draft on CLUSTER THEORY OF PROPER NAMES (1 de 5)

 

This is part of a Draft of the book How do Proper Namers Really Work? published by De Gruyter in 2023. It is not the final draft.

 

 

BLURB

This work is an exploration of unknown philosophical landscapes. Its most impressive feature is that most ideas seem to fit one another like pieces of an all-encompassing jigsaw puzzle. The result is a breakthrowing assault on the new orthodoxy led by names like those of Saul Kripke, Hilary Putnam, and David Kaplan. Its goal is to overthrow a forty-year stalemate between internalist-descriptivist and externalist-referential views of proper name reference. This goal is, in principle, achieved by means of a two-tiered neo descriptivist theory in which the clusters of descriptions summarized by proper names are regimented by a meta-description rule able to make those proper names rigid designators in contrast to definite descriptions, which answers Kripke’s and Donnellan’s objections in a decisive way. This new start suggests deeply unexpected consequences for analyzing indexicals and general terms, and for much of the present views on meaning and reference.

 

 

 

 

 

HOW DO PROPER NAMES REALLY WORK?

 

A Neodescriptivist Theory

 

 

Claudio Ferreira Costa

 

 

 

 

Probleme kann man nicht mit derseben Denkweise lösen, durch die sie entstanden sind. [Problems cannot be solved by the same way of thinking that produced them.]

Albert Einstein

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

CONTENTS

 

 

    PREFACE

    INTRODUCTION

 

I.               CLUSTER-DESCRIPTIVISM

1.     John Stuart Mill: names as labels

2.     Descriptivism (I): Frege and Russell

3.     Descriptivism (II): Wittgenstein, Strawson, and Searle

4.     Addendum: identification rules & descriptions

 

II.            CAUSAL-REFERENTIALISM

1.     Three arguments against descriptivism

2.     Kripke on individuation and trope-theory

3.     Baptism and the causal-historical chain

4.     Internal problems

5.     The radically consequent Kripkean automaton

6.     Discussing counterexamples

7.     Coincidental references

8.     Empty and imaginary names

9.     Empty names descriptively approached

10.  Causal chains and cognitive links

11.  Causal records

12.  No fear from causal chains

13.  A very simple example

14.  Conclusions

 

III.         METADESCRIPTIVISM: DEVELOPING A THEORY

1.     Fundamental description-rules

2.     Auxiliary description-rules

3.     Disjunctive rule

4.     Meta-identification rule: a preliminary version

5.     Meta-identification rule: final version

6.     Solving Theseus’ paradox

7.     Semantic contents of proper names

8.     Ordinary proper names

9.     Language’s division of cognitive labor

10.  Why are proper names rigid designators?

11.  Why are definite descriptions accidental designators?

12.  Autonomous definite descriptions

 

IV.           METADESCRIPTIVISM: ANSWERING COUNTEREXAMPLES

1.     Responses to Kripkian counterexamples

Problems of rigidity

Undesirable necessity

Fictional proper names

Elliptical and incorrect descriptions

Circularity

2.     Pierre’s puzzle

3.     Responses to Donnellan’s counterexamples

Thales the well-digger

The philosopher J. L. Alston Martin

The inverted squares

“Tom is a nice person”

4.     Devitt’s objection of epistemic magic

5.     Russellian reformulation

6.     Proper names and the “necessary a posteriori”

7.     Conclusion

 

V.    IDENTITY STATEMENTS

 

VI. SUGGESTING POSSIBLE CONSEQUENCES

 

APPENDIX 1: TROPICAL NUMBERS

 

APPENDIX 2: NON-NAÏVE DIRECT REALISM

 

BIBLIOGRAPHY

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

PREFACE

 

The aim of this book is not to suggest new philosophical hunches about how proper names could work referentially, but rather to develop what clearly seems to me, in its foundations, to be a comprehensive and definitive neo-descriptivist theory of reference for proper names, with consequences for other terms. Its methodological point of departure is also different: a much more pragmatic than formally oriented “philosophizing by examples”. It was to some extent inspired and guided by Wittgenstein’s later anti-speculative and anti-scientist “therapeutic” philosophy – this by good reasons apparently forgotten enfant terrible of present analytic philosophy. Along with it there is the multi-faceted technique of using any disponible resource at hand by dealing with a philosophical problem (John Searle). All that this book demands from the reader is readiness for a new start.

   To make the undertaking prima facie justifiable, some orienting historical remarks are in order.  Concerning approaches to mechanisms of reference for proper names, there were two distinct periods in the philosophy of linguistic analysis. The first period is that of the old orthodoxy. It was inaugurated by Frege, already in the 19^th century. In the 20th century, the main actors were Wittgenstein, Russell, A. J. Ayer, J. L. Austin, and P. F. Strawson, along with the logical positivist philosophers…, and their work was continued by philosophers like Michael Dummett, still in England, and Paul Grice and John Searle in the USA (it also exercised some influence in Germany through works by Ernst Tugendhat and Jürgen Habermas), along with positivist philosophers like Rudolf Carnap and, following those lines, W. V-O. Quine. They all assumed that the mechanisms of reference were basically internal, explicitly or implicitly cognitive, and accessible through descriptions. Most of these thinkers were anti-speculative. The second period can be called that of the new orthodoxy. This period was initiated by Saul Kripke and Keith Donnellan in the early seventies, with their causal-historical views of proper names. A group of original formalist-oriented philosophers joined them: Hilary Putnam, David Kaplan, David Lewis, John Perry, Tyler Burger, and several others. Regarding mechanisms of reference, they were externalists, causalists, and to a greater or lesser extent anti-cognitivists and anti-descriptivists, and much of their work had a speculative vein. Gradually, they increased their influence in the philosophy of language to its limiting extrem. After all, the much greater influence of the new orthodoxy does not mean it has no serious drawbacks. Indeed, both approaches are to a considerable measure as stimulating as controversial, which has generated a deeply rooted stalemate.

   From a methodological viewpoint, the analytic philosophy of language also had two main approaches. The first was motivated by developments in formal logic (J. O. Urmson called it “ideal language philosophy”), like symbolic predicate logic and later modal logic. Regarding the emphasis on the philosophical uses of Fregean symbolic logic, it was championed by Frege, Bertrand Russell, and the Wittgenstein of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Ideal language philosophy was also the approach of the Vienna Circle, particularly of Rudolf Carnap, later greatly influencing American philosophy (W. V-O. Quine, Donald Davidson, Saul Kripke, David Kaplan…) since most of its members emigrated to the USA. With greater emphasis on the semantic application of modal logic, this first philosophical approach was championed by Saul Kripke and the new orthodoxy. Hence, one of the main characteristics of the new orthodoxy is that it was formally inspired. The second approach was centrally motivated by a careful examination of communication praxis in our common language (Urmson called it “ordinary language philosophy”, although this label can be misleading). It was influenced by Moore’s common-sense approach and its reflection on the pragmatics of our natural language. It had an exponential place in Wittgenstein’s later therapeutic philosophy, flourishing in the works of J. L. Austin’s, Gilbert Ryle’s, and P. F. Strawson’s so-called Oxford school, which had its final but minor influence in the USA through the works of Paul Grice and John Searle, both having studied in Oxford. It is easy to understand that the common language focused approach is today eclipsed by the dominant new orthodoxy, which being formalistically inspired leaves scant room for a wider, pragmatically inspired natural language philosophy.

   The present book is to a large extent a return to the old orthodoxy, since its methodology is pragmatically oriented, and since the theory developed here is essentially internalist, cognitivist, and (neo)descriptivist. However, it is also heavily supplemented by the answers it needs to give to the important challenges posed by referentialism (including the Kripkean causal-historical quasi-referentialism) and by imported new methodological devices like the appeal to possible worlds. In other words: the inspiration and the necessary underpinnings for a much more elaborate cluster-descriptivist theory of proper names here developed come from the old orthodoxy. The new orthodoxy, however, has provided new methodological devices, along with the indispensable dialectical challenges without which no progress could be made. The here presented theory was developed in the form of a critical dialogue with the main writings of all these philosophers, so that without their inquisitive and imaginative work it would never have had enough fuel to lift off the ground.

   From a methodological perspective, much of the innovative character of the present book is due to its reintroduction of pragmatically inspired natural language philosophy in the discussion of proper names and in the philosophy of language in general, challenging the present scientistic fragmentation of the field.

   Aware of this, my expectation concerning the theory developed here is that it will help overcome the forty years of stalemate between the old cluster-descriptivism and the new referentialist or causal-referentialist views of proper names. In my judgment, this can be achieved by a new perspective that could be called meta-descriptive: a two-tiered form of cluster descriptivism, which contains a meta-descriptive rule evaluatively ordering the basic cluster of descriptions belonging to a proper name in any possible world.

   I woud like to express my greatfulness to some people for discussion and support. These include first John Searle, for his legendary courses at UCLA-Berkeley, which I had the good fortune to attend in 1999; his work was a major influence in this book. I am also grateful to Manuel Garcia-Carpintero, who in 2007 first suggested that I should undertake the hard work of developing my own views on the reference of proper names; Richard Swinburne, for his encouragement regarding the merits of the old orthodoxy; Marco Antonio Ruffino, for his sympathetic skepticism; Wolfgang Spohn, for discussions at the University of Konstanz in 2010; João Branquinho, who invited me to explain my views at the University of Lisbon in 2011; Guido Imaguire, for discussions at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro in 2013. I am also very grateful for discussions with Anna-Sofia Maurin and her talented, attentive students at the University of Gothenburg in 2016/1, along with François Recanati, for receiving me at the IJN in 2016/2, where I could attend his excellent course on philosophy of language. I would like to give very special thanks to Peter Stemmer, who accepted me for post-doctoral work as a researcher at the University of Konstanz in 2021, and, also to Francesco Orilia for discussions at the University of Macerata in the beginning of 2022. Special thanks are also due to my friend Dr. James Stuart Brice for numerous suggestions on how to best formulate my ideas in idiomatic English.

Natal, 2022

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

INTRODUCTION

 

 

In order to help the reader, I give in what follows a short summary of the main ideas of each chapter.

   Chapters I and II are preparatory, critically, but also constructively examining the central ideas of the old and new orthodoxies on proper names. Chapters III, IV, and V are dedicated to the exposition and defense of my own theory. Chapter VI is concerned with what this theory might change if applied to other singular and general terms.

   Chapter I is dedicated to an exposition and evaluation of the merits and limits of traditional descriptivist views of proper names, which were mainly developed by Frege, Russell, Wittgenstein, P. F. Strawson, and John Searle. According to these views, proper names are essentially abbreviations of definite descriptions or clusters of definite descriptions. Saul Kripke (1980, Lectures I and II) and his nearest followers (e.g., Devitt & Sterelny 1999) have assumed the existence of two kinds of descriptivist theories: the classical and the modern ones. According to the classical theory, defended by Frege and Russell, a proper name is the abbreviation of a unique definite description. For instance, ‘Bismarck’ is the abbreviation of a definite description like ‘the first chancellor of the German empire and an astute diplomat’. Since there are many definite descriptions that can be associated with a proper name, and since there is no obvious criterion to choose the relevant ones, the old theory was replaced by modern theories, defended mainly by Wittgenstein, P. F. Strawson, and John Searle. According to these modern theories, called cluster-descriptivism, a proper name abbreviates a set of definite descriptions, which are either all the descriptions that can be associated with a proper name, or, at least, the weightiest ones.

  The interpretative thesis that I defend in the first chapter is that the distinction between classical and modern descriptivism is highly deceptive. All the mentioned philosophers, even if not explicitly, as in the cases of Frege and Russell, were cluster descriptivists. The main difference was aspectual. Beginning with Frege, descriptivist philosophers have approached the same problem from different perspectives and with different interests and assumptions, although their views can be shown to be profitably complementary. It is easy to understand, for instance, that Searle’s theory has been developed in much more detail than Frege’s casual remarks, since his theory was the last to arise. Searle’s theory replaces Strawson’s restricted idea of reference borrowing by a wider idea of parasitic reference. In the present book, proposals of the descriptivist philosophers will be tentatively developed and integrated into a single more complex theory, which is why it is profitable to expose and discuss them in the first chapter.

   Also important in the first chapter is its Addendum. There I suggest that weightier descriptions associated with proper names could be seen as patterns derived from their identification rules – an idea inspired by Michael Dummett’s Wittgensteinian interpretation of Frege, and by Ernst Tugendhat’s classical analysis of the singular predicative statement. According to Tugendhat, the proper name must have an identification rule (Identifikationsregel) (1976: 485, 495) which can be satisfied by criteria belonging to its bearer when the proper name is not empty. My proposal is that the cluster of descriptions suggested by cluster theorists could be intrinsically associated with the linguistic expression of the proper name’s identification rule, an insight that will be developed only in the third chapter.

   Chapter II is a critical exposition of the more recent causal-historical view, initially suggested by Saul Kripke and Keith Donnellan in the early Seventies. This view was decisive for the development of the so-called new orthodoxy, which since then has, by and large, replaced the old orthodoxy. The chapter begins with a general presentation of the causal-referentialist criticism of descriptivist theories, followed by descriptivist answers. I am not the first to show that the objections against descriptivism advanced by Kripke, Keith Donnellan, and others are not sufficiently convincing (See Searle 1982, Ch. 9; Ahmed 2004: 5-40).

   The main theme of the second chapter, however, is the place of the causal-historical chain in the attempt to explain the proper name’s reference. According to Kripke, a proper name refers properly because it is used at the end of a causal-historical chain that typically begins with a baptismal ceremony for the referred object (referent) performed by some speaker in linguistic interaction. My goal was to show that, although it is out of the question that there must be external (physical) causal or causal-historical chains associating the referent with the speech act of naming, any attempt to identify links of these causal chains will at some point inevitably resort to cognitive awareness of the referent. This can easily be translated in the form of descriptions, committing causal-referentialism to some form of covert descriptivism. In other words: the causal-historical view is unavoidably trapped in a petitio principii: Although its goal is to overcome descriptivism, it must presuppose some form of descriptivism in order to gain any kind of explanatory power. Even if descriptivism without causalism is empty, which I admit, causalism without descriptivism would be entirely blind; since reference at some point implies awareness of it, some form of descriptivism must be in the foreground.

   Beyond this, I found that it is not only the causal-historical chain initiated by baptism or by a description that can give rise to the speech act of naming, which to a certain measure relativises the original idea. Any causal-historical chain initiated by occurrences related to the existence of the name’s bearer can give rise to relevant descriptions which seem able to have referential import, and some of them seem to be in this respect even more important than baptism, which is the only causal origin privileged by the causal-historical view. For instance: the causal-historical chain initiated by the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand by Gravilo Princip, which produces the corresponding description, seems to have a considerable referential import when we utter the proper name ‘Gravilo Princip’. It is not from the beginning assured that the causal chain initiated by the baptism of Gravilo is more relevant for the referential function of this name than the causal chain initiated by the assassination that triggered the First World War.

   Only in Chapters III, IV, and V, do I develop my own neo-descriptivist cluster theory. This theory can be seen as a meta-descriptive one, since it is a two-tiered theory based on a meta-descriptive rule, able to select and evaluate the weightiest descriptions belonging to the cluster of descriptions attached to a proper name in order to evaluate its referential success.

   Chapter III is the central one, though not easy to summarize. The methodological Leitfaden to find the weightiest descriptions is taken from J. L. Austin, who advised consulting lexicons as pre-philosophical work. Since proper names are usually not found in lexicons, I began by checking what encyclopedia entries had to say about famous proper names. If we do this, we can clearly see two complex kinds of descriptions that almost always prominently appear and can be justly called the fundamental ones: (i) localizing descriptions, telling the time, place, and career of the proper name’s bearer, and (ii) characterizing descriptions, telling the main reasons why we use the proper name to refer to its bearer.

   The key part of my thesis is that at least for privileged users of proper names – those who really know how to apply them – these two kinds of descriptions belonging to the cluster are the weightiest. Having found these two most fundamental kinds of descriptions, the next task is to find a meta-rule requiring the combinations and measures of satisfaction of such descriptions that allow the application of proper names. What this meta-rule (meta-descriptive rule) typically demands regarding any proper name is that at least a disjunction of localizing and characterizing descriptions is sufficiently satisfied by the referent in the absence of any equally weighted competitor. The rule resulting from the application of the meta-descriptive rule to the cluster of descriptions we associate with a particular proper name can be properly called the identification rule of this name. This allows me, for instance, to confidently refer to Isaac Newton, insofar as I know that he was the famous (i) English physicist, who lived from 1642 to 1727, who (ii) discovered classical mechanics, the law of universal gravitation, and the infinitesimal calculus.

   The above-summarized mechanism concerns only privileged users (specialists, baptizers, familiars…). It very often excludes second-hand referential use of proper names by non-privileged users, the many people who are able to associate with a proper name only some less relevant description or even some wrong but convergent description. The possession of these descriptions already enables a person to insert the proper name in public discourse by means of a mechanism akin to what P. F. Strawson once called reference borrowing.

   Furthermore, the difference between the rigidity of proper names and the accidentality of definite descriptions is also explained under the neo-descriptivist perspective: a proper name is rigid, because it can identify its bearer in all possible worlds[1] or, as prefer to say, conceivable world-circumstances where this referent exists, by applying variable descriptions belonging to its fundamental cluster of descriptions in sufficient degrees and without competitors. An isolated definite description, however, is accidental, because it can be said to change its reference in different possible worlds, insofar as its application does not need to coincide with the application of the same definite description considered as a member of the whole cluster of descriptions belonging to a proper name. This is the reason why definite descriptions that do not belong to any cluster of descriptions distinctive for a proper name can be said to be rigid: they apply in any possible world where their bearer exists. Example: ‘the Last Ice Age’.

   In chapter IV, the main objections against descriptivism are addressed, now appealing to the theoretical developments already presented in the third chapter. In this chapter I answer famous counterexamples, not only from Kripke, like those of the semi-fictional prophet Jonah and the Gödel-Schmidt case, but also those of Donnellan, such as the examples of Thales, Tom and the friendly guest, etc., along with related problems like those of identity sentences. The answers are in my judgment conclusive, and their success, I believe, is a decisive measure for the success of the proposed theory.

   An important point in answering Donnellan’s counterexample of Thales is to show that causal-historical chains leave behind what we can call causal records, which are retained, publicly recognizable events, that can on their side be converted into descriptions, some of them even belonging to fundamental descriptions. Thus, the fact that Aristotle quoted Thales’ affirmation that water is the principle of everything is a causal trace fixed in his writings, a trace that belongs to the causal record and that reappears in the cluster’s definite description ‘the philosopher quoted by Aristotle as having said that the principle of everything is water’. This finding is decisive to refute Donnellan’s simplified claim that Thales would still be Thales even if he didn’t satisfy the definite description of having said that all things are water, because he was the causal origin of our spelling of his name. No: we refer to Thales because (also simplifying) he is the object of the definite description ‘the philosopher quoted by Aristotle as having said that the principle of everything is water’, even if the content of this quotation of Aristotle were mistaken.

   Chaper V deals with identity sentences between proper names. Here it is investigated what could be called the phenomenon of identity in the difference. It can be rendered as a distinction between the internal identity between the applications of identification rules in their inteirity (which gives the objectual identity of kind “A = B”), which differs propositionally from the circumstantial and linguistic partial applications of identity rules (which gives the sense-difference of kind “A ≠ B”). The result is a clearer duplication of propositional meaning able to dissolve Kripke’s insightful and at once defective views of the necessary a posteriori and contingent a priori.  

   Chapter VI is an unsystematic collection of provisional sketches. Its goal is to show some of the many possible consequences of the proposed neo-descriptivist theory of proper names for the philosophy of language. A more conclusive application of the suggested descriptivist approach to all kinds of singular and general terms, along with their implications, would demand an entirely new book.[2]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I

 

CLUSTER-DESCRIPTIVISM

 

 

 

In this chapter, we begin our investigation of how proper names refer. There are two general kinds of theories of proper names, which might be called the descriptivist and the referentialist.[3] The first emphasizes the internal intermediary cognitive link[4] existing between a name and its bearer, regarded as a semantically relevant link supposedly expressible by means of definite descriptions. The second emphasizes the causal relationship between the external referent (the ‘object’, the ‘bearer’) and its name, rejecting the descriptivist view according to which resorting to the intermediating link is not only unavoidable but explanatorily fundamental.

  My goal in this and the next chapter will be to provide theoretical and critical support for chapters III and IV, in which I will present my own composite meta-descriptivist explanation of the referential mechanisms of proper names, followed by its application to counterexamples. Hence, in the present chapter, I will introduce and critically discuss the classic versions of descriptivism and, in the next, the main ideas of Kripkean causal-historical referentialism. Before beginning, however, I want to critically introduce the referentialist theory of proper names suggested by John Stuart Mill in the 19^th century, since it was the origin of the contemporary analytic discussion.

 

1. John Stuart Mill: names as labels

Mill began by distinguishing between the denotation and connotation of a term: denotation is the reference of the term, while connotation (signification) is the descriptive element, implying an attribute. Among the referential expressions, the definite description (called by him an ‘individual name’) has both a denotation and a connotation. It denotes through its connotation, namely, by expressing attributes that, when possessed solely by its object of reference, allow us to identify its object referentially, distinguishing it from a multiplicity of others. A description such as ‘the author of Heart of Darkness’ connotes an attribute belonging to a unique individual, namely, the attribute of Joseph Conrad having written that story. The same is not true regarding proper names. In his own words:

 

Proper names are not connotative: they denote the individuals who are called by them, but they do not indicate or imply any attributes as belonging to those individuals. When we name a child by the name Paul or a dog by the name Caesar, these names are simple marks used to enable such individuals to be made subjects of discourse. (...) Proper names are attached to the objects themselves and are not dependent on the continuance of any attribute of the object. (2002: 20)[5]

 

In other words: a proper name has no connotation, no signification. Even if it has meaning, this meaning has no influence on its referential use. According to Mill, the city of Dartmouth was so-called because it is located at the mouth of the River Dart, but if an earthquake changed this river’s course and shifted it away from the town, the name of the town would not necessarily be changed. That is, a proper name refers independently of any linguistic meaning it may have. It refers directly as if it were a label glued to a bottle. Since for Mill the meaning does not lie in what a name denotes, but in what it connotes, it follows that proper names “strictly speaking, have no signification” (2002: 21).

   I want to pause here only to note that this standard interpretation might not tell the whole story. Mill also made statements that seem to complement what I have just set out, though conflicting with the standard interpretation. As he wrote some paragraphs later:

 

We put a mark, not indeed upon the object itself, but so to speak, upon the idea of the object. A proper name is but an unmeaning mark which we connect in our minds with the idea of the object, in order that whenever the mark meets our eyes or occurs to our thoughts, we may think of that individual object. (...) By enabling [the reader] to identify the individuals, we may connect them with information previously possessed by him. By saying “This is York” we may tell him that it contains the Minster. But this is not by anything implied in this name. (My italics) (2002: 22)

 

This passage makes it clear that with the word ‘meaning’ Mill understood in our first quoted passage only the meaning linguistically expressed. This meaning must be distinguished from the idea of the object, which in the English empiricist tradition should be understood as the content of meaning (informative content) in a wider sense. In fact, a proper name (even ‘Sitting Bull’) lacks a referentially relevant linguistically expressed meaning in a way comparable to that of definite descriptions or, as also happens, to general terms (‘general names’ for Mill) like ‘man’, ‘dog’ and ‘disease’. For him, these last terms connote their attributes, in addition to denoting the sets of all men, of all dogs, and of all sick organisms. However, what Mill calls ‘the idea of the object’ does seem to be simply a psychologist’s way of speaking of an often-shared informative content, that is, of senses, of ways of presentation that only differ from Fregean senses regarding their contrasting ontological interpretations.[6]

   If my understanding of this point is correct, then Mill’s conception of what proper names mean ends up being compatible with the suggestion that proper names are marks evoking in our mind senses, here understood as psychological modes of presentation of the object (their ideas), that is, a description like ‘the city containing the Minster’ regarding the proper name ‘York’. Surprisingly, the result would be no principled contradiction between his views and the forms of descriptivism about proper names advocated by later philosophers from Frege to John Searle. Although I consider this the most generous way to interpret Mill’s intentions, I will ignore it in the rest of this book for purely expositive reasons.

   The theory of direct reference allegedly proposed by Mill is easily refuted, and Bertrand Russell did not find any difficulty in doing this. In the way the theory is understood in our first quotation, it is unable to satisfactorily solve the paradoxes of reference answered by Russell in his famous theory of descriptions. The first of them was the riddle of the non-existent reference. How can we make sense of a sentence like “Santa Claus lives at the North Pole” if the name ‘Santa Claus’ has neither a connotation nor a denotation? To this, Mill could answer that Santa Claus refers to an imaginary object. But consider the case of a true negative existential like “Santa Claus does not exist.” If all that belongs to the name is its reference, such a sentence seems contradictory, for to apply the name one should already admit its existence. Consider now identity utterances containing co-referential names. Think about the difference between the sentence (a) “Mount Everest is Mount Everest” and the sentence (b) “Mount Everest is Chomolungma”. The first is tautological, saying nothing, while the second can be informative. But for Mill, since names have no connotation, co-referential names should not have different meanings; sentence (b) should be just as trivial as (a), though this is not the case. Finally, there is the problem of the lack of intersubstitutivity in opaque contexts. Consider a sentence such as “Mary believes that Cicero, but not Tullius, was a great Roman orator.” If the proper names ‘Cicero’ and ‘Tullius’ are only labels for the same person, it seems that Mary needs to be able to believe in totally inconsistent things, such as that Cicero is not Cicero. For reasons such as these and under the challenging influence of Russell’s insightful theory of descriptions, the alleged Millian theory of the direct reference of proper names soon fell into well-deserved oblivion.

 

2. Descriptivism (I): Frege and Russell

Millian referentialism was replaced by what we can call the descriptivist theory of proper names. The descriptivist theory dominated the 20^th century until the 1970s, when it was gradually eclipsed by a new and improved version of Millianism first proposed by Saul Kripke and Keith Donnellan, which inaugurated the new orthodoxy. The fundamental idea of descriptivism is that proper names refer indirectly, as shorthand for bunches or clusters of descriptions applicable to the properties of their owners. In other words, in opposition to Millianism, proper names do connote. They connote, having in this way meaning, because their role is that of replacing clusters of meaningful descriptions, being, therefore, more complex and not simpler than the descriptions.

  According to a current interpretation disseminated by Kripke, there are two forms of descriptivism: the classical and the contemporary.[7] The more primitive one, advocated by Frege and Russell, was a theory according to which a proper name’s meaning is a shorthand for the meaning of a single definite description associated with it. The second, more sophisticated one, advocated by philosophers such as Ludwig Wittgenstein, P. F. Strawson, and John Searle, attached the meaning of a proper name, not to the meaning of a single description, but to the meaning of a whole group of descriptions. This new theory can be called the cluster theory of proper names, since it identifies the whole meaningful content of a proper name with a cluster, a bundle, or an aggregate of descriptions.

   My explicit goal in this chapter (along with others) is to demonstrate that this dichotomous interpretation of the development of descriptivism is false. My take is that a more complex cluster theory of proper names was already alluded to in the writings of Frege and Russell, even though they were not sufficiently and thoughtfully thematized. What has really happened since then has been a progressive explicitation and addition of aspectual details around a common insight.

 

Frege on sharing descriptions

To advance my view, I want to start by considering the Fregean formulation. In the little he wrote about the reference of proper names he interpreted their changing senses as expressible by different descriptions or conjunctions of definite descriptions that different speakers associate with them. This view appears in a well-known note from his article “On Meaning and Reference” (Über Sinn und Bedeutung), which can be considered (pace Dummett) the locus classicus of the descriptivist theory of proper names in analytic philosophy:

 

In the case of genuinely proper names such as ‘Aristotle’, opinions as to the senses may differ. It might, for instance, be taken to be the following: The pupil of Plato and the tutor of Alexander the Great. Anybody who does this will attach another sense to the sentence “Aristotle was born in Stagira” than will a man who takes as the sense of the name ‘the teacher of Alexander the Great who was born in Stagira’. To the extent that the nominatum remains the same, these fluctuations in the sense are tolerable. But they should be avoided in the system of a demonstrative science and should not appear in a perfect language. (1892: 28)

 

What this footnote suggests is that different people may associate descriptions or even conjunctions of different descriptions with the same proper name – conjunctions such as (i) ‘Plato’s most famous student and the tutor of Alexander the Great’, or (ii) ‘the teacher of Alexander the Great and the philosopher born in Stagira.’ Various partial meanings or senses or “modes of presentation” (Arten des Gegebenseins) associated with the proper name are expressed by these variable definite descriptions, under the condition that speakers can preserve the same reference. But how could the reference be preserved? The most immediate answer we could give is that there must be a same set of descriptions that contains the conjunction of descriptions (i) and (ii) as referring to the same bearer, namely, Aristotle. In other words, in this quote Frege’s next step to warrant the preservation of the reference, though not explicitly elaborated, would be to assume a cluster of descriptions in some way carried by a proper name, at least concerning the natural language.

   Frege’s view is clearly not that a speaker should always have only one or two definite descriptions in mind. If two persons agree that the sentence “Aristotle was born in Stagira” refers to the same person, it might be because even though they have in mind two different sets of definite descriptions, they also agree on the application of some common description, such as ‘a philosopher’. They may be apt to agree regarding the application of the definite description ‘the great philosopher born in Stagira,’ possibly having still other things in common, like ‘the author of the Metaphysics’ or ‘the husband of Pythias.’ Some form of cluster theory is a consequence if the speakers should agree that the nominatum remains the same.

   The point appears more clearly in “The Thought” (Der Gedanke), a paper written 20 years later. There Frege explicitly shows how the fluctuations in the sense of a proper name can be so great as to prevent communication: if different language users associate descriptions or conjunctions of totally different descriptions with a proper name, they will lack any way to unify the meaning, and it will be impossible for them to know if they are talking about the same reference, since definite descriptions are the identifying criterion for the reference.

To show this, he imagines that Leo Peter went to the residence of Dr. Gustav Lauben and heard him say “I was wounded,” and this is all he knows about Gustav Lauben. Leo Peter tries to comment on what happened to Herbert Garner, who in turn knows of a Dr. Gustav Lauben who was born on September 13, 1875, in N.N., without knowing where Dr. Lauben resides, nor anything else about him. It turns out that Leo Peter and Herbert Garner cannot know if they are talking about the same person. In Frege’s formulation, they…

 

do not speak the same language, since, although they do in fact refer to the same man with this name, they do not know that they do so. Therefore, Herbert Garner does not associate the same thought with the sentence “Dr, Gustav Lauben has been injured,” that Leo Peter wants to express with it. (1918: 65)

 

From the quotations above it is easy to conclude that Frege, who sees definite descriptions as carriers of senses, would be forced to agree with a cluster theorist’s suggestion that the proper name Gustav Lauben must be associated with definite descriptions common to both Herbert Garner and Leo Peter, to achieve communication about the same bearer. But this also means that any other person with other definite descriptions of Gustav Lauben in mind should share some descriptions with Herbert Garner and Leo Peter, to also be able to communicate about the same bearer, which would once again lead to the assumption of a cluster of descriptions.

   In conclusion, if speakers S1 and S2 have the different descriptions D1 and D2 but along with them the description D3 in order to share the referent, and if speakers S2 and S3 have respectively the different descriptions D2 and D5, but possibly need a different description D4, which is not the same as the others, shared by them in order to share the referent, and the same possibly being the case regarding the speakers S3 and S4… and we continue this process,  the result will be the formation of a whole set of descriptions {D1, D2, D3,  D4… Dn} that should at least to some extent be shared by the speakers. Here we again reach a full cluster of descriptions – a full set, which should be responsible for the complete meaningful content of the proper name since Frege defends the claim that each description must have its own sense (Sinn). The only reason he didn’t become an explicit cluster theorist is that he did not envision building a natural language theory of proper names.

   Furthermore, we also must agree that every capable speaker usually has access to a certain subset of a cluster, like ‘the tutor of Alexander’, ‘the pupil of Plato’, and ‘the person born in Stagira’ in Frege’s first example. But this, of course, leaves open the possibility that when applying a proper name, some speakers could have in mind a big share of the cluster, which could even be nearly to its entire repository of meaningful content, for instance, if the speaker were a pupil of Plato. Though none of these inferences were made by Frege, considering his writings it is difficult to imagine that such a deeply insightful person would disagree with any of them. If Frege didn’t follow this path, he at least paved the way.

   A curious point is that Michael Dummett, Frege’s most original and influential interpreter, contested the idea that Frege proposed a descriptivist theory of proper names.[8] Dummett’s claim was that Frege used descriptions because they were easy ways to clarify the meanings of some examples, but that this had nothing to do with Russell’s idea that a proper name is short for a complex description, nor with the referential conception of meaning inherent in Russell’s theory of descriptions... Moreover, writes Dummett, there is no indication that Frege would agree with the idea that the meaning of a proper name can always be expressed through descriptions. According to him, the important thing for Frege is that a proper name is associated with a criterion enabling us to recognize a given object as its referent. Dummett illustrates his point by considering the multiple possible ways to identify the River Thames (1982: 97-98; 101-111). Often, he writes, this is done indirectly, using collateral information, as in the case of a person who realizes that it is the same river that passes under the Radcot Bridge or through the citadel of Henley... And one can know that it passes through Oxford without knowing that it is the same river that runs through London, still identifying the river correctly. There is, he concludes, no sufficient condition that everyone needs to know for the identification of the River Thames.

   However, none of the reasons put forward by Dummett justifies his protest. First, it is perfectly possible to adopt descriptivism without a commitment to the referential conception of meaning implied in Russellian logical atomism, which seems to me the culprit of the Dummettian reaction. Ignoring Russell’s atomism, we see that the collateral information given by Dummett is made up of definite descriptions, like ‘the river that passes under Radcot Bridge, through Henley, and through Oxford’, although the weightiest definite description is that of ‘the river that flows through London’. The last description, one can guess, is more central to the criterial rule with which we conventionally identify the River Thames, though the first ones are almost irrelevant. In the neo-descriptivist theory of proper names that I will propose, descriptions should be understood as linguistic expressions of conventions or conventionally grounded rules, calling conventionally grounded rules any combination of conventionally established rules by means of which an unlimited range of new meanings is able to be added to the language.[9] And considering the referential character of these descriptions, what they really express are what may be called semantic-criterial rules, whose main function is to bind a proper name to its bearer in one way or another in a public language. This understanding, however, should be complementary to Dummett’s own idea that the important thing for the meaning of a proper name is that it is associated with an identity criterion for the identification of its bearer, allowing it to be recognized again as being the same bearer (1981: 73). I will come back to this point in the addendum of this chapter.

   My conclusion is that a philosopher like Frege was far from thinking of a single description as the complete sense of a proper name used by any speaker; and concerning the whole sense of a proper name, he was already implicitly an unspoken cluster theorist. Dummett didn’t see that this contained a too narrow view of what a descriptivist theory of proper names could be, based upon a simplified but quite common understanding of Russell’s own description theory. This will become obvious in the following section when I compare his example of the River Thames with Russell’s example of Bismarck.

 

Russell’s mass of information

Let us now move on to Russell’s conception. He saw the proper names of ordinary language as abbreviated, truncated, or disguised definite descriptions, suggesting that they could be analyzed using the same method with which he analyzed definite descriptions. As he was primarily concerned with logical analysis, he was not very much interested in the ways we really apply proper names in the practice of natural language. However, it was clear for him that a proper name does not abbreviate a single description, as many insisted on interpreting his ideas, and as he himself, for mere convenience of exposition, often did in his more technical texts. His awareness of the real complexity of proper names in natural language is better shown in a book with fewer formal concerns, his Problems of Philosophy (1912). In this introductory, but nonetheless philosophically deep book, he demonstrates a much more complex understanding of the issue’s pragmatics. Here is a passage:

 

Common words, even proper names, are usually descriptions. That is to say, the thought in the mind of a person using a proper name correctly can generally only be expressed explicitly if we replace the proper name with a description. Moreover, the description required to express a thought will vary for different people, or for the same person at different times (my italics). (2013: 39)[10]

 

What this passage suggests is that language contains a vast repository of information about the object referred to by a proper name, which can usually be expressed in the form of descriptions. When we think or spell a proper name, we usually have in mind one or more of these descriptions, so that a hearer only needs to know that our descriptions apply to the same reference evoked by them in his mind (2013: 40).

   Russell presents, as an example, the name ‘Bismarck.’ According to him, a first and peculiar form of access to Bismarck is the one that the latter has to himself in a judgment like “I am Bismarck”; in this case, Bismarck himself is a component of his judgment, without going through a description. Another way of access is that of persons who were personally introduced to him. In this case, what they considered was Bismarck’s body and mind, known through sets of data associated with him and usually able to be expressed by descriptions. But still another way to get to know Bismarck, Russell writes, is through history. In this case, we associate with his personal descriptions, such as ‘the first chancellor of the German empire is a cunning diplomat’ (which is a composite description, formed by the conjunction of a definite and an indefinite description). In the end, he concluded, what we usually have in mind is a vast set of historical information expressible in the form of descriptions able to identify the person uniquely. As he wrote:

 

When we, who didn’t know Bismarck, make a judgment about him, the description in our minds will probably be some more or less vague mass of historical knowledge – far more, in most cases, than is required to identify him. But here, for the sake of illustration, let us assume that we think of him as ‘the first chancellor of the German empire.’ (My italics) (2013: 40)

 

What Russell suggests in these textual words is that when we use a proper name in the third person, what we have in mind is not just one description. It can be a complex “mass of information” which is composed of a great variety of descriptions. Such a composite of descriptions must have vague contours, which “will vary for different people or for the same person in different times” (2013: 39).[11] This makes it unavoidable to infer that the descriptions in the mind of a user of a proper name must belong to an even larger repository of descriptions that express the non-personal totality of identifying information on the referred object. If those remarks from Russell do not affirm, they surely invoke the cluster theory. And no matter how we decide to interpret the notion of the full mass of information, each user will be able to know only a portion of it. The conclusion is that the interpretation of Russell’s suggestions as to the defense that when we use proper names, we have in mind a single definite description, is only a rough simplification of what he really thought.

   What these close textual readings also demonstrate is that Russell is willing to analyze the proper name ‘Bismarck’ in a way that does not differ substantially from the way Dummett analyzed the meaning of the proper name ‘Thames’, or even from the way Frege should treat the name ‘Gustav Lauben’.  A central description, such as ‘the first chancellor of the German Empire’, is for Russell only one among the mass of descriptions that we can associate with Bismark, in the same way that for Dummett the central description ‘the river running through London’ is just one of the many descriptions that we can associate with the proper name ‘Thames.’

   If Dummett insists on claiming that Frege wasn’t a descriptivist, then he should conclude the same about Russell. But since Russell has always been considered the ultimate descriptivist, the conclusion can only be that Frege was also a descriptivist and, like Russell, an unspoken cluster theorist. And there is an important reason to think so: if there is an effective unity in the theoretical object of descriptivist theories, then its various versions need not be inconsistent alternatives to each other, but instead could be congruent approximations of the same complex phenomenon, each of them highlighting different aspects, even if diverging in methods and assumptions.

 

3. Descriptivism (II): Wittgenstein, Strawson, and Searle

After Frege and Russell, several other philosophers associated with the philosophy of natural language, mainly Wittgenstein, P. F. Strawson, and J. R. Searle, presented suggestions of interest for the improvement of the theory of proper names as clusters or aggregates of descriptions only fragmentarily revealed by the former philosophers. I want to briefly consider some interesting suggestions from each of them since they will be useful to us later.

 

Wittgenstein on proper names

In section 79 of Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein added some commentary to Russell’s conception. According to him, ‘Moses’ may be a proper name abbreviating a variety of definite descriptions, such as:

 

the man who led the Israelites through the desert,

the man who lived in such and such a time and place and was called ‘Moses’,

the man who as a child was found in the Nile by the pharaoh’s daughter’, etc.

 

To this he added that the name ‘Moses’ gains different meanings depending on the description we associate with him, thus recognizing that a name’s cognitive meaning is expressed by the definite descriptions we associate with it (1984b: sec. 79). The question that emerges is: to what extent do descriptions of the cluster of descriptions associated with a name need to be satisfied by its bearer? Wittgenstein evades a direct response. He limited himself to noting that we use proper names without having in mind a rigid meaning, so that even if some descriptions fail to apply, we can still use others as support. Natural language is inevitably vague. Moreover, with time, the body of relevant descriptions associated with the object referred to by a proper name can change. That is: characteristics that previously seemed irrelevant may become relevant and conventionally accepted, while others may weaken or be rejected, changing the conceptual meaning.[12]

 

Strawson’s concept of reference borrowing

Following Strawson’s view, for each proper name, there is generally a set of presupposed descriptions with indefinite limits, a so-called presuppositional-set. To know how to apply a proper name, we must normally know a reasonable part of the set which consists of definite descriptions called by him genuinely identifying descriptions, understood as those applying specifically to the name’s bearer. Although neither the limits of the set nor what constitutes a reasonable and sufficient proportion of these descriptions is precisely defined, one could distinguish the most frequently used descriptions as those of greater significance.

   An important idea proposed by Strawson is that of reference borrowing. It helps us to understand a very common phenomenon, namely, how someone can be successful in using a proper name referentially, even without having a relevant or proper identifying definite description. Suppose that a description has an indexical element, for instance, ‘the nice woman my brother said he met yesterday’. It seems that I can refer to her by using this description. For Strawson, what I have is an identifying description, though not in itself a genuinely identifying description. Despite this, I can identify the woman by a mechanism of reference borrowing. Here is Strawson’s somewhat convoluted explanation:

 

It should be added, moreover, that the identifying description, though it must not include a reference to the speaker’s own reference to the particular in question, may include a reference to another reference to that particular. If a putatively identifying description is of this latter kind, then, indeed, the question, whether it is a genuinely identifying description, turns on the question, whether the reference it refers to is itself a genuinely identifying reference. So, one reference may borrow its credentials, as a genuinely identifying reference, from another, and that from another. But this regress is not infinite. (1963: 185, footnote)

 

Although Strawson had in mind the borrowing of indexical references, there is no problem in giving a broader application to the concept of reference borrowing. Suppose that a student was unable to attend a class, and a colleague tells him that Plotinus was ‘the philosopher discussed by the professor last week’, so that this is all the student knows about Plotinus. Thus, for instance, although the student has not attended the class and does not have any genuinely identifying description of the philosopher Plotinus, he has borrowed reference credentials offered by the testimony of a colleague. This person has attended the class, and in this way learned some reference credentials provided by the professor. The later supposedly knows enough of the cluster of descriptions necessary to be able to safely identify the greatest Neoplatonic philosopher. Therefore, it seems that through a mechanism of reference borrowing, a person can in a parasitic sense use a proper name to refer to some bearer sufficiently known by some speakers of the linguistic community, even if this person knows almost nothing about the object of reference. The borrowing of a reference works here like the signature of a promissory note; it guarantees that something is owned to the reference maker. Later in this book, we will make extensive use of this idea.

 

Searle’s cluster theory of descriptions

Searle, the most recent of these philosophers, is the author of the clearest and most elaborate formulation of descriptivism.[13] Searle notes that we learn and teach the use of proper names only by ostension or by descriptions and that both methods connect the name to its object of reference only in virtue of specifying enough characteristics of the object to distinguish it from other objects. Hence, there is a close connection between the ability to use a proper name and the knowledge of these characteristics, which can only be expressed by means of descriptions, even if these descriptions are not analytically tied to the object. From this Searle concludes that the use of a proper name by a speaker has conditions defined by the application of a sufficient but indefinite number of descriptions to a single object; only this indefinite sub-set of descriptions is sufficiently tied to the object to allow reference, though no description is necessarily tied to, and no pre-established set or sub-set of descriptions requires the existence of the object. He exemplifies this with the name ‘Aristotle’, which is associated with a class of definite descriptions that includes:

 

 the tutor of Alexander the Great,

 the author of the Nicomachean Ethics, the Metaphysics, and the Organon.

 the founder of the Lyceum school in Athens.[14]

 

According to him, the descriptions belonging to the cluster can even include some indefinite descriptions, such as ‘a Greek’ and ‘a philosopher’. For Searle, the proper name ‘Aristotle’ warrants its application insofar as a sufficient number of such descriptions applies, a number that may vary from speaker to speaker. And it is possible to assume that this number would, in a limiting case, be reducible to a single definite description: the logical sum or even the disjunction of the descriptions (1958: 172).

   For Searle, the question of the descriptive condition for applying a proper name is also that of its meaning. Or, in Susan Haack’s summarizing paraphrase: “proper names have the sense of some indeterminate sub-set of some open-ended set of co-referential descriptions” (1978: 58).

   For Searle, the fact that proper names do not connote specific meanings does not mean that they do not connote in any sense. Proper names connote by being shorthand expressions for clusters of descriptions logically connected with criterial properties of their bearers in a loose way. But far from being a shortcoming, this is what gives the proper name flexibility of application much greater than that of an isolated definite description or an indexical. As Searle wrote:

 

If the criteria for proper names were in all cases quite rigid and specific then a proper name would be nothing more than a shorthand of these criteria, a proper name would function exactly like an elaborate definite description. But the uniqueness and immense pragmatic convenience of proper names in our language lie precisely in the fact that they enable us to refer publicly to objects without being forced to raise issues and come to agreement on what descriptive characteristics exactly constitute the identity of the objects. They function not as descriptions, but as pegs on which to hang descriptions. (1958: 171)

 

This version of descriptivism allows us to explain a variety of cases. It is possible, for example, that an object satisfies only a few, or even only one of the descriptions belonging to the bundle of descriptions usually associated with its name. What cannot happen is that the proper name applies without any of the relevant descriptions being satisfied. As Searle noted, Aristotle cannot be the name of a waiter at a restaurant in Berkeley or the name of a prime number. Or, in his most striking example:

 

If a classical scholar claimed to discover that Aristotle wrote none of the works attributed to him, never had anything to do with the works of Plato or Alexander, never went near Athens, and was not even a philosopher but was in fact an obscure Venetian fishmonger of the late Renaissance, then the discovery would become a bad joke. (1967: 490)

 

In possession of this theory of proper names, Searle is enabled to better explain statements of non-existence with proper names. For instance, “Cerberus does not exist” is true, because the set of descriptions associated with the proper name Cerberus (‘the hound of Hades’, ‘the multi-headed dog that guards the gates of the underworld’, ‘the offspring of the monsters Echidna and Typhon’) do not apply in the real world; but Cerberus still has a meaning which is given by descriptions like these. He also has a way to explain analytical and non-analytical identities: we say “Everest is a mountain” when a minimum, though indeterminate number of descriptions sufficiently apply to the object; we affirm an analytical identity, such as “Everest is Everest” or even “Tully is Cicero”, since the same sets of descriptions of each occurrence of the name-word apply to the same object (1967: 490); and we affirm non-analytical identities, such as “Mount Everest is Chomolungma” since different sets of descriptions apply to the same object. Of the last two proper names, he would claim that the different sets of descriptions that people can keep in mind cannot be disjointed; even if they are not identical, they at least need to intersect in a way that enables us to know that we are talking about the same object (1967: 171). In my understanding, these explanations are in perfect agreement with Frege’s own views.[15]

    A last point is that Searle has its own expanded understanding of reference borrowing as a parasitic form of reference. As he notes, even by knowing only that the name ‘structuralism’ concerns “a kind of fashionable theory” (an indefinite description), and therefore including it in the right type of thing, he is alreaduy using the name to refer parasitically to the what better informed people are able to refer in a more complete, non-parasitic way (this would not work only in the case of wildly mistaken views, as when someone thinks that Socrates is a non prime number divisible by 17).[16]

   Although Searle developed the most elaborate exposition of descriptivism available, there are some good and bad objections to it. A useful objection, remembered by William Lycan (2003), though already anticipated by Searle (1958: 170), is the following: even if the number of descriptions satisfied by the object is not defined, it needs to be more than half the bundle of descriptions, because less than that would allow two totally different objects, each satisfying half of the descriptions, to be identified by the same name. However, it seems quite possible that an object can be discovered that satisfies less than half of the descriptions, perhaps only one or two, and that it is still referred to by the name.

   Replying to this objection is not difficult. Like all the criteria of application, the criterion of partial satisfaction of a cluster of descriptions has its own limits of application. Thus, if one object satisfies half of the descriptions and another object satisfies the other half (assuming the descriptions all have the same weight), there is simply no way to know to which object to apply the proper name, and it thereby loses its referential function.

   Stronger objections could arise, however, if we focus on the weight of the descriptions. Searle’s theory offers no criterion to evaluate weight. Suppose, for instance, that in a possible world very near to ours there were two twins called Osama Bin Laden, the first being responsible for founding Al-Qaeda and planning the 9/11 terrorist attack, but not satisfying most of the descriptions that can be biographically associated with that name, while the other twin satisfies half or even most of the descriptions that we biographically associate with that name (like getting a devout Sunni Muslim education, marriage with Najwa Ghanhen, business study at the King Abdulaziz University…), although he had nothing to do with Al-Qaeda and the 9/11 attacks. Even so, we would prefer to identify our real Osama Bin Laden in that world with the twin responsible for the 9/11 terrorist attacks, since this event and the descriptions related to it have much more weight. Searle’s theory does not give us a clue about how to explain our preference for the first twin as our real Osama Bin Laden. In fact, assuming all descriptions have the same weight, if more than half of the bundle, say 3/5, is satisfied by the second twin, Searle’s theory will lead us to conclude erroneously that with the name ‘Osama Bin Laden’ we must mean the second twin brother, although this response is also counterintuitive.

   This objection already shows that Searle’s theory requires improvement to keep its explanatory value. It is necessary to add at least the requirement of the absence of homonymous competitors with associated clusters of descriptions with a similar weight as the cluster of descriptions accepted for the proper name considered as applicable to its bearer. As we will see later, the main problem with the descriptivist theories discussed in this chapter is not that they contain errors, but that they are still vague and fragmentary theoretical sketches, which limits their explanatory power.

   Finally, considering what all these philosophers wrote, we can provisionally suggest two kinds of sense or meaning of proper names: (i) the whole sense or descriptive content of a proper name, which can be expressed at least by the whole cluster of weighted descriptions; (ii) the actual sense of a proper name, which is what “is in the mind” (Russell) of the speaker when he uses the word, even if only tacitly. The last one must be a sub-set of the whole cluster, even if it is only some generally known definite description. Frege’s theory clearly thematized the sense (ii), which can change from speaker to speaker. Although Searle’s theory explicitly accepts sense (i), it is also concentrated on the case of individual users, the case in which the speaker “has in mind” a sub-cluster (ii) of descriptions belonging to (i). Considering Frege’s first example, it is clear that one can count as the meaning of ‘Aristotle’ not only ‘the pupil of Plato and the tutor of Alexander the Great’, but also ‘the teacher of Alexander the Great who was born in Stagira’ as belonging to the whole sense of the proper name ‘Aristotle’, which is confirmed by the fact that one can easily conceive a person who has in his mind both definite descriptions and also many others scattered throughout the language, for instance, if this person is a specialist in Aristotle.

   We can end on a positive note. What this short historical excursion demonstrates is that, differently from what some tend to think, there is a strong complementarity and unity in what the defenders of traditional descriptivism have held, since they are in the end all cluster-descriptivists. It is not a question of several competing theories, but of a single research project, which was insufficiently developed by different authors with various perspectives and interests. This suggests something in favor of its heuristic potential.

 

4. Addendum: Identification rules & descriptions

It is worthwhile to add an informative note aiming to suggest a plausible relationship between descriptivism and identification rules. According to Wittgenstein: “criteria give our words their common meaning” (1958: 57).[17] His views, along with those of philosophers like Strawson, seem to have deeply influenced Michael Dummett’s interpretation of Frege’s concept of sense (Sinn), since according to him:

 

…for Frege, the sense of a word or expression always consists in a rule which, taken together with the rules constitutive of the senses of the other words, determines the condition for the truth of a sentence in which the word occurs (1981: 194).

 

Thus, in Dummett’s interpretation of Frege, the sense or meaning of a proper name, as much as the sense of a predicate and a relation, can be analyzed in terms of criterial rules. This is made clear in a telling passage of his book on Frege’s philosophy of language:

 

To know the sense of a proper name is to have a criterion for recognizing, for any given object, whether or not it is the bearer (referent) of the name; to know the sense of a predicate is to have a criterion for deciding, for any object, whether or not the predicate applies to that object; and to know the sense of a relational expression is to have a criterion for deciding, given any two objects taken in a particular order, whether or not the relation it stands for holds between the first object and the second (1981: 229).

 

Restricting ourselves here to the case of the sense of proper names, we can follow Ernst Tugendhat’s clearer presentation of a similar view (1983: 235-6). According to the last author, the meaning (sense) of any singular term, including proper names, must be given by its identification rule (Identifikationsregel), which I would understand as an often only tacitly applied semantic-cognitive criterial rule, which is a rule to be satisfied by external criterial conditions that the rule is internally able to demand.

   Here we need to note that the word ‘criterion’ is ambiguous, denoting internally what the criterial rule requires and, externally, what we believe to have satisfied this requirement. Wittgenstein insightfully distinguished between primary criteria and secondary criteria or symptoms (1958: 24-25; 2001: 28). The finding of primary criteria is seen as warranting the application of a term, while the finding of secondary criteria or symptoms makes this application only probable. From this point of view, a primary criterial rule can generally be formulated as:

 

Ce [Ci => A],

 

where ‘Ce’ symbolizes the for us given external criteria, ‘Ci’ the corresponding internal criteria expected to be satisfied, ‘=>’ the warrant, and ‘A’ the awareness that the criteria are satisfied. For instance, if a chair can be described as “a non-vehicular artifact with a backrest made for only one person to sit on at a time”, the internal criterial condition Ci is expressed by means of that description. The external criterion Ce is what we find in the world that satisfies Ci, allowing the awareness A that the criterial meaning-rule for the identification of chairs is satisfied. The secondary criteria or symptoms are non-necessary properties like the fact that most chairs have four legs. (Costa 2018: 144-146)

   Back to Tugendhat, it is instructive to note that he applied an analysis like that of Dummett to any singular predicative statement. In my understanding of his writings (1983: 235-6; 1976: 259, 484-5, 487-8), a singular predicative statement should have in the place of its senses or cognitive meanings what we could call three criterial rules:

 

(i)              the identification rule (Identifikationsregel) of the singular term,

(ii)            the application rule (Verwendungsregel) of the general term, which I prefer to call its ascription rule, and,

(iii)          resulting from a combination of (ii) with (i), there should be some kind of verifiability rule (Verifikationsregel) (1976: 484-8), which would be able, if applicable, to make the statement true by means of what he calls correspondence, which I understand as the satisfaction of its verifying criteria (1983: 236).

 

Tugendhat saw that the rule to be applied first must be the identification rule of the singular term (in our case the proper name), which then allows the application to its result of the ascription rule of the general term (the predicative expression), both together constituting a kind of verifiability rule.

   To make clear why it should be so, we can take as an example Yuri Gagarin, the first person to orbit the planet. He watched from the small window of his space capsule and said: “The Earth is blue”. He first applied the identification rule for the proper name ‘Earth’, whose criteria were satisfied by the object of reference; only afterward did he find that this object of reference satisfied the criteria for the application of the predicative term ‘…is blue’. The combination of both applications amounts to the application of a verifiability rule for the sentence “The Earth is blue”, which at least in this case can be clearly seen as correspondence, supposedly in the sense of a structural isomorphism between the two associated criterial rules and their associated referents.

   It could be objected here that the appeal to verificationism and consequently to a verifiability principle was demolished by the logical positivists and their heirs... However, I must argue that this was not quite true! What the positivists really demolished was a straw man, namely, their own inflexible formalist versions of the principle. Even the idea was not from them. The first person to equate cognitive meaning with verification was Wittgenstein in his expositions to the members of the Circle in 1929 (See Glock: 1996)[18]. There and in later works, he suggested that the only way to analyze the (cognitive) meaning of a declarative sentence – without reverting again to meanings – would be to consider the links this sentence has with the world, interpreting its meaning as the same thing as diversely ramified criterial methods or rules responsible for its verification. To make this point evident, I quote a text from him exposing his nuanced and contextually variable view, which cannot be forced into a unique and logical formulation, as A. J. Ayer and others have tried:

 

Attending to the way the meaning of a sentence is explained makes clear the connection between meaning and verification. Reading that Cambridge won the boat race, which verifies “Cambridge won”, is obviously not the meaning, but it is connected with it. “Cambridge won” is not a disjunction, “I saw the race, or I read the result, or…” It is more complicated. Yet, if we ruled out any one of the means of verifying the statement, we would alter its meaning. It would upset our grammar if we excluded as a verification something that always accompanied winning. And if we did away with all means of verifying it, we would destroy the meaning. It is clear that not every sort of verification is actually used to verify “Cambridge won”, nor would just any verification give the meaning. The different verifications of the boat race being won have different places in the grammar of “boat race being won”.[19]

 

This means that Wittgenstein’s identification of verifiability with meaning is something that allows the most varied forms and grades of complexity. They are generally multiple, though usually based on grounding roots. There is no common formulation able to unify them, and the verifications are also interdependent, though not in the holistic way proposed by Quine[20]. The only way to analyze these forms of verification would be through careful pragmatic investigation of different cases or groups of cases, something that has nothing to do with the anti-metaphysical machine gun idealized by the Vienna Circle. Wittgenstein’s insight was almost commonsensical and, as far as I know, until now neither adequately developed nor successfully refuted.

   Coming back to our issue, we can conclude that it is plausible to think that the above-sketched view of criterial identification rules for proper names can be rescued for the cluster theory of proper names, to make it more adequate, insofar as definite descriptions can be understood as verbal expressions of criterial rules aiming at the identification of objects of reference, while a cluster of descriptions that could be seen as abridged by a proper name could also be seen as having to do with some complex kind of identification rule aiming to identify its bearer.

   I am here intentionally speaking in a condensed, overly vague way. However, much of the third chapter of this book will be dedicated to the development of a sufficiently precise and, as I hope, clear and convincing version of the general form of identification rules for proper names able to be conceived from a descriptivist viewpoint.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

---

[1] In agreement with Kripke, I understand the concept of a possible world in a humble way, as “a total way the world is or might have been” (Kripke 1980: 15-20).

[2] Some asked me why I really didn’t engage with the developments of the philosophy of language of the present century. This would be a serious mistake, forgetting that the revolutionary decade of analytic philosophy of language was the Seventies of the XX Century, whose results remained afterwards internally unchallenged. Because of this the attempt to give an illuminating and comprehensive account of how proper names refer to individuals by overthrowing the old stalemate between cluster descriptivism concerning proper names (mainly represented by John Searle) and causal-referentialism (mainly represented by Kripke) seems to be now as much as abandoned. Because it didn’t overthrow the old stalemate, pure referentialism (e.g., Soames 2002, 2004) remained unable to satisfactorily explain empty terms and modes of presentation. Two-Dimensionalist semantics remained too abstract, precisely by achieving no independent answer for the problem of reference of terms and statements (Costa 2018: Chap. IV). Other theories, like predicativism (e.g., Fara 2016), are deviants, interesting for linguists, but letting aside the main reason why philosophers are interested in proper names. Still others belong to a “metaphilophy” of proper names, which is also deviating and derivative (e.g., Garcia-Carpintero 2018). Philosophy of language today has a proto-scientific import, particularly for linguists, but has a bad scientist-redutionist import for philosophers interested in the achieveness of comprehensiveness, as in the present book. For access to criticism of present analytic philosophy, see Susan Haack, Reintegrating Philosophy (2016).

 

[3] The word ‘referentialism’ can be misleading. It applies fully to Stuart Mill’s alleged view of proper names, but in the case of the posterior, much more influential causal-historical views of Saul Kripke, Keith Donnellan, and others I would prefer the label ‘causal-referentialism’, remembering that Kripke is not a referentialist about meaning. Anyway, in order to have a unified terminology, I will use the word ‘referentialism’ here for both cases.

[4] Notice that I use the word ‘cognitive’ as including what some would call pre-cognitive, that is, what is cognitive but tacit, implicit, unconscious, even as in Sigmund Freud’s analyse of thoughts belonging to the primary processes (1982, 2002).

[5] This passage provides us with the elements of Mill’s standard interpretation.

[6] Frege was a kind of Platonist regarding senses while the British empiricists were particularists (meaning-ideas should be within psychological minds and qualitatively repeatable.)

[7] Kripke 1980, Lessons I and II. Devitt & Sterelny 1999, p. 45. See Lycan 2006, p. 256-7, and S. P. Schwartz 1977, p. 18-19. Although this kind of interpretation was popularized by Kripke, he seems to have taken it from John Searle (1967, p. 488; 1969, p. 170).

[8] American authors, influenced by Kripke, associate Frege with descriptivism, while English authors, influenced by Dummett, often reject this association (See Dummett 1981: 97-98; 110-111; 186 f.).

[9] Descriptivists do not need to argue that everything can be expressed through descriptions: from a phenomenal viewpoint, tactile, visual, auditory sensations, associated emotions… cannot in themselves be conveyed through spoken or written words. The only form in which to convey these things linguistically is metaphorical, through artistic representations like poetry. Frege called them colorations (Färbungen) and illuminations (Beleuchtungen) (1892: 31).

[10] The book was first published in 1911. This passage, as well as the next to be quoted, appears identical in Russell’s article from 1918.

[11] Anyway, the composite description assumed by a proper name’s user can be easily symbolized through Russell’s theory of descriptions: if the descriptive predicates are symbolized as the set {F₁, F₂... F_n}, then a composite definite description (formed by an indefinite number of definite descriptions) can be formulated as (∃x) ((F₁x & F₂x... & F_nx) & (y) (F₁y → y = x) & (y) (F₂y → y = x)... & (y) (F_ny → y = x)).

[12] Leonard Linsky interpreted Wittgenstein as having here suggested the absence of conventional limits to fix descriptions (1977: 99). But there is unqualified textual evidence for this idea. Anyway, if Wittgenstein thought so, he would be wrong. It does not seem conceivable that a proper name can maintain a single and distinguishable reference if the limits of its application result from arbitrary decisions.

[13] Searle’s formulation first appeared in a paper published in 1958 and was re-exposed in his contribution to the Encyclopedia of Philosophy edited by Paul Edwards (1967), and in his book Speech Acts (1969: 162-174).

[14] 1967, vol. V, p. 490.

[15] I think Searle misinterprets the Fregean example of Herbert Garner and Leo Peter as demanding that both should have the same descriptive contribution to the name. But this interpretation is contradicted by the remark on the innocuous fluctuation of senses in Frege’s footnote on proper names in “On Sense and Reference”. Certainly, the two sub-sets must only in some way intersect. (Cf. Searle 1969, pp. 168, 170)

[16] See Searle 1983: 249, 259.

[17] See also 1984a, sec. 61-62. For a discussion, see Baker 1974, and Hacker 1975, Ch. XI.

[18] Sometimes it is advisable to check what the true inventor of an idea has said before naively believing in the achievements of those who have tried to improve on it.

[19] Wittgenstein 2001, p. 29. For an extensive comparative analysis, see Costa 2018, Chap. V.

[20] The application of a chosen verifiability rule is not hopelessly entangled with the application of many other verifiability procedures, as Quine suggests; it only presupposes their application (see Costa 2018: 327-332).