This is part of a developed draft of the book "How do Proper Names Really Work?" (De Gruyter 2023), challenging the present theories of reference.
IV
ANSWERING COUNTEREXAMPLES
My main goal in this chapter is to examine the
most insidious counterexamples against cluster-descriptivist theories of proper
names suggested by proponents of causal-referentialist theories. I want to
demonstrate that the meta-descriptive theory of proper names is able to offer
more detailed and convincing answers to these objections, which often fail to
distinguish the true identification rules.
1. Responses to
Kripke’s counterexamples
Beginning with Kripke, let’s first offer some
general considerations on objections of rigidity (modal), according to which if
descriptivism were correct, then proper names could not be rigid designators,
since descriptions are flaccid designators.
The
general answer to this objection is that although no usual description-rule
associated with a proper name needs to apply in all possible worlds where its
object of reference definitely exists, the description-rule DD (the
identification rule) of a proper name necessarily applies in all possible
worlds where its object of reference definitely exists. (As we have already
seen, there may be possible worlds where one cannot know whether the
identification rule of a proper name applies; but such worlds are identical to
those where the object also does not have a definite existence, since the very
existence of the object is defined by the effective applicability of its
identification rule, because it has a definitional character.) Indeed, the
modal objection of rigidity, as much as the epistemic objection of undesirable
necessity, is answered by the application of MIRF to the clusters of
proper names, considering that the resulting identification rules can cope with
multiple criterial variations without losing their rigidity.
Kripke
considers cases where our fundamental definite descriptions do not apply, such
as the case where Aristotle for some reason didn’t have the “famous
achievements” we commonly attribute to him, like having written the
Aristotelian opus (1980: 62), or even a possible (even if hardly imaginable)
world where Aristotle lived five hundred years later (1980: 62). Even in the
case of a disjunction of such properties, he thinks, we could still recognize
Aristotle.
Usually what Kripke suggests are cases of non-application of the
characterizing rule accompanied by a tacit application of the localizing rule,
or vice-versa (1980: 62-63, 74-75). However, we have already seen that these
cases are fully compatible with the application of a proper name’s
identification rule. What Kripke never considers, as we have already noted, is
a concrete counterexample in which none of the cluster’s descriptions apply to
any extent. Indeed, until now no one could give us any counterexample in which
the identification rule of a proper name is in no way applicable, although its
bearer exists; and this happens to be the case for the simple reason that the
proper name’s identification rule simply defines what its bearer can be, which
makes such a counterexample inconceivable.
The displaced Hesperus
First, I wish to deal with the most ambiguous
and deceitful counterexample to descriptivism suggested by Kripke. It concerns
the proper name ‘Hesperus.’ He begins by imagining that someone he calls ‘the
mythical agent’ decides to fix the reference of Hesperus via a
description saying: “I shall use the word ‘Hesperus’ as the name for the
heavenly body appearing in the yonder position in the sky” (1980: 57). Kripke
then notes that this description cannot express the meaning of ‘Hesperus’,
since if Hesperus had been struck earlier by a comet, it might have been
visible in a different position at that time. He argues that the name Hesperus
is a rigid designator, which means that it cannot be different from Hesperus,
even if it occupied a different position in a counterfactual situation (1980:
58).
A
problem with this argument is that in the first moment Kripke seems to be
speaking of the first identification of a heavenly body with the help of a
description. But in a second moment, he speaks as if Hesperus were a planet
baptized much earlier (we assume that in some way a rigid designator must be
baptized), and the ‘mythical agent’ were there only to localize the luminous
body. If we resolve this ambiguity by assuming that a mythical agent is only a
person giving a description of something already named, this description is
only a very partial localizing description. But this would be in full accord
with our view according to which the rigidity of a proper name is given by its
identification rule and not by any definite description belonging to the
cluster which one casually applies.
However, we can elaborate Kripke’s counterexample in ways that
strengthen it. Imagine that the name ‘Hesperus’ was coined by astronomers who
saw this planet at dusk in the direction of the Sun. Imagine that some time
later a rogue planet of the same size collided with Hesperus, so that it would
no longer be visible at dusk, or else (to make matters worse) that the
wandering planet would become visible in its place at dusk. In this case, it
does not seem that with the name ‘Hesperus’ we are now referring to the
celestial body that satisfies the description ‘the celestial body visible there
at dusk,’ even if we mistakenly believe this.
To
respond to this unambiguous version of the counterexample, I want to consider
the argument keeping in mind the meta-descriptivist conception in place of the
simplified versions of descriptivism on which Kripke bases his arguments. The
elaborated version of the counterexample owes its efficacy to the fact that the
proper name ‘Hesperus’ has a double meaning, which can be understood:
(a) as what we see or
(b) as a
discovered planet.
My conclusion will be that the new version
mixes them unduly, using this mixture as if it were what we really understand
with the name ‘Hesperus.’
Let us
consider the first sense of ‘Hesperus,’ the sense (a) of what is seen.
‘Hesperus’ or ‘Evening Star’ can actually be understood as referring to
something like the celestial body that always appears to us in the direction of
the Sun[1] at
dusk and as the brightest object visible in the night sky after the Moon.
Certainly, this was what was understood with the name before astronomy advanced
to its modern form, at a time when humanity was still unable to differentiate
Hesperus, the planet, from Hesperus, a shining angel. In this primitive,
archaic sense, the identification rule of what we can call
‘Hesperus-as-the-Evening-Star,’ derived from the application of MIRF
(assuming the satisfaction of a C-condition), is:
IR-‘Hesperus(-Evening-Star)’:
The proper name ‘Hesperus(-Evening-Star)’
refers appropriately to an object x belonging
to the class of celestial bodies
iff
(i-a) x
satisfies its localizing rule of being a celestial body that to this day people
have always seen at dusk in the direction of the Sun.
and
(i-b) x
satisfies its characterizing rule of being (after the Moon and some comets…)
the brightest celestial body that has ever been seen by people on Earth.
(ii)
x satisfies the conjunction
(i-a) and (i-b) to a degree overall sufficient, and
(iii) x satisfies the conjunction (i-a) and (i-b) more than any
other celestial body.
First, it is important to see that we have here
a conjunction, not a disjunction. If it were a disjunction, then by the
satisfaction of (i-a) alone, any celestial body seen at dusk in the direction
of the Sun would satisfy the rule. Once we have this identification rule, it
cannot be that that Hesperus does not satisfy the description only because the
proper name refers to a mere perceptual appearance. However, today no one uses
that archaic sense of the word – although a child may be able to grasp it in that
way. In this first sense of the name, if a wandering planet collided with Venus
and hurled it out of the Solar System, we would say that Hesperus had
disappeared for good, that it no longer exists. And if the wandering planet
took the place of Venus, we would say that surely the same Hesperus continues
to exist there in the heavens, because its identification rule continues to be
satisfied, given that in this sense of the name we are referring only to a mere
phenomenal manifestation (which satisfies our phenomenal criterion of temporal
identity), and not to a planet. However, as Kripke often refers to Hesperus as
a planet, I do not believe he is not properly bearing in mind the archaic sense
of the name.[2]
Let us
now look at the most current meaning of the proper name ‘Hesperus’, through
which we recognize that it is actually the second planet of the Solar System,
which so far has been seen as the brightest planet, appearing at dusk in the
direction of the Sun. Let us call it ‘Hesperus-as-the-planet-Venus’ or simply
‘Hesperus(-Venus).’ Here is the identification rule[3]
resulting from the application of MIRf (assuming a C-condition):
IR-‘Hesperus (-Venus)’:
The proper name ‘Hesperus (-Venus)’ refers
properly to an object x belonging to
the class of planets of the Solar System that has been seen at dusk as the
brightest celestial body (after the Moon) in the direction of the Sun
iff
(i-a) x satisfies its localizing rule of
having been to this day the second solar system planet, which has orbited the
Sun between Mercury and the Earth during the time it has been identified as
such and probably has been doing so for some billions of years,
(and
(i-b)
x is a planet with ca. 80% of the mass of the earth and a hot, dense, reflexive,
very acidic, poisonous atmosphere,)
(ii) x
satisfies (i-a) to an overall sufficient extent, and
(iii) x satisfies (i-a) more
than any other planet.
The first thing to be noted concerning this
identification rule is that it is a one-foot rule that can be expressed
as containing a conjunction of
fundamental description-rules in which only the first conjunct plays an
effective role. The localizing description (i-a) is what really counts,
since the non-satisfaction of (i-b) or the satisfaction of (i-b) by another
planet would make no real difference. If ‘Hesperus(-Venus)’ didn’t exist in our
solar system because it had only one planet, this would not be ‘Hesperus’(-Venus),
even if it satisfies (i-b).[4]
Let us
now consider what we should say regarding the proposed case of a wandering
planet that collided with Hesperus(-Venus), hurling it out of the Solar System.
Should we say that the planet thrown out of the Solar System isn’t the planet
Venus anymore, since it no longer satisfies the localizing rule of being the
second planet in the Solar System? Of course not! For according to
IR-‘Hesperus(-Venus)’, this would be the wrong answer. The condition (i-a) does
not say that Hesperus(-Venus) must in the future (or after the time of
its constitution) continue orbiting the Sun as the second planet. It does not
even demand that the planet we now see is still Venus… It could be that
sometime in the future someone will need to add the discovery that after the
year so-and-so some object like Venus was thrown out of the Solar System and
took a very unexpected path through the universe, but this should be before our
discovery of Venus as a planet.
More
can be said about that. One could confuse IR-‘Hesperus(-Evening-Star)’ with
IR-‘Hesperus(-Venus).’ And I guess that Kripke, in his short example
identifying Hesperus with the celestial body visible there, went in that
direction.[5] If
we use the IR-‘Hesperus(-Evening-Star)’ for a situation in which
IR-‘Hesperus(-Venus)’ should be applied, we cannot explain why the planet
Venus, once it disappeared from the Solar System, would continue to be
recognized by us as Venus, for it fails to satisfy both the localizing and
characterizing conditions, contrary to our intuitions. Moreover, it could be
discovered that this replacement occurred one million years ago, leading us to
the conclusion that Hesperus(-Venus) did not belong to the primitive solar
system. Furthermore, if a bright wandering planet had taken the place of our
planet Venus, and we now used the IR-‘Hesperus(-Evening-Star)’ instead of the
IR-‘Hesperus(-Venus)’, we would not be able to explain why the celestial body
visible now is not our Venus anymore. But if we tacitly apply the description
‘the heavenly body appearing in the yonder position in the sky’ to the planet
IR-‘Hesperus(-Venus)’ as if it were
used for the IR-‘Hesperus(-Evening-Star)’, we could then complain that that description
did not account for the replacement of Hesperus. I believe Kripke was a victim
of this kind of confusion.
Finally, we can make another twist in the example. Suppose that in
another possible world near ours, 1 billion years ago a wandering planet
collided with the second planet of the Solar System, a bright evening star like
Venus, breaking it into an immense number of fragments that dissipated into
space together with the wandering planet. In this possible world, it seems
there was a Venus that once was the second planet in the solar system, and
existed from 4.5 billion years to 1 billion years ago. Taking the side of
Kripke, one could object that we now have no description able to explain why we
think we can call that earlier original planet Venus (or Hesperus).
However, in this case it is perfectly possible to say that what we
understand as the planet Venus, satisfying IR-‘Hesperus (-Venus)’, does not actually exist in this possible
world. Even in Kripke’s own terms, we have not found a baptism or even anything
that satisfies an assumed causal condition of the type of Cc.
We can, however, imagine. We can imagine, for
instance, that there was once an advanced civilization in this possible world
that was able to know that Venus (or Hesperus) really existed before the
collision and that it satisfied an IR-‘Hesperus(-Venus)’, to be applied from 4
billion years to almost one billion years ago. For that civilization this planet
satisfied the identification rule derived from MDRF, including some
causal path originating the hypothesis, so that the proper name ‘Venus’ (as
much as Hesperus, since the inhabitants also know that it appeared as the
brightest celestial body in the direction of the Sun at dusk) continues to
refer to the planet based on descriptions, without ceasing to be a rigid
designator. In this case we could even, because
of the similarity of rules,
call this Venus our Hesperus in that possible world, even if it was no longer
the brightest celestial body seen at dusk in the direction of the Sun, but that
could be seen that way more than a billion years ago… This would be their
temporally dystopic Venus and, consequently, also their Hesperus as
Hesperus(-Venus).
Rigidity and rule
changeability
Let us now look at the objection of undesirable
(epistemic) necessity. This objection is based on Kripke’s finding that proper
names, being rigid designators, necessarily apply to their objects. According
to him, because no proper definite description necessarily must apply to its
object, proper names cannot be reduced to descriptions.
Considering that this objection, as we have seen, applies only to a
caricature of descriptivism, it would be even more foolish to want to apply it
to meta-descriptive theory. What necessarily applies, if the object definitely
exists, is in the normal case only the identification rule that we derive from
the application of MIRF to the cluster chosen to name it (i.e., at least one fundamental
description must be sufficiently and predominantly applicable to something).
Thus, as we have also seen, the identification rule for the proper name
‘Aristotle’ can be transformed into a necessarily applicable definite
description, abbreviated as:
DD-‘Aristotle’:
the person who
sufficiently and predominantly satisfies the descriptions of a person born in
Stagira in 384 BC, the son of Amyntas II’s court doctor, who lived in Athens
and died in Chalkis in 322 BC and/or the person who was the author of the
philosophical ideas developed in the Aristotelian opus.
In considering this issue, we should not forget
that descriptions constituting the meaning of a proper name can easily be
altered (when auxiliary), and very often more and more detailed (when
fundamental), or even minimally altered (e.g.
if it turns out that our Aristotle was actually born in 379 BC, and this is
incorporated into the extended identification rule, so that he becomes a person
born in 379 BC who was previously thought to have been born in 383 BC[6]),
but cannot be truly changed in such a way that it loses the possibility of
being applied to one and the same object, differentiating it from all others in
any reasonably conceivable circumstance, not only because it is the very rule
that defines what it is, but also because the existence of its object is no
more than the effective (warranted and continuous) applicability of the
identification rule or, to put it in a more intuitive way, the disposition of
the object to be not only something conceivable, but also something whose
identification rule is effectively applicable to itself.
Suppose that it were discovered that Aristotle wrote nothing,
while his smart students wrote all his works, including the Metaphysics and
the Nicomachean Ethics; to make matters worse we find that he was not
born in Stagira, but years later in Magna Graecia, dying in Athens. These
unlikely discoveries would have to be accompanied by many other changes in our
historical knowledge. Intuitively, we have a different Aristotle. Corroborating
our intuition, MIR-‘Aristotle’ will probably no longer apply. But it won’t make
sense for us to say that MIR-‘Aristotle’ can be altered to identify this new
Aristotle as being the same as our old Aristotle, who no longer exists. The
flexible character of the rules for identifying proper names should not be
confused with the possibility that they can be
altered in a measure that intuitively would destroy their rigidity. Once
its limits of flexibility are exceeded, the identified object will no longer be
the same, since the identification rule will be considered the identifier of
another object. We can summarize the point, adopting the maxim that the
limit of the alteration is the limit of rigidity. Limits of applicability
are blurred, since the tolerance to change depends on a multiplicity of
elements (remember the case of the 52nd regiment of Fot). But even this fact
does not eliminate the rigidity of proper names, just as the sorites paradox does
not eliminate what we see as heaps of sand. Therefore, the objection that the
changeability of our rules of identification destroys rigidity is not
convincing.
A
curious case of the impostor named ‘Arthur Orton’ may be of some help in
clarifying the issue. Born in England and having gone to sea at an early age,
he was certainly identified through rules of localization and characterization
by all who knew him. Years later, when he was in Australia, he read in a
newspaper that an English woman, Lady Tichborne, was searching for her son
Roger Tichborne, who had disappeared in a shipwreck in the Atlantic, and she
refused to believe he had died. Back in England, despite his lack of
resemblance to Roger Tichborne, Orton introduced himself as her son.
Immediately “recognized” by the elderly lady, he lived in her son’s place at
least until the death of Lady Tichborne three years later. After that, however,
the ill-fated Orton was charged with fraud by relatives of Lady Tichborne (who
never believed his claims), convicted, and sentenced to 14 years in jail. Note
that the characterizing description by which we today know Orton is that of a
great impostor. Orton was a person who falsely passed himself off as Lady
Tichborne’s son by the very partial sharing of an identification rule with a
high degree of vagueness in the localizing description and almost no
characterizing description, though reinforced by the English lady’s desire to
believe. That is: rules for identifying the same object that are so vague that
they allow the identification of different objects in different possible
worlds, cannot be considered the same rules, and the identification rule of
Arthur Orton is by far excessively different from the identification rule of
Roger Tichborne. Anyway, during the time of Orton’s life, mainly for
ideological reasons, the point was publicly disputed. If this case shows
anything, it is the difficulty of determining the limits of application of an
identification rule when strong psychological and socio-ideological factors are
involved.
Gödel-Schmidt’s case
Let us now move on to Kripke’s most famous
example. It concerns the description that most people associate with the
logician Kurt Gödel, which is: ‘the man who discovered the incompleteness of
arithmetic’. Kripke asks us to imagine that Gödel did not actually discover the
incompleteness theorems. Suppose, says Kripke, that Gödel had a friend, an unknown
logician named Schmidt, who alone first developed the theorems of
incompleteness in an unpublished article, but died soon after in suspicious
circumstances. Gödel then stole the article and published it under his own
name. Also imagine that, like many other people, all that a certain person,
whom I will call Mary, associates with the name ‘Gödel’ is the description ‘the
discoverer of the incompleteness theorems of arithmetic.’ In this case, Kripke
thinks, according to descriptivism, when Mary learns that it was Schmidt who
discovered the theorems of incompleteness, she must conclude that the name
‘Gödel’ means the same as ‘Schmidt’, that is, Gödel is Schmidt. But that is not
what happens. It remains quite clear, even to Mary herself, that Gödel is Gödel
and not Schmidt.[7]
Disagreeing with Kripke’s analysis, John Searle noted that a person like
Mary will say that Gödel is not Schmidt because she understands by Gödel “the
man my community claims has the name Gödel, or at least those members from whom
I learned that name, assuming that something else is required.”[8] Indeed, if all Mary knows about Gödel is that
he discovered the incompleteness of arithmetic, and if she still thinks this is
enough for his identification, then she does not understand the grammar of
proper names, does not know what a proper name is, and is not able to give it
meaning.
Now,
based on our analysis of the form of the identification rule for proper names
we can explain this something else that according to Searle the person assumes
to be required. Just look at the identification rule generated by MIRF
and the conditions (i-a) and (i-b). This alone leads us to realize that
Kripke’s conclusion is incorrect. After all, it does not take account of the
identification rule that the linguistic community must have for the name
‘Gödel,’ which includes the assumption made by Mary, as a competent speaker of
the language, that she does not know enough to be led to conclude that
the reference has changed its bearer (Mary certainly grasps MIRF,
knowing that she does not know).
To
take a better look at the case, let’s first consider what the identification
rule for the name ‘Gödel’ would be like for the privileged namers of our
linguistic community. From the point of view of these users, there are two
reasons why Gödel should not be identified with Schmidt. First, the description
‘the discoverer of the incompleteness theorems’ is no more than part of the
characterizing description-rule for Gödel. The incompleteness theorems were
only the most important of Gödel’s varied contributions to science. Also, even
without being Schmidt, Gödel was a sufficiently competent logician to work for
many years at Princeton, where he had friends like Albert Einstein. Thus, the
characterizing rule for Gödel would remain partially satisfied by the name
‘Gödel’ (say, 2/3 of it), even if he had not discovered the theorems of
incompleteness considered in the example. Furthermore, the main reason why the
linguistic community will continue to call Gödel ‘Gödel’ is that the localizing
description-rule remains fully satisfied
by Gödel! After all, it remains the same localizing rule for Gödel, having
nothing to do with the unknown localizing rule for Schmidt. Summarizing, here
it is:
Localizing rule: the man who was born in Brünn in 1906, studied at the University
of Vienna, and in 1940 emigrated via the Trans-Siberian railway to the USA,
where he worked as a logician at Princeton University until his death in 1978.
So, after all, the identification rule remains
much better satisfied by Gödel than Schmidt, at least for those who really know
this rule, the name’s privileged users.
Now,
what about Mary? She is not a privileged user. She does not know the localizing
description-rule for Gödel. However, she is assumed to be a competent speaker
of the language, and as such, she knows that she does not know enough of the
identification rule for Gödel. Knowing that she lacks information about the
localizing description and that she does not have sufficient information about
Gödel, she simply suspends her judgment (following SCB-2). After all, her
mastery of the grammar of proper names leads her to conclude that she does not
have enough elements for the assertion that Gödel is Schmidt. Mary is certainly
aware that by associating the name ‘Gödel’ with the description ‘the person who
established the proof of incompleteness in arithmetic’ she knows only part of
Gödel’s characterizing description-rule, which should be more completely known
to certain other members of the linguistic community. But the crucial point is
that, as a competent speaker of the language, Mary knows that since Gödel is the
name of a person, there must also be some description-rule of space-time
localization for Gödel which she does not know – a rule that must be different
from the localizing description-rule for Schmidt, since the information she has
is that Schmidt is another person (Gödel could not kill himself in order to
steal his manuscript). Knowing this and knowing that she does not know the
localizing description rule, she knows that she is not in a position to
conclude that Gödel is Schmidt. However, as privileged speakers, we know that
Gödel cannot be Schmidt. She knows only that she does not know enough about the
name Gödel to reach the conclusion that Gödel is Schmidt.
There
is something odd about it all. As at least part of one of Gödel’s two
fundamental descriptions is satisfied by Schmidt, it can be said that Schmidt
now inherits something of the meaning of the name ‘Gödel,’ even if it does not
gain his reference. And that really happens. Let us say that a logician,
disgusted by news about the theft of the theorems and feeling pity for
Schmidt’s fate, exclaims: “Schmidt was the real Gödel!” This would be a true
statement if understood as hyperbole. And the reason is given by the
meta-descriptive theory which predicts that the name ‘Schmidt’ inherits
something relevant, even if unqualified, from the meaning of the name ‘Gödel’.
There
is, finally, a way to make Gödel really be Schmidt, but while it lets Kripke
have his cake it does not let him eat it. Imagine the unlikely story of a young
man named Schmidt, who for some reason murdered the teenage Gödel and then
assumed his identity. However, Schmidt was not just a cold-blooded murderer,
but also a genius as a logician. He studied at the University of Vienna,
discovered the proof of the incompleteness of arithmetic, married a dancer named
Adele, fled Nazism via the Trans-Siberian railway, and became a professor at
Princeton, where he died in 1978. So, do not be fooled by appearances: that
skinny man standing close to Einstein in the famous photo of both was in fact
the criminal Schmidt! In that case there is no doubt that Gödel is Schmidt. And
the identification rule explains this. He is Schmidt because the predominant
characterizing and localizing description-rules – apart from less relevant
descriptions concerning a remote childhood – are those of Schmidt and not of
the child who was once called Gödel and has long since ceased to exist.
Semi-fictional proper
names
Let us now look at cases involving fictional
proper names. They are important because they illuminate the social character
of the representational contents involved in the reference.
A
special case of ignorance and error (in addition to undesirable necessity)
clarified by Kripke was that of partially
fictional proper names, such as Jonah the biblical Prophet. He
distinguishes such cases from those of purely fictional proper names, such as
Santa Claus. Even though there was a Christian Saint Nicholas in the past, we
know that our Santa Claus has nothing to do with him and that it is a case of a
mere accidental homonym, as much as Napoleon as the name of a historical figure
can be also the name of a pet dog so baptized. But the same does not occur,
thinks Kripke, in Jonah’s case (1980: 93, 97). According to the Bible, Jonah
was a prophet sent by God to the city of Nineveh to convert the pagans.
Irresolute, he tried to flee from God on board a ship that sank in a storm and
was swallowed by a great fish, which saved him from drowning. Of course, no one
believes these descriptions to be literally true. Even so, Bible scholars
believe that there really was a person who originated the story. But if so,
then descriptivism is wrong, for we have no description capable of uniquely
identifying Jonah.[9] And the causal theory must be right, because
the semi-fictional use of the name should really begin on the basis of its
bearer (Kripke 1980: 67-68).
A more
appropriate example of a semi-fictional name is that of Robin Hood (Lycan 1999:
70). Historians believe that the legend of Robin Hood is based on some real
person who lived in the 13th century. Among the candidates, however, are people
who were not poor and not outlaws, did not take from the rich to give to the
poor, did not live in Sherwood Forest, and were not even called Robin Hood!
However, the referent of this partially fictional figure is supposed to be one
and the same person, even though it does not properly satisfy any description.
For a philosopher like Kripke, the reason we are dealing with people who really
existed is that the causal chain leads us to a real person, independently of
any description. Thus, causal-historical theory seems to possess an explanation
for something that descriptive theory is not able to explain, namely,
semi-fictional names.
Before
we respond, it is helpful to remember that there are things that can be
accepted as bearers of a name and others that cannot. Considering the last
case, I give an example of a possible cause of the story of Jonah and the
whale, followed by two examples concerning Robin Hood:
1)
Suppose
that an ancient biblical scribe stepped on a sea urchin and that in the painful
period of convalescence that followed, memories of the accident inspired him to
invent the story of Jonah.
2)
While
crossing a forest at night some 13th-century storyteller was ambushed by an
unknown assailant, who beat him unconscious. This accident moved him to imagine
Robin Hood’s story.
3)
A medieval bard had a brave, faithful dog that
followed him when hunting in Sherwood Forest. This dog had been baptized
‘Robin.’ The dog inspired him to imagine the story of a hero named Robin Hood,
who lived in the forest and robbed the rich to help the poor.
Obviously, no one will say that the sea urchin
is Jonah, that the unknown thief is Robin Hood, or that the dog baptized with
the name ‘Robin’ was Robin Hood, just because they can be considered the
ultimate causes of the subsequent invention of the character. Someone may at
this point object that for Kripke the causal-historical chain needs to be
associated with an act of baptism. But the dog named ‘Robin’ was baptized with
that name. Why, then, if this could be proven, would we reject the conclusion
that Robin Hood is the name of a brave, loyal medieval dog? What is more, this
would not have happened with the name ‘Robin Hood’ in a case where the person
who originated the legend had been baptized, as some suggest, under another
name. As for the name ‘Jonah’, we can still imagine that the ancient scribe
kept the sea urchin in his house and that soon after inventing the story of
Jonah, telling it to his friends, he had taken the sea urchin in his hands and
said, “That is why I baptize you with the name Jonah”. It does not seem that he
would in this way have become able to originate a causal chain capable of
making us apply the name ‘Jonah’ to the sea urchin, for Jonah should have been
a person, while a sea urchin would never have been more than a sea urchin, just
as the dog would never have been more than a dog. From our side, however,
things cannot be that way. MIR rules require proper classification, in the case
excluding sea urchins and dogs. Identification rules for names of humans
resulting from MIRs solve the problem, since they forbid non-human beings from
being eventual recipients of proper names such as those of the biblical Jonah
and the legendary Robin Hood.
Why do
we recognize the causal chain as appropriate for the name bearer in certain
cases and not in others? The answer already adumbrated in a previous chapter is
that the cause we recognize as adequate is one capable of satisfying cognitive
elements that we associate with the name. Therefore, it is more than reasonable
to think that in cases of semi-fictional names such as Jonah and Robin Hood,
even if there is a causal chain, what confers adequacy (even if only in a
considerably vague way) on this causal chain, are descriptively expressible
cognitions from which we have received the stories of Jonah and Robin Hood, and
which suggest where and when they were disseminated and elaborated. Indeed,
from biblical history, we infer something of the localizing description. We
infer something of the disjunctive rule containing the localizing description
of Jonah as a person who lived in
biblical times (between 1,000- and 600-years BC) somewhere in the Middle East,
if not something of the characterizing description, such as that he would have
been a person belonging to the Hebrew
religion. And as for the person propagated in the legend of Robin Hood, we
know that the person must satisfy something of the disjunctive rule containing
the localizing description of having
lived in England around the 12th to 13th centuries AD, if not something of
the characterizing description, something very vague, such as the property of having been a sort of fighter that inspired Middle Ages ballads about him. In
addition, in both cases, vague causal lines may be assumed. According to MIRF,
the admission of grounding by a supposed satisfaction of fundamental
description-rules still too generically known, would be what makes these
semi-fictional names indicators of things allegedly real. The exclusion of such
descriptions let us without any reason to believe that Robin Hood is more than
a purely fictional figure. It is
true that these descriptions are unqualified for the unambiguous identification
of Jonah and Robin Hood, but that is not what we want from them; because after
all, we are not in fact able to identify these people. What they allow us to do
is just to propose plausible hypotheses suggesting that these legendary persons
really existed.
We can
distinguish two elements in the descriptions associated with the names of
semi-fictional persons. The first is (a) the
merely fictional element, consisting of generally colorful and fanciful
descriptions, which were not meant to apply to reality, such as Jonah’s
suffering inside the fish or the fanciful heroic deeds of Robin Hood. The
second is (b) the non-fictional element:
it is based on the very vague localization and/or characterization descriptions
considered above, which are too vague to allow trustworthy real identification.
These vague descriptions should be implied by unknown localizing and
characterizing rules that, we assumed, could be completed if we had sufficient
information about the name’s bearer. What defines what we call a semi-fictional
person is the inclusion of imaginary details, based on unqualified identifying
criteria that originally would have been bequeathed to us. Added to this is the
difficulty that comes from the impossibility of a satisfactory dissociation of
what is a mere product of the imagination from what would be remaining traits
of original identifying criteria.
There
is reason to think, however, that in some cases this distinction could be
clarified, transforming the semi-fictional proper name into a real proper name.
Imagine that scholars discover documents proving that Robin Hood was in fact a
man called Robart Fitz Odo, an outlaw who really lived in Sherwood Forest in
the late 12th century, linking this bearer to medieval ballads... In this case
our presently too vague localizing and characterizing descriptions are filled
with details that are sufficient to allow the identification of our present
alias with its real bearer. However, suppose this is not the case. In this case
we may be faced with the possibility of having examples identical to that of
Santa Claus, whose connection with some original historical person is merely
accidental. There is, consequently, an expected parallel between the
uncertainty associated with semi-fictional names and the insufficiency of the
descriptions that we are able to associate with them.[10]
Elliptical and
incorrect descriptions
The most interesting form of objection of
ignorance and error is one in which Kripke demonstrates that people can usually
make a proper name refer, even when it is associated with only one indefinite
description or an incorrect description. Examples of the first case are the
names ‘Cicero’ and ‘Feynman’, which many have associated only with some
indefinite description such as ‘a famous Roman orator’ for the first and ‘a
great American physicist’ for the second. Only a few people would be able to
explain the political discourses of Cicero or discuss Feynman’s contributions
to micro-physics. (1980: 81-82) Even so, people are able to refer to Cicero and
Feynman using such indefinite descriptions. More than that, people are able to
use proper names referentially, even when they associate blatantly erroneous
descriptions with them. Kripke noted that in his days many Americans associated
the name ‘Einstein’ with the description ‘the inventor of the atomic bomb.’
With this phrase people could already refer to Einstein, he believed, although
the atomic bomb was produced by the scientists of the Manhattan project, which
Einstein never participated in. (1980: 85)
We can
return here to the previously stated response that the description the speaker
has in his mind can be successful in a derived sense of what I called an unqualified
reference, insofar as it satisfies the criterion of success for unqualified
references, which is constituted by the convergence condition (to insert the
name in the right class) and the condition of linguistic competence (to know
RMIF). This criterion is satisfied by all the examples above. Thus,
by associating the names ‘Cicero’ and ‘Feynman’ with indefinite descriptions,
and even associating the name ‘Einstein’ with an erroneous but convergent
description, people already become able to communicate them sufficiently to put
them in the orbit of the reference. That is, they become able use them in
linguistic practices where their role is sufficiently vague and adequate to be
read by other users as also satisfying the conditions SCB-1 and SCB-2, under
the assumption of the existence of privileged namers able to refer
self-sufficiently to their bearers.
For
example, one can use the proper name Feynman to say I have heard he was a
famous physicist who once performed with members of a samba school, in front of
the Copacabana Palace in Rio de Janeiro… without knowing anything about his
contribution to quantum electrodynamics, but already classifying him as a
scientist. This weak form of reference, although clearly unqualified (one will
not identify Feynman in this way), will be, according to the context, accepted
by others, some of them knowing something more about Feynman. For instance,
they will know that he was an American physicist, but always under the
assumption that there are privileged speakers who know the real localizing
(Caltech, USA, etc.) and characterizing (creator of quantum electrodynamics,
etc.) description-rules belonging to the identification rule for Feynman.
Concerning an incorrect definite description such as ‘the inventor of the
atomic bomb’ associated with the proper name ‘Einstein’, the speaker already
knows that the name refers to a scientist and a human being, and so he is
already able to insert the name in non-demanding dialogical circumstances. If
someone says that Einstein invented the atomic bomb, others can understand that
the person is speaking about a famous scientist, maybe also believing that he
invented the atomic bomb, and still some others will be able to understand the
name and make the due correction, under the contextual assumptions that the
speakers wanted to refer to the same famous scientist they referred to with that
name. In all these cases we have enhanced
reference borrowing at work. However, there are limits to this, which are
reached in the case of what I have called failed
(unhappy) references. As I have
already noticed, if a person uses the name ‘Cicero’ to designate a small bird,
if person uses the name ‘Feynman’ to designate a brand of perfume, or
‘Einstein’ to designate a diamond, these uses will be contextually so
inappropriate that no one would say that the speaker is referring to the
expected object. He has failed in referring to the same class of things to
which we refer in using those names, being therefore unable to adequately
insert them in dialogical situations. Not even an unqualified reference is
achieved here.[11]
It
would be possible to object to the descriptive response that the main reason we
remember the physicist Robert Oppenheimer is that he was the person most
responsible for producing the first atomic bomb. Hence, anyone who says
Einstein was the inventor of the atomic bomb is using the characterizing rule
for the name Oppenheimer, which means that he is using a characterization that
should refer to Oppenheimer and not Einstein, which is a mistake...
The
answer to an objection like this, in addition to relying on the success
criterion for unqualified references, depends on what is being emphasized. If
the sentence were “The inventor of the atomic bomb was Einstein”, the speaker
would in fact be corrected with the answer that the person most responsible for
the atomic bomb was the physicist Oppenheimer and not Albert Einstein. However,
when the name ‘Einstein’ is in the usual position of the subject, what the
speaker emphasizes is the rule associated with the auxiliary description ‘the
bearer of the name “Einstein”’, which is assumed as belonging to the
definitional rule IR-‘Einstein.’ The subject’s usual position only becomes
important when the information is more detailed. If a person said, “Einstein
was the excellent theoretical physicist who directed the Manhattan project in
which the first atomic bomb was produced, having been born in 1904 and died of
cancer in New York in 1967”, we would not correct him by saying that Einstein
was not responsible for the atomic bomb; we would say that the proper name
‘Einstein’ is mistakenly being used to refer to Oppenheimer.
Circularity
A final influential argument from Kripke
appeals to circularity: the name ‘Einstein’, he says, cannot be explained by
the description ‘the creator of relativity theory,’ because the name
‘relativity theory’ is explained by the description ‘the theory created by
Einstein’. (1980: 81-82) A similar circularity he points to concerns the
explanation of the proper name ‘Giuseppe Peano’. Many of us associate this name
with the description ‘the discoverer of the axioms of arithmetic’. This is,
however, a mistake. Peano only improved the axioms, adding to his text a note
in which he correctly attributed their discovery to Dedekind. The mistake,
according to Kripke, was perpetuated. One solution, he writes, would be to say
that Peano is ‘the person most experts
refer to as Peano’. But that solution would be circular. How to identify Peano
experts? Suppose they are mathematicians. It may be that most mathematicians
mistakenly associate the name Peano with the description ‘the discoverer of the
axioms of arithmetic.’ We could then suggest recourse to the description ‘the
person most Peano-experts refer to with the name Peano.’ But this solution
would also be circular, because to identify Peano-experts, we already need to
have identified Peano, thus already knowing know who Peano was. (1980: 84-85)[12]
These
circularity objections are clearly fallacious, and I wonder if anyone has ever
taken them very seriously. It is certainly in principle possible that someone
could learn the theory of relativity independently of any reference to
Einstein’s name. This could become usual someday in the future… And as for
Peano, if all you think you know about him is that he was the discoverer of the
axioms of arithmetic, that is a false but convergent description. Now, just type
‘the axioms of arithmetic’ in Google, and soon you will find out that you are
mistaken: Peano’s achievement was an improvement on previous developments. But
because it is convergent, the description already implies true information,
such as the fact that Peano was a famous Italian mathematician. So, realizing
the mistake, you start again by guiding yourself through the new information.
To learn more, you can do research in an encyclopedia or a book on the history
of mathematics. There you will find more detailed information conveyed by
clusters of descriptions of major or lesser importance offered by specialized
mathematicians. In possession of this information and a bibliography, you will
come up with specific texts on Peano written by experts on Peano, and finally,
texts written by Peano himself. More importantly, in this case, you will come
up with biographies of Peano explaining fundamental description-rules, the
localizing and characterizing rules.
This
makes it clear that the whole process is not circular, but arises in what we
could call an ascending swinging movement:
based on the generic preliminary information I1 (in the case derived
from an equivocal description) about x,
we are able to search and find the additional information I2 on x. Based on the set of information {I1,
I2} on x, we become able
to search and find the information I3 about x; and based then on the set of information {I1, I2,
I3}, we come to I4 and so on. Of course, each new body of
information acquired already contains the previous information and the
initials, including corrections of possible errors, which can give some
careless reader the impression of circularity... But that is not enough to make
the process circular, since it is the information added to, and not the
information saved or removed, which helps us acquire more knowledge.
2. Pierre’s puzzle
In 1979 Kripke presented a problem that seemed
to call into question both the descriptivist and the referentialist answers to
the problem of reference (1979: 239-283). Pierre is a Frenchman who as a child
believed in the truth of the sentence “Londres est jolie” (London is
pretty), because he had seen beautiful drawings of the city. As an adult, due
to a strange set of circumstances, he went to England to live in a quite
unattractive part of London, where he stayed without knowing any other part of
the city. After he saw his surroundings and made the acquaintance of his
uneducated neighbors, he came to believe the sentence “London isn’t pretty” was
true. Because he learned English only through direct contact with his
neighbors, he continued to hold both beliefs without realizing their
contradiction. According to Kripke, Pierre is not satisfying what he calls a disquotational
principle, according to which to give one’s assent to a sentence “p”
one needs to believe in the proposition that p. But Pierre agrees with
the sentence “London is not pretty” without giving up his belief in the truth
of the proposition expressed by “Londres est jolie.” And this is
understandably puzzling.
There
are also background worries. If you are an externalist/referentialist and think
that the meaning of a proper name is its reference, then Pierre must know that
either London is not pretty or Londres est jolie, since ‘London’ and ‘Londres’ mean the same thing.
Considering that the causal-historical origins of ‘Londres’ and ‘London’ are the same, it is difficult for an
externalist to figure out why Pierre is unable to realize that he is
attributing contradictory predicates to the same reference.
The
meta-descriptive explanation of the proper name’s reference mechanism easily
solves the “Pierre puzzle”. He somehow doesn’t know that ‘Londres’
refers to the same city as ‘London’. Of ‘Londres’ he has only the vague
identifying description (i-a) “Londres est un village” (London is a
town), and the auxiliary description inscribed in (i-b) “Londres est jolie”,
which allows a rather unqualified reference to the city of London. But
regarding the word ‘London’ (we might suppose) he knows something of the localizing
description (ii-a) ‘A city located on the banks of the River Thames in England’
and something of the characterizing description (ii-b) ‘London is the capital
of the United Kingdom’, in addition to knowledge of the faulty auxiliary
description, (ii-c) ‘London is an ugly city’. Since the overly vague
identifying descriptions (i-a), together with the auxiliary description
inscribed in (i-b), and the identifying descriptions constituting group (ii),
do not have enough in common to identify the same city among many others,
Pierre cannot associate them, remaining unable to realize that descriptions of
group (i) and descriptions of group (ii) refer to the same city. Frege, as we
learned from his comments on Dr. Gustav Lauben in chapter I, would already have
known how to solve this “puzzle” in 1918. Finally, regarding the disquotational
principle, ‘Londres’ is
associated with descriptions (i-a) and (i-b), while ‘London’ is associated with
the descriptions (ii-a), (ii-b), and (ii-c), which makes the propositional
contents “Londres est jolie” and “London is pretty” different in their
constituents, justifying differences in beliefs and assents.[13]
A
further problem is how we treat the concept of proposition regarding the
disquotational principle. If the proposition is seen from an externalist
viewpoint, as a singular Russellian proposition, I have nothing to say about
Pierre’s puzzle. But if the proposition is treated in a neo-Fregean way, an
internal cognitive content of thought that could be equated with a kind of
Wittgensteinian verifiability rule, requiring the satisfaction of a variety of
criteria, then we can say that for Pierre “Londres
est jolie” and “London is pretty” have different constitutive mental
tropical belief-properties, which dissolves their supposed contradictoriness.
3. Answering
Donnellan’s counterexamples
In addition to Kripke’s objections, we need to
address some counterexamples suggested by Keith Donnellan in his important 1970
article, where he defended a causal-historical theory similar to Kripke’s.
These insightful counterexamples are dialectically fruitful for further
developing some aspects of the neo-descriptivist view explained in this book.
Thales, the well-digger
The most interesting counterexample concerns
the philosopher Thales, about whom we know little more than the definite
description ‘the ancient Milesian philosopher who proclaimed that everything is
water’. Imagine now that our sources, Aristotle and Herodotus, were
misinformed, and that Thales was just a world-weary well-digger who, exhausted
by his hard labor, exclaimed, “I wish everything were water so I wouldn’t have
to dig these damn wells!” (1972: 374) Suppose that with little knowledge of the
local dialect, a traveler mistakenly understood this as the profound insight of
a great philosopher concerning the ultimate nature of reality. This erroneous
interpretation was perpetuated by Herodotus and Aristotle, who eventually
bequeathed it to the philosophical tradition. Apart from that, Donnellan
imagines that in more ancient times there was a hermit who never shared his
ideas, but who really claimed everything is water. According to him, a
descriptivist should say that the name ‘Thales’ really refers to this hermit,
for he was the true bearer of the definite description ‘the philosopher who
said that everything is water.’ But that is not what would in fact happen. Our
tendency, Donnellan writes, would be to think that with the name ‘Thales’ we
are not referring to the hermit, but to the well-digger, although he does not
satisfy our description. We make references, he suggests, due to some
causal-historical connection between the referent and the speech act (1972:
377). That is, what really counts for the reference of a proper name is the
causal-historical chain that would begin with some first linguistic tag of
Thales, even if this reference was later associated with erroneous
descriptions. In favor of this conclusion is the fact that there is no causal
relationship between our use of the name ‘Thales’ and the hermit. Suppose the
definite description ‘the philosopher who said the world is made of water’ were
remembered by successive generations of philosophers as related to the name
‘Thales’. The thoughts of the hermit (perhaps never communicated to anyone)
cannot make this proper name refer to him, simply because a causal-historical
relationship is lacking.
Let us
first see how John Searle answered this counterexample. He began by
relativizing Donnellan’s conclusion. He does this by devising a version of the
example that seems to contradict the causal-historical view. Suppose that
Herodotus had a well where a frog was able to emit sounds resembling
“Everything is water”, and the frog belonged to a species called ‘Thales’. He
could have said, “Thales said that everything is water,” himself giving rise to
the misunderstanding. But if the causal-historical theory is correct, once
enlightened about this fact, we should conclude that the name ‘Thales’ refers
to the frog in Herodotus’s well, which is certainly not the case. What we would
conclude, of course, is that Thales never existed. It seems, therefore, that
causal origin alone isn’t enough. (Searle 1983: 252-253)
What
Searle notes we have already considered, since the identification rule for
Thales must demand that he belongs to a class G of human beings, and not that
of talking frogs. However, what I wish to note here is that our
metadescriptivism is not only able to produce a more complete response to
Donnellan’s counterexample, but a response that enriches our own proposal. This
can be made by the introduction of descriptions belonging to what in the
previous chapter we called a causal record. We can understand these as
descriptions of those cognitively charged nodal events outlined by
causal-historical chains. Searle seemed to have realized this when he observed
that:
When we say, “Thales was the Greek philosopher
who maintained that everything is water”, we don’t just mean that anyone maintained that everything is
water, we mean the person who was known to other Greek philosophers as arguing
that everything is water, who was referred to in his time or subsequently by
some Greek predecessor with the name ‘Thales’, whose works and ideas came to us
posthumously through the writings of other authors and so on (1983: 253).[14]
Something remarkable about Thales is that his
importance lies largely in his specific place in the history of Western
philosophy, which was that of its origin. Because of the resulting long
causal-chains and stories, what justifies the application of the name has
largely been the belief in what was said by a great variety of descriptions
presented by other philosophers that demonstrate his place, presence, and
influence as the first Greek thinker to be properly called a philosopher.[15]
After all, if any contemporary philosopher suggested that everything is
permeated by water, this statement would be considered simply ridiculous. As a
result, if we could discover that Thales was just a well-digger, we would tend
to hesitate between conceding that he really was a well-digger and (as Searle
also noted) deciding that the philosopher ‘Thales’ simply never existed.
It is
interesting in the case of Thales to consider all the real historical data,
since they are few and allow us to have a good grasp of the concrete path
towards reference. When we examine the data, we see that even if we cannot
cognitively rescue supposed causal-historical chains, we can cognitively
salvage important traits left behind by causal chains that are constitutive
elements of a causal record. That is, we can recover important, historically
remembered space-time events showing nodal points of causal chains, mainly
through representational repetitive links that occurred in the minds of some
people and are capable of being linguistically manifested, not necessarily
dependent on their factual truth. In Thales’ case, there are well-known descriptions,
such as that he was ‘the person secondhand identified by Aristotle in the
doxography as the pre-Socratic philosopher who stated that water is the
principle that originated the world and permeates everything, and that all
things are full of gods...’ (Kirk & Haven 1995: 89-97) Such descriptions
allow us to rescue cognitively charged nodal points of the causal-historical
chain concerning representations that must have occurred in the minds of
Aristotle, Herodotus, Simplicius, Diogenes Laertius, Proclus...[16]
After all, Thales left no writings, and everything we know of him and his
thoughts comes from what later philosophers said about him. In this special
case, the importance of these historical elements is so great that they have
become part of a more complete characterization rule of ‘Thales’ – the
philosopher. This description-rule can be briefly summarized as:
Characterizing description-rule: The philosopher who left behind no writings,
but was secondhand referred to in the doxography written by Aristotle as having
been the first Greek philosopher, who in his cosmology stated that the earth rests
on water, being water the principle that originated the world and that
permeates everything, that all things in sum are interpenetrated by some life
principle, that all things are full of gods… He was also an astronomer who once
predicted the year of a solar eclipse, according to Herodotus, Diogenes
Laertius, and Dercyllides… and a geometer, who, according to Diogenes Laertius,
based on Hieronymus, measured the pyramids by their shadows. (See Kirk &
Raven 1995: 81-97)
Even if this much more impressive and plausible
characterizing description were satisfied by the well-digger, it is crucial to
note that we are informed about him by means of the quotations in the
doxography by Aristotle, Herodotus, Diogenes Laertius, and Deircyllides. This
fact would remain true even if it were not the case that Thales was the first
philosopher who said that water is the principle that originates and permeates
the world, etc. He continues to satisfy the definite description of his having
been the philosopher alluded to by doxographers as having said
certain things. With such remarks, I need to call attention not only to the
much more complex real characterizing description, but mainly to the fact that
what counts most is that the voices of the doxographers that have given us
these descriptions are also included as parts of them. Even if it could be
discovered that the content of these descriptions has a considerable degree of
falsity, they still concern the person referred to by doxographers and not to
some other person who lived in remote a time, such as Donnellan’s hermit philosopher,
even if they were the perfect truth-bearers of all these descriptive contents.
Even if he existed, he could not be our Thales because he is not mentioned in
the doxography.
Furthermore, we should add to this the condition requiring the
satisfaction of the spatio-temporal location and career summarized as the
following:
Localizing description-rule: The person who, according to the doxography
from Diogenes Laertius, was born in 640 BC and died on 548-545 BC. According to
Laertius and Herodotus, Thales was a Milesian, and Laertius wrote that he was
the son of Examynes and Cleobuline. According to Laertius and Proclus, he
visited Egypt, the traditional fountainhead of Greek science, at some point in
his life. (See Kirk & Raven 1995: 76-80)
The addition of this new fundamental disjunct
is decisive since according to it the Milesian philosopher Thales satisfies the
doxographic information much better than Donnellan’s hermit or any other
causal-historical philosophical invention.
We can
now, with great certainty continue to say we know the name ‘Thales’ refers to
our Thales, even if the doxographers were wrong about his profession and he was
only a Milesian well-digger who made no contributions to philosophy. Thales
satisfies sufficiently and more than any other person his disjunctive rule and,
therefore, his identification rule, so he remains our Thales. Likewise,
Donnellan’s hermit satisfies only very little of the characterizing condition B
(he said that all is water), though not satisfying the essential condition of
having said something in particular as the result of the work of the
doxographers and nothing of the localizing condition A (the hermit lived
somewhere in a remote time), so the hermit cannot be our Thales.
The
assumption of the causal record as part of the rule of characterization in the
above discussed case is still of fundamental importance, since in a sense it
allows cognitive expressions of nodal points leaved by external
causal-historical chains to participate in the identification. To highlight its
importance, it is enough to imagine that the hermit considered by Donnellan, in
addition to having claimed that everything is water, satisfied the localizing
condition for Thales of having lived between 624 and 548-50 BC, been born and
died in Miletus and visited Egypt. Let us also imagine we discover that Thales
the well-digger lived in the same period in Miletus, although he never visited
Egypt or was a philosopher. In this case, it may be objected that the hermit
satisfies the localization rule, and even the characterizing rule better than
Thales. Even so, it seems to us that the hermit could not have been Thales. And
this is so insofar as the hermit does not satisfy the expected
causal-historical nodes expressed by the causal record produced by the
doxographers and thus incorporated into the characterizing rule. If, on the
other hand, the name ‘Thales’ were not so strongly linked to the causal record,
or if it is discovered that the hermit had enough participation in it, we would
have no difficulty in identifying Thales with the hermit. Finally, of course,
by changing the information, we can make the balance shift to either side or
even to the conclusion that Thales did not exist.
The philosopher J. L.
Aston-Martin
The second counterexample is about a student at
a party who was talking to a person he mistakenly believed was a famous
philosopher, J. L. Aston-Martin, author of “Other Bodies.” Although the person
shared the name Aston-Martin, he only impersonated the philosopher. Donnellan
(1962: 64) notes that the statement (a) “Last night I spoke to Aston-Martin” is
false, as it associates the name ‘Aston-Martin’ with the following description:
D1:
the philosopher and author of “Other Bodies,”
while the statements (b) “At the end of the
party Robinson stumbled on Aston-Martin’s feet and fell flat on his face” and
(c) “I was almost the last to leave, only Aston-Martin and Robinson, who was
still out cold, were left,” are true, as they are associated with the
description
D2:
the man named ‘Aston-Martin’ whom I met at the party.
The objection is that cluster theory does not
explain this change: for the student in (a) and (b) and (c) the name
Aston-Martin should be associated with the same cluster of descriptions that
includes ‘the author of “Other Bodies”.’
This
objection assumes that the application of the descriptions to the cluster is a
question of all or nothing and that they cannot be decoupled. In the present
case its is effectively answered by applying to proper names a distinction that
recalls that introduced by Donnellan himself between attributive and referential
uses of definite descriptions. In the case of definite descriptions, the
attributive usage is the one most properly linked to the content of the
description, while the referential use is linked to the indexical function
associated with the description. In the case of the proper name, the equivalent
of the attributive use is one based on the descriptions that express its identification
rule. This explains the meaning given to the name ‘Aston-Martin’ in statement
(a) because the description D1, ‘the philosopher and author of “Other Bodies”,’
expresses a characterizing dimension of the object’s identification rule, which
is known by the student but that isn’t satisfied by the statement (a), since he
meant that the previous night he had spoken with the philosopher Aston-Martin,
which makes it false (if someone is mistakenly confused with another because of
homonymity this does not mean that the speaker is committed to apply correctly
the few descriptions he knows belonging to the identification rule). Now, in cases
like those of the referential use, the indexical element and the context play a
decisive role, so that the proper identification rule no longer matters. This
explains the meaning of the name ‘Aston-Martin’ in cases (b) and (c). Here what
matters is the adventitious description D2, in place of which the
proper name appears. As such, it is provisional and dependent on the
conversational situation in which it was acquired. The speaker’s task in these
cases is only to identify a certain participant at the party using the name by
which he was called, and for this intent, it no longer matters whether this
name is part of the right identification rule of this or that person.
Summarizing: As for statement (a), it is really associated with the
characterizing description D1, ‘the philosopher author of ‘Other Bodies,’
though not applicable to the homonymous person whom the student met at a party
and confused with the philosopher. It was only the case of someone with unqualified
knowledge of a proper name applying it erroneously to the wrong person. On the
other hand, correctly applying statements (b) and (c) goes hand in hand with
the also adventitious character of the auxiliary description D2. If they do not
pick out the philosopher Aston-Martin, this is in such cases indifferent.
Inverted squares
Another of Donnellan’s counterexamples is that
of a person A who, wearing special glasses, identifies two identical squares on
a screen, one placed directly above the other (1972: 368-370). The square on
top is called Alpha, the square underneath is called Beta. The only description
provided for the Alpha square is:
(a)
the square that is on top.
It turns out that, without the person who is
wearing the glasses knowing this, her glasses reverse the positions of the
squares, so that Alpha square is underneath. But it is intuitive that the
person is not referring to the Beta square on the top. Donnellan thinks he has
thus demonstrated that the square to which the person really refers is the
Alpha square (the one below), even if the word is associated with the erroneous
description (a).
The
answer is not difficult. The person really refers to the Alpha square. But she
does that because, although associating Alpha with an erroneous description, it
is a convergent description (it is surely one of both squares). This
description should be completed as:
(b)
The square [which A sees as the Alpha
square] is on top
This correction, in turn, is part of the
true identifying description of the Alpha square, which is:
(c): The square [which A sees as the Alpha square] on top...
that is in fact underneath, since A is wearing glasses that reverse the
positions of the images.
Observer A is unaware that the description (a)
is part of the most complete identifying description (c). But this fact and
this last description are things known to other language users – the
sufficiently informed users – whom we can call B. These privileged namers will
say that A refers to the Alpha square, which is underneath, by having the
information given by description (c), which expresses the most complete mode of
presentation of the object, the most complete identification rule (which
characterizes Alpha as a square seen by the person as on top and locates it as
the square that is below).
Suitable evidence for what I am saying is the fact that once possessing
the information offered by the informed users B, which includes description
(c), person A will agree to review description (a) as part of (b), referring
only to how A sees Alpha, which in turn is part of description (c). Although
literally false, description (a) is useful to the reference, because it can be
reinterpreted as part of the correct identifying description-rule.
“Tom is a nice person”
One last counterexample offered by Donnellan is
that of a child who has already gone to bed and who is awakened briefly by his
parents (1972: 364). A friend of the parents named Tom has come over
unexpectedly for a visit and asked to meet their youngest son, whom he does not
yet know. The mother wakes the child and tells him: “This is Tom.” Tom says:
“Hi, youngster!”; the little boy says “hello” and goes back to sleep. The next
day the child wakes up and all he can say about Tom is that he is ‘a nice person.’
The child doesn’t even remember being awakened the night before. But he refers
to Tom without the aid of definite descriptions. W. G. Lycan, who emphasized
this counterexample, believes this is solid evidence for the causal theory of
names: the child is able to refer to Tom only through a demonstrative causal
transfer. (1999: 46-7; 1976: 376).
Taking
into consideration this example, Brian Loar noted that it may well be that in
this case language deceives us, as in the case where a person realizes that
guests are absent for dinner but does not remember who; we are entitled to say
that the person refers to those who did not attend. However, the word ‘refers’
does not seem to be used here in the appropriate sense. Indeed, if the child
remembers nothing when saying that Tom is nice, we cannot even distinguish his
uttering this from the mere expression of his willingness to please his
parents. (1976: 367)
My own
answer depends on a precise consideration of the child’s words. It can be that
the child says “Tom is a nice person” only to please his parents, though he
does not remember anything from the previous night. In this case, the child is
lying; he is just saying what his parents want him to say, and there can be no
reference. We can assume, however, that the child has some kind of semantic
cognition, some vague memory of his encounter with Tom, which could justify his
saying that Tom is nice. In this case, there is indeed a convergent semantic-cognitive
element, which allows us to conclude that the child is able to introduce the
word into the dialogical situation, referring to a person. However, this would
be a case of unqualified reference, of reference borrowing. As everyone knows
which person the child means, the example can produce the false impression that
he is able to make a complete identifying reference to Tom. But this is an
illusion. He does not know who Tom is and could not recognize him if he met him
on the street. If he said ‘Tom is a nice person’ to strangers who were unaware
of the circumstances, the memory of the testimony being lost, no one would be
able to tell us who Tom is. Therefore, the utterance does not refer effectively
to Tom for the child who is speaking, but rather for the only interpreters able
to complete the reference, who in this case are the child’s parents. After all,
they not only remember that the child was introduced to Tom and assume that it
is because of this that he now says that Tom is nice, but they are also those
who really know who Tom is and are able to re-identify the person to whom the
words refer. Indeed, the child’s parents are privileged speakers who know in a
self-sufficient way the identification rule for the name ‘Tom,’ which can be
descriptive of his appearance, his psychological traits, what he does, where he
lives, and his origins. They also know relevant auxiliary descriptions
concerning Tom’s family relationships. As the child’s speech takes place in a
public space where these privileged interpreters are present, the child’s
intention to refer to a sympathetic person with whom he was in contact is
complemented by the referential identification of this person. This is made by
the other participants in the conversational situation, leading us to the
illusion that the child produced something more than a mere gesture towards the
reference.
4. Devitt’s objection
of epistemic magic
There is, finally, a generic objection raised
by externalist philosophers such as Michael Devitt, according to which there is
something magical in descriptivism. According to this objection, descriptivism
attributes an extraordinary property to the mind, which is the ability to allow
its contents to relate as if by magic to things outside it. As Devitt writes in
his criticism of Searle:
How could something inside the head determine
the reference, which is a relationship with particular things outside of the
head? ... to assume that one’s thought can reach particular objects outside the
mind is to sustain magical theories of reference and intentionality. (1990: 83)
(...) How can something inside the head refer to something outside the head?
Searle sees no problem: it just happens. That’s the real magic. (1990: 91)
Certainly, a commonsense cognitivist will
insist that the thesis that words are bound to objects by means of ideas,
representations, instantiated conceptual or criterial rules, is perfectly
natural and intuitive. However, as philosophers, we are here almost inevitably
led to the traditional and almost intractable problem of perception, that is,
the problem of knowing how we can go beyond the veil of sensations since it
seems all that can immediately be given to experience are sensory impressions
(sense data).[17] Here there is for many a mystery that requires
magic to be solved. But the magic with which through sensory impressions we can
have access to an outside physical world, we have reasons to guess, is merely
apparent. First because it is nowadays very difficult to deny that internal
sense impressions are at least indispensable vehicles of all perception[18].
At least to me it seems that we use these sensory impressions as something
that, when accompanied by joint
satisfaction of criteria for external reality, such as maximum sensory intensity, independence of the will, possible
intersubjectivity, the following of natural laws… naturally allows us to
reinterpret these sensory impressions as similes of properties belonging to
external reality. This happens simply because external reality can in a sense
be defined as all that conjunctively
satisfies criteria like these.[19]
Much
more extreme, however, seems to me the referentialist sorcery of
causal-externalism, according to which in some way words themselves should have
the power to reach objects in the external world to refer to them. It is true
that Devitt advocates a nuanced form of causalism, according to which partially
cognitive causal networks are responsible for references (1981). Yet, if he
does not want to fall into cognitivism and hence into descriptivism, he will
need to ignore the explanatory force originated from the cognitive content of
these cognitions. However, such an admission makes the objection return with
all its strength: how could external causal chains and the derived spelling of
words, independently of their relationship with cognitive content, be able to
explain our reference to the external objects that originated them? This makes
us suspect that Devitt’s considerations can be explained psychologically as an
unconscious projection of the denial of the very problem created by causalism
in the enemy field of cognitivism.
5. Russellian
reformulation
Meta-identification rules allow a systematic
application of description theory methods to the meta-descriptive theory of
proper names, which can help us reach the goal of displaying the logical
structure of the identification rule. Consider, for example, the sentence (i)
“Aristotle had to leave Athens.” Bearing in mind the application of MIRp in
formulating the identificatio rule for the name ‘Aristotle,’ we can paraphrase
(i) through the method proposed by Russell in his theory of descriptions as:
1.
There is at
least one human being x who
sufficiently satisfies the condition of having been born in Stagira in 384 BC,
lived in Athens and died in Chalkis in 322 BC and/or the condition of having
been the philosopher who created the great doctrines explained in the
Aristotelian opus,
2.
There is
precisely one human being x who
satisfies (1),
3.
This x is called ‘Aristotle’ and,
4.
had to leave Athens.
Condition (1) includes the idea of sufficiency,
condition (2) demands uniqueness, and condition (3) demands that x is
named ‘Aristotle’, while (4) adds the predicate that appears in (i). To
formulate the sentence (i) symbolically, we establish the predicates N = ‘...
is the person named “Aristotle”’, A = ‘... satisfies (within a whole with B)
with sufficiency the condition of having been born in Stagira in 384 BC, lived
in Athens and… died in Chalkis in 322 BC’ (localizing description-rule), B =
‘... satisfies (within a whole with A) with sufficiency the condition of having
been the author of the great doctrines of the Aristotelian corpus’
(characterizing description-rule), and T = ‘... had to leave Athens.’ In this
way, the statement “Aristotle had to leave Athens” can then be formalized as:
∃x [(Ax ˅ Bx) & (y) ((Ay ˅ By) → y
= x) Nx & Tx]
With this, existence, uniqueness, and
sufficiency are required in association with predicates expressing identifying
properties. What this short comment suggests is that the true work of
description theory concerning proper names is to display the essential formal
structure of its identification rules.[20]
6. Proper names and the
“necessary a posteriori”
The considerations we have just discussed lead
us to one last question, concerning the epistemic status of identities between
proper names. According to Kripke, because proper names are rigid designators
two proper names with the same reference must apply to the same object in any
possible world where this object exists. Therefore, even though identity
sentences connecting proper names can be a
posteriori, that is, learned from sensory experience, they are necessary. Hence a statement like
“Hesperus is Phosphorus” is, according to Kripke, necessary a posteriori.
However, the conclusion that there are necessary a posteriori propositions has
been considered controversial by more than one philosopher. After all, how
is it possible that a proposition we know to be true in all possible worlds
would depend on experience to be seen as true?
To
begin with, consider the statement “Cicero is Tullius.” The identifying
description-rule for the proper name ‘Marcus Tullius Cicero’ can be abbreviated
as:
IR-‘Marcus Tullius Cicero’
The proper name ‘Marcus Tullius Cicero’ – as
well as, consequently, its name-mark’s constituents ‘Marcus,’ ‘Tullius’ and
‘Cicero’ – refer to an object x belonging to the class of human beings iff sufficiently and more than any other
candidate, x was born in Arpino in 106 BC, lived in Rome and died in
Formia in 43 BC and/or x was a Roman
skeptic philosopher, orator, lawyer and politician, the senator who wrote the Catiline
Orations.
Considered in view of this intended sense, the
statement “Tullius is Cicero” is obviously necessary and a priori,
because it is analytical in the sense of stating the conventional identity
among parts of a proper name’s phonetic and orthographic symbols: “‘Marcus
Tullius Cicero’ = ‘Marcus’ = ‘Tullius’ = ‘Cicero’”. Omitting supposed
variations of meaning between the different name-marks, a person who does not
know that Tullius is Cicero is like a person who does not know that in German,
“ß is ss”. That is: her ignorance is like not
knowing the identities between conventional equivalent phonetic and
orthographic symbols in a name.
Other
examples are more complex. Consider the identity sentence “Mary Ann Evans is
George Eliot”. Since George Eliot was a pseudonym of the writer Mary Ann Evans,
we can state for the last name the following general identification rule:
IR-‘Mary Ann Evans’
The proper name ‘Mary Ann Evans,’ like her
pseudonym ‘George Eliot,’ refers to an object x belonging to the class
of human beings. Object x is
sufficiently and more than any other candidate the origin of our consciousness
that x is a woman who was born in Nuneaton in 1819, lived much of her
life in London and died in Chelsea in 1880, and/or she was perhaps the greatest
female English novelist, author of classics such as Adam Bede and Middlemarch, married twice and
possessed such and such personality traits.
We can consider here three groups of speakers:
(i)
the group of those who knew the young Mary Ann Evans, such as her relatives and
childhood friends before her career as a novelist,
(ii)
the group of those who knew only ‘George Eliot,’ such as people who read Adam
Bede at the time of its publication, when the author’s real name was not
yet public knowledge,
(iii)
those (privileged namers) who not only knew Mary Ann Evans, but also always
knew that George Eliot was a pseudonym of Mary Ann Evans.
The
latter knew the general rule IR-‘Mary Ann Evans’ very well. In this intentional
sense, well known by the two husbands of Mary Ann Evans, by some family
members, and by herself, “George Eliot is (the same as) Mary Ann Evans” can be
considered a necessary and a priori identity statement. But it
does not need to be so. What the people in the group (ii) have in mind with the
identification rule for George Eliot could be: ‘the author of Adam Bede,
Middlemarch, and other classics of English literature,’ added to some
vague indications about the time and place in which that author lived. Finally,
some people in the group (i) have in mind the identification rule of Mary Ann
Evans such as ‘the young woman with such and such personality traits, daughter
of Robert Evans, born in Nuneaton in 1819...’ The localization and
characterization rules used by these three groups of speakers cannot contradict
each other, since speakers from groups (i) and (ii) know only part of a larger identification
rule (iii), which they can learn by acquiring information. For that reason, the
identity statement “George Eliot is (the same as) Mary Ann Evans” is for them contingent and a posteriori. The statement is a posteriori in the sense
that it depends on the learning of information concerning what we could call
contingent sub-facts, such as the sub-fact that Mary Ann Evans made the
decision to use a certain literary pseudonym, which would be a sub-fact of the
fact that George Eliot is Mary Ann Evans. (Costa 2018: 245-259)
It should be noted that the members of the
group (iii) can also think of George Eliot’s identity with Mary Ann Evans in the second way,
in terms of the person’s modes of presentation, for example, when explaining
this identity to someone else. In this case, they are considering the partial
rules for each name, wanting to show that they are constitutive parts of Mary
Ann Evans’s complete identification rule, which makes the utterance of “George
Eliot is (the same as) Mary Ann Evans” for them necessary a priori,
concerning the whole fact that they are numerically the same person. At the
same time, they are explaining the differences between George Eliot and Mary
Ann Evans. In a sense they are showing in what aspects “George Eliot isn’t (the
same as) Mary Ann Evans”, and this difference is not a priori; it is contingent
a posteriori, since concerning contingently established sub-facts regarding
a single person, which are qualitatively different. Hence, the statement
“George Eliot is Mary Ann Evans” is ambiguous, and may mean one or two or both,
depending on the context.
Finally, something similar can be said of the well-known identity
statement “Hesperus is (the same as) Phosphorus.” The identification rule for
Venus is today something like the following one-foot identification rule, which
in a descriptive mode can be abbreviated as:
IR-‘Venus’
The proper name ‘Venus’ – as well as the names
‘Phosphorus’ (emphasizing the ‘Morning Star’) and ‘Hesperus’ (emphasizing the
‘Evening Star’) – refers to the planet of our solar system that was discovered
as satisfying sufficiently and more than any other the localizing condition of
being the second planet in the solar system, situated between the Earth and
Mercury…
Notice that, as already considered, one cannot
add a characterizing description-rule ‘and/or a planet almost the same size as
the earth…’ as a disjunct, since any other planet with its characteristics
could sufficiently satisfy the identification rule. Thus, if there were only
one planet in the solar system and this planet had almost the same size as the
earth, this would be Venus. Be that as it may, it is not necessary to consider
differences between Hesperus and Phosphorus, which makes “Hesperus is
Phosphorus” a necessary and a priori
statement, since it derives from the rule.
But we
can also consider the identity in question, as Frege did, as an astronomical
discovery. In this case, what we are doing is associating the name ‘Hesperus’
with the auxiliary description ‘the brightest celestial body usually seen at
dusk in the direction of the Sun’ and associating ‘Phosphorus’ with the
auxiliary description ‘the brightest celestial body usually seen at dawn in the
direction of the Sun.’ Each of these descriptions simply refers to the celestial
body we see in the sky at a certain time and place and nothing more. What the
identity phrase does is to state that, in addition, these two modes of
presentation are modes of presentation of the same object, that is, each of
these rules of identification is part
of the auxiliary rules belonging to the general identification rule for Venus.
As we know, it was empirically discovered by Babylonian astronomers that these
two rules of identification for different presentations of objects could be
understood as able to be associated with a single more general identification
rule for a single object, so that from such a perspective, “Hesperus is
Phosphorus” expresses an a posteriori and contingent truth (which
contains the idea that Hesperus’ mode of presentation is not the same as that
of Phosphorus), because it might not have been so.
If there is no disambiguating context, the
statement “Hesperus is Phosphorus” retains its semantic ambiguity and can be
interpreted as meaning: “(Hesperus)-Venus = (≠) (Phosphorus)-Venus”,
emphasizing the identity, and (ii) “Hesperus-(Venus) ≠ (=) Phosphorus-(Venus)”,
emphasizing the difference. This is what we might call the identity in
difference. Or, if one wishes, here there are two thoughts intertwined with
each other: one about the difference in the identity, the other about the
identity in the difference. Under the assumptions of this view, what a
philosopher like Kripke more often did was to confuse these two ways of
understanding identity statements between newly presented proper names,
ignoring contextual deviations that could disambiguate them. He confused the
two forms of understanding by joining the necessity of the identity-thought
that makes it conventionally understood as analytic (i.e., necessary
and a priori, constituted by a rule that verifies identity) with the a
posteriori character of the difference-thought, understood as synthetic (i.e.,
contingent and a posteriori),
which aims to reveal the modes of presentation (appearances) of different
objects of appearance in order to inform us that such objects of appearance
(like the Morning Star and the Evening Star) are themselves results of the
different modes of presentation of the same more fundamental object (Venus).
Finally, it is interesting to observe the
curious coincidence between these results, which are derived from our analysis of the identification
rules of proper names, and the results of the analysis of identity statements
from the methodologically different perspective of semantic two-dimensionalism.
This coincidence does not seem to be causal.[21]
7. Conclusion
As is common in philosophy, whenever we believe
we have solved a problem, new ones are lying in wait for us around the next
corner. However, a little reflection on the arguments discussed in this and the
preceding chapter suggests that the proposed path is by far the most feasible.
Suppose, for example, that MIRF is implemented in a computer
program, and that proper names are introduced into it along with the necessary
information about its fundamental descriptions, associated auxiliary
descriptions, causal records, etc. In this case, it seems quite conceivable
that the computer will be able to tell us with a reasonable margin of error
whether the proper name is applicable, provided that it was supplied with the
correct information. But the same is far from conceivable to us, when we think
of traditional descriptivist theories, and even less regarding the
causal-historical view considered in this book.
It is
certain that the proposed theory, although possessing greater explanatory
power, is inevitably more complex. But this is in fact a small price to pay for
the suitability, considering that the advantages of simplicity lie in the
foundations of a theory, not in its developments. General relativity theory is
based on an amazingly simple principle of equivalence, though it is
exceptionally complex in its mathematical proofs. As in natural science,
simplicity of developments and applications is the least one can expect from
more mature theories. It is not our fault that reality – including the reality
of our linguistic mechanisms of reference – is much more complex than it
appears at first glance.
Finally, it is said that when philosophy comes to a feasible result, it
gives place to science. Indeed, though being aware that there must be many
unforeseen difficulties, my hope concerning the theory presented in this book
is that it outlines the beginnings of a properly scientific understanding of
how proper names really work.[22]
[1] It appears in the direction of the
Sun because it is an inner planet with an orbit closer to the Sun than the
Earth’s.
[2] I think this example was initially
suggested by Ruth Barcan Marcus using the name ‘Venus’ at a conference, which
possibly was assisted by Kripke. But Kripke gave the idea a more sophisticated
turn. (See Marcus 1993: 11)
[3] For considerations on the
identification rule for the name ‘Venus’, see Ch. III, sec. 3.
[4] See the final remark on section 3
of the last chapter concerning one-foot rules.
[5] This would be an example, among
many others, of the deep confusion among linguistic practices identified by
Wittgenstein as common in metaphysics, requiring philosophical therapy.
[6] One could ask: what about those
possible worlds where Aristotle was born in 383 BC, after our rule has changed?
– Only remember that our concept of rigidity allows vagueness.
[7] Kripke 1980, pp.
83-84.
[8] Searle 1983, p.
251.
[9] I accept this statement by Kripke
for the benefit of the example, given that in fact most scholars believe that
this biblical person is entirely fictional.
[10] In the case of Robin Hood, maybe
the most plausible explanation is that the medieval ballads that originated the
later stories were inspired by several of the many outlaws who lived in the
forests of England at that time. It this case the proper name is unable to
identify a unique real bearer, and the proper name ‘Robin Hood’ must be
considered a merely fictional name inspired by them.
[11] The same occurs with conceptual
words. If a fisherman thinks that a whale is a great fish from the ocean, this
(indefinite) description is wrong, since a whale is not a fish. However, this description
is already convergent,
since the person is referring to something belonging to the class of Marine
animals. But if a child says that Whale must be the name of a mountain in the
Appalachians, this is a divergent (indefinite) description devoid of
referential function, simply because there is no mountain with this name there.
[12]
I present here the elaboration made by Scott Soames, 2003, vol. 2, p.
361.
[13]
The worries are greater for the referentialist when Kripke gives a second
example concerning the case of an only proper name, Podorowsky, that is
understood by the speaker as referring to two different persons, when in fact
it is referring to two different persons. The speaker believes there are two
Podorowskys, the first being a pianist and the second being a politician, when
in fact they are the same person. This is an obvious trouble for the
referentialist, since by knowing the name that the speaker should also know the
meaning-object, and also a trouble for the metalinguist thinker. But it would
obviously be no problem for a metadescriptivist, since the speaker associated
the two different descriptions carried by the name Podorowsky to two different
barriers without knowing that they belong to the same characterizing
description-rule.
[14] Due to passages like this, Searle
was already interpreted as a causal descriptivist, which is surely a mistake.
[15] “Thales abandoned the mythical
formulations; this alone justifies the claim that he was the first philosopher,
naïve though his thought still was” (Kirk & Haven 1995: 99).
[16] It is instructive to read the
documented doxography, based on many lost sources, along with the commentaries
of specialists, based on their historical and cultural knowledge of the
Hellenic world, to get a sense of the full complex of fundamental and auxiliary
description-rules that allow privileged namers to refer in the most appropriate sense to Thales, thereby attributing
existence to him. (See Kirk & Raven 1995: 76-99).
[17] Consider, for instance, the moving
visual images computationally reconstructed by means of fMRI. (Nishimoto et
al., 2011) See Costa 2017.
[18] Consider, for instance, the moving visual
images computationally reconstructed by means of fMRI. One can indirectly “see”
the visual sense-data images forming in the brain (Nishimoto et al., 2011). See
also Costa 2017.
[19] According to G. E. More, the real
is something independent of the mind that is verifiable by others, continuously
connected with other things, and in this way has causes, effects and
accompaniments with the highest degree of reality (1953). (See Costa 2014, ch.
6, and Costa 2018, ch. VI)
[20] In section 1 of Chapter V
(Appendix) the formalization is adapted to MIRF
[21] In two-dimensional semantics, a
statement of identity such as “Hesperus is Phosphorus” ambiguously expresses
two propositions. The first is the proposition of primary intention, whose terms refer cognitively, varying their
reference in possible worlds, which makes the proposition contingent a
posteriori. This is the meaning captured here by Hesperus-(Venus) ≠
Phosphorus-(Venus). (In the case of conceptual identity, for instance, “Water
is H2O”, it would relate to what we could call the popular core of
its meaning.) The second meaning of the proposition is given by the secondary intention, whose terms are
rigid designators, invariably referring to the same thing in many different
possible worlds, which makes it necessary and a priori. This is the meaning
captured by (Hesperus)-Venus = (Phosphorus)-Venus. (See Chalmers 2006)
[22] I am assuming here the
non-reductive definition of science as an inquiry able to achieve public
consensus among specialists (scientists); this definition contrasts unavoidably
with the common view of philosophy as unable to achieve public consensus, even
(and particularly) among specialists (philosophers). (Ziman 1968; Costa 2002:
47-48)
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