‘Madagascar’, introducing a homonym with a new localizing description.

  Another counterexample from Evans concerns two babies, one baptized as Jack, and the other baptized as John, which were accidentally switched by a nurse. The nurse mistakenly gave John to Jack’s mother, and Jack to John’s mother, The respective parents did not notice the switch and they and their relatives simply continued calling their child by the wrong name. If causal-historical view were correct, the boys would always be known by the name that was used for them, despite the original baptism under a different name. The best Kripkian answer is to accept a less strict idea of baptism. John was unwittingly rebaptized as Jack by his parents, giving rise to a much more extended causal-historical chain.

  An additional difficulty, which I want to briefly consider, concerns the meanings of more than one proper name of the same bearer. There are cases where these proper names have the same informative content (e.g., “Everyone calls Beatrice Bia”). But there are cases where the informative content differs. For instance, Father Marcial Maciel was the founder of the Legionnaires of Christ order and unfortunately also a scoundrel. Among his many illegal activities was the use of false identities. One of them was that of Raúl Rivas, an alias with which he claimed to be a Shell employee and CIA agent. In 1976 Rivas met Blanca Gutiérrez, a naive woman who fell in love with him, knowing him only as Raúl Rivas and fully unaware of his true biography. Rivas had two children with her without her having discovered his secret identity. The informative contents of the names ‘Marcial Maciel’ and ‘Raúl Rivas’ are certainly very diverse, although they referred to the same person.

   Cluster theory would find no problem in explaining this difference. A supporter of this theory would say that the set of descriptions abbreviated by the false name Raúl Rivas would have been publicly regarded as being completely different from the set of descriptions abbreviated by his real name, which is why their meanings were seen as so diverse. All that occurred is that later it was discovered that the first set of descriptions was only a subset of the second one; that is, the meaning-content given by the sub-cluster of descriptions associated with the false name Raúl Rivas was part of a more complete meaning-content, namely, that of the entire cluster of descriptions to be associated with the original name Marcial Maciel. This explains not only why the two identities belonged to the same person, but also why it was possible for Blanca Gutiérrez not to know that they were the same person: she was only aware of the cluster associated with Raúl Rivas.

   It does not seem impossible to find an explanation for what happened from the perspective of the causal-historical view, though it lacks convincing power. Supposing that the source of the referential function is the act of baptism, then we can imagine that there were two different acts, one of them was the original baptism of Marcial Maciel, while the other was the baptism that Marcial Maciel gave to himself under the alias of Raúl Rivas, which he used with Blanca Gutiérrez. One could now object that in this case we no longer have any intrinsic reason to say that the two names do not refer to the same object. However, the causal-referentialist can still hope to answer this objection by remembering that, although the baptismal acts of the two names had the same referent, the imposter only told Blanca Gutiérrez of the causal chain associated with his identity as the self-baptized Raúl Rivas. He concealed his other pseudonym and identity because he wanted her to only refer to him using this alias. He concealed from her the causal-historical chain initiated by the baptism of Marcial Maciel with the intention that this name should be used in referring to him.

   Even so, the causal-referentialist will find persisting problems. How could the causal-historical view be able to explain that Raúl Rivas and Marcial Maciel were in fact the same person? How could the causal-historical view explain why Blanca didn’t become aware that Raúl Rivas was Marcial Maciel, considering that the two baptisms were of rigid designators of the same bearer, who stood there in front of her? (“Raúl Rivas = Marcial Maciel” is a necessary identity.) How could she only much later come to the shocking discovery that Raúl Rivas was in fact the same person as Marcial Maciel, by means of information and cognitive awareness communicable by descriptions? By now it begins to be clear that a causal-historical theory based upon baptism is quite incapable of standing alone.

 

8. The radically consequent Kripkian automaton

Several authors have objected that referentialist views have been unable to give an adequate account of the relation between semantics and psychology. As Francesco Orilia wrote:

 

…a complete semantic theory must be, say, cognitivist, i.e., capable of going hand in hand with a plausible psychological account of mental processes that are involved in the generation or interpretation of a linguistic token and of the mental representations that such processes give rise to. (2010: 5).

 

The aim of this section is to show the indispensability of the debased cognitive-representational and potentially descriptive element by means of a reductio ad absurdum. For this, we need to draw on the idea of what one could call a complete Kripkian automaton. This would be an automaton capable of creating and using proper names satisfying Kripke’s anti-cognitivist causalism in a fully consequent way. It is complete in the sense that it does not run any risk of implying descriptivism, since it does not need to satisfy even the requirement of the intention to use words with the same reference as the other automatons of the same kind in any cognitive sense of the word ‘intention.’ It is, therefore, a primitive mechanism, devoid of any form of mind or consciousness, but still capable of “identifying” people through their photoelectric sensors and “baptizing” them with “proper names”. Imagine now a “society” of these automatons. They would be able to retain images and behavioral traits of the persons they have “baptized” with proper names like ‘Rwzf’, and even transmit them to other similar automatons, relating them to the same bearers (the physical mechanism can be here called “K-intentionality”), in this way “communicating” them. This would enable them to repeat the person’s “name” when they “see” its bearer, or when appropriately “asked” about what a person with such and such characteristics is called. It seems that the reference mechanism is reduced here to a purely external causal-historical chain, that is, to a third-person accessible causal chain devoid of any psychological content.

   What is interesting about this thought experiment is that it makes evident how unconvincing the act of referring becomes in the absence of any truly cognitive element. We do not really understand how it is possible for a complete Kripkian automaton to really refer in the proper sense of the word. Words such as ‘denotation’, ‘name’, ‘identification’, ‘reference’, ‘K-intention’, ‘communication’, ‘seeing’, ‘society’, were all applied with quotation marks due to the simplified and analogical use that was made of them. What these automatons would be able to do would only produce mechanical imitations of the referential processes that take place in our conscious minds, which is demonstrated by their almost complete lack of flexibility, inferential complexity, and behavioral sophistication.

   Imagine, however, that there are no longer complete Kripkian automata, but instead extremely sophisticated androids, such as those appearing in Steven Spielberg’s popular film A.I. Artificial Intelligence: they can perfectly share our way of life, learn all the details of our natural language, using our own names as correctly and competently as we ourselves do. In that case, we would no longer be prone to consider their acts as naming terminal links of purely external causal chains. By analogy with ourselves, it will be inevitable to attribute mental capability to them. That is, we would be compelled to treat some unknown nodal points of their external causal pathways as internally describable in psychological terms such as cognitions, representations, and intentions.

   After all, we cannot prevent ourselves from identifying the consciousness of others by analogy with our own.[29] We are not able to imagine that androids completely devoid of consciousness would be able to speak and behave in the same way as human beings. Even if they came to talk to us, trying to convince us that they were completely devoid of consciousness, not really possessing thoughts, having no intentions, no will, we would not believe such statements, for they would sound ridiculously incoherent. We would be irresistibly persuaded to endow them with consciousness.

   It seems that if we want to use proper names, other users can tell us by themselves something about their references. External third-person processes, like neuro-physiological ones, will have to be so elaborate that they will inevitably appear to us to have the form of internal psychological processes. However, in them the cognitive-representational-intentional element must have a preponderant role, forcing us to return to the initially rejected assumption of the necessity of a descriptively explicable cognitive constituent.

 

9. Empty and imaginary names

A resilient problem left insufficiently explained by the causal-historical theory concerns empty proper names. Here are some examples:

 

1.     Vulcan

2.     Eldorado

3.     Zeus

 

4.     Rumpelstiltskin

5.     Gandalf

6.     Urville

 

There is an important difference between the names from (1) to (3) and from (4) to (6). Only the first three are empty proper names in the full sense of the word. They are what we could call proper names of non-existent real objects. They are meant to be applied to references belonging to the domain of our real world (the first because they are empirically empty, the other two because of their mythological character). The last three are proper names of merely fictional (imaginary) objects. They are not empty insofar as they are applied to referents belonging to the proper fictional or imaginary domain, where they were conceived to be applied. They only appear empty if they are misleadingly seen as applying to references belonging to the domain of the real world.

   None of these examples of proper names constitutes a problem for descriptivist theories. The first three do not, because their status as proper names depends on their descriptive meanings and not upon the existence of referents in the domain of our real world. After all, for descriptivists, what constitutes the status of a proper name, its referential function, its meaning, belongs to the modes of presentation given by its associated descriptions, not the ultimate success of its referential function. About the last three proper names, they are also abbreviations of descriptions that give them their meanings, making them able to refer in fictional worlds which recombine elements of our own, where they can appear as terms in true (ex: “Gandalf was a wizard”) or false (ex: “Rumpelstiltskin was a dwarf”) statements, insofar as they are consistent with these imaginary recombinations.

   However, the admission of names without a reference can be a real problem for causalist-referentialist theories, which tend to make the status of a proper name dependent on its reference, leaving aside the problem of its signification.[30] Anyway, Kripkian referentialists would have the means to invent strategies to save the causal-historical theory of proper names belonging to a fictional domain.[31] They could easily suggest that fictional names like Rumpelstiltskin, Gandalf, and Urville, were respectively “baptized” by their creators, who were respectively the Brothers Grimm, J. R. R. Tolkien, and Gilles Tréhin, which would produce an informational causal chain. And, as was said, the baptismal relation can be seen here as a causal-mental relationship belonging to fictional worlds.

   However, this solution would open the doors to the objection that no matter what kind of “baptism” is performed, a petitio principii haunts the causal-referentialist. Such characters can only be identified by those who know their roles in the fictional stories. Only with the help of cognitive descriptions of these characters, their intentions, their actions, are people able identify them and understand their places in the respective fictional worlds. Since all these things must be described, it seems that the causal-historical theorist must here assume the priority of descriptivism in a wide-open way. I say it is worse, because the possibility of an automatic or tacit form of tagging or baptism – still conceivable in our real life-world – would be excluded in these fictional worlds.

   A greater problem for causal-historical referentialists, however, concerns what I call proper names of non-existent real objects[32], like ‘Vulcan’, ‘Eldorado’, and ‘Zeus’. If they do not have references, it also seems that they will never be able to be really tagged or baptized. They cannot have a direct referential causal function, which seems to deflate their significance as real proper names. There is an extensive debate about these issues among referentialists, whose discussion would lead us too far from our present intentions.[33] Along causal-historical lines, however, the most auspicious answer to the problem departs from remembering that the first link of the causal-historical chain is not the object referred to, but the baptism itself. If this is so, then the act of baptism, even though it can be empty, is already sufficient to produce a causal-historical chain... Thus, as Keith Donnellan brilliantly suggested, the empty proper name is one whose historical explanation ends up by presenting empty indications. As he wrote concerning a statement like “Santa Claus does not exist”:

 

When the historical explanation of the use of a name (with the intention to refer) ends in this way with events that preclude any referent being identified, I will call it a “block” in the history. (1974: 23)

 

The explanation for the existence of Santa Claus ends up in a “block” because one cannot point to its bearer in the actual world.

   This answer is helpful in showing how the C-condition works in the case of an empty name. However, the associated Kripkean causal-historical view is not without problems. If the causal effect of a given referent in the baptizer’s mind is indifferent to the characterization of a proper name, how can we distinguish the historical chains that start with a real reference from those chains that begin with empty baptisms? Should the existence of some causal relationship between the referent and the act of baptism not be essential to real naming, allowing the proper name to pick out its reference in a way that justifies the all-important property of rigidity? If not, would these empty names still deserve to be called authentic proper names?

 

10. Empty names descriptively understood

Instead of trying to figure out how the defenders of the causal-historical view would answer questions like those presented above, I wish to consider another referentialist response, according to which empty names are not true proper names, but only disguised definite descriptions. For an advocate of this view, if there is one[34], since empty proper names are only disguised descriptions, they are made to refer by means of a mechanism completely different from the direct causal-historical baptismal way proper names usually refer. Consequently, they do not deserve to be called real proper names, and empty proper names do not really exist!

   This view is certainly, implausible and would be rejected by Kripke. However, I do not choose to consider this view, because of its plausibility within the causal-historical or referentialist framework. I do this here only as an exercise for a better understanding of how empty proper names could be interpreted from a descriptivist viewpoint – as a springboard to what will be explained in the next chapter.[35] What I wish to make clear is that a careful examination reveals that empty proper names for real objects (just as much as proper names for fictional objects) are too much like the most common proper names to force us to distinguish seriously between the two cases – a conclusion that will favor descriptivism concerning proper names.

   First, consider again examples (1) to (3). If we examine them more closely, we will see that these names do not replace a single definite description, but a variety of descriptions, leading us back to a cluster theory. In the case (1) of Vulcan, it is the name of a small planet postulated by Urban Le Verrier in the 19th century as orbiting about 21 million km from the Sun, to explain changes in Mercury’s perihelion (which after 1915 were precisely explained by general relativity theory). It is possible to replace this last sentence with a single composite definite description, formulated to localize and characterize a referent that in fact does not exist.

   Examples (2) and (3) can be seen as proper names with more elaborate informational content, not differing too much from what we expect from cluster theories of proper names. The proper name (2) ‘Eldorado’ comes from various indigenous accounts and rituals, which led the Spanish conquistadors to believe that in some regions of the western Amazon there could be a city whose king dressed in gold and possessed unbelievable riches. Based on these and other localizing and characterizing descriptions, adventurers and explorers descended to the mouth of the Amazon searching for it in vain and sometimes ending up as feasts for cannibals. If an implausible place like Eldorado were found, it would be because at least some of those descriptions of the cluster would apply. Consider now (3): the name ‘Zeus’. He was considered in Antiquity to be the ruler of all the gods on Mount Olympus, the sixth son of Chronos and Rea... There is a whole range of localizing and characterizing descriptions that mythology has associated with the name ‘Zeus’, which makes it a cluster not very different from the clusters of our usual proper names.

   Now compare the functioning of the name ‘Eldorado’ with that of the name ‘Troy’. In the latter case, all that was available was a very limited cluster of localizing and characterizing descriptions taken from Homer’s Iliad. It was seen as a mythological name. However, unlike the previous cases, the site of Troy was discovered in modern Turkey by Heinrich Schliemann. As is well known, having taken seriously the localizing descriptions, Frank Calvert indicated to Schliemann where he could find the ruins of the historical city of Troy, which enabled him to discover the site and build a well-grounded causal chain. What is the difference between the name ‘Eldorado’, on one side, and the name ‘Troy,’ on the other? In my view, only one thing: the former name is certainly empty, the latter not. Other than that, they behave the same way. Therefore, a word like ‘Eldorado’ is certainly a truly empty name, and a causal-historical theory does not seem very apt to explain why it is rigid or why it seems informative and meaningful.

   It is true that the description clusters of the above examples are still poor and uncertain if compared to those of common proper names such as Paris and Aristotle. But this is not because these names are misleading descriptions. The main reason is the simple fact that the real bearers of the usual proper names persist in their complex causal interaction with the world, often allowing us over time to accumulate identifying information, continually enriching their clusters of descriptions. In contrast, empty proper names are in a situation as fragile as that of the planet Neptune shortly after the discovery of its existence by Le Verrier. None of the considered examples adumbrates the necessity of postulating some mysterious identification mechanism essentially different from what possibly could be given by well-grounded definite descriptions supposedly demanding the satisfaction of variable complexes of tropical properties. Furthermore, as we will see with the proper name ‘Urville,’ poverty of descriptions is not an unavoidable property of empty names.

   Let us now consider once more the fictional names (3) to (6), which, unlike (1) to (3), are meant as referring to merely imaginary objects. Here we also have often rich clusters of identifying descriptions of the object, only they are not made to be applied to the real world but are limited to the domain of objects that exist only in our imagination. ‘Rumpelstiltskin’ abbreviates the identifying description of a greedy dwarf in a fairy tale, ‘Gandolf’ abbreviates detailed characterizing descriptions of a wise magician belonging to the fictional world created by J. R. R. Tolkien. It seems clear that the identification mechanisms remain similar. What changes is the domain of application, which in these cases is the second-order domain of merely fictional reality.

   The last case I would like to consider is that of (6): Urville. This city is located in the southeast of France. It was founded in the year 1,100 BC by the Phoenicians, was transformed into a city-state in the Middle Ages, and was occupied by the Nazis during World War II... These are the main descriptions by which we build the rule that enables us to locate the city in space and time. Urville is also the largest city in Europe, the present capital of France, with about 12 million inhabitants... These are only a very small part of the uncommonly complex cluster of localizing and characterizing descriptions constitutive of the criterial rule by means of which we are enabled to identify Urville. The only problem is that Urville, obviously, does not exist. This city is the product of the imagination of an autistic artist named Gilles Tréhin, who for more than twenty years conceived and drew that city in its smallest details. He created for the name ‘Urville’ a precise and extraordinarily complex fictional cluster of descriptions that should work as its identification rule. Although constructed in the most realistic possible way, this rule does not apply to our actual world. It is as if it belonged to a close possible world, in which history had undergone a small but significant change: Urville in the place of Paris. The case of the proper name ‘Urville’ shows beyond any doubt that an empty proper name cannot simply be reduced to a definite description, even to a composite one. Urville is an empty proper name replacing an immensely complex cluster of descriptions, since realism was Tréhin’s main aesthetic goal. Searle’s cluster theory would be at home concerning Tréhin’s city: in a possible world where a sufficient but undetermined number of localizing and characterizing descriptions associated with the name ‘Urville’ were satisfied, the city would certainly exist.[36]

   Finally, it is worth noting that localizing and characterizing descriptions were present in all the examples of proper names given above. In the next chapter, we will see that their place is fundamental in the articulation of the proper meta-descriptive rule for proper names in general, and why it must be so.

 

11. Causal chains and cognitive links

Even if I am convinced that some causal relation satisfying the C-condition is indispensable for any given proper name to have a reference, the crucial and until now unanswered question is that of explanatory power. A fully consequent causal-historical theory should be able to be fundamentally constructed without the admission of any psychological link such as content-filled intentions, cognitions, conscious representations – things that in general could be expressed as descriptions. But it does not seem that the mere use of an external causal chain – that is, a causal chain consisting only of interpersonally accessible elements like neurophysiological phenomena, sound waves, bodily movements, etc. – could be sufficient to explain the reference. Even if Kripke admits that we need to have the intention of referring to the same object, we have already seen that to be fully consequent we would need to reduce it to an intention to reproduce an unknown content, which would be nothing more than a wager.

   More serious difficulties arise when we effectively try to explain or justify the reference of a proper name through a purely external causal network. A first difficulty is that there are countless causal chains to which we are continually being exposed but whose final link can be anything but the referential use of a proper name.[37] How then can we identify the causal chain that has as its final link the referential use of a proper name? How do we know, for example, that from an eternal viewpoint the spelled word ‘White’ is being used as a person’s name and not as the name of a color? How can we know that a person is using the proper name ‘Aristotle’ correctly, as the last link of an appropriate causal-baptismal chain? Let’s imagine that when first hearing the name ‘Aristotle,’ a schoolboy concludes that the speaker wants to refer to a school in his city that bears that name. How can we know that this is not the correct causal-historical chain without resorting to cognitions-descriptions that we relate to Aristotle’s own person? Imagine, giving wings to our imagination, that in the act of baptizing Aristotle, the sounds of the words being uttered made a nearby mirror swing, which because of this reflected a photon that crossed the stratosphere and sped toward the Moon, from whence it was reflected back again, returning by chance to the surface of the earth, where it was absorbed by a carbon atom in a field of grain; suppose then that this tiny amount of energy remained stored in that atom, even if it passed through the bodies of animals that were fed grain, dancing about for millennia until the moment when it somehow contributed (very slightly!) to the movement of the vocal cords of someone who uttered the name ‘Aristotle.’ Would this photon reflection be part of the causal chain that caused the person to utter the name ‘Aristotle’? Certainly not!

   We have difficulty in seeing the physical absurdity of the issue, because we are normally unaware of the fact that we are continuously immersed in an inextricably complex causal ocean of interconnected events. That is, our universe is an incredibly intricate causal network, where events are constantly causing and being caused by other events on multiple sides and in myriads of ways.[38] Considering such an inconceivably complex ocean of external causal chains that simultaneously occur and intersect, how  can we identify those responsible for a particular act of naming? Suppose I utter the name ‘Aristotle’. It is undeniable that I can only designate this philosopher if there is, within the indescribably intricate causal ocean, an already vastly complex causal chain that (at least partially) had its beginning in the act of baptism of the newborn Aristotle and that ended with my current utterance of the name… However, just as certain as the very existence of external causal-historical chains linking the first speaker (and, we would add, the referent) with its name is the certainty that if searched only in itself and by itself, this search would give us no clue for its criterial identification, revealing the real chain as impossible to identify and isolate from the innumerable other connections forming the incommensurately vast causal network in which we are immersed. Now, is there any procedure that allows us, at least in principle, to pick out some relevant causal link?

   Although at first view the situation seems hopeless, we can imagine a procedure for the identification of links of the relevant external causal chain that can teach us something. It is based upon the assumption that there are neurophysiological external causal links (those accessible to a third person) that may also in some way be described in psychological terms, namely, as coinciding with cognitions, representations, or intentions to designate a single object. This would allow us to locate some external neurophysiological causal links of a causal chain. The trouble, however, is that the appeal to this resource makes it seemingly inevitable that we should first identify cognitions (or internal representations) in order to become able to perceive a correlation between these cognitions and their physical third person counterpart in the form of neurophysiological links of the external causal chain, whatever they may be. Since these cognitions and communicable internal representations are typically expressible through descriptions, if we admit that this is the proper way to identify causal chains, it seems that we will end up committing ourselves to some form of descriptivism. Hence, a way out of this commitment does not seem humanly possible.

   We can also perform thought experiments helping us prove the conclusion that cognitions and connected descriptions are inevitable for the identification of correct causal chains. The first is the following: Imagine that a very powerful brainscope is invented. This brainscope is a device able to identify when a person A, an Aristotle-specialist, by remembering and saying the name ‘Aristotle’, articulates the final link of the correct causal chain by reading the appropriate type[39] of neurophysiological link in the neuronal behavior of A’s brain. With this information, the brainscope will be able to tell us that another person B is using the word ‘Aristotle’ in the final sequence of the correct causal chain, simply by reading in B’s brain the same type of neurophysiological link as that of person A. A problem emerges when we consider that it will only be possible to know that the brainscope is reading the correct final causal link if both speakers, A and B, agree that they are referring to the same Aristotle – the philosopher – and not to another referent, like Aristotle Onassis or Greta Garbo or, say, the Cheops pyramid (even if always uttering the same word ‘Aristotle’). This agreement, however, is cognitive and in the end descriptively expressible. Worst of all, this agreement is the ultimate criterion for the conclusion that the brainscope identified the correct final causal link. In other words: the identification of the right neurophysiological type of causal link will depend on cognition and the related descriptions, which shows a fatal petitio principii in the explanatory goal of Kripkian’s causal-historical referentialism.

   An example of psychological explanation can illustrate the same crucial point of cognitive indispensability. Suppose I decide to buy a gift for a friend named Kate to thank her for a favor. If someone asks me, “Why did you decide to buy the gift?” I will answer, “I was feeling grateful for a favor she did for me.” In this case, it is a decision at the psychological level, which is explained by a feeling that is also psychological. Both the explicandum and the explicans concern the same psychological level. But suppose it is possible to explain my decision to buy the gift and my reason for making it by appealing to neurophysiological processes in my brain corresponding to my feeling of gratitude for the favor. Would this isolated explanation be appropriate to explain and justify my decision to buy the gift? Surely not. For it can only be considered appropriate if it is already known in advance that the neurophysiological process in question coincides with the reason and decision to buy the gift, and the feeling of gratitude can be explained as a reaction to another person’s mental states and behaviors. In other words: an external causal explanation of mental acts could only be justified to the extent that we are able to translate it into some sort of supervening internal causal-psychological explanation.

   Something similar happens when we consider a possible explanation of the reference by appealing to external causal chains as a whole: such explanations will only make sense to the extent that some of their links are seen as containing external correspondences to internal mental events. Taken by themselves, external causal-historical networks are like shadows in the dark; they are only able to tell us that proper names refer by means of causal mechanisms, which is as true as it is worthless as an explanation.

   Imagine now that nearly omniscient alien beings, while visiting our planet, decided to study our linguistic praxis. Suppose they were able to record all our communicative acts and identify the causal-historical chains that lead us to utter our proper names in the most diverse contexts. It seems reasonable to think that they would eventually become able to identify these chains without recourse to our descriptions of cognitive-representational links. This seems to suggest that a purely causal third person explanation is logically possible.  However, even this suggestion would be illusory. After all, to identify our language as a proper language, and our referential uses as such, the aliens would need to be aware of our language by identifying in us cognitive-representational states corresponding to those they themselves would have. In other words, it will always be necessary to find patterns consisting of cognitive-representative-intentional states at some previous stage of the process, explicit or not, which for this reason are demonstrated to be the true causative links interpretable in physicalist terms. Our conclusion is that some cognitively given state must be the ultimate criterion for the identification of external, third person causative links, even though the latter are irreducible.

   To sum up, the central point of my criticism of Kripke’s causal-historical view is that considered as an anti-descriptivist attempt to explain reference, causal-historical referentialism inevitably ends up begging the question, by demanding some kind of descriptive explanation.[40] A purely external causal chain can always be appealed to, and we all know that external causal chains are needed. But since the only satisfactory way to find the links that would lead to the correct utterance of a proper name within an external causal ocean is with the help of internal mental states, cognitions, representations, intentions… which to be communicated, must be able to be descriptively translated, one cannot avoid a descriptivist commitment.

 The foregoing considerations are not only true concerning possible neurophysiological links, but also concerning occurrences in the external world like someone baptizing a baby, Aquinas citing Aristotle, a professor teaching about him, etc. Being necessary, but extremely meandering and independently unachievable, these external causal chains are in themselves inscrutable. The final conclusion is that if taken in themselves, these chains have no explanatory power, being unable to justify our referential application of any chosen proper name.[41] Kripke’s positive view is, therefore, unable to explain how proper names refer.

 

12. Causal records

Should we conclude from the above arguments that the appeal to external causal chains is always incapable of playing any role in explaining reference? Not exactly. Although screening external causal chains (sounds given in baptismal acts, specific effects on the brains of participants, multiple resulting actions, etc.) is practically impossible, it is often possible to identify what we might call a causal record, which can be characterized as the cognitively recoverable relevant manifestations resulting from the causal-historical-communicational chains initiated by the object of reference of a proper name or at least relevantly related to it. Although the idea of a causal record can include the causal chain initiated by a relevant baptism, almost all recorded events related to the bearer of a proper name belong to its causal record. Consider, for instance, the fourteen books of the Metaphysics and the remarkable historical fate of this work in connection with the name ‘Aristotle’.[42]

   The idea of causal records leads us to see another important point, namely, that the broadness of causal-historical chains associated with the bearer of a proper name stretches far beyond a mere baptism. Consider, for example, the name ‘Socrates’. Although we know he was born about 470 BC, we know nothing about his baptism. What we know about Socrates is taken from the testimonies of contemporaries who knew him personally, such as Plato, Xenophon, and Aristophanes, who were later remembered in writings by Aristotle, and the minor Socratics. We can discern in these reports causal records – relevant manifestations – obviously resulting from causal-historical chains, which, through many ramifications, have come down to us. Although we will never have access to the causal occurrences associated with the real Socrates, we know the causal repercussions that his acts and words had on the brains of Plato, Aristotle, and the minor Socratics... which produced causal records that have left permanent, memorable landmarks, such as the descriptions of Socrates’ trial and his condemnation to death, as reported in the Platonic dialogues Apology and Phaedo. A definite description belonging to the causal record such as ‘the Greek philosopher condemned to die by drinking poison hemlock’ in association with the name ‘Socrates’ has come to us with the help of causal-historical chains and belongs chiefly to its characterization. As we will see later, information about causal records may become relevant to the explanation and justification of reference, and we can be aware of it. Conversely, the complete absence of causal records could even lead us to reject a supposed historical reference to the bearer of a proper name as illegitimate.

   It is important to have in mind that causal records can only gain any explanatory force concerning the determination of the reference because we can represent their components cognitively, which means making them susceptible to descriptive representation. Therefore, a descriptivist theory of proper names should also be able to incorporate information about causal records into the cluster of descriptions constitutive of the meaning of a proper name, thus requiring that the linguistic community (at least through its privileged members) be able, at some point, to produce descriptive representations of this story in order to justify the referential use. We will see at least one concrete case justifying this view in Chapter IV, when we critically examine Donnellan’s example of Thales, the first philosopher of the Western tradition, who simply because he was the first left particularly relevant causal records.

 

13. No need to fear causal chains

After the foregoing arguments, we are led to ask the question: if the existence of a referred object is at the origin of so many causal-historical chains, why should we give baptism such a special place? Consider the example of something that appears in a horror film and is known to exist, but has received no name, except “the thing”. Would the lack of baptism be more important for our identification of the thing than its terrifying acts?

   Furthermore, besides baptism, there is a whole network of causal-historical chains initiated by the bearer of a proper name that effectively reach us, and there are as many as the number of satisfied descriptions we associate with the name. Consider the case of Aristotle. That he wrote the Corpus Aristotelicum seems to be an extremely important fact about Aristotle, which presupposes a causal-historical-informative chain that has come down to us, and without which we could not gain knowledge of those writings or attribute them to him. That Aristotle was born in Stagira in 384 BC and died in Chalcis in 322 BC are also very important historical events concerning Aristotle. But they are only known by us because there are causal-historical chains that extend from the recording of these facts by others up to our awareness of them. It is also by means of causal records (grounded on causal chains) that we know that Aristotle traveled to Magna Greece when he was 17 years old to meet Plato, that he was Alexander’s preceptor, that he married Pythias, that he founded the Lyceum, and that he was called by Dante ‘the master of those who know’. Our awareness of these and many other events is always ultimately assured not just by one, but by a multiplicity of associated causal-historical chains, a network whose existence we are prepared to consider beyond reasonable doubt, even if they remain completely unknown to us, though leaving many main traces in causal records. But then, why select a specific causal-historical chain – that of baptism – as the only appropriate one? What does a person’s baptism – a perfectly accidental sound or visual linguistic sign – do that is necessarily superior to other causal-historical links like those producing relevant cognitions associated with a proper name, such as the localizing and characterizing cognitions of its bearer? What is so special about baptism as to justify its causal priority in so many cases? The answer is: not very much.

   It is not difficult to show that the causal-historical effect of baptism can be superseded. I can give two examples showing this with the help of counterfactual situations. The first concerns a possible world very near to ours, where in the remote hamlet of Obljaj, in July of 1894 a baby was baptized with the name ‘Ligzarb Rijab’. He was the second son of a married Christian orthodox Bosnian-Serbian peasant couple. Although the mother was not called Marija and the father not Petar Princip, soon after his birth Ligzarb Rijab began to have, in all details precisely the same life history as our Gravilo Princip: he excelled as a student, went to Sarajevo, became radicalized, joined the black hands terrorist group and, with his two friends Trifko Grabez and Milan Ciganovic, planned the assassination of the Austrian Archduke during his visit to Sarajevo. As expected, Ligzarb Rijab murdered Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife on 28 June 1914 at 10:15 a.m., which as we know, was the fuse that ignited World War I. As also expected, Ligzarb Rijab died in prison some years later in appalling circumstances. Would the baptism of Ligzarb Rijab under those somewhat different circumstances make us identify a person who would not be the Gravilo Princip of our world?[43] Intuitively not. He would be identified as our Gravilo, only with another name and somewhat different circumstances of birth and genetic design. The baptismal causal-historical view, even if reinforced by Kripke’s here artificially sounding essence of origins, is too poor even by its own standards.[44]

   Another example of this kind could concern the name ‘Napoleon’. Gareth Evans (1973) imagined a Napoleon who was impersonated by a Doppelgänger after having fled from Elba in 1814… This idea can be explored further. In the biography of Napoleon, it is well known that in 1769, in Ajaccio, Corsica, a newborn was baptized as ‘Napoleone di Buonaparte’. Suppose, however, that the following discovery is made. In fact, there was a super-smart malevolent orphan of the same age called Nicólo, whom no one could distinguish by physical features from the real Napoleon.[45] Knowing that the Buonapartes were a minor aristocratic family, the boy studied them and did what only his nature would enable him to do. He killed Napoleone when he was almost ten years old, taking his place in his family and entering military school when he was ten years old. The rest of this story you already know. This Napoleon went to France, had a military career, fought the Napoleonic wars and self-proclaimed himself emperor of France… only to commit the fatal mistake of invading Russia, which led to his final defeat at Waterloo and bitter exile on the remote island of Saint Helena, where he dictated his deceptive Memorial to Las Casas and died of cancer four years later.

   Now, the question is: who was the real Napoleon? Napoleone di Buonaparte or Nicólo? For Kripke it should be the former, the so-baptized ‘Napoleone’. Moreover, he satisfies the individuating essence of origin, since the bearer of this name by baptism is the real son ofthe true parents. Consequently, it should not be Nicólo, but the child killed by him. Napoleon’s family, once knowing the facts, would also think like Kripke, and I have nothing against this choice. Nevertheless, we are interested in our Napoleon, and our Napoleon is the Napoleon who made history. From the last perspective, our linguistic intuition could say something very different. For some it could even say that now that we have discovered all this, we have even uncovered a mystery surrounding our Napoleon. We see that the world’s most infamous megalomaniac couldn’t easily be a true Buonaparte. Our historical Napoleon should be, as he in fact was, the clever but evil psychopath called Nicólo. This would explain Napoleon’s enormous narcissism and his almost complete lack of sensitivity concerning the lives of other people... In the future, historians will forget Buonaparte and write biographies of Napoleon’s Great Deeds, speaking about Nicólo. The conclusion is that the localizing descriptions (his birth in 1769 in Ajaccio, his further life in France, his retreat from Russia, his time in exile on the Isle of Elba, and his death on Saint Helena in 1821) added to the characterizing descriptions (a military genius who conquered much of Europe, fought the Napoleonic wars, changed the legal order, self-proclaimed himself Emperor of France, invaded Russia and was decisively defeated by European armies at the Battle of Waterloo…) overcame by far the force of his baptism. The true Napoleon – our historical Napoleon – was not the person literally named ‘Napoleone di Buonaparte’, but a very clever and ambitious impostor, a military genius who with more justification was called Napoleon, but at least regarding his birth name was called Nicólo.

   Summarizing the results, we can say that we have two meanings for the name ‘Napoleon’: (i) the meaning of ‘Napoleon’ that takes the name of baptism as central and therefore concentrates on his parental origin; (ii) the meaning of ‘Napoleon’ that considers what at most counts as the characterizing and localizing descriptions regarding the whole life of the man called ‘Napoleon’, regardless of his baptism. Although both determinations usually converge, in the present case they diverge.

   Another remarkable point is that in essence, what we said above about causal historical chains regarding proper names also applies to definite descriptions, contributing to dissolve the impression that the distinction of proper names as rigid designators gives them a radically different way to pick out their references, in contrast with definite descriptions. A definite description usually also has a kind of baptism. Cervantes “baptized” Don Quixote with the description ‘El caballero de la triste figura’, and Dante “baptized” Aristotle as ‘Il maestro di color che sano’ in La Divina Commedia, and these baptisms generated causal chains that have reached us. In Burkina Fasso there is a building called La maison du people; it was certainly so baptized. The same can be said of the Champaner-Pavaghad Arqueological Parq, the Aga Kahn Palace Building, the Tomb of Abdul Rahim Khan-I-Khana, all of them located in India. Although the words of such descriptions often begin with capital letters (like proper names), no one would deny that they all have connotations associating them semantically with their bearers. Moreover, there is no reason to deny that satisfied definite descriptions are known because of causal-historical chains that usually begin with their causal associations with their references, as much as it should be in the case of baptism, following a C-condition. For instance: ‘the defeated general at Waterloo’ came to us by means of a causal-historical chain, like any other definite description, and the “baptismal” causal chains of descriptions, since they reflect the connotations inscribed in them, seem to be more important than those we associate with typical proper names. A consequence is that the puzzling difference between rigidity and accidentality must be looked for somewhere else (see chap. III, sec. 11).

   It is also worthwhile to note that according to Kripke, bearers of proper names have an essentiality of origin. His main example is that of Queen Elizabeth II (1980: 112 f.), since she would not be Queen were she not the daughter of Albert, Duke of York, and his wife, Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon.[46] This example is, however, biased, since in the case of a queen, biological origin acquires maximal importance. If we look at theories of parenthood, we see that the point is highly conventional (see Ahlberg & Chobli 2017). Often the true parents are considered those who educated and nurtured the child, independently of its biological origin, which is superseded.[47] Thus, the importance of origin must be relativized, as much as the importance of baptism.

   If we relativize the role of baptism, then the appeal to causal chains, though unavoidable, does not contribute to categorially distinguishing proper names from descriptions, since definite descriptions are also only able to refer because they are, if satisfied, in some way or other causally related to their references. Consider the definite description ‘the man who wrote that form, unlike matter, is what gives a thing its identity’. Independently of being Aristotle or any other person, if the person existed, this person, by means of his writings, was a causal factor in a direct or indirect way related to a causal chain responsible for the description’s reference. Moreover, some definite descriptions can explanatorily go back to acts of baptism. One example is the definite description ‘the Eagle of The Hague’. It was initially suggested as an epithet for Joaquim Nabuco, though by chance it ended up as a description to be satisfied by Ruy Barbosa, who instead of Nabuco went to The Hague.[48] Even fictional descriptions are causally determined. The definite description ‘the man in the iron mask’ is causally related to a dramatic story originally written by Alexandre Dumas. The fact that the relationship between naming and reference is in the end causal does nothing to differentiate the mechanism of reference of proper names from that of definite descriptions.[49]

 

14. A very simple example

Before ending, I wish to recap by giving a didactic example. It concerns a very simple proper name for a playful dog named Dodó (a corruption of ‘Dona’), which my wife and I once owned.[50] Before this female dog had a name, we already knew how to identify her as ‘our dog.’ We identified her perceptually by t-properties like her size, the brown color of her fur, the shape, and the white color of her nose, not to mention the localizing fact that she was the only canine living in our house. When she came to be called Dodó, we used the name, keeping in mind the creature with the described characteristics, along with some peculiar behavioral traits. Moreover, we also remember some causal records left by Dodó, like being chased by a furious Owl after unwisely sticking her nose in its nest… Thus, what we did was to associate the name with representations capable of being interpersonally shared and to a good extent expressible in the descriptive form of a spoken portrait, if necessary. Those who really knew Dodó, knew a description with a characterizing and a localizing form: ‘the female dog with such and such t-properties, who belonged to such and such people and who lived in such and such a place.’ Of course, I was able to tell the name to other people who had never seen her without the aid of that description, saying she was our dog. These people knew, therefore, the representation expressed by the very secondary description: ‘Claudio’s dog’, even if unable to identify the dog by themselves. They borrowed the reference from me (in Searle’s terms, their reference is parasitic on my non-parasitic reference.)

   It should be noted that we are here considering a variety of causal factors, including a causal-historical chain (the satisfaction of a C-condition) regarding the baptism of the dog with the name ‘Dodó’, necessary to explain how it is possible after all these years to speak about that same dog. However, it is even more important to note that the causal factors and some links of the causal chain come to be cognitively registered as internal cognitive-representational contents, which can occasionally be updated (perhaps in a non-reflective way) in peoples’ minds, being typically expressible-communicable through definite descriptions expressing what could be called criterial identification rules (criterial description-rules, as we will see).

   It is true that when we speak of Dodó, we satisfy the requirement of having the intention of referring to the same object... However, this intention was at no time devoid of cognitive content. It was the intention to designate the same object by sharing cognitive elements in the form of definite descriptions mostly known and shared by the name’s privileged users. Of course, these intentional elements only exist because the links of the causal chain are in the case neurophysiological events of a certain type, whatever they may be, which could be presented to us internally in terms of cognitive-representational contents which are normally able to be descriptively communicated in proportion to their relevance... These links, when thought of by various speakers, present an indispensable degree of similarity and complementarity to each other. The example also suggests that some broadly constructed causal-historical network is a necessary background condition for the cognitivist-descriptivist explanation and justification of our acts of naming. However, the work of explanation is on the descriptivist side: the more weighted definite descriptions we add, the more we know what that dog was like, and the better we are able to referentially identify that individual.

 

15. Conclusions

As I feel I have shown, the existence of a C-condition, including some broadly constructed external causal or causal-historical connection between the name and its reference – no matter how indirect – remains an indispensable condition for a proper name to possess a reference. This is an indisputable background condition and (as far as I am informed) was already agreed upon by sophisticated descriptivist philosophers such as P. F. Strawson.

   However, if our goal is to explain how a proper name refers, taken alone, a C-condition and any broadly constructed external causal-historical connection are useless. Explanatory relevance, as our examples have suggested, seems to appear only when external causal factors are cognitively interpreted in the form of mainly localizing and/or characterizing definite descriptions which are as a whole sufficiently weighted to support reference to a unique individual.

   The conclusion of the ad nauseam argumentative evidence collected in this chapter is that with his view of causal-historical baptism, Kripke has tried to suggest as a necessary and sufficient explanatory condition for the reference of many proper names something that, albeit pointing to a real fact – the C-condition – when closely viewed betrays either a begging of his question against descriptivism or an explanatorily empty condition for the name’s reference. All the illuminating aspects of his views ask for the development of some neodescriptivist explanatory approach. Hence, it seems that descriptivist views of how proper names refer do not deserve rejection, but rather improvement. This is what I expect to do in the next two chapters.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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[1] I will restrict myself to a critical examination of Kripke’s ideas, since with the time they have established themselves as a kind of explanatory paradigma for the reference of proper names. My intention is to show in the next chapters that a dialectical change to an internalist neodescriptivist paradigma is not only possible but desirable.

[2] See Salmon 2005: 23-31; G. W. Fitch 2004; Burgess 2013: 19-24, 53-55; Cf. also Ahmed 2007: Ch. 2.

[3] I am only avoiding the often-noted inaccuracy of the description ‘the first European to visit America’. (Searle 1958: 68; Kripke 1980: 83-84).

[4] As noted by Karen Green, Searle’s requirement that the bearer of a proper name “must necessarily have the logical sum, inclusive disjunction”, of properties commonly attributed to it (1958: 172) was never really met by Kripke’s objection (Green 1998).

[5] I will leave aside for now the more important and difficult counterexamples of Gödel, Thales, etc. for Chapter IV since they are better dealt with after the presentation of my own theory.

[6] Searle dedicated the last chapter of his 1983 book to a brilliant defense of his descriptivist cluster theory against the objections of Kripke and Donnellan. I am not the first to note the curious point that his defense remained virtually unanswered by partisans of the new orthodoxy.

[7] See Ahmed 2007: 37.

[8] See Salmon 1980: 27.

[9] This is also the conclusion of specialists like David Braun and Marga Reimer in their respective articles for the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. For a supportive defense of Kripke, see Scott Soames (2002, Ch. 2). For a well-balanced critical approach, see Arif Ahmed (2007, Ch. 2).

[10] Arthur W. Burks, for example, following our robust common sense, suggested that a proper name refers by means of the satisfaction of changeable and generally non-indispensible properties (1951: 39 f.).

[11] Today trope theory is already a major player in the ontological discussion, together with realism and nominalism. See, for instance, J. W. Carol and Ned Marcosian (2010: Chap. 9).

[12] D. C. Williams’ ground breaking work (1953) was the proposal of a radical naturalist alternative to the traditional but always controversial realist and nominalist answers common in  ontology. A relevant attempt to develop a trope-ontology was made in Keith Campbell’s 1990 book. Since then, the literature devoted to trope-ontology has grown steadily, though often weakening Williams’ original insight. The development of a fully adequate theory of tropes remains an unfinished task. For bibliographical access, see Anna-Sofia Maurin (2018).

[13] Keith Campbell (1990) called them quasi-tropes, though from the here explained perspective there is no good reason to do this.

[14] Friedrich Nietzsche (e.g., 2017: sec. 9; 2021: sec. 372) made a case on what he saw as an ascetic supernaturalism that had afflicted philosophy since Socrates, continuing with Plato, Plotinus, and most Judeo-Christian philosophers. It is very possible that the real explanation for the fact that trope theory emerged only in the XXth Century was a psychologically grounded form of escapism, together with the enlightenment provided by the sciences and the effects of technology in the human life world.

[15] The details concerning these compositions of concurrent or compresent tropes are, however, more complex and diversified than it seems at first sight (See Simons 1994). Speculatively, I suggested that the trope of what physicists call inertial mass could be considered the fundamental criterion for the identification of a multitude of individuals, since it comprises all physical individuals, from macroscopic objects, including persons, to microphysical particles, though excluding energy waves (Costa 2018: 172).

[16] Consider the form “Ce [Ci => A]” in the addendum of the last chapter.

[17] Kripke prefers to use the term ‘picture’ instead of ‘theory’, since what he presents is a rudimentary sketch, not even applicable to all proper names; ‘Jack the Ripper’, for example, is better explained descriptively, since the identity of the murderer was never discovered (1980: 79-80, 94). Kripke’s sketch is of a theory of reference, not of a theory of meaning, since he tends to share Mill’s idea that proper names have “no signification”.

[18] There are other versions of the view, such as those of Keith Donnellan (very similar to Kripke’s) and Michael Devitt (a deviant view). To simplify my explanation, I present only that of Kripke, which over time established itself as the standard version.

[19] See also p. 91. Keith Donnellan held a similar hypothesis: “It seems clear to me that in some way the referent must be historically, or, we might say, causally connected to the speech act. But I do not see my way clear to say exactly how in general that connection goes. Perhaps there is no exact theory” (1970: 377).

[20] E.g., Noonan 2013: 117. 

[21] Gareth Evans has rightly spoken of the “causal theory of names” (1973). Indeed, it seems too implausible to assume a historical-communication chain made up of non-causal successions of events, since this succession would either be arbitrarily chosen or at least graspable by means of cognitive relationships among their components which, being descriptively representable, would lead us in the most direct way back to some form of descriptivism.

[22] The view according to which cognitive states like reasoning have causal effects was convincingly introduced in the analytic discussion by Donald Davidson (1963).

[23]  Assuming a consequent trope ontology, as Williams do, we are committed to see “abstract” entities like numbers as causally effective. For an explanation of how it could be so, see the Appendix of this book.

[24] In his classic work on causality, J. L. Mackie (1974, caps. 2 and 3) showed that what we call the ‘efficient cause’ is the result of a merely pragmatic choice of a causal factor that is an unqualified but non-redundant part of a set of causal factors that is itself an unnecessary but sufficient condition for the effect to take place. There is much more to say about causation, but Mackie’s definition remains arguably the most powerful, serving well in the context of the present discussion.

[25] Searle added that this reference is only possible because people form intentional representations of objects when baptizing them. (1983: 240-241).

[26] It could be if the proposition were something a-temporally true. Here it is important to note that by presupposing trope ontology, as we do here, there is no thought in the Fregean realist sense of a non-spatiotemporal abstract proposition (Frege 1918). A thought must be either a trope or (corresponding to the Fregean thought) a universal in the sense of a sum or set of precisely similar tropical thoughts or, as I prefer to understand it, a tropical thought used as a model or any tropical thought regarded as precisely similar to it.

[27] Searle realized the difficulty by noting that the explanations given by Kripke and Donnellan for introducing proper names are entirely descriptivist: “Implicitly,” wrote Searle, “he also resorts to an intention when he speaks of the perception of the object by the speaker and hearer in the act of baptism since the perception has an intentional content, which ends up presupposing descriptivism.” (Searle 1983: 234-235) However, a causalist-referentialist philosopher could still suggest that the act of baptism (even if intentional) includes a mechanical (non-conscious), unintentional sharing of the reference, insisting that this could be all that really matters as a causal factor.

[28] The emptiness of a descriptively unsalvageable intention was already made clear by Gareth Evans’ example of someone who identifies Kingston correctly as the capital of Jamaica, when the person from whom he picked up this scrap of information was actually making a racist remark about Kingston upon Thames, in England. (1973)

[29] I say this assuming it is physically possible to construct such androids. It seems to me much more defensible to claim that only biological beings produced by processes of organic chemistry, alive in the same way we human beings are, would be able to use natural languages as we do. One does not have to know much about biology and human brains in comparison with silicon-chip based computers to realize that computer “brains” and human brains made up of living nerve cells are immeasurably different. It is only our present ignorance of how the human brain really works that allows such approximation.

[30] Some causal-referentialists, like Kripke, tend to dismiss the meaningfulness of proper names. Hard externalists, like Nathan Salmon and David Kaplan, attributed meanings to their references.

[31] Independently of any objection, the most recommendable work about related issues is Kripke’s Reference and Existence (2013).

[32] There are also proper names for non-existent non-real objects: in Samuel Beckett’s play “Waiting for Godot” (1953), the characters are anxiously searching for something that is almost certainly a creation of their minds (for fictional-fictional circumstances cf. Kripke 2013: III).

[33] See, for instance, van Inwagen 1977, Braun 2005, Salmon 1998, Caplan 2004.

[34] I was verbally informed about this implausible alternative, probably taken with changes from Russell’s view of proper names as disguised descriptions.

[35] This illustrates what Avrum Stroll, a Wittgenstein specialist, called philosophizing by examples; a painful consideration of individual cases to avoid the dangerously reductive character of excessive formalism.

[36] The history of the fictitious city, together with more than 300 drawings, was published in the form of a book in 2006.

[37] Even advocates of Kripke’s view have difficulties with the problem of finding the right causal-historical chain: “…if one, say ‘James,’ uses that expression attributively as a proper name, and has in mind no particular source, how do we decide which branch to follow?” (Kaplan 1989: 583)

[38] As Richard Feynman noted in an interview: “…even the trajectory of the light waves that allow us to see the most differently things when from different places and perspectives… makes a tremendous mess, and this without counting short and long invisible electromagnetic waves, like the many radio waves of different frequencies that simultaneously reach us in the same spot… only this already gives us a quaint idea of the absurd causal complexity of the universe, the inconceivable nature of nature.” Cf. BBC-Series “Fun to Imagine”.

[39] I say type, because I wish to sidestep a possible objection suggested by the controversial concept of multiple realizability (See Polger & Shapiro 2016).

[40] This conclusion can be easily extended to any anti-descriptivist causal-historical-communicational chain view (cf. Donnellan 1972: 337; Sterelny 1983).

[41] It is worthwhile to note that without using as many arguments as possible Searle came to a similar conclusion forty years ago: “The external causal chain plays no explanatory role whatever in either Kripke’s or Donnellan’s account… The only chain that matters is a transfer of intentional content from one use of an expression to the next, in every case reference is secured in virtue of descriptivist Intentional content in the mind of the speaker who uses the expression.” (1983: 244-245).

[42] The astonishing story of the more than 200 years in which the original Aristotelian manuscripts called by him ‘Writings of First Philosophy’ passed from one hand to the other, were hidden in a cave, sold to a bibliophile, acquired  by the Roman conqueror of Athens, crossed the sea, and were finally published in Rome by Andronicus of Rhodes under the new title of ‘Metaphysics’ is told by W. K. C. Guthrie, 1981, Vol. VI, Ch. III. The causal-history of the manuscripts left a series of descriptive registers belonging to what in the next chapter will be called the spaciotemporal career of the object of reference.

[43] Curiously, in photos Ligzarb Rijab looks somewhat like our Gravilo Princip, and his parents look a bit like Marija and Petar Princip.

[44] Certainly, there are cases, like that of Queen Elizabeth, where the essence of origins, namely, to be the daughter of the official parents, takes priority, but this is an ad hoc example.

[45] This phenomenon of practically indistinguishable persons who lack any family relations in common is rare, but really exists. Anyway, its real existence does not need to be part of the story.

[46] Her father became king when his brother abdicated the throne, and this made her next in line of succession for the throne. For a discussion of the essentiality of origins, see Costa 2018, pp. 98-100.

[47] For Kripke, the essentiality of origin is shown by the fact that if one were born to parents x and y, then one could not have been born to any other parents (1980: 113). But so understood this is nothing beyond a trifling tautology like ‘If A’s only cause is B, A cannot be caused by anything other than B”.

[48] Both men were Brazilian writers, diplomats, and statesmen.

[49] The same point could be extended to indexicals. If a host says to her servant, “When the dinner table is set, take that chair with red upholstery you can see in that corner and put it at the head of the table,” the host, by the act of pointing, together with a complementary description, is creating a localizing and characterizing identification rule for the chair. This rule is causally grasped by the servant, who is aware of it and at the right time will take the chair and put it in the required position.

[50] Any similarity with Michael Devitt’s dog called ‘Nana’ is a mere coincidence.