This is a draft of a chapter of the book "How do Proper Names Really Work?" published by De Gruyter 2023
III
META-DESCRIPTIVISM:
DEVELOPING A THEORY
The mainstream of our philosophical community
sometimes behaves like a pendulum, which first oscillates to one side and then
to the other.[1] One result of this is that,
when considered over a short period of time, it offers us the illusory
reassurance that the pendulum will continue to move in the same direction
forever. The theory of the direct reference of proper names allegedly proposed
by John Stuart Mill did not have a long lifetime. It lost credibility with the
appearance of the descriptivist theories of Frege, Russell, Wittgenstein, P. F.
Strawson, John Searle, and others. In the sixties of the last century, it
seemed as if the true theory of reference for proper names had finally been
outlined. However, what a surprise it was when in the early seventies the
philosophical world was presented with a new conception of how proper names
refer that sounded like a rebirth of Millianism, re-conceived in the form of
the causal-historical view of proper names advocated by Saul Kripke, Keith
Donnellan, and later in somewhat different forms by Michael Devitt and others,
in a movement that persists to the present day? As I endeavored to show in the
previous chapter, it is not at all certain that this movement is definitive.
Indeed, my goal in this chapter is to reverse the direction of the pendulum’s
trajectory in the direction of a kind of neo-descriptivist theory.
Notwithstanding, my approach must be considerably more complex and nuanced,
since it must take enough account of the considerable range of reflections
produced for and against the later causal-referentialist view. Although the argument
I will present in what follows is very lengthy and detailed, requiring some
effort from the reader, I believe it is in the end clear and convincing – in
fact, the only reasonable alternative.
My
working hypothesis on descriptivist theories of proper names is that they fail
due to “lack of structure.” A proper name cannot take the place of some
haphazard cluster of non-differentially weighted descriptions, as orthodox
cluster theory seems to claim. For instance, a look at the examples analyzed in
the last chapter seems to make somewhat intuitive the idea that definite
descriptions concerning the spatiotemporal localization of the object of
reference (“localizing descriptions”), as much as those definite descriptions
concerning the main reasons why we use a proper name (“characterizing
descriptions”), must occupy a place of pride against more fortuitous
descriptions. That is, it seems that the descriptions that make up a cluster
must be subject to some structuring principle. It is indeed plausible to think that the main
reason why Searle’s version of a cluster theory lacks explanatory power resides
in its not taking account of the internal organization of the cluster, giving
the impression that a causal-historical view constitutes a plausible option.
Now,
what is the structuring principle we are searching for? The natural answer
arises when we consider what we have seen in the appendix of Chapter I: the
constitutive descriptions of any cluster can be seen as what could be called description-rules,
i.e., linguistic expressions of what might be called semantic-cognitive
criterial rules, insofar as they must be able, somehow and to some extent (even
if minimal and only tacitly understood) cognitively[2]
to connect a proper name with its bearer. Now, since the definite
descriptions constitutive of a cluster summarized by a proper name are
expressions of rules, the structuring principle must be a rule of rules,
namely, a meta-rule, a higher-order rule having as its field of application
first-order description-rules belonging to the cluster of descriptions of
proper names in general. Hence, I call this structuring principle a general
meta-description rule since my aim is to apply it to the descriptions of any
proper name in general. Because of this, I call the version of descriptivism
that I am searching for a meta-descriptivist theory of proper names. (It
would not be fair to call it a form of ‘causal-descriptivism,’ since even if it
assumes an indispensable causal element, this element, as we have seen in the
last chapter, has no explanatory power, being therefore unable to tell us how a
proper name reaches its reference.[3])
Before
trying to explain and justify the general meta-descriptivist rule, some
classificatory investigation of the types of descriptions belonging to the
clusters is necessary. The reason is that not all definite descriptions seem
relevant or even minimally relevant. Consider the following one: ‘the person
who in the winter of 1938 lay in the grass of the dikes that enclose the
Mississippi, and in the presence of the moving waters of that magnificent river
experienced one of his rare moments of peace’.[4]
This is an irrelevant definite description that can be found in the
autobiography of Bertrand Russell, irrelevant because almost no one knows or
knew it. To select the more important kinds of definite descriptions, I start
by systematically investigating the main types of descriptions belonging to the proper name’s clusters,
since it is certain that if there is a general meta-descriptive rule, it will
not apply to irrelevant descriptions
Before arriving at the proposed classification, however, it is worth
noting that philosophers who defended descriptivist views of proper names have
often taken vivid but in fact arbitrarily chosen definite descriptions
associated with a proper name as examples. These descriptions were arbitrarily
chosen for their often-alluring character. Nonetheless, they are deceitful and
can often be dismissed as having almost no importance for the real
identification of the object to be referred to by a proper name. Frege, for
example, suggested that the name ‘Aristotle’ could be used in place of the
descriptions ‘Plato’s greatest disciple’ and ‘the tutor of Alexander the
Great.’ Wittgenstein suggested that the name ‘Moses’ could be used in place of
the description ‘the man who as an infant was discovered in a basket floating
in the Nile by pharaoh’s daughter.’ And Searle remembered in connection with
Aristotle the description ‘the founder of the Lyceum school in Athens’. But, as
we shall see, none of these folk descriptions plays a relevant role in
identifying the person they indicate.
1. Fundamental description-rules
There are undoubtedly more, and less weighted
definite descriptions associated with proper names. Consider, for example, the
proper name ‘Moses.’ The description ‘the man who led the Israelites to the
promised land’ seems far more relevant than ‘the man who as an infant was found
in the Nile by pharaoh’s daughter.’ After all, it is intuitively clear that the
falsehood of the latter description would cause far less semantic damage than
the falsehood of the former.
To
hierarchize description-rules, I want to distinguish three groups of definite
descriptions capable of expressing parts of the informative content of proper
names:
groups A
and B, containing what I call fundamental
descriptions,
and
group C,
containing what I call auxiliary
descriptions.
I want to show that groups A and B are those of
descriptions that are truly relevant to the identification of the object, while
group C is that of descriptions which, although often exemplified and having
greater or lesser value for the connection with the object, do not play a
really grounding role in the identification, although, as we will also see,
they might gain an important communication role, particularly in borrowed or
parasitic references. The rationale for these distinctions will be given in what
follows.
Let us
first look at what I called the fundamental descriptions belonging to groups A
and B. To make sure that they are not an arbitrary invention of mine, I would
like to begin by showing why they are the most relevant description-rules in
the game of naming. But how to do this? Unexpected as it might seem, there is
an easy way. As some know, J. L. Austin, the ordinary language philosopher,
advised that when working with philosophy one should always have the Oxford English Dictionary at hand.[5] This can be helpful when we
need to get a pre-philosophical understanding of the plural meanings of concept
words that are central to our understanding of the world, for instance, the
meanings of the verb ‘to know’.
However, many have objected that we cannot look up the most important
types of descriptions associated with proper names… After all, proper names are
generally not found in dictionaries. This is a reason why some philosophers
have decided that proper names have no meaning. But this should not discourage
us. Even if proper names are not usually included in dictionaries, at least
many of them are placed in encyclopedias. Hence the new advice: “if you wish to
find the descriptions that matter for a proper name, you should start (if
possible) by consulting its article in encyclopedias!”
To
begin with, look at what I have found in the ‘Aristotle’ entry of my pocket Penguin Philosophical Dictionary. I chose this because it is
the shortest competent entry I could find. There it is written:
Aristotle = (384 BC – 322 BC) was born in
Stagira, northern Greece, Aristotle produced the greatest philosophical system
of antiquity. (What follows is a short list of Aristotle’s main works.)
When we examine this or any other encyclopedia
entry for the proper name ‘Aristotle,’ we always find a similar pattern. They
especially abbreviate two description-rules, one establishing the place and time of Aristotle’s life, to
which are added the stages of his career in space and time,[6] while the other establishes the
most important properties attributed to Aristotle, those which constitute the very
reason why we apply the name. These properties are, above all, the central
ideas and arguments presented in the Corpus Aristotelicum.
We can
now abstract from this concrete case two types of fundamental description-rules
justifying what I called groups A and B, respectively:
A) Localizing
description-rule: expressed by the description that establishes what we consider
to be the object’s space-time location and career (with the possible inclusion
of spatiotemporal antecedents and consequents).
B) Characterizing
description-rule: expressed by the description that establishes what we
consider to be the object’s most relevant properties – those that constitute
the very reason we name it (– possibly including relevant antecedents and
consequents).
We must note that the spatiotemporal career may
include causal paths before and after the object’s existence, as the final
clauses of (A) and (B) show, insofar as they are seen as relevant. Thus, it is
relevant (concerning causes) to the name ‘Aristotle’ that he was the son of
Philip of Macedon’s court doctor; it is particularly relevant to Queen
Elizabeth II that she was the daughter of Prince Albert, Duke of York, who
later became King George V… Moreover (concerning effects), it is relevant to
the name ‘James Mill’ that he was the father of John Stuart Mill; and it is
still more relevant to Gavrilo Princep, the Bosnian Serb student who assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria
and his wife, that his act triggered the First World War.
However, it does not seem of any relevance to know who the parents of
Anaxagoras were (there are no historical references to them). Kripke reserved a
completely different place for such things with his story about the
essentiality of origins, while my intention is to link them to descriptivism.
Let us
now consider Aristotle’s localizing and characterizing description-rules, by
more explicitly stating them. Both descriptions are highlighted in
encyclopedias and can be briefly summarized as follows:
(a) Localizing description-rule of the name
‘Aristotle’: the person who was born in Stagira in 384 BC as the son of Philip
of Macedon’s court doctor, who lived most of his life in Athens, had to flee to
Asos, returned to Athens, but in the end had to flee to Chalkis, where he died
in 322 BC.
(b) Characterizing description-rule of the name
‘Aristotle’: the author of the relevant philosophical doctrines explained in Metaphysics, Physics, Nicomachean Ethics,
Organon, Topics, and other main works of
the Aristotelian opus.
Such fundamental description-rules or
conditions can be more and more descriptively detailed; for instance, we know
that he crossed the Aegean see when he was 17, and that after the death of
Plato he lived for two years on the island of Lesbos, where with help of
Theophrastus he conducted important biological research… And we could give
detailed summaries of the 14 books of his Metaphysics or his Ethics
or his Organon. In Aristotle’s case, these accounts are ultimately
justified by historical testimonies and the many surviving writings. Moreover,
it seems that in this case, the characterizing rule is somewhat more relevant,
which would give it greater weight. Anyway, both description-rules are clearly
relevant and, as you should have noted, not completely separable.
To
underline the importance of fundamental description-rules, here are some
examples of definite descriptions of group A, which I took directly from the
headings of Wikipedia entries.[7] They are presented as
conditions for localizing identifying properties of the objects referred to by
proper names:
1. Churchill (Sir Winston Leonard Spencer
Churchill): a person who was born in 10/11/1874 in Oxfordshire and died on
24/1/1965 in London. He lived most of his life in England, except for some
short holidays in cities like Venice, though as a young man he worked as a
correspondent in the British colonies…
2. Taj Mahal: a mausoleum commissioned in 1632
near the city of Agra, India, existing from 1653 to the present day.
3. Paris: city of more than ten million
inhabitants situated in the center of northern France, on the banks of the
River Seine. Its emergence as a city dates back to the 9th century.
4. Amazon: a river whose source is in the
mountains of Peru, and which empties into the Atlantic, following the line of
the equator. Together with its tributaries, it forms the world’s largest
watershed. It has existed since time immemorial…
Note
that the localizing description has at least one characterizing element, which
consists in classifying the kind of object referred to. Thus, Churchill
is classified as being a person, the Taj Mahal a mausoleum, Paris a city, the
Amazon a river, Venus a planet… This minimum characterization is indispensable
for the localizing description to make sense. Furthermore, the kind of object
has some priority in weight: it would not be possible to name
‘Churchill’ if he were a dog, ‘Taj Mahal’ if it were a shack, ‘Paris’ if it
were a longhouse, ‘Amazon River’ if it were a stream, ‘Venus’ if it were an
asteroid.
Group
B of description-rules is also fundamental. One can make this clear by scanning
the headings of encyclopedias in general. In the same order, here is what Wikipedia briefly says:
1. Churchill = was a remarkable British statesman,
who was the prime minister of the United Kingdom from 1939 to 1945, in the
critical years of the Second World War, and again from 1950 to 1955.
2. Taj Mahal = the wonderful marble mausoleum
constructed by Emperor Shah Jahan for his beloved wife, Mumtaz Mahal.
3. Paris = the capital of France, economic,
cultural, and political center of the country, and one of the most beautiful
cities in the world.
4. Amazon = the river carrying the most water and
possibly also the longest river in the world, source of 1/5 of the fresh water
flowing into the oceans.
I want to demonstrate that the primacy of these
localizing and characterizing descriptions is in no way an extravagance of
encyclopedias. It is pretty much because of the importance of properties
denoted by the definite descriptions of these two lists that we are able to
apply these names. These properties can be considered of greater importance, as
they result from an agreement among privileged users about what would be the
most fundamental properties associated with their bearers.
2. Auxiliary description-rules
Now I want to consider the definite
descriptions that have been left out. They are what I call the auxiliary
description-rules belonging to group C. They are many, some of them
colorful and used in everyday life in the place of names. That’s why, as I have
suggested, they have often confused philosophers, making it difficult to
determine what really matters concerning identification. In the following, I
present a classification that, although unsystematic, can be helpful.
(1) The first case of group C consists of
descriptions that can be called
metaphorical, often used in place of the proper name. Examples are
descriptions such as ‘the lady of the camellias’, ‘the eagle of The Hague’,
‘the city of light’, ‘the knight of the sad figure,’ ‘the master of those who
know’. The properties they allude to are not, in general, those that draw
attention to their peculiarity. But they do draw attention to their usefulness
as suggestive and picturesque mnemonic devices. Thus, ‘the iron marshal’, for
instance, draws attention by pointing to a striking characteristic of Marshal
Floriano Peixoto, which was his authoritarian and uncompromising character. But
this is of little value in the sense of helping us to identify Floriano Peixoto
unequivocally, because there were many other persons with similar character
traits. What most properly allows us to identify Floriano Peixoto is,
certainly, awareness that he satisfies the localizing description (a) of having
been ‘the military officer born in Joazeiro in 1839, who served in the war
between Paraguay and Acre and died in 1895 in Barra Mansa,’ in addition to the
characterizing description (b) of having been, mainly, ‘the second president
and the first vice-president of Brazil, responsible for those acts of
repression that consolidated the republic’. Both descriptions are unavoidably
found in encyclopedias.
(2) There are also non-metaphorical auxiliary
description-rules, which we can classify as
accidental, but well-known.
Examples of well-known accidental descriptions are ‘the man who as an infant
was found in the Nile by pharaoh’s daughter’ and ‘the tutor of Alexander the
Great.’ These descriptions are known to most people who can be said to know
what is meant by the names ‘Moses’ and ‘Aristotle’ and often also by some who
do not know. Yet they are quite accidental, for surely neither Moses nor
Aristotle would cease to be the persons we consider them to be if the
information provided by these descriptions were false.
To
this type also belongs a very peculiar definite description, which has the form
of ‘the bearer of the name “N”’, for example, ‘the bearer of the name
“Aristotle”’, understanding this description as referring to only one distinct
individual, namely, our ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle.[8] Definite descriptions of
this kind are accidental, for their referents would not cease to be what they
are, nor to be easily identifiable as such if they had received a different
name, or if they had later changed their name. Indeed, it is a mere accident
that Aristotle was baptized with the name ‘Aristotle,’ while it does not seem
to have been equally accidental that he wrote the Aristotelian opus or that he
belongs to the classic period of ancient Greece. Imagine that in a possible
world Nicomachus, a physician at Philip’s court, instead of baptizing the son
born in Stagira in 384 BC as ‘Aristotle’ had baptized him with the name
‘Pittacus’. Supposing that Pittacus had studied with Plato, written the entire
Aristotelian opus, and had the same biography as Aristotle, we would not
hesitate to say that in this possible world Pittacus was our Aristotle, only
with a different name.
That
the description-rule of the form ‘the bearer of the name “N”’ is not
fundamental to the identification of a particular object is made evident by the
fact that we can use a name – as a phonetic-graphic sensible form, a name-word – and, after discovering that
it is incorrect, replace it with the correct name-word for the same person. In
addition, we can know who a person is – her appearance, where and when to find
her, what is relevant about her – without remembering or even knowing what the
person is called (some people lack a memory for names). The proper name,
understood as a sensible form, is like the label on a binder that contains a
cluster of description-rules: We can replace the label (‘Aydes’ changed his
name to ‘Adilson’), we can even be deceived as to the most appropriate label,
as, in the case of the baptized name (‘Raúl Rivas’ was actually called ‘Marcial
Maciel’). However, what really matters here is the content of the
binder, seen as a kind of identification rule for the name’s referent. After
all, even if some sensible mark and a disambiguating context are necessary for
us to know which binder we are considering, such a mark is, in the end, the
result of almost arbitrary and potentially changeable choices (the Russian city
currently called ‘Volgograd’ was previously called ‘Stalingrad’, although it
was originally called ‘Tsaritsyn’). The content, however, should have
epistemological and ontological import.
This
last remark leads us to a curious conclusion. If we admit that in our
reflections on language a philosophically relevant explanation is one that has
epistemological and ontological import, then a philosophical theory on the
semantics of proper names is not a theory restricted to what we usually call a
‘proper name’ in the current language, which is a phonetic or orthographic
expression of what we mean with a proper name.[9] This expression is what, for example, leads
us to regard the word ‘Köln’ as a different proper name than ‘Cologne’ (name as
a symbolic expression), while we could also say that they are respectively the
German and the French forms of the same proper name (a name as an expressed
cognitive content). A philosophically relevant theory of proper names should be
essentially a theory of semantic-cognitive contents constitutive of proper names, which should be seen as
identification rules for the proper names’ bearers, associated with names
as sensible marks, such as ones we are searching for. If this is so, a theory
of proper names must be essentially a binder theory and not a label theory,
since although required for communication, labels are arbitrary and capable of
substitution.
Although many would disagree, I think we can make a distinction here
parallel to the distinction between the lexical sense and the semantic
content of indexicals. Indexical terms are singular terms like ‘this’,
‘that’, ‘I’, ‘you’, ‘she’… which can refer to different things in different
contexts. However, they have a fixed lexical sense, for instance, ‘“This”’
should usually indicate something near to the speaker’, ‘“I” should usually
indicate the speaker when she utters it.’ However, indexical terms must also
have semantic content, the sense they gain when applied to an object given in a
particular context (for instance, when I say this and am referring to
this notebook or use I to mean myself). Correspondingly, the lexical
sense of a proper name is that of a term whose sense isn’t expressed through
syntactic complexity and that is used to identify a single object,
distinguishing it from a multiplicity of others (Tugendhat 1976: 425 f.).
Theories of the lexical meaning of the proper name are possible, I
concede, but they will lack any epistemic or ontological import, since they
will not give us the rules that would allow us to individuate any name’s
bearer. A theory of the semantic content of a proper name, in turn, is a theory
like that of Fregean sense, of its cognitive meaning, or of the rules
establishing the criteria for the identification of its bearers and what is
common among them. Only such a theory will have explanatory force to clarify
the epistemic relationship between the proper name and its object. But for this
very reason, the sensible mark of a proper name becomes, in the end, something
accidental, explaining why a set of different sensible marks can conventionally
express an identical or similar semantic content, thereby not failing to
produce the act of naming the same referent. Therefore, for us, a proper
name is an identifying (internal) semantic content plus a conventional sensible
mark that makes that content communicable. For a philosophically relevant
theory of proper names, these sensible marks are only their unavoidable
symbolic expressions, in no way exhausting what we understand as the content of
proper names.
(3) There are also accidental and generally
unknown description-rules. Examples are ‘the husband of Pythias’, ‘the
lover of Herphyllis’, ‘the grandson of Achaeon’. Not many people know that
these descriptions are all associated with the name ‘Aristotle’. Such definite
descriptions can, of course, be multiplied at will, and are found in abundance
in biographies. There are, however, still less well-known definite
descriptions, for instance: ‘the first naturalist to open a fertilized chicken
egg and to describe the living embryo within it’, whose bearer was also
Aristotle when he lived in Lesbos. Because such descriptions are known to only
a few persons, they have in themselves almost no relevant function in their
association with the proper name. Thus, imagine that all a speaker knows about
Aristotle is that he was Achaeon’s grandson. In most cases he will not be able
to make use of this name to communicate with other people, since a description
that is shared by only a few cannot help people recognize it as referring to
Aristotle as the famous Greek philosopher, rather than, say, the Greek
multi-millionaire Aristotle Onassis, who could also have a grandfather called
Achaeon[10] – here could the contexts
of the utterance and of the learning of the proper name eventually disambiguate
the word ‘Aristotle’.
(4) Finally, there are adventitious auxiliary
descriptions, such as that expressed by the dsescription ‘the philosopher
mentioned by the teacher’ or ‘the girl who was introduced to us at the party.’
The rules expressed here associate the name with some context in which it was
properly used. They are typically provisional: at first spontaneously produced
in public speech, then used for some time, and later abandoned and forgotten.
They are therefore not permanent semantic constituents and characteristics of the
name. However, because these description-rules refer to a context known to a
group of speakers in a certain period, they may suffice for a speaker to be
able to use them alone or associated with the proper name in conversations.
Consequently, the speaker will be uniquely recognized by interlocutors, with
the possibility of subsequent exchanges of information about the proper name’s
bearer.
At this point, the following objection could
be made. Apart from the fact that they appear in the headings of encyclopedia
entries, there does not seem to be any compelling reason to privilege so-called
fundamental description-rules of groups A and B. After all, just as auxiliary
descriptions are contingent, the same can be shown to be the case with
fundamental descriptions themselves: that Aristotle did not write his
philosophical works, that Churchill did not become a British statesman, that
the Taj Mahal was not built near Agra, and that Paris did not arise where it
did, but rather in the south of France, are very improbable empirical
possibilities, but not necessities. We can, after all, imagine possible worlds
where neither the rules of characterization for Aristotle and Churchill, nor
the rules of location for the Taj Mahal and Paris are applicable, but even
then, the philosopher and the statesman, as well as the ivory-white marble
mausoleum and the city of light still exist. In isolation, fundamental
description-rules do not designate anything necessary for the identification of
a proper name’s bearer. On the other hand, it seems that we can identify a
single object through a single auxiliary description: according to the
circumstances, to know that someone is talking about Aristotle may be enough to
know that he is speaking of the founder of the Lyceum, or Alexander’s tutor, or
even to know that he is speaking of the Lyceum’s founder, Pythias’ spouse,
Herphyllis’ lover, etc.
The only thing I can do in the face of
objections like these is to ask the reader for patience! What we have done so
far is to consider with some attention the main pieces of a puzzle. Only after
the introduction of second-order rules capable of selecting the weighted combinations of first-order description-rules able
to justify the application of a proper name, will the importance of the
descriptions of groups A and B become indisputable.
3. Disjunctive rule
From our working-hypothesis and from what was
said above, it seems to follow that we need to search for ways of identifying
combinations among the description-rules of a proper name’s cluster that make
possible the name’s referential application. To do this we need to look for a
second-order rule (or description-rule) that can be applied to the cluster’s
first-order description-rules associated with any proper name, so that the
second-order rule is able to select the combinations that make it possible to
apply any name. This rule of rules should therefore be a general meta-rule, a meta-descriptive rule applicable to bundles of descriptions that we associate with
proper names in general.
Is
there such a general meta-descriptive rule? If there is, we should be able to
find it. Assuming by hypothesis an affirmative answer, the question becomes:
how can we find such a rule? The strategy I propose is the following. To begin
with, it seems quite advisable to dismiss group C descriptions as
insufficiently relevant. They seem to be identifiers only in the sense of
assisting the speaker in his social connection with the object by means of a
parasitic reference. This function is realized to the extent that they enable
us to insert a name into a discourse, understood as a communication medium,
assuming we already know the true identification rules of the object capable of
completing this connection. If the true identification rules are not known by
all, they can at least be known by privileged users of a name, or partially
known by each of them, under the assumption that they may have different and
complementary focuses of specialization.
What
evidence can be offered for this suggestion? It is not difficult to find.
Whenever the fundamental description-rules belonging to group C are accepted as
applicable, the auxiliary description-rules could be absent, even on the whole.
To prove this, imagine that the group of conditions A and B for the name
‘Aristotle’ are satisfied. Imagine that the proper name ‘Aristotle’ satisfies
(a) its localizing description rule of being the person born in Stagira in 384
BC as the son of Amyntas II, the court doctor, who lived most of his life in
Athens, had to flee to Assos, returned to Athens, but later had to flee to
Chalkis, where he died in 322 BC… and (b) its characterizing description-rule
of being the author of the relevant philosophical doctrines explained in Metaphysics, Physics, Nicomachean Ethics,
Organon, Topics, and other main works of
the Aristotelian opus. Now, try to imagine that he didn’t satisfy any auxiliary
description rule usually attributed to him. Thus, suppose that he was neither
Alexander’s tutor, nor Nicomachus’ son, nor Pythias’ husband, nor Herphyllis’
lover, nor the founder of the Lyceum. You can even imagine that his grandfather
was not called Achaeon, that he did not have a son named Nicomachus, that he
was never in Lesbos, that he was not called by Dante the master of those who
know, etc. Even so, he could perfectly well still have been the greatest Greek
philosopher, together with Plato… that is, our Aristotle!
However, the same cannot be said of fundamental descriptions. We cannot
conceive that no fundamental description-rule applies; we cannot
conceive of “~A & ~B.” Suppose that neither the localizing nor the
characterizing description-rule applies, and the person is still called
Aristotle. Then he will not be our Aristotle. To make this clear, just
remember the example presented by Searle of the expert on Aristotle who
informed us he had discovered that Aristotle could not have written any work
attributed to him, since he was only an illiterate Venetian fishmonger of the
late Renaissance... (1967: 490) We will answer that at most he may be talking
about some homonym of ‘Aristotle’, who has nothing to do with the person we
have the right reasons to call by this name, since none of the fundamental
description-rules that we associate with the name ‘Aristotle’ was minimally
satisfied by him.
If the
meta-identifying rule excludes “~A & ~B,” would it be reduced to “A &
B”? Would it require the conjunction of the localizing description with the
characterizing description, or should it perhaps just reject its disjunction?
It would surely not require the conjunction. For although the objects referred
to by proper names usually satisfy a conjunction of groups A and B of
description-rules, it is not difficult to conceive of unusual situations and cases
where a name refers without the descriptions constitutive of one of these two
groups being satisfied.
To
highlight this point, consider once again the name ‘Aristotle’. It is not
difficult to imagine possible worlds close to ours where he existed without
satisfying the conjunction of the rules of location and characterization for
that name. The spatio-temporal localizing rule for Aristotle does not
necessarily need to be what his identification-rule demands: we can perfectly
well conceive of a possible world close to ours where he wrote the Aristotelian
opus, even though he was born and died in Rome a few centuries later, and there
was no disciple of Plato named Aristotle who was born in Stagira in 384 BC.
We can
also conceive of a possible world where only the localizing rule for Aristotle
is satisfied, but not the characterizing rule, for in this world the philosophy
of Aristotle never existed. Suppose that in this world Aristotle was born in
Stagira in 384 BC, the son of Nicomachus, the physician at Philip’s court and
that at age 17 he moved to Athens to study under Plato. Unfortunately, shortly
after his arrival, he was afflicted by a brain fever that left him unable to
pursue intellectual activities for the rest of his life, until his death in
Chalkis in 322 BC. Despite this, it seems that we have enough elements to
recognize that person as our Aristotle “in
potentia.” But here only the localizing rule is satisfied.
Another piece of evidence that a conjunction of descriptive
identification rules is not always necessary is that there are proper names
that by convention refer to a single object only through its location or solely
through its characterization.
As an
example of the first type, let’s say someone decides to call the center of a
circle Z. This point satisfies the condition of type A of having a
well-defined space-time location. Suppose this point has no relevant function.
Nonetheless, to make the identification it is not necessary for a point to have
any relevant distinctive characteristic. In our example, it is just a point,
which once established can be used, say, for some geometric measurement. This
is what I call a one-foot identifying rule.
Another example that can be recalled in this context is ‘Venus’. The
localizing rule is ‘the second planet in the solar system, orbiting the Sun
between Mercury and Earth, which was identified thousands of years ago (and has
probably existed for more than four billion years)’, while the characterizing
rule should be ‘a planet with a third of the Earth’s mass and a very hot,
dense, poisonous atmosphere’. However, what matters here is that the localizing
rule must be satisfied, while the characterizing rule matters least. We see
that even if Venus lost part of its mass or all its atmosphere, which is what
makes it the brightest planet we can see with the naked eye, as long as it
remained a planet – a condition already included in the localizing rule – it would
remain Venus. We can also imagine that Venus lost so much of its mass so that
it shrank to the size and form of an asteroid. In this case, it would satisfy
neither its characterizing nor the relevant part of its localizing rule, which
already demands that it must be a planet, for it would change from a planet to
an asteroid. We can also imagine that it could for some reason cease to orbit
the sun. In this case, it would not cease to satisfy the localizing rule, as we
might think, because at the time when it was named (and so baptized) it would
satisfy that rule, orbiting the Sun as the second planet. Even if it were
discovered that it did not belong to the early solar system, but was a late
comer, only having drifted in from outer space a million years ago, it would
still satisfy the localizing rule, still being called ‘Venus’. On the other
hand, it would be wrong to identify Venus by the satisfaction of the
characterizing rule alone, as the disjunctive rule allows, since in this case
any planet could be called Venus, insofar as it satisfies that rule. We need to
accept that the identification rule for Venus is very much another case of a
one-foot localizing rule.
Perhaps the best way to paraphrase what happens in the cases above is to
say that for them the characterizing rule is
the localizing rule itself. Let us remember that the characterizing rule was
defined as the reason why we chose to use the proper name. But in the case of
the Z center of the circle, the only reason is the location itself, and
in the case of Venus, the localization as the second planet from the Sun during
and after naming is in fact the only reason that really counts.
There
are also examples that require only the satisfaction of the characterizing
rule. One of them is offered by the name ‘Almostásim,’ which appears in Jorge
Luis Borges’ short story entitled El aciercamento de Almostásim. Almostásim
is a being, possibly a person, who when in contact with people emanates
perfection. We do not know where this being is, and if it really exists
somewhere in space and time. Some believe that we can approach it through
contact with human beings who have become limited repositories of its infinite
glory. Only these vague indications constitute the characterizing rule of that
name. But there is no rule identifying its spatio-temporal location, as no one
has ever encountered Almostásim, and some even commit the heresy of denying its
existence. This is a case of a one-foot disjunctive rule.
There
is, finally, an example of a proper name that by definition cannot have
a localizing rule: this is the word ‘Universe’ (or ‘Multiverse,’ as preferred
by some). The object referred to by that name has a one-foot characterizing
rule: it is all that could be shown to exist empirically, including things that
are still to be verified. But it cannot have a localizing rule, because it
contains all space and all time, since the Universe cannot be in space or time.[11]
If we
exclude the possibility of “~A & ~B” and also the need for “A & B,” it
seems that the better candidate for a meta-descriptive condition for the
application of the proper name could be “A ˅ B,” that is, an inclusive disjunction of the localizing
and characterizing descriptions. We can conclude these considerations with a
first and more rudimentary version of the general meta-identifying reference
rule for proper-names, to be applied to fundamental first-level
description-rules belonging to groups A and B. This meta-rule, to be called a
disjunctive rule, will be inadequate, but furnishes a working model that in the
following sections will be corrected and complemented.
Calling ‘N’ any chosen proper name, and using quotation marks to stress
the arbitrariness of the choice involved in the rule’s instantiation by a
proper name (Aristotle could be called ‘Pittacus’), calling G the nearest class
of objects to which the proper name refers that does not mix with its
descriptions (Aristotle does not belong to the class of prime numbers, but
rather to that of human beings), and calling L and C respectively the
localizing and characterizing description-rules, we can formulate the following
second-order disjunctive rule:
DR:
A proper name “N” refers properly to an x object belonging to a class G of
objects
iff,
(i-a) x
satisfies L: its localizing description-rule
and/or
(i-b) x
satisfies C: its characterizing description-rule.
To DR we can add two tacit assumptions: (1)
that there is a cluster of descriptions associated with ‘N’ that includes the
localizing and the characterizing description-rules, and (2) that a non-empty
‘N’ must be in some unknown way causally associated with its reference (a
C-condition).
An
example will make the application of the disjunctive rule clear: we can apply
the proper name ‘Aristotle’ to an object of the class of human beings (G), if
and only if there is an individual who (i-a) satisfies the localizing rule (L)
for ‘Aristotle’, which is that of being a person born in Stagira in 384 BC,
being the court physician’s son, having lived the main part of his life in
Athens, taking refuge for some time in Lesbos, returning to Athens and, in the
end, again as a refugee, dying in Chalkis, in 322 BC and/or (i-b) satisfies the
characterizing rule of ‘Aristotle’ (C), of being the philosopher who produced
the entire Aristotelian opus. This instantiation of DR can already be
considered an identification rule for the bearer of the name
‘Aristotle’. Nevertheless, an identification rule that takes this form, as we
will see later, is still unqualified and rudimentary.
Some
additional considerations about DR are indispensable. First, the applicability
of DR assumes the satisfaction of some causal precondition like a C-condition,
since some kind of causality is indispensable for a name to have a bearer. However, since the C-condition is
an assumed background condition, without any independent explanatory or
justificatory power, it does not take part of what explains how a proper name
refers to its object or of what explicitly justifies its
application. Thus,
it does not need to belong to DR. Moreover, the disjunctive rule assumes as
probable the satisfaction of auxiliary description-rules, though these
conditions do not belong to DR.
The
second additional consideration is that ‘N’ refers properly or self-sufficiently
to object x. We define a
proper or self-sufficient reference as a reference made by idealized users
of the name who know the rule well enough to employ it alone. This is often
only possible for privileged namers (specialized, primary users,
baptizers…). Here is the case of a reference of its own in the sense that it is
made with a sufficient cognitive basis, for instance, by an Aristotle scholar.
Often this is not what happens. For instance, one can refer to the pop singer
Amy Winehouse, even if one knows only that she wrote a song called ‘Back to
Black’, which is a central part of her characterizing rule, and even without
knowing the proper name ‘Amy Winehouse’, in the right context others will
instantly understand.
A
third additional consideration is that class G corresponds to a genus proximum, a concept used by
Aristotle as part of the definition of concepts to distinguish the nearest
class of properties to which the specific
differentia belongs. In our case, G has the limiting function of
establishing the nearest, most relevant genre of things to which object x belongs, such as living beings,
material objects, celestial bodies, etc. The use of class G serves to limit the
scope of the definition in advance, because without this we would have to pick
out just one thing among all the objects in the universe, which could be a
cognitively impossible task. Concerning the name ‘Aristotle,’ for example, G
can designate the class of human beings, since the class of philosophers is
already embedded in Aristotle’s characterizing description-rule as the greatest
philosopher of antiquity. Consequently, with G we exclude in advance that
‘Aristotle’ is the name of a college or a computer program. Even if in a
possible world an extremely advanced supercomputer with a program called
‘Aristotle’ produced the Aristotelian opus, assuming G we would not need to
admit that this program is our Aristotle, even in the case where it was built
by aliens in the year 384 BC in Stagira, used for more than twenty years in
Athens, and finally dismantled in 322 BC in Chalkis. We would consider this a
coincidence or a forgery. Differently from what Kripke would think, even if
someone believes that Aristotle is an extra-terrestrial being, or supposes that
he is an android, he will nevertheless be seen as human, that is, a human extra-terrestrial
being or a human android (Cf. Soames 2002: 64). In sum: using a stricter
G-class (not necessarily a scientific one) can be particularly useful
for disambiguating proper names. If G is understood to be the class of ancient
philosophers, this excludes the possibility that Aristotle could be the name of
a 20th century philosophy student at the University of Athens.
Here
we could still ask the following question: in the DR, auxiliary descriptions
disappear; but what then is the role of auxiliary descriptions? The answer
begins to emerge when we ask ourselves whether auxiliary descriptions alone
would be able to identify the bearer of a proper name. Suppose that a certain
object satisfies many or all auxiliary descriptions associated with its name,
but without satisfying any of the fundamental descriptions. Consider again the
Searlean illiterate fishmonger who lived in the 16th century in
Venice. But suppose he still satisfies many auxiliary descriptions for the
name. He was the son of a man named Nicomachus, he was Achaeon’s grandson, he
was Pythias’ husband, and had a lover called Herphyllis… he taught Alexander
and he founded a Lyceum… However strange these coincidences would be, they
would not be relevant, as they would lack the appropriate contexts of
localization and characterization. After all, this Nicomachus could not be the
physician named Nicomachus, who we know served at the court of Philip of
Macedon, nor can the grandfather Achaeon be the same one who lived in the 4th
century BC, and neither Pythias nor Herphyllis could be women of ancient
Greece, despite their names. The Alexander whom this pseudo-Aristotle taught
could not have been the famous general and conqueror from Macedonia. And the
Lyceum that this inept person founded could have nothing to do with the Lyceum
of the ancient Aristotelian School. The conceptual mess created in attempt to
conceive a situation where only the auxiliary descriptions remained the same is
not able to produce more than a series of curious, odd coincidences, which
present themselves to us as a strange imitation of reality. It is unable to
convince us that the proposed Aristotle is the real one. One can even imagine
circumstances where the application of auxiliary descriptions would be
justified. Suppose that the fishmonger called ‘Aristotle’ were a laughable comic
figure who worked near a school called the Lyceum, and that schoolboys called
his lover Herphyllis… or that by chance he had as a helper a young fishmonger
called Alexander… No matter how much they complement each other, auxiliary
descriptions alone are unable to provide us with the true identification rule.
As we will see, the leading role of auxiliary descriptions is much different;
they help us to insert the proper name into discourse (including public
dialogue or communication), where they can, in senses to be explained later, at
least point in the direction of the ultimate identification rule.
Finally, what about the one-foot fundamental rules? One possibility is
that the DR could in these cases be transformed into a rule of either the kind
“A ˅ A” or the kind “B ˅ B”. In cases of complete absence of one foot, like the
proper name ‘universe’, from which the localizing disjunction is simply
missing, the best form must be “B ˅ B”, while in the case of the center Z, the
best form will be “A ˅ A”. Consider, finally, the case of the planet Venus. The
DR form “A ˅ B” cannot be applied to this case, since if it were the case, then
any planet in the universe with the internal characteristics of Venus (any
planet with almost the same size as the earth, and a very hot, dense, poisonous
atmosphere) will be, according to the disjunctive rule, an exemplar of the
planet Venus. Instead of “A ˅ A”, this
case can also be represented by the conjunction “A & B”, where B would be
almost redundant, as it includes the characteristic of being a planet. These
anomalies are important, because they will remain in the more complex rules to
be considered in what follows, which are modified extensions of DR.
4. Meta-identifying rule: a preliminary version
Although the disjunctive rule is important,
because it highlights the role of descriptions that really matter, it is by no
means sufficient, since it is too narrow on the one side and too broad on the
other. Regarding narrowness, we will soon see that there are cases of
application where just one of the fundamental description-rules is satisfied,
and even so only partially, while the other is not satisfied at all, although
the name is still found to have a reference. As for breadth, where there is
excessive amplitude, there could be cases of application of the proper name
where both fundamental rules are applicable, and even then, the name still has
no reference!
Let us
first consider a case that demonstrates the disjunctive rule’s narrowness of
application. This is the obvious case where the localizing rule is incompletely
but sufficiently satisfied, and the characterizing rule is not at all
satisfied, even though the proper name applies. Imagine a possible world close
to ours, where there was never an Aristotelian philosophy, but there was an
Aristotle who died at a young age because while jouneying to Athens to study
with Plato, his ship sank, and he drowned in the Aegean see. Even so, if we
learn that he was born in Stagira in 384 BC, was the son of Nicomachus, the
physician of Philip’s court, and was sent by his grandfather Achaeon to Athens
at the age of 17 to study philosophy with Plato, we will have no doubt that he
was our Aristotle in potentia, even
if DR is not satisfied. The localizing rule, we see, is only partially
satisfied, since the information we have about Aristotle’s biography ends at
the age of 17. The characterizing rule, on its side, is not satisfied at all,
since this young man, whose life was so tragically cut short by fate, left
behind no writings. Our intuition is that even in this counterfactual situation
our Aristotle would have existed, though the disjunctive rule is too
coarse-grained to satisfy it.
Let us
now consider a case where only the characterizing rule is satisfied, and even
that incompletely. Imagine a possible world close to ours where there was no
Aristotle and no Aristotelian opus in the ancient world, although Plato and
other Greek philosophers existed. Imagine that in that world, in the 10th
century, in Damascus, an Arab philosopher who had read Greek philosophical
works wrote in Arabic the main parts of Aristotle’s work, including the Organon, the Metaphysics, and the Nicomachian
Ethics, using the pseudonym ‘Aristotle.’ In such a situation we would also
tend, without much reluctance, to recognize this person as being our Aristotle,
despite being an Arab philosopher and not Greek.
Of
course, there are limits involving too partial satisfaction of fundamental
description-rules. Suppose that, in a possible world close to ours, where there
was never an Aristotelian philosophy, in 384 BC the court doctor in Stagira had
an anencephalic son who was called Aristotle, but as could be expected, died
shortly after birth. In this case, although a minimum of the localizing rule
and none of the characterizing rule is satisfied, this minimum seems
unqualified, and we will have difficulty believing the newborn was our
Aristotle. Also, if in a possible world an Arab philosopher with the pseudonym
Aristotle had written only the first two paragraphs of book Alpha of Metaphysics, without any other
contextual clue we certainly wouldn’t be able to recognize him as our
Aristotle, since the characterizing description-rule would not be sufficiently
satisfied. A case like this would be recognized by us as a strange,
inexplicable coincidence. We conclude that the satisfaction of only one
fundamental condition does not need to be complete, as DR demands, though it
should also not be too weak.
To
make this suggestion more plausible, let us now consider cases where the
characterizing descriptions are conjunctively satisfied, though only partially.
In such cases, it appears that the minimum threshold of satisfaction required
for each description would become lower than the minimum threshold of
satisfaction for the description in the case where only one of the fundamental
description-rules is incompletely, but sufficiently satisfied. So, if in a
possible world a single Aristotle had been born in 384 BC, not in Stagira, but
in Athens, had studied with Plato, written only the Categories, and then died, it seems that this would be enough for
us to admit that he is our Aristotle. In this case, it seems that limited
satisfaction of each disjoint results in fully sufficient satisfaction of the
disjunctive rule as a whole. In other words, the requirement of sufficient
satisfaction of inclusive disjunction must include consideration of the sum
of the satisfactions of the disjoints. Our conclusion is that the disjunctive
meta-descriptivist rule must be supplemented by a new condition, which can be
called a condition of sufficiency. This condition can be stated as
follows:
Condition of sufficiency: it must be required that the sum of the
satisfactions of each of the two fundamental description-rules should be
sufficient, in accordance with the given circumstances.
A question that remains is about the exact
measure of what we should understand as sufficient. The most plausible answer
is that there is no exact measure. After all, empirical language is inevitably
vague, and our criteria for applying words do not define their extensional
boundaries in a perfectly precise way. There are always ambiguous cases, where
we cannot decide if our criteria apply. Important is that, despite this
vagueness of our natural language, we are in general – actually, in nearly all
cases – quite capable of publicly referring to objects without ambiguities.
Therefore, the vagueness of natural language – which supposedly reflects the
vagueness of the objective divisions of reality that we intend to categorize –
should not be seen as an imperfection of our language. It is at the least a
fact to be admitted. The right amount of linguistic vagueness is capable of
modulating discourse in the most satisfactory way, opposing pointless and often
undesirable insistence on precision. This vagueness only seems
troublesome when, in the philosophical effort to scrutinize the limits of our
concepts, we consider unusual limiting cases, as we are presently doing.
Another important point is that in counterfactual situations Aristotle
would cease to be our Aristotle if there were competitors who also satisfied
the disjunctive rule in equal measure. So, imagine a possible world where it
would not be unusual, but in fact quite natural, for people to have two heads.
Imagine then that in 384 BC, Nicomachus, the physician at Philip’s court, had a
son who was born with two identical heads, both baptized with the name
‘Aristotle.’ Suppose that the two-headed Aristotle journeyed to Athens to study
with Plato, and further, by working together, these two heads wrote the entire
Aristotelian opus. Although it is possible to say that this world had two
“Aristotles” with parallel spatiotemporal careers (given that the two persons
were permanently joined to the same body), from a more rigorous perspective it
is also possible to argue that this world had no Aristotle in the usually given
sense of the name, because a proper name is, in its most usual sense, a
singular term that by definition can only be applied to a single object able to
be distinguished from all others. It is largely a matter of convention whether
in that world the two identical heads account for two Aristotles or only one.
Such
consideration leads us to a new condition to be added, which is that a proper
name can have only one and the same reference. Consequently, it seems that we
need to admit for the application of the meta-referential rule itself the
condition of uniqueness:
Condition of uniqueness: it is the condition that in the considered
domain, only a single and the same object of reference satisfies the
disjunctive rule.
The main
case where the uniqueness condition is no longer satisfied is one where the
localizing rule is satisfied by one object, while the characterizing rule is
satisfied by another. This would be the case in a possible world W1
where there existed (a) a Greek Aristotle, son of Nicomachus, who was born in
Stagira in 384 BC, but who contracted brain fever upon arriving in Athens and
was so severely handicapped that he could do no work in philosophy in the years
before his death in Chalkis in 322 BC, and (b) a philosopher named Aristotle,
who wrote an identical Latin version of the Politics in Rome about three
centuries later. In these circumstances, we could no longer have a way to
decide who the real Aristotle was, whether the Greek or the Roman, because our
two fundamental identification rules conflict with each other. The immediate
and reasonable alternative is to abandon the assumption that our Aristotle
existed in such a world, since the condition of the object’s uniqueness is not
satisfied. (In criterial logic, 1 + 1 = 0.)
By
adding the conditions of sufficiency and uniqueness to the disjunctive rule, we
achieve what could be called a meta-identifying rule, namely, a rule
that will show us in a more precise and adequate way than does the disjunctive
rule, under what conditions proper names are typically applicable to their
references. This rule will tell us the adequate combinations of the fundamental
description-rules that need to be satisfied by any proper name to allow us to
say that it refers to its bearer. Here is how this rule can be formulated:
MIRp:
A proper name “N” refers properly (self-sufficiently) to an object x belonging to a class G of objects
iff
(i-a) x
satisfies a localizing description-rule L of “N”
and/or
(i-b) x
satisfies a characterizing description-rule C of “N”
And
(ii) the satisfaction of L and/or C of “N” by x is overall (on the whole) sufficient
and
(iii) univocal
(under
the tacit assumption of an expected satisfaction ‘Ns’’ cluster of descriptions,
and an unknown C-condition.)
I call the rule resulting from the application
of the meta-identifying rule MIRp to the fundamental description-rules of a
given proper name the identifying or definitional rule of that proper name –
which is something equivalent to what Ernst Tugendhat hypothetically would call
the Identifikationsregel of that
singular term (1983: 235). (This identification rule may also be regarded, I
think without a real difference, as a simple instantiation of MIRp in
which the variables, “N”, G, L, and C, are replaced by constants, insofar as we
consider MIRp a general form of the identification rules).
Let us
also remember that the condition (ii), of sufficiency, is to be applied “as a
whole,” that is, to the sum of the satisfactions of each of them taken
together. This allows us to rescue the intuition that the rule can be applied
(and is therefore applicable) even when in isolation each single fundamental
description-rule is considered to be unqualifiedly satisfied. The rule will
apply if the sum of the satisfactions of each fundamental description-rule is
considered by the privileged namer – tacitly reflecting the evaluation of the
linguistic community – sufficient for its application.
Finally, once we apply an identification rule that instantiates MIRp, we
are necessarily led to the hypothetical conclusion that a C-condition is
satisfied. One could here ask if MIRp could not be derogated in its application
if we discover that the C-condition isn’t satisfied… But how could this
discovery be made, except by descriptive means? We will see, in the next
chapter, that when resulting elements of a causal record begin to have
explanatory value, they are integrated into the disjunctive rule itself,
gaining explanatory power.
Let’s
now look at a case where the MIRp is applied to the specific bundle of
descriptions associated with the name Aristotle. By doing this we formulate
what Tugendhat could call the identification
rule for the proper name ‘Aristotle’, which I will abbreviate as IRp for
‘Aristotle.’ Here it is:
IRp-“Aristotle”:
The proper name “Aristotle” refers properly to
an object x belonging to the class of
human beings
iff
(i-a) x
satisfies the localizing description-rule of having been born in Stagira in 322
BC, lived much of his life in Athens, and died in Chalkis in 322 BC (...)
and/or
(i-b) x
satisfies the characterizing description-rule of having been the philosopher
who developed the great ideas that form the Aristotelian opus (...)
And
(ii) the satisfaction of the localizing
description-rule and/or of the characterizing description-rule for x is overall sufficient and
(iii) Univocal.[12]
As I have already noted, the name Aristotle is
also placed in quotation marks here in order to indicate that as a specific
sensible mark it is not an indispensable component: another sign could possibly
be agreed on to meet the same conditions.
It is
also important not to forget that the meta-identifying rules we are considering
are meant to be applied by ideal types of speakers, who I call the
privileged users of the proper name. As we will see, not all speakers know
the identification rule and, in many cases, they are only oriented by some
group of more or less relevant descriptions. As we will see later, we very
frequently use proper names “referentially” in a weaker sense of the word,
without having fulfilled this ideal. It will be at this point that the
auxiliary descriptions will show their full importance in the cluster of
descriptions associated with a proper name; but this is not the focus of the
present discussion; so, for now I will ignore the role of descriptions
belonging to group C.
Finally, there is an ontological point that reinforces and is reinforced
by the proposal made in the last chapter that a trope ontology may furnish the
true key to the identification of individuals. Indeed, different combinations
of tropes can be totally congruent with the demands made by identification
rules derived from MIRp. An identification rule will tell us which combinations
of definite descriptions and what amounts of them will be necessary to justify
the application of a proper name, allowing us to say that it refers to its
bearer. But in doing this, the rule will also show which combinations of tropes
or t-properties must be found in the world in order to allow us to judge and
say that the identifying rule is satisfied or applicable. Concerning examples
with the proper name ‘Aristotle’, the tropical criteria can vary as much as:
a.
One (only) Aristotle from 10th century
Damascus, who satisfies the tropes of having written the Organon, the Metaphysics,
and the Nicomachean Ethics, and of
having chosen ‘Aristotle’ as a pen name.
b.
One (only) Aristotle who was born in Stagira in 384
BC, the only son of the court physician, who contracted brain fever while
traveling to Athens, dying in Assos in 322, but who satisfies most of the
tropical properties concerning his spatiotemporal career.
c.
One (only) Aristotle born in Stagira in 384 BC who
satisfies the tropes of first becoming a doctor like his father, joining
Alexander’s army, and succumbing to dehydration and starvation while returning
from the military campaigns in the East.
The important philosophical
point is that now we do not need any “individuating essence” (here understood
as a necessary and sufficient individuating tropical property) common to
these three Aristotles that can be found in the world. The old idea of an
objectively shared identifying essence of the object, which is impossible to be
satisfied, is here replaced by the demand of an objectively grounded essence
inscribed in the identification rule of its identifying linguistic unity. The
identification rule gives us ways to unify those very different
combinations of tropes found in the world that confirm the applicability of a
proper name, allowing us to identify these three Aristotle as one person
existing in different possible worlds. In other words: we agree that there
is no objective property individualizing a referent like Aristotle. However, we have found a way of formulating
the identifying rule for a proper name like ‘Aristotle’ that makes it possible to unify very different (clusters of) tropical
properties by means of which the same referent can be presented to us. If there
is here an essence, it is givenby the rule; it is a nominal, not a real one. As
we will see later (Chap. V), the lack of unifying criterial essences can also
occur with general terms. The problem of essence finds in this way a
non-compromising solution.
5.
Solving Theseus’ paradox
The MIRp already allows us to give the best
answer to the famous puzzle of Theseus’ ship, so often cited in philosophical
handbooks. Let us suppose that Theseus’ ship was named the ‘Calibdus.’[13]
In the course of the years, Theseus gradually replaced the worn-out planks of
his ship until eventually they were all replaced. However, it was decided to
refurbish the old planks, which had been saved and kept in storage, repair
them, and use them to build another ship identical to the first. Suppose that
someone then asks, “Which of the two ships is the true Calibdus?”
Paradoxically, we do not know for sure how to answer. A too hasty answer could
be that both are Theseus’ Calibdus. That would be logically unacceptable,
because a singular term cannot refer to more than one object of reference. Most
people will tend to say that Theseus’ real ship is the one on which he sailed
for all those years; but there will still be uncertainty: after all, the second
ship is the only one that is made of the same planks as the one that was
initially built! The problem is not irrelevant, because, as someone once noted,
if the two ships were to collide head on and start sinking, Theseus, who, like
every good captain was honor-bound to go down with his ship, would have had to
decide whether to stay on the old ship or jump onto the new one.
What
we have considered so far makes possible a better answer to this old puzzle.
The reason for the uncertainty is our realization that the question of which of
the two ships is the true Calibdus has become unanswerable due to a criterial
conflict between the two fundamental description-rules for that name. The first
ship satisfies a localizing rule, which tells us that Theseus’ ship is the one
built in a specific place and time, having then enjoyed a long space-time
career under the command of Theseus. The second rule, satisfied by the second
ship, belongs to the characterizing dimension. It tells us that Theseus’ ship
is the one built from certain specifically given material… This conflict is
understandably the reason for the uncertainty.
At
this point, someone can rightly object that the characterizing rule is much
more complex. It not only concerns the same material, but also includes
functional and structural characteristics that were preserved by both ships.
Consequently, it seems that the first ship must be the Calibdus captained by
Theseus, as it more completely satisfies the fundamental description-rules.
That is why this is usually the first idea that comes to mind. Nevertheless, we
can balance this intuitive difference by increasing the speed of replacing the
old planks with new ones to shorten the ship’s space-time career until the
replacement of all parts is complete. Imagine that the entire series of plank
replacements took place in just two months. In that case, we’d start having
doubts. What if the replacement took just one week? Calibdus is launched and
soon afterwards, with Theseus supervising the work, the replacement of planks
begins with the immediate construction of another ship… Then we begin to think
that at the end of the week Theseus is not the captain of the Calibdus anymore!
Imagine now that the construction of Theseus’ Ship is completed, but that it is
not yet launched. Hours after it is ready, workers begin to build a second
identical ship, next to the Calibdus. When both ships are completely built, the
first one is baptized with the name ‘Calibdus’, while the second remains
unnamed. Then workers begin to substitute the planks of Calibdus with planks
from the second ship and vice-versa. After two days all planks of each ship
have been removed and replaced by planks of the other. Which ship is now the
true Calibdus? The answer seems obvious to us: the second ship is now the real
Calibdus, because all that has happened is that both ships, so to speak, have
exchanged places. Here the identity of the Calibdus’ original material is what
warrants our intuition. It seems that the identification rule derived from the
application of MIRp can give us the final explanation for the puzzle of
Theseus’ Ship, since in this case the second ship better satisfies the
identification rule for Calibdus.
Finally, MIRp also allows us to give a straightforward answer to the
oldest and simplest version of the puzzle. In this version, the question is
whether the Calibdus would still be the same ship after having all its planks
replaced.[14] The obvious answer is
that since the Calibdus must be a single ship, and since it continues to
satisfy the localizing and most of the characterizing rule, it does indeed
remain the same ship.
But
let us return to the initial story of the Calibdus having sailed for a certain
time under the command of Theseus. Because the same proper name cannot name
more than one object, the strategy of renaming ships turns out to be a
convenient way to avoid misunderstandings. We can give different names to the
ships, assuming the existence of two ships: the Calibdus-1, which fully
satisfies the localizing rule and much of the characterizing rule, and the
Calibdus-2, which although not satisfying the localizing rule, completely
satisfies the characterizing rule, which among other things requires the
preservation of the same material of the ship ever since it was initially
built. Similarly, in the previous example, we can propose the existence of two
Aristotles in the possible world W1: Aristotle-1, who lived in
ancient Greece and satisfies only the localizing rule, and Aristotle-2, who is
the author only of a large part of the Aristotelian opus, and satisfies at
least part of the characterizing rule, without satisfying the localizing rule.
It would be a mistake, however, to see this as an answer to the same problem.
It is simply a new move in the name game, a proposal for new conventions, for
new reference terms, to be used in place of failed terms.
6. Meta-identification rule: final version
MIRp is already a very satisfactory rule,
explaining most cases of a proper name’s application. However, it results from
a still incomplete analysis. After all, it is not difficult to demonstrate that
the condition of uniqueness is a derived condition and that MIRp does not
account for counterexamples that depend on a prior stage of derivation. To
prove this, I will examine two counterexamples.
A
first counterexample concerns the Twin-Earth fantasy. A Twin-Earth must be like
ours, and everything on each planet exists and happens identically (or almost
identically) to what exists and happens on the other. Thus, all that applies to
one object on our Earth should apply to its Doppelgänger
on the distant Twin-Earth. Nevertheless, even if we knew of a Twin-Earth
somewhere in outer space, we would continue to have the very strong intuition
that by pronouncing the name ‘Aristotle’ we are referring to our Aristotle and
not to some other Aristotle on the Twin-Earth. However, if we consider our
first formulation of the identification rule for Aristotle, it no longer seems
applicable. After all, both the Aristotle of our Earth and that of the
Twin-Earth sufficiently satisfy the disjunctive rule. After all, on the one
hand, both seem to satisfy the rule of space-time localization, since both were
born in 384 BC in Stagira, sons of the physician at Amyntas of Macedon’s court,
etc. In addition, both Aristotles satisfy the characterizing rule: both wrote
the Aristotelian opus down to the last comma. Hence, concerning the
satisfaction of the disjunctive condition “(i-a) ˅ (i-b),” the two Aristoteles
sufficiently satisfy the identification rule for the name ‘Aristotle.’ But if
so, condition (iii) of uniqueness is no longer satisfied, resulting in
the counter-intuitive conclusion that Aristotle did not exist. However, it is
intuitively clear that he not only existed, but was also our Aristotle
and not that of the distant Twin-Earth.
Counterexamples with possible worlds can also be easily imagined. Let us
say that in a possible world W2 in Stagira in 384 BC Nicomachus, the
court doctor, became the father of twins, both baptized with the name
‘Aristotle.’ The first became a doctor like his father, joining Alexander’s
army and succumbing to thirst and hunger while crossing the desert when he was
returning from the East. The second went to Athens, where he learned philosophy
from Plato and wrote all the Aristotelian opus. Since both sufficiently satisfy the localizing rule, both
sufficiently satisfy the disjunctive condition “(i-a) ˅ (i-b)” required by the
identification rule resulting from the application of MIRp to the cluster of
descriptions associated with the name. However, also in this case the condition
(iii) of uniqueness is no longer satisfied, leaving the identification rule for
the name ‘Aristotle’ inapplicable and leading to the conclusion that Aristotle
did not exist. However, such a result is also counterintuitive. Intuitively, we
have no doubt that there is a single true Aristotle in W2 and that
he is the second Aristotle and not the first. Only in a possible world W3,
which only differs from W2 through the fact that the second
Aristotle was not born, would we consider the first of them, the unfortunate
physician, to be our Aristotle in
potentia. Here the MIRp leads us to the puzzling conclusion that if we find
an incomplete Aristotle, we are allowed to call him our Aristotle, but if we
find two Aristotles, then we are not allowed to.[15]
The
question we should ask here is: what leads us in the first counterexample to
choose the Aristotle of the Earth over the Aristotle of the Twin-Earth? And, in
the second, what leads us to choose the Aristotle who wrote the Aristotelian
opus instead of the one who became a doctor? There can be only one answer: a
sufficient satisfaction of the disjunction of localizing and characterizing
conditions by more than one object must be complemented, not by a condition of
uniqueness, but by a condition that objects that are less able to satisfy the
disjunction must be excluded from the competition for the right to satisfy the
conditions for applying a proper name. The solution, therefore, is to replace
the condition of uniqueness with what could be called a condition of predominance,
which can be stated as follows:
Predominance
condition: the condition that in the case where more than one object
sufficiently satisfies the disjunctive condition of a proper name, the bearer
of the proper name must be the object that most completely satisfies it.
Such an addition allows us to easily solve the
two counterexamples above. For in the first, the Earth Aristotle satisfies the
disjunctive rule added to the condition of sufficiency better than the
Twin-Earth Aristotle, since the condition of localization implies that the
right Aristotle should have been born in the Stagira on our Earth, lived in the
Athens on our Earth… and died in the Chalkis on our Earth… a condition that the
Aristotle from the distant Twin-Earth cannot satisfy. In the second counterexample,
the Aristotle who wrote the Aristotelian opus also better satisfies a
identification rule that replaces the condition of uniqueness with the
condition of predominance, since he is the only one who satisfied the condition
of characterization by having written the Aristotelian opus.
Based
on such considerations, I now want to suggest a last and improved formulation
of the meta-identification rule, which incorporates into itself this last
condition. Here it is, remembering that we are considering a rule only as used
by privileged namers:
MIRf:
A proper name “N” refers properly
(self-sufficiently) to an object x
belonging to a Class G
iff
(i-a) x
satisfies N’s localizing description-rule L
and/or
(i-b) x
satisfies N’s characterizing description-rule C,
(ii) x satisfies
L and/or C to an overall sufficient extent, and
(iii) x satisfies L and/or C more than any other object,
(Under the implicit assumption of a an expected
satisfaction ‘Ns’’ cluster of descriptions, and an unknown C-condition.)
Here we replace the condition (iii), which was
one of uniqueness, with the condition of predominance, which is prior to that
of uniqueness, since it serves to guarantee it. The predominance condition is
applied in such a way as to select the object that sufficiently satisfies the
inclusive disjunction of the disjuncts more than any other object of the same
class that also satisfies it, from which we obtain an unambiguous
identification of the proper name’s reference.
As in
the previous case, when the MIRf is applied to the fundamental
description-rules constituting any proper name (or, treating MIRf as the
general form of the identification rules, when we consider the last ones
as simply instantiations of MIRf’s formal variables), it produces an identifying or definitional rule for the proper name, to be applied by an ideal
speaker. Here is how this identification rule can be summarized for the name
‘Aristotle’:
IRf-‘Aristotle’:
The proper name “Aristotle” refers properly to
an object x belonging to the class of
human beings
iff
(i-a) x
satisfies the localizing description-rule of being born in Stagira in 384 BC,
having lived much of his life in Athens… and died in Chalkis in 322 BC,
and/or
(i-b) x
satisfies the characterizing description-rule that it was the philosopher who
produced the relevant content of the Aristotelian opus.
(ii) x
satisfies the disjunction (i-a) and/or (i-b) to a degree that is overall
sufficient and
(iii) x satisfies the
disjunction (i-a) and/or (i-b) more than any other human being.
Detailing what we have noted above, the
identification rule RIf-‘Aristotle’ resulting from the application of MIRf to
Aristotle’s fundamental description-rules gives us a clear and intuitive answer
to the problem of the Twin-Earth’s Aristotle. According to this answer,
although both the Earth Aristotle and the Twin-Earth Aristotle satisfy the
disjunctive rule sufficiently, the Aristotle of our Earth is the only one who
truly satisfies the condition of spatio-temporal localization. After all, as
philosophers have plausibly noted, there is only one space, and we are talking
about our own region of this space. Since only the first Aristotle exists in our spatio-temporal region, and the
localizing description-rule is made to be applied to our spatio-temporal
region of a single space that includes both Earths – and not to the analogous
spatio-temporal region located on the distant Twin-Earth – our first Aristotle
is the only one who really satisfies the localizing condition. Thus, our Earth
Aristotle satisfies the disjunctive condition “(i-a) ˅ (i-b)” more completely
than the Twin-Earth Aristotle. In doing so, he fulfills the predominance
condition of the identification rule for Aristotle resulting from the
application of MIRf to the fundamental description-rules associated with that
name, which is in full agreement with our intuition that we are referring to
our Earth Aristotle.
The
application of RIf-‘Aristotle’ also solves the problem of the twin Aristotles
who sufficiently satisfy the disjunctive condition (i) in W2. Only
in his childhood does the first (who marched to India with Alexander) satisfy
the localizing rule, satisfying this rule sufficiently, but he never satisfies
the characterizing rule. The second (who went to Athens and wrote the
Aristotelian opus) not only
completely satisfies the localization rule, but also completely satisfies the
characterizing rule. For this reason, due to the great predominance in the
satisfaction of the disjunctive rule, we choose the latter Aristotle as the
true one, which also conforms to our intuitions. In a world W3,
where the second Aristotle never existed, but only the first, we will tend to
identify the former as our Aristotle, even if he was unfortunately prevented
from accomplishing the great intellectual deeds we attribute to him.
Returning to MIRf,, there remains one question to be
answered. Imagine that other names for the same object, with their own
identification rules, were competing with the identification rule we are
considering. Thus, if various clusters of descriptions associated with the various
proper names N1... Nn have their MIRfs satisfied by the same object,
that is, if different identification rules are satisfied by the same referent,
it seems that a condition should be proposed so that we can decide which of the
proper names truly refers to that object. Would it not be necessary to have a
predominance condition requiring that to be referred to by a name, an object
should satisfy the disjunctive identification rule for the name in question
more than any other identification rule that also refers to it?
Fortunately, it does not seem that in the case of proper names this
additional condition needs to be introduced, because any new and different
criterion or cluster of criteria for the identification of an object will only be
added to the old ones, even if this also means the addition of a new aspect
that had previously been overlooked or unknown. These criterial tropes
typically concern characterizing description-rules, since concerning the
localizing description-rules we cannot have two different spatio-temporally
localizing descriptions for the same object. A confirming example of two
apparent identification rules that are added for the same object was that of
Father Marcial Maciel presented in the previous chapter. This famous imposter
used the alias ‘Raúl Rivas’ while courting Senõrita Gutiérrez, deceiving her
with the fraudulent claim to be an Esso employee and CIA agent. These and other
descriptions of Raúl Rivas should be added to the descriptions belonging to the
cluster associated with the proper name ‘Marcial Maciel’, which is the most
inclusive.
An
adverse example, but still in accordance with what we said, is the following.
Suppose it is discovered, as has long (and implausibly) been speculated, that
Francis Bacon was the true author of Shakespeare’s works, and that there was no
Shakespeare who independently satisfied the characterizing condition attributed
to him by us of having written the complete Shakespearean opus. So considered,
it seems that the rules of identification for Bacon and Shakespeare should
compete. However, this does not have to be so. We do not really find ourselves
forced to choose between Bacon being Bacon and Bacon being Shakespeare. In this
case, we will extend the attributes of Bacon to encompass the characterizing
attributes of Shakespeare, saying that in addition to being a scientist,
philosopher, and diplomat, Bacon also anonymously wrote the poems and plays
attributed to Shakespeare.
However, what about the Shakespeare born in Stratford-upon-Avon in 1564,
who married Anne Hathaway? That must now be another person, another referent,
for whose identification there must be another identification rule. The
important thing to be noticed is something that no one denies, namely, that for
the case in question, the weightiest element is by far the satisfaction of the
characterizing description-rule, besides the fact that Bacon lived in London at
that same time, thus partially satisfying the localizing condition. Thus, in
our imaginary example, Bacon better satisfies the identification rule for the
proper name ‘Shakespeare’ than does the Shakespeare born in
Stratford-upon-Avon. Several utterances could sum up this identity dispute: not
only “Bacon was the real Shakespeare” and “The person baptized as Shakespeare
was not the person we call Shakespeare,” but also, say, “Bacon was the great
playwright; Shakespeare was just a fellow thespian and theatrical director”.
7. Proper name’s semantic geography
Let us now look at the question of a proper
name’s meaning or, to avoid ambiguities, of the semantic content that can be
attributed to it. To arrive at an answer, it helps to recall the argument
presented in the introductory chapter suggesting that any meaning – here
restricted to the semantic-cognitive meaning corresponding to the Fregean sense
(Sinn) of a singular term – is
plausibly clarified in terms of rules or combinations of rules that enable the
effective application of expressions.[16]
The reason seems simple to me. Rules are the originating source of what we call
meaning, since rules are meaningful per se. Following a rule is the same
as giving meaning to something. If “&%” seems less significant than
“à$,” it is because we are used to regarding an
arrow as the expression of a rule indicating a direction, and the dollar sign
as a rule indicating value. Where there is a rule, there is a meaning of some
kind, even if usually not of the kind that may interest us here, as in the case
of syntactical rules. More specifically, assuming Wittgenstein’s dictum that
“meaning is what the explanation of meaning explains” (1984b Sec. 560), it
seems clear that when we talk about the meaning of a linguistic expression, we
are usually considering more properly the rules that we rely on in explaining
what we mean by the expression. Furthermore, a meta-descriptive
neodescriptivist theory of proper names, being a theory of semantic rules
expressed by replacing descriptions, is no more or less than a theory of the referential
or cognitive criterial meanings of proper names, since these description-rules
explain the referential meanings of the names. Moreover, from the ontological
viewpoint assumed in the last chapter, these rules can be nothing but
repeatable tropes of a psychological nature. Meanings promise to lose their
mystifying character when seen from this perspective.
The
acceptance of proper names’ meaningfulness contrasts sharply with the opinion
of those who argue that proper names are meaningless. The reasons they offer
are well-known: when asked the meaning of a proper name, we do not know what to
say (Ziff 1960: 93-94). Moreover, as we have previously noted, proper names are
generally not defined in dictionaries; and as the purpose of dictionaries is to
clarify the meanings of words, this is an additional reason for rejecting the
claim that proper names have meanings.[17]
However, this thesis does not withstand closer scrutiny. Certainly, any
proper name has meaning in the sense of having the lexical function of a proper
name, which is the function of identifying some singular object as being its
bearer. But it also has meaning in the most substantive sense of possessing
semantic-cognitive content constituted by identifying rules. That a proper name
should have meaning in this last sense is immediately clear when we consider
sentences about identity between proper names. Repeating something basic, we
can remember as an example Robert Louis Stevenson’s story of a man with two
diametrically opposed personalities alternately competing for control of his
psyche: Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. The statement “Dr. Jekyll is Mr. Hyde,” would
be tautological and non-informative if the proper names ‘Jekyll’ and ‘Hyde’
were not intended to refer to rather contrasting things – if they did not have
diverse characterizing semantic-cognitive contents, that is, different
meanings. After all, although Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde shared the same body,
they differed in their guiding intentions and subsequent behaviors; while Dr.
Jekyll was a good person, sometimes a bad side dominated his psyche, after he
took a potion that gave control of his personality to the demonic Mr. Hyde. In
other words: the localizing description-rule remains satisfied by the same
human body, while the satisfaction of the characterizing description-rule
alternates intermittently from Dr. Jekyll’s character traits to Mr. Hyde’s character
traits, changing what we are emphazising in meaning. – Today we would tend
to call it a problem of a split personality of the same (mind-body) person, so
that “Dr. Jekyll = Mr. Hyde” means not only “Jekyll’s person = Hyde’s person,”
but also “Jekyll’s character ≠ Hyde’s character”, that with the names ‘Jeckill’
and ‘Hyde’ we are eliciting two different characterizing rules, two cognitive
contents alternatively applied to the same object of reference. The sentence
“Dr. Jeckill is Mr. Hyde” says two things: (a) that there is an identity in the
object that can be expressed using the identity sign: “Dr. Jeckill = Mr. Hyde”,
since the whole identification rule for Jeckill-Hyde is the same. But it also
says (b) that there is a difference in what Frege would call the mode of
presentation, here constituted by the alternative employment of different
characterizing rules, one for Jeckill’s character, the other for Hyde’s
character. This semantic-cognitive difference can be made explicit when we say
that both characters are different using a sentence like “Dr. Jekyll ≠ Mr. Hyde”.
This point will be considered in more details in the nex chapter.
Moreover, if we admit the Fregean understanding of semantic content, it
explains itself as meaning (Sinn),
which is informative content (informatives
Gehalt). But if it is informative, then it becomes increasingly clear that
in this aspect proper names should not be lacking, but, on the contrary, full
of meaning, full of content. As Arthur Burks noted in his short but important
paper on proper names:
That proper names have meaning is shown by the
fact the people apply them consistently and use them to communicate. A person
using a name correctly must have in mind some properties… which enable him in
favorable circumstances to decide whether or not a given individual is the
designatum of that name. (1951: 38)
After all, it seems that many of them are
repositories of a diffuse mass of variously accessible informational content.
Consider, for example, the immense amount of informational content that we can
associate with the name of the emperor Napoleon or the philosopher Bertrand
Russell. Russell’s excellent autobiography is full of informative content about
himself, and all this information content comes to be at least implied by the
proper name ‘Bertrand Russell’. From such a perspective, the issue is not so much
that the proper name contains (or implies) less meaning, but rather too much. And so much so that the best
place to look for the meanings of influential proper names is not in a
dictionary, but rather in an encyclopedia. And in some cases, more than the
encyclopedia, the place where we find the most detailed and complete content of
meaning of a proper name is in a biography. Biographies such as Plutarch’s Parallel
Lives, and autobiographies, such as Ingmar Bergman’s The Magic Lantern,
are rich sources where we can find detailed expositions of the mass of
informational contents associated with the regarded proper names – contents
that in their essentials can easily be compressed and abridged into definite
descriptions. In such works the rules of localization and characterization are
not included in an abbreviated form, as we have done here, but rather in a much
more detailed and complete form.
There
is also another reason why some think that proper names are meaningless. It is
a fact that, when we casually use a proper name, all we often know about it are
vague and variable aspects of its meaning, limited parts of its information
content, whose domain generally varies from speaker to speaker, and even from
occasion to occasion for the same speaker. The full content of many proper
names, particularly scientific ones, is completely known only by a few privileged
users, and often by no one of them in a complete way. When we contrast this
situation with the permanent, distinct, and universally shared meaning of the
simplest general terms (such as, say ‘red’ and ‘round’), we have the impression
that because proper names do not mean anything specific for their users, they
are not able to mean anything at all. Actually, proper names have so much
meaning that they seem to have none.
Having
identified cognitive meanings with criterial rules and their combinations, let
us now consider the question of the meanings of proper names from the already
considered view of descriptive expressions. What would be the semantic value
that really matters? A first rule to be excluded is the meta-identification
rule itself, the MIRf: the distinctive semantic nucleus of a proper name cannot
be constituted by it, as it is no more than a simple form shared by the
identification rules of the most diverse proper names, while what matters most
for the meaning of a term is what semantically distinguishes it from homonyms
and other terms of the same kind. The meaning should also not be relevantly
constituted by the auxiliary rules expressed in the descriptions of group C,
since they are accidental in relation to the application of the name, although
they are expected to contribute to some extent to its informative content and
even to a great extent to its use in discourse. What remains are the
fundamental rules of localization and/or characterization, expressed
respectively by the descriptions of groups A and B in the clusters and entering
into the identification rules of a proper name, singularizing both the name and
its reference. Hence, these fundamental rules must be those which in a relevant
way constitute the meaning of a proper name. If we ask ourselves, for example,
which descriptions express the core of what should be meant by the name
‘Aristotle’, we tend to accept that it means the ancient Greek philosopher who
studied with Plato in Athens and who developed ideas that profoundly influenced
the course of Western philosophy; ideas presented in works such as Metaphysics, Ethics, Nicomachean Ethics,
and the Organon. When all that a
person is able to say of Aristotle is that he was ‘a famous Greek philosopher’,
he is saying something that is already implied by the fundamental descriptions.
Thus, the fundamental description-rules are those that express the indispensable
informative content constituting the central nucleus of meaning of that proper
name. If a person who watched a film about Alexander learned that he had been
taught by a philosopher called ‘Aristotle’, and then tells us he was ‘the
teacher of Alexander’, we decide he is referring to Aristotle, because we
associate this definite description with fundamental localizing and
characterizing descriptions we know, even if in most cases only in a vague way.
Apart
from the central semantic nucleus, we can see that there is certainly a halo of
secondary meanings, generally expressed by auxiliary description-rules. Thus,
it seems that the metaphorical auxiliary description ‘the master of those who
know’, formulated by Dante to connote Aristotle, also contributes to the mass
of informative content that constitutes the full significance of this proper
name. In the same way, better known accidental descriptions, such as ‘Plato’s
greatest disciple’, ‘the tutor of Alexander’, ‘the founder of the Lyceum’... do
so as well and even better in parasitical uses since those who know them are
already able to give some clearly convergent meaning to the name Aristotle. Not
all auxiliary rules, however, contribute to enriching the informative content
of proper names. Ignored accidental description-rules, such as ‘Achaeon’s
grandson’, certainly do not contribute in a relevant way. Even parasitical uses
are here very improbable. And by their circumstantial nature,
adventitious description-rules, such as ‘the philosopher mentioned by the
teacher in the classroom’, contribute nothing to the permanent informative
content of the proper name, and therefore will never be found in encyclopedias
or biographies. Nevertheless, it can be said that adventitious
description-rules still express an occasional
sense which is intended by a name when a user employs it, and a borrowed or
parasitical reference when it is correctly understood by his hearers.[18]
To
avoid confusion, it is always indispensable to distinguish between the complete or full meaning and the intended meaning of a proper name. Let’s
start with the intended meaning. This is the variable content that different
people and even the same person at different times has in mind when employing a
proper name. It is what Frege, Strawson, and Searle usually had in mind and
what Russell called the “description in our minds”. (1980: 30) We can say that
it consists in what is, if not consciously, at least unconsciously intended by a speaker when he thinks or utters a
name, considering that the intention does not need to be consciously
elaborated. I say that this meaning is at least fully intended, because what is
intended in terms of description-rules – which can be both fundamental and
auxiliary – does not need to be reflexively considered at the time of the
name’s application, although it determines the meaning-in-use of the name by
the speaker and can in principle be made conscious. Moreover, it is common for
us to know very little of the meanings of many proper names we use, so that the
intended meaning rarely coincides with the complete meaning. Who knows, for
example, the complete meaning of the name ‘string theory’? Even specialists do
not know the full range of theoretical alternatives attached to the concept of
string theory.
As for
the complete meaning, it is constituted primarily by what we can call the proper or essential meaning: the set
formed by localizing and characterizing description-rules – the semantic
core. Secondarily it is also formed by what we might call auxiliary meaning: the one constituted
by auxiliary rules – the semantic halo. Furthermore, it is important to
note that the borders are blurred between descriptions that belong to the
semantic core and those that belong to the semantic halo. Ask yourself, for
instance, if the definite description ‘the greatest of Plato’s disciples’
belongs to the characterizing or the auxiliary descriptions of the bundle we
associate with the name ‘Aristotle’.
The
following scheme summarizes the distinctions made above with respect to the
meaning of a proper name:
Proper meaning
Full meaning
(semantic core)
(possibly only known
Cognitive by privileged namers) Auxiliary meaning
meaning
(semantic halo)
(= informative
content or the
Intentional meaning of the proper
name
Fregean senses
(identified with the meaning given by the
of the proper proper name’s user
when it is applied)
name)
With this picture in mind, it becomes easy to
clarify the semantic role of the auxiliary rules expressed by group C
descriptions. Clearly, a person who knows only one auxiliary description-rule
does not yet have sufficient knowledge of the proper name’s meaning. But
auxiliary description-rules such as ‘the iron marshal,’ ‘Plato’s greatest
disciple,’ or even ‘the philosopher quoted by the professor,’ may already
suffice to enable the speaker to insert a proper name into speech in a
communicatively effective manner, achieving referential success in a derived
sense of the word. Moreover, if a speaker inserts this unqualified allusion to
the referential term into public discourse, it is important that he is aware of
his unqualified knowledge of its meaning. After all, this person is only able
to rationally insert a proper name in discourse, if he is using it with the
intention of referring in a weak or unqualified sense, even though he is part
of a linguistic community that in its linguistic division of labor ultimately
has links with interpreters capable of completing the meaning and reference of
the proper name. That is: in such a community, assuming the right context,
other people understand to whom the speaker is intending to refer, or at least
this intention is socially comprehensible. This unqualified reference,
understood as the assumption that a complete reference can in principle be
socially rescued, is based, as we will see, on an improved form of reference
borrowing already anticipated in Strawson’s concept of reference borrowing
and, more decisively, in Searle’s concept of parasitic reference.
8. Ordinary proper names
You may now wonder whether MIRf would
apply to the proper names of ordinary people, whose contents of meaning can be
found in neither encyclopedias nor biographies. The answer is that there is no
essential difference in relation to the above considered cases; the real
difference usually lies only in the greater spread or dispersal of the
characterizing description-rules, which can more often be only aspectually
known by the contact with many different pragmatically moved speakers. To
understand this, imagine an elderly man remembering a woman he once knew named
Bärbel Hildish. If asked who Bärbel was, he could perhaps say that she was (i)
“the nice lady who helped me several times when I went to ask about rooms in
the Student Dormitories at the University of Bielefeld, and who had fascinatingly
exotic facial features” (adventitious description). The man who had formerly
been her husband, Felix Schneider, might remember something very different.
Perhaps he would say that she was (ii) “the woman who was my wife for sixteen
years and who had two children with me” (part of the characterizing
description-rule). The children, for their part, could perhaps agree that (iii)
“our mother was a cheerful person with great human understanding” (widely known
accidental description). Her father, Tobias Hildish, might recall that she was
(iv) “a very playful child” (little known accidental description). The last
ones emphazise emotional motivations.
Descriptions like these are often aspectual, even if this is the
way we frequently know people. But let’s say someone wants a more detailed and
precise characterization of who Frau Bärbel Hildish was, for example, a civil
servant. In this case, one will use a document like a passport, drivers license,
or other official ID, which will typically specify place and date of birth,
including a photo and a fingerprint. These descriptions are less aspectual and
more concerned with fundamental elements.
Let’s
now say that Frau Hildish were involved in a lawsuit.[19]
In this case, a history of the addresses where she lived could be required, in
addition to personal details, her level of education, professional history,
police records, and of course photos, fingerprints, etc. Let’s just say,
finally, that someone in her family decides to write a biography of Frau
Hildish. In this case, all the above elements will certainly be drawn upon. The
conclusion we reach is that, although aspectual knowledge plays a more
important role in the legal case, as there is no major reason for very many
people to remember common names, this knowledge exists in connection with the
fundamental description-rule for identifying Frau Hildish. This constitutes the
localizing description-rule summarized as follows:
The person who was born on 12.3.1926 in Berlin,
whose parents were Tobias and Frida Hildish, spent her youth in Stuttgart and
later lived in Bielefeld, where she died on 26.4.2018.
Followed by the characterizing description-rule
summarized as follows:
The woman who was married to Herr Felix
Schneider, with whom she lived for sixteen years, having two children. After
their separation, she worked in the Student Administration of the University of
Bielefeld, later was a diligent manager of the same, and looked very much as
shown in photos.
The descriptions one initially knows are either
auxiliary or, to a greater or lesser extent, components of the localization and
characterization rules of Frau Hildish. Here the question arises: few know in
detail the localization and characterization rules; how then is it possible
that many people are able to refer to Frau Hildish with as little information
to go on as the descriptions of (i) to (iv)? The obvious answer is that this is
achieved by means of enhanced reference borrowing, also called parasitic
reference. Details of this answer will be addressed in the next section.
9. A socio-linguistic division of cognitive
labor
Against the MIRs and the consequent
identification rules, one could still raise the following objection: We do not
need to know the fundamental descriptions associated with a proper name in
order to be able to use it in a sufficiently correct manner. Perhaps the only
thing most people know about Aristotle today is that he satisfies the
indefinite description ‘a great philosopher of ancient Greece’. A person who
knows only this knows only some generalities implied by Aristotle’s localizing
and characterizing descriptions. Even so, we would still say that this person
is referring to Aristotle. Moreover, a person can be understood as referring to
Aristotle, even associating this name with a single auxiliary description such
as ‘Plato’s greatest follower’ after seeing a picture of Raphael’s famous
fresco, The School of Athens, or ‘Alexander’s tutor’ after watching a
film about Alexander’s life, or even with an adventitious auxiliary description
such as ‘the philosopher about whom my uncle has spoken’. Furthermore, for a
philosopher like Kripke, a person could even refer to Aristotle by associating
him with an erroneous description, such as ‘a Greek general’ or ‘a medieval
philosopher’. We have already said something as an answer to the problem. My
intention now is to go into details.
One
way to give a complementary answer to the question of parasitic or borrowed
reference consists in the appeal to what might be called a
descriptivist-internalist understanding of
the hypothesis of the division of labor in language. This division was
originally proposed by Hilary Putnam for his non-descriptivist externalist view
of the conceptual references of general terms. For him, many words are used by
different people in different ways, each way containing its own greater or
lesser pieces of information, which can be more or less specialized, so that
they are all interrelated in the social network of our language. For him, words
achieve their meanings not through psychological states, but in “the
sociolinguistic state of the collective linguistic body” (1975: 229). Here he
uses the pertinent metaphor of a steamship:
We may summarize this discussion by pointing
out that there are two sorts of tools in the world: there are tools like a
hammer or a screwdriver, which can be used by one person; and there are tools
like a steamship which require the cooperative activity of a number of persons
to use. Words have been thought of too much on the model of the first sort of
tool. (1975: 229)
Essentially, different people use ships with
different functions and purposes; most people use them as passengers who do
nothing but ride on them to reach their destination. Others use them like crew
members, having more active roles. They can work as pilots, serve in the engine
room, perform on-board services... This variety of uses is surely a factor in
the application of most general terms with scientific connotations, like
‘water’, ‘neoplasia’, ‘entropy’, ‘quark’, ‘string’, although, as it seems, not
of more everyday terms like ‘stone’, ‘chair’, and ‘house’. Putnam was thinking
of natural kind words. We will discuss his views in the right time. My question
here, however, is: can we apply a similar understanding of a socio-linguistic
division of labour to our cognitivist-descriptivist understanding of proper
names?
Putnam, committed to his semantic externalism, considers the linguistic
division of labor as involving social groups and does not resort to
cognitive-descriptive semantic aspects that psychologically understood should
belong to their diversified component members. However, it is important to note
that prima facie his externalist
commitment is arbitrary, since it is even easier to imagine a division of
semantic labor comprising diverse levels of descriptively expressible cognitive
abilities that speakers, or even groups of speakers, need to have in order to
warrant the most complete referential use of a word. After all, as A. D. Smith
noted (1975: 70-73), allusions to something like the division of labor in
language can be found in the writings of internalist philosophers preceding
Putnam, beginning with John Locke himself, who was the classic advocate of a
descriptivist semantics in which meanings are psychological ideas.[20]
Moreover, Putnam’s arguments for his externalism of meaning are, as we will
later see, more than controversial.[21]
Having
this in mind, my goal is to apply the above view to proper names, first
classifying the divisions of language work into degrees of cognitive abilities
in the application of the descriptively expressible semantic-cognitive contents
that various speakers can associate with those terms. It seems clear that when
we attribute reference to a name, we can have in mind different degrees of
referential success. Three proheminent cases can be easily identified:
(A) that of a proper, self-contained, self-sufficient reference,
(B)
that of a
parasitic or borrowed, unqualified reference.
(C)
that of an unhappy, failed reference.
Let us first consider the case (A) of the
reference I call self-sufficient (proper referencing). We can understand it as
the reference made by privileged users of a name, capable of offering
identification of an object as a referent that exists in the world, guaranteed
by the application of its proper name’s identification rule, that is, by the
application of the proper name’s localizing and/other characterizing
description-rules sufficiently and predominantly, at least in typical cases.
There
are many proper names, for example, those of our close relatives, whose
identification rules we can self-sufficiently know, so that we are essentially
privileged users. But there are other proper names whose relevant informative
contents are known by only a few privileged users, such as, say, experts,
historians, biographers, witnesses of their baptism… Consider, for example, the
proper names ‘Kublai Khan’, ‘Battle of Salamis’, ‘Andromeda Galaxy’. A self-sufficient
reference to the bearers of these names requires privileged users who can
properly refer to their bearers, ideally being responsible for their
institution and maintenance. Furthermore, among these privileged users/namers,
we can find sub-specialized divisions of labor. The Battle of Salamis, for
instance, will be seen differently by an historian, a military strategist, and
a geographer, each knowing more about different special aspects of the event
than others know.
It
often happens that when we attribute reference, we are considering unqualified
reference. What a person has in mind is only an unqualified description-rule
(B), which can be:
(B1) insufficient, in the sense of being schematic or accessory, or even
(B2) inappropriate, in the sense of being erroneous, although still
convergent in the sense of being correctly classified – a reference whose
character is derived.
As for insufficiency due to deficiency, it is
customary to attribute this to people who know only generalities or auxiliary
descriptions associated with a proper name. Thus, two persons can agree about
the existence of ‘the great old Spanish painter called “Velázquez”’ without
having seen his paintings and knowing nothing more about him; we do not deny
that they can refer to Velásquez, although in an unqualified way, in sense B1.
They are able to insert the name into discourse, and people who know something
about Velázquez will usually agree that they are referring to the classic
Spanish painter. However, in a more demanding sense, they do not know the
painter about whom they are talking. The same can be said of people who only
know that Aristotle is a figure in a famous fresco painted by Raphael, or who
have seen him in a Hollywood movie, where he appeared as Alexander’s tutor.
These persons are referring to the philosopher only in an extended sense
of the word, in the sense that they are able to insert the name ‘Aristotle’ in
undemanding conversational contexts, assuming that there are interpreters able
to do something with the name, either because they are privileged namers or
because they know as much as the speaker, but are confident that there are privileged
namers who have sufficiently mastered the identification rule in order to be
able to recognize in their use an attempt to identify the same person, the
painter that privileged namers could actually refer to in a self-sufficient
way. To this we must add that such a mechanism of reference borrowing works
insofar as there is a common general context that is sufficiently
determined to disambiguate the proper name (e.g., Aristotle is understood by
hearers as the name of a thinker, and not as the name of a school or a Greek
shipping magnate… Velázquez is understood by hearers as a great painter and not
just a person living in a Spanish village). Through what I prefer to call an
enhanced mechanism of reference borrowing, generalities regarding fundamental
description-rules (e.g., the Greek philosopher Aristotle) and popular auxiliary
descriptions (e.g., the greatest disciple of Plato) are recognized by others as
part of the common general context. Satisfaction of B1 or B2
and of a common general context allows the sharing of a borrowed reference
without directly appealing to privileged namers, though assuming their
existence.[22]
Insufficiency occurs in degrees. A degree of insufficiency that is
somewhat lower than that of the examples above is given by Kripke’s example of
a person who can associate a proper name only with an indefinite description,
as in the case of a person who associates the proper name Feynman with the
indefinite description of him as ‘a great physicist’. A description can,
however, also be clearly inappropriate, though still worthy of the term
‘referential’ in our natural language. This is the case with Kripke’s example
of an erroneous description such as ‘the inventor of the atomic bomb’
associated with the name Einstein (1980: 81-85). In most cases, these people
make such associations with a full understanding of the grammar of proper names
(implicitly knowing MIRf, and having sufficient background information to be
aware of what they can – and especially of what they cannot – do with a proper name). In such cases we are still
accustomed to say that the person was successful in referring, since the
speaker, as well as his audience, normally knows that Einstein belonged to the
class G of human beings, or that he was a scientist, or even that he was not
the inventor of the atomic bomb. They know enough to correct the speaker, and
all of them assume that the linguistic community contains privileged users. That
is, there are people able to correct and complete the name’s reference because
they have mastered its proper identification rule.
Nevertheless, there are limits to the ability to refer using incorrect
information about the possessor of a proper name. If someone uses the proper
name ‘Aristotle’ in the erroneous belief that it names a prime number, if
someone uses the name ‘Feynman’ thinking it is a brand of perfume, or if they
use the proper name ‘Einstein’ thinking that it means a precious stone, he has
a divergent understanding of those names – unqualified in the sense of being
(C): failed. These are uses in which even class G (in these cases, of
humans) is not recognized. Here the speaker will no longer be able to correctly
insert the name into discourse in the sense that privileged namers can conclude
that he is able to make the right gesture toward a fully referential use of these
names. The speaker does not know what he is speaking about. He is not referring
at all.
Keeping in mind the derivative referential use of a name by a speaker
without sufficient knowledge of its identification rule, we can propose a
secondary, weaker, or parasitic sense of referential success. It concerns (B):
unqualified references that are: (B1) insufficient or: (B2)
inappropriate, but not: (C) failed. For the identification of the weakened, but
the very common sense understanding of referential success belonging to class
(B), the criterion is threefold:
SUCCESS CRITERIA FOR UNQUALIFIED REFERENCES:
SCB-1. Convergence
condition: we understand by a convergent use one where a person can at
least correctly classify the referred object in the nearest relevant
class G that together with the corresponding proper name makes its reference
sufficiently recognizable for other speakers and, in the end, for privileged
namers, who are assumed to exist (something equivalent to the knowledge of a genus proximum regarding
conceptual terms).[23]
SCB-2. Condition
of linguistic competence:
knowledge of MIRf and of the mechanisms of reference borrowing on the speaker’s
part. This enables a person to at least know that she does not know
(e.g., if all I know about Aristotle is that he was Alexander’s preceptor, and
I know MIRf, then I know that I am far from knowing enough about who Aristotle
really was to believe I am able to properly identify him).
SCB-3. Condition of socio-contextual
adequacy: there must be an adequate social context, where people who
already know generalities about the proper name are already able to disambiguate
it. (e.g., one can introduce the name ‘Aristotle’ referentially, linking it
with the wrong description ‘a pupil of Socrates’ in a social context where he
is already known to have been a Greek philosopher, but not in a context of
children who only know Aristotle as the name of their school.)
In other words: A person is admittedly able to
use a proper name in the extended senses of the word that are here classified
as unqualified in an enhanced form of borrowed referential success, for which
three main criteria must be satisfied. First, the uses must be convergent,
falling within appropriate general classifications (satisfaction of SCB-1).
This is so, simply because by inserting the name into discourse in a convergent
manner, a person should already be able to employ the proper name in communication
based on his expectations concerning the linguistic community. The spelling of
proper names in convergent senses and adequate contexts already makes it
possible for other users – assuming the ultimate support of privileged namers –
to accept this insertion of the proper name into a discourse as successful,
since in this way the path to a more complete reference is opened. Second, it
is assumed that the person tacitly knows MIRf, the metalinguistic rule for the
construction of proper names’ identification rules (satisfaction of SCB-2).
Normally this makes the person aware that to use a proper name referentially in
a self-sufficient way she would need to know more about it than she really
knows. Third, the linguistic community where the name is inserted must be
inclined to recognize contextual generalities about the name that enable its
disambiguation (SCB-3): the community must know that the speaker is referring
to a philosopher in the case of Aristotle, a world-famous historic building in
the case of the Taj Mahal, etc. Without the satisfaction of these conditions, a
proper name could not be suitably introduced into discourse in the form of an
unqualified reference.
Enhanced borrowed references are acts of referring that belong to our
everyday communicative actions. The speaker performs his act of unqualified
reference because he is counting on the support of a linguistic community able
to recognize well-known generalities about the bearer and eventually complete
his reference. It is only with the aid of better qualified speakers that it is
cognitively possible to correct or complete the senses of the expressions he
has in mind.
Here
it is worth remembering that although this process is social, it is obviously
internal. The meaning of the proper name is internal, even though it is located
especially in a speaker’s head, in other words, even though it is distributed
differently in the heads of other speakers, including the very interpreters who
are the privileged namers. Meaning is internal in all its moments, apart from
its origins. – And here lies the original sin of externalism: the genetic
fallacy of mistaking the usually external origins of meaning for the
meaning itself.[24]
Returning to our use of Putnam’s metaphor: a person is successful in
referring according to the criteria of unqualified referential success, in
contrast to a self-sufficient reference in a way comparable to that of a
passenger who is taking a ship to go to a certain destination, even knowing
that it is the crew that will sail and steer it. The case of the passenger is
obviously different from that of a person who is successful in referring
according to the true criteria of referential success, such as the captain of
the vessel, who actually uses on-board controls to steer the ship to its
destination. If we want to be demanding, we must admit that people who use a
proper name without knowing its fundamental description-rules do not really
know what they are saying when using the name. In fact, we only agree to say
that they can insert a name into language referentially, because we rely on the
existence of privileged namers who are actually able to identify its bearer.
Finally, unqualified non-failed references form a spectrum ranging from
knowledge of almost irrelevant descriptions (such as the overly vague ‘a
philosopher,’ or the too little known ‘grandson of Achaeon’) to knowledge of
important identifiers (such as ‘Plato’s greatest pupil’) or parts of fundamental
descriptions (such as ‘the Greek philosopher who wrote the Metaphysics’).
To
emphasize the social dependence of unqualified references on self-sufficient
references, we can imagine a situation in which, for some reason, all
privileged namers disappear. Imagine that a catastrophe like a nuclear war
occurs and that only a few almost illiterate people survive, reduced to a
primitive state. Imagine that these survivors find a scrap of paper preserving
some auxiliary descriptions concerning Aristotle, such as ‘the greatest
disciple of Plato’. They would be able, I suppose, to recognize the word
‘Aristotle’ as the name of a person. However, they would not actually be able
to refer to Aristotle, even in the sense of making an unqualified reference,
simply because of the absence of any possible support given by a linguistic
community, which must include speakers capable of filling gaps guaranteeing the
reference and giving it a sense of what it originally was. Without privileged
namers able to (together, at least) master the identification rule, there would
be no possibility for the proper name’s effective referential use. It is as if
the passengers remaining on board a ship were abandoned by its crew in
mid-ocean, without having the slightest idea of how to navigate. They could
never reach a port by their own efforts.
10. Why are proper names rigid designators?
A problem that has always haunted descriptivism
is the prima facie impossibility of explaining why proper names
are (obviously) rigid designators. After all, it seems clear that there is no
identifying property that must satisfy some weighted definite description of a
proper name’s cluster in all possible worlds. Searle tried to explain why:
[the name can be used as a rigid designator
because] …we have a notion of the identity of an object which is separable from
those particular intentional contents which are used to identify the object.
(1983: 260; my italics)
This is the right insight but is not clearly
expressed because of the lack of the right conceptual device, which is the form
of the identification rules (MIRf). Now, what I want to show in this section is
that another great advantage of the identification rules resulting from the
application of MIRf to a proper name’s cluster is to explain in a clear and
decisive way why proper names must be rigid designators even in the domain of a
descriptivist theory.
In
order to give a meta-descriptive answer to the question, we need to begin by
examining some semantic properties of the identification rules for proper
names. One is that these rules can always be translated into the form of complex
definite descriptions to be read as analytical-conceptual truths in the sense
of definitions. We can make this clear by rewriting the identification rule
of a proper name, which we can do simply by formulating it as a long definite
description, which I call DD (definitional description, which can
also be understood as an identification rule or IR expressed in a descriptive
form). Here is the general form of DD:
DD (the formulation of MIRf as a definitional
description):
The object that satisfies ((ii)) sufficiently as a
whole, and ((iii)) more than any other the localizing condition ((i-a)) and/or
the characterizing condition ((a-b)).
As you can see, the three conditions of the
MIRf are contained in the DD form of definitional description. To make the
function of a DD clear we can apply (or instantiate) DD to a proper name. If
the proper name is ‘Aristotle’, the result is the following:
DD-‘Aristotle’ =
The person who satisfies
((ii)) sufficiently as a whole and, ((iii)) more than any other, the condition
((i-a)) that he was born in Stagira in 384 BC, was the son of Philip’s court
doctor, lived in Athens and died in Chalkis in 322 BC and/or the condition ((i-b))
that he was the author of the fundamental texts comprising the Aristotelian
opus.
The essential point to be noted about a DD
expressing the identification rule of a proper name is that it is a
definitional description that is a
tacitly accepted rigid designator. After all, it applies to the bearer of
the name ‘Aristotle’ in any possible world where Aristotle can be said to exist
and cannot be applied in any possible world where Aristotle cannot be said to
exist. That is, we cannot conceive of a possible world where Aristotle exists
and the identification rule provided by such a definitional description does
not apply, since it is this same identification rule that defines
who Aristotle can be for us.
These
considerations give us the most interesting clue to a new understanding of
reference mechanisms that bridges the apparently insurmountable gap between
Kripke’s insight and descriptivism. All we need to see is that the
identification rules of proper names can be translated as rigid definitional
descriptions, that is, that they are in fact, and intuitively, nothing but
rigid definitional descriptions. This is important because it solves a central
problem of descriptivism pointed out by Kripke, namely, the apparent
impossibility of explaining how we can extract rigidity from a definitional
description or a cluster of descriptions. This also means that from the
ontological viewpoint we do not need any common essential property linking
different possible worlds to warrant the rigidity of a proper name. It suffices
to have a DD description-rule.
11. Blurred conceptual borders
We can now ask ourselves: could there be
ambiguous cases, possible worlds where there is no way of knowing whether we
can apply an identification rule? Could there be possible worlds where there is
only, so to speak, “half” an Aristotle? The answer is: yes, but that does not
matter at all! Vagueness is a pervasive characteristic of language and
supposedly also of the world through the many ways it can be subdivided, and an
adequate semantics of possible worlds also needs to cope with this fact.
Certainly, there are possible worlds where Aristotle does not sufficiently
exist, so that we cannot decide whether or not to apply his identification
rule. In such worlds there is no way to attribute either existence or
non-existence to Aristotle, and (assuming the plausible idea that vagueness
arises from the very nature of things) where Aristotle neither exists nor does
not exist. This does not mean that the name ‘Aristotle’ is not a rigid
designator. It is rigid because outside the boundaries of indeterminacy the name
can still be guaranteed to apply or not.
There
is an intuitively clear way to accommodate the concept of a rigid designator in
such cases. For our purposes, it is sufficient to redefine such a concept as
designating the property of a referential expression of applying in all
possible worlds where the referred object definitely
exists. Rigidity is, in other words, the property of the
semantic-cognitive criterial rule of a referential term of “constituting” the
existence of its referent in all possible worlds where this rule can reveal
itself to be effectively applicable, that is, warranted and continuously
applicable in a defined way without doubts about its applicability, which can
occur only by means of direct or indirect verifiability procedures. For
example: we can say that our Aristotle existed in our world simply because we
have already applied the identification rule for the proper name Aristotle in a
myriad of verifiability procedures, and therefore we know for sure that the
identification rule for Aristotle (IRf-‘Aristotle’ or DD-‘Aristotle’) is
effectively applicable.
It
would still be possible to object to this view by recalling the Sorites paradox. If there are frontiers
of indeterminacy, where do they begin or end? If there is no clear limit to its
extent, what justifies our saying that we have already reached a zone of
clarity in the application of a concept, where the bearer of the name can be
said to exist? The only answer we need to present here is that Sorites can be
generated for virtually any vague term of our language without this fact making
it practically inapplicable. Indeed, even if we are aware of Sorites, we do not
fail to apply the word ‘bald’ to a totally bald head, nor the word ‘mountain’
to a mountain large enough so that it is impossible to confuse it with a hill.
We do not need to solve the Sorites to
apply our predicates. In a similar way, we do not need to make undecidable
cases disappear to admit that the proper name ‘Aristotle’ might express a
semantic core constituted by an identification rule which is a rigid
designator.[25]
12. Rules’ changeability
We know that changes in an identification rule
are clearly possible. This fact raises two questions: (a) How much can the
identifying rule of a proper name change? (b) Can the change cancel the
rigidity of a proper name?
Before
answering these questions, it is useful to consider a case of reference change
due to the creation of a completely new rule. This is the case of the already
considered example of Gareth Evan’s name ‘Madagascar’, now to be interpreted
according to the metadescriptivist view. According to him, Madagascar was first
identified as a region on the east coast of Africa. However, when Marco Polo
visited the region, he mistakenly took Madagascar to be the great island near
the east coast of Africa, which led to the formation of a completely new
dominant identification rule for a new bearer of the proper name. Notice that
the description ‘the region on the east coast of Africa with such and such
characteristics’ elliptically shows the identification rule for the old
reference of the proper name ‘Madagascar’, while the description ‘the great
island with such and such properties near the east coast of Africa’
elliptically shows the identifying rule for the new reference of the same
proper name. Accordingly, we have two homonymous proper names with different
meanings and references. These two rules identify different objects in our
world, but they are also rigid: they surely identify two different Madagascars
in any possible world where their references exist.
We can
also imagine cases in which the differences are smaller but sufficient to
sisawohl the candidat for a proper name’s bearer. The first is that of a
conceivable world in which the person called 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
history. Intuitively, we have no proper 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 limits of alteration are 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.
The
curious case of the impostor named ‘Arthur Orton’ may be of some help in
clarifying the issue, showing how much can the vague limits of application of
an identification rule can be stretched by the acceptance of changes. 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 conceivable 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, though it is no matter of certainty.
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.
Now,
since the identification rule is definitional
regarding the bearer of a proper name’s reference, changes in the rule must be
limited to the scope of what is intended to be defined. But how and to what
extent? Well, we can consider three innocuous ways of change.
The
first way of change is that of changes in auxiliary description-rules
belonging to a proper name’s cluster. They can be added or even subtracted
without changing the applicability of the identification rule, since they do
not really belong to it. To give an example: it does not really matter whether
Proxenus of Artaneus was Aristotle’s guardian after the death of his father, or
if Theophrastus really accompanied him to the lagoon on Lesbos Island… This is
so because the auxiliary rules, while belonging to a proper name’s cluster, do
not belong to the identification rule, and are consequently unable to suppress
rigidity. Therefore, the possible worlds in which the identification rule
applies remain the same.
The
second way of change is by increasing or decreasing the number of details
concerning the fundamental localizing and/or characterizing conditions.
This is very common. Regarding fundamental description-rules, the number of
details relating to location and character usually increases with time, insofar
as our knowledge of the bearer increases, though it can also possibly decrease
if we discover mistaken attributions, for example, the discovery of water under
the surface of Mars in one case, and the decision by astronomers that Pluto is
not a real planet in the solar system in another. It makes no difference if a
considerable increase in informational details occurs, since this normally does
not change the reference or the possible worlds in which the name could apply.
The
third way of change concerns replacements within the identification rule.
For example: we could discover that our Aristotle was in fact born in 392 BC
and not in 384 BC. We could discover that he was not the true author of the Metaphysics
and that this major work were actually written by his disciples soon after his
death. Now, could small changes or not too big changes accepted as facts
dissolve rigidity? Could such changes make a difference in terms of the
possible worlds where Aristotle could exist? I think it is unlikely. If we
consider a possible world where there were only one Aristotle, it would make no
difference, since we would apply the somewhat changed identification covering
both cases due to the rule’s vagueness. But consider possible worlds where
there is more than one competitor for the bearer of the name ‘Aristotle’.
Suppose there were a possible world – a conceivable world-circumstance – in
which there were two identical bearers of the proper name ‘Aristotle’, one born
in 392 BC and the other in 384 BC. In this case we would say that the
distinction is too minimal to make a difference. We should better choose new
proper names like ‘Aristotle-1’ and ‘Aristotle-2’ to dissolve the ambiguity and
differentiate them. Now, if in a possible world we find two identical
Aristotles, one who did not write the Metaphysics, and another who did write
the Metaphysics, we would either reject the applicability of the identification
rule, or we would say that we have made a small change in the semantic core and
therefore in the reference of the proper name ‘Aristotle’. We cannot change an
identification rule in a way that changes the possible conceivable world-circumstances
in which a proper name already does or does not definitely apply, simply
because the identification rule is what defines what should count as the bearer
of the proper name in any conceivable world-circumstance (here expressions like
‘conceivable circumstance’ are better than the misleading ‘possible world’).
A
further example of change is that of a big replacement within the
identification rule: suppose, for instance, we change Aristotle’s
identification rule to say he was an Arab philosopher who lived in the 9th century
and wrote a book in Latin called De
Proprietatibus Elementorum. This person really existed in some possible
world that happens to be our own. But he cannot compete with our Greek
Aristotle. Here the changed rule is an identifying rule for an eponymous use of
a person’s name, sharing with the original only the fact that the real author
was also a man of science, one of many pseudo-Aristotles. Considering a cluster
of descriptions belonging to a proper name, we have blurred boundaries between
these descriptions and the fundamental descriptions, and between localizing and
characterizing fundamental descriptions and, finally between the identification
rules associated with the cluster and the identification rules of other
identification rules associated with different clusters. Any attempt to counter
the rigidity of identification rules by means of rule changeability will need
to take this fact into consideration. Our answers to the questions presented at
the beginning of this section are: (a) an identification rule can be changed
insofar as it still identifies the same object in any possible world where this
object exists; (b) if changing the identification rule cancels rigidity, it
will also cancel the proper name’s function by changing its potential
references in possible worlds. And the ultimate reason for these conclusions is
that the identifying rule of a proper name is analytically definitional of what
should count as its reference in any conceivable definite circumstance in which
the reference can be said to exist (any possible world).[26]
To think otherwise is to be deceived by what Wittgenstein once called the
surface grammar (Oberflächiche Grammatik) of our language (1984: sec
664); the confusion is supported by an artificial term like ‘possible world’.
Another way to state the same result arises when we consider the
internal vagueness in the identification rule. Consider again the condition
(iii) of the MDRf, that is, the predominance condition. It was stated as follows:
Predominance
condition: the condition that in the case where more than one object
sufficiently satisfies the disjunctive condition of a proper name, the bearer
of the proper name must be the object that most completely satisfies it.
The point here is one of vagueness: the blurred
borders between what counts as predominant or not. In the example of the Arab
medieval philosopher who wrote De Proprietatibus Elementorum it is clear
that in our world he is not the Aristotle of our identification rule, since he
does not satisfy the predominance condition. But in the case of a conceivable world-circumstance
in which we need to choose between an Aristotle who was born in 292 BC, and one
born in 284 BC, or one who had and another who had not written the Metaphysics,
ceteris paribus, there would be at least in the first case a practical
ground for doubt. In any case, it seems to me that we are here reaching the
limits of language, or, in better words,
the limits of our criterial linguistic tools to deal with proper names in our
natural language.
13. Existence
A related point regards the attribution of
existence to objects of reference in statements like “Aristotle exists”. I will
consider here only a natural association between identification rules and the
second-order view of existence traditionally defended by philosophers like
Aquinas, Kant, Frege, and Russell.[27]
According to this view, existence is not a property of things, but a property
of concepts, which we could generally render as the property of being satisfied
by at least one object.[28]
Formally speaking, if we call ∃ the attribution of existence, and we
call A the expression of the concept involved in the predicate ‘Aristotle’, we
can say “Aristotle exists” or, which is the same, “There is only one x such
that x is Aristotle”. Formally we can express this as “∃x [(Ax) & (y) (Ay → y = x)]”. Here we
can clearly see that A applies to x, while ∃ applies to A, more precisely, we see that
the concept expressed by A applies to something at the level of reference,
while the concept of existence expressed by ∃ applies to the concept expressed by A
and not to x. Now, if we accept that a concept is a
criterial rule (a sense), we can replace A with the identification rule for
Aristotle, and ∃ with the satisfaction of this rule, which is to us nothing but the
property of applicability or effective applicability of the
criterial rule. This means, namely, the effective (warranted, verifiable)
applicability of the identification rule for the name ‘Aristotle’. Or, in other
words, I am suggesting that the higher-order property of existence can be paraphrased as the
meta-property of the effective
(warranted, verifiable) applicability of conceptual rules in the considered
domains.[29] I
will try to make this clear by offering an example: suppose someone utters the
indexical sentence: “The object on this table is a pencil”. Let us say that the
ascription rule for the concept of pencil is: “a hard tube containing a sufficiently
solid rod which can be used for writing or drawing”. If we claim that the
pencil exists, we are saying that this rule is effectively, that is warrantably
or verifiably applicable to the object on the table, even when we are not near
that object, and even when we are not applying the rule. Moreover, the rule is
effectively applicable, since it is warrantably, verifiably applicable,
even in cases where we do not yet know of its effective applicability in the
domain of the world around us (e.g., we do not know that the pencil exists). In
a similar way, the existence of a proper name’s bearer, such as Aristotle, must
be able to be identified by the effective applicability of the conceptual rule
that we normally associate with the word ‘Aristotle’. Here, this is the
identification rule (expressed by IR-‘Aristotle’ or the DD definite
description) for this proper name. Thus, it is the effective applicability (the
attribution of existence) of the identification rule, which establishes a
referent as the bearer of the name in any possible world. With the above
explanation, I am offering a more detailed analysis of the higher-order concept
of existence that is somewhat equivocally analyzed by Frege as the second-order
property of concepts of having at least one object falling under it (Frege
1961: 65). According
to my analysis, the existence of the property designated by the ascription rule
of a predicative expression is the higher-order t-property of this rule of
being effectively or warrantably applicable, since the conceptual rule itself
can be regarded as a first-order t-property in a world made up of tropes. Consider, as a further example,
the statement “Aristotle is white”. This
sentence can be formalized as ∃x [Ax &
(y) (Ay → y = x) & Wx], where ‘∃’ expresses the second-order predicate of existence, while the
first-order predicates are expressed by ‘A’
= Aristotle and ‘W” = white. Now, according to our neo-Fregean
understanding, A and W apply to x, while ∃ applies to the conceptual rules expressed
by A and W. Considering the concepts expressed by A and W as
first-order tropical rules, A is an identification rule effectively applied to
(or satisfied by) a composition of concurrent t-properties (which is the same
as the person of Aristotle), and W is an attribution rule applicable to (or
satisfied by) a t-property (which is the Aristotelian whiteness). Furthermore,
the second-order conceptual rule expressed by ∃ and meaning effective applicability applies to the rules expressed by A and W. It attributes
to these first-order rules a second-order property of existence, which is
nothing but the property of these first-order rules of being effectively
applicable in a proper domain.
Initially, the proposed view may seem puzzling, if we think of existence
as a meta-property of effective applicability floating above the object
supposedly constituted by its tropical properties. But we can easily get around
the objection insofar as we paraphrase the above explanation more naturally as
saying that the existence of an object is the meta-property of its
identification rule of being effectively (warrantably, verifiably,
continuously) applicable to it, while an object that does not possess this
meta-property is not a real object, but merely a conceivable one. This way
of speaking protects us from any accusations of anthropomorphism regarding
existence: an object can have an identification rule effectively applicable to
itself – thus not being a merely conceivable object – even if this rule has
never been thought of or applied by any cognitive agent. Consequently, if we
know that the identification rule for the name ‘Aristotle’ is effectively
applicable in a possible world – that is, we have verified its applicability in
a possible world that is our own – we know that Aristotle exists. In other
words, the effective applicability of the identification rule is in some way
“constitutive” of its object.
14. Why are definite
descriptions accidental designators?
In this section, I present what I regard as an
irrefutable demonstration of the greater explanatory power of the here
presented theory of proper names’ referential function.
We
have already seen in Chapter II that a significant advantage of the
causal-historical view is that it provides an explanation for the fact that
definite descriptions are accidental designators, while proper names are rigid
designators. In conformity with that view, it seems that proper names identify
their bearers in any possible world where these bearers exist, by being
connected more directly, even if mysteriously, with their references by means
of baptism. Definite descriptions, on the other hand, can identify different
objects in different possible worlds. They do so, it appears, by connecting
with their references indirectly through what they mean (or, according to J. S.
Mill, what they connotatively express). This Kripkian explanation remains to
some extent unsatisfactory, as it must unavoidably resort to some mysterious
“direct connection to the object”. This is supposedly acquired by proper names
through the ceremony of baptism, even if often accomplished with the help of
accidental descriptions.[30]
In contrast, it is a great advantage of the meta-descriptive theory of proper
names that it allows us to explain the difference in usage between definite
descriptions and proper names simply by showing that what makes such
descriptions accidental is their associations with proper names. To arrive at
this explanation, however, we will need a detailed argument. We can start by
asking: in what cases do definite descriptions become rigid designators? I do
not wish to speak about the stipulation of rigidified descriptions referring to
an object in the actual world, such as, e.g., ‘the actual last great
philosopher of antiquity’, referring to the actual Aristotle even in worlds
where he was not a philosopher (Cf. Searle 1983; Stanley 1997). What I want to
consider is the case of perfectly normal assignable definite descriptions which
are naturally interpreted as rigid designators simply because they are not
associated with any proper name. They are not so rare. Here are some examples:
(A)
(i)
the square
root of nine,
(ii)
the
easternmost point in South America,
(iii)
the
Rafflesia discovered by Dr. Joseph Arnold on 20 May 1818.
(iv)
the Third
Cavalry Corps of the Grande Armée.[31]
(v)
the Last
Glacial Period,
(vi)
the
assassination of Austrian Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo in 1914.
By definite description (i) we mean not only
the number 3, but also a method of reasoning or calculation which leads to this
number. This description can be considered an obstinate designator, since its
formal character makes it abstractly applicable in any possible world.[32]
What
really interests us here is not case (i), but that of descriptions from (ii) to
(vi), whose content is empirical. Whether or not we regard them as rigid
designators does not usually depend on how we interpret them. Consider case
(ii). It is true that in our world the easternmost point of South America is
located in the Northeast of Brazil near the city of João Pessoa, or so I’ve
learnt as I was there. This geographical fact, however, can surely be
considered irrelevant. For suppose that in another possible world Patagonia
bends towards Africa, making it farther east than João Pessoa. In this case,
description (ii) would apply to the same easternmost point, which
would be located in Patagonia. It remains a rigid designator notwithstanding
the difference in latitude and longitude and any other geographical
specification, since these are not to be considered in cases where a point can
change its spatial position. Worth noticing is that this reading of (ii) as a
rigid designator is not a new and artificial stipulation but can be seen as a
natural interpretation of the description’s content (ask yourself about the
relocation of a Euclidian geometrical point).
What I
am trying to show becomes more plausible when we consider other cases of rigid
descriptions that are obviously not associated with proper names. Consider
(iii): The Rafflesia Arnoldi is regarded as the largest flower in the world.
The first known specimen was discovered by Sir
Stamford Raffles and Dr. Joseph Arnold on 19 May 1818 during an
expedition to the Manna River in Sumatra. The description (iii) is rigid since
it is true in any possible world where Dr. Arnold discovered that Rafflesia
specimen on 19 May 1818 during an expedition to the Mana River in Sumatra.
Hence, (iii) is a rigid designator. Indeed, if we try to treat it as an
accidental designator, the question will arise: accidental with respect to
what?
Consider now (iv): if we have in mind only Napoleon’s Third Cavalry
Corps of the Grande Armée, leaving aside the particular soldiers and horses
that constituted it, its description is clearly seen as a rigid designator,
applying to the same regiment in any possible world where that regiment can be
said to exist. We should note that in this definite description the localizing
description-rule (France, 1804-1815) and the characterizing description-rule
(the third cavalry corps of Napoleon’s Grande Armée) are already clearly
expressed.
Now,
consider descriptions (v) and (vi). They should also be interpreted as rigid
designators. Description (v) can be understood as designating a state of
affairs characterized by the Earth’s last cooling period. In our world, it
lasted from 111,000 years ago until about 11,700 years ago, but in a
counterfactual situation it could have occurred in a very different period,
insofar as it could still be identified as the last glacial period.
Description (v) is a rigid designator of a past state of affairs that we have
located on our planet. Description (vi), finally, refers to an event explicitly
containing its characterization as the assassination of Archduke Franz
Ferdinand. In our world, he was tragically gunned down by Gavrilo Princip, but
in another near possible world, he could have been stabbed, poisoned,
strangled, etc. His death might not have ignited World War I in some possible
worlds… But it is important to see that the description would not fail to
satisfy the description of the assassination as a rigid definite description,
applicable in all possible worlds where Archduke Ferdinand was assassinated.
Now, if we apply rigidity tests to the above
examples, we see that they also pass the test, since the corresponding
statements are, as the test demands, false (see Chapter II, sec. 1). Thus,
applying the test to A-(iii) we get “Something other than the Rafflesia
discovered by Dr. Joseph Arnold on 20 May 1818 might have been the Rafflesia
discovered by Dr. Joseph Arnold on 20 May 1818”, which is clearly false.
Applying it to A-(vi) we get: “The assassination of Austrian Archduke Ferdinand
in Sarajevo in 1914 might have been something other than what was in fact the
assassination of Austrian Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo in 1914”. Surely not.
The same results are reached by applying Hugues’ version of the rigidity test.
Thus, applying it to A-(v) we get: “The last glacial period could have existed
without being the last glacial period”. In any possible world, such statements
would involve a logical contradiction, being therefore false, which
demonstrates rigidity.
We see
now that there are definite descriptions naturally interpretable as rigid
designators referring to (i) numbers, (ii) points, (iii) objects, (iv) groups,
(v) states of affairs, (vi) processes, and even (vii) events. It is clear that
these things are or can be considered as rigid designators. Are there features
common to all these cases? The interesting point is that the answer is in the
affirmative. There are two common features. The first feature is crucial and
decisive for our whole argument: it is that there are no proper names
corresponding to any of these descriptions.[33]
That is why I call them autonomous descriptions. Below I show why this
is a decisive feature: by nature, autonomous descriptions must be rigid. A
second feature is a consequence of the first: these descriptions express
fundamental rules of localization and/or characterization, and not auxiliary
rules, as often found in the case of metaphorical or accidental descriptions
used in association with proper names. This point is less important, because we
may well invent a linguistically metaphorical or accidental description in
place of the cases above, and it may also be rigidly interpreted as tacitly
containing fundamental description-rules.
As a
contrast, let us now consider some examples of usual definite descriptions
which clearly behave as accidental designators that can refer to different
objects in different possible worlds. Here are some examples:
(B)
(i)
the Eagle
of The Hague,
(ii)
the iron
marshal,
(iii)
the founder
of the Lyceum,
(iv)
the first
Roman emperor,
(v)
the city of
light.
(vi)
The third
planet of the solar system.
In opposition to the examples given in list
(A), the above definite descriptions are designators so typically accidental
that a Kripkian philosopher would be pleased to use them as examples. Contrary
to the previous descriptions, one cannot make them rigid, except by means of
stipulation. Consider (i): it is usual to think of the description ‘the Eagle
of The Hague’ as a laudatory metaphor for Rui Barbosa’s oratorical powers in
his address to The Hague Peace Conference in 1907. But we can also conceive a
possible world where the ship Rui Barbosa took to the congress at The Hague had
sunk already at the beginning of its voyage, taking with it that outstanding
orator, and that he was replaced by another excellent speaker, who was called
by his devoted compatriots ‘the Eagle of The Hague’. The same goes for any
other description in group B.
The
descriptions of group B do not pass the Kripkian tests of rigidity.
Consider, for instance, the statement B-(v). Applying the test to (v), we get
“The City of Light could have existed without having been the City of Light”
(Hughes’ incremental test). This is a true statement, failing to pass the
rigidity test that requires its falsity. For it is obvious that Paris, the City
of Light, could have existed as a city without ever being called the City of
Light!
The
next question is: what makes group B descriptions accidental, in contrast to
the rigid descriptions of group A? The answer would not be that the
descriptions of group B are only auxiliary, even if most of them are, because
we could add to this list descriptions such as (vii) ‘the most famous soccer
player in history’ and (viii) ‘the 45th president of the United
States’. These are fundamental and yet accidental, since in some possible
worlds Pelé might not have become the most famous soccer player, and someone
other than Donald Trump could have become the 45th president of the
United States. The real answer to the question is more profound. It is that the
descriptions of group B, unlike those belonging to group A, are semantically associated, albeit loosely,
with corresponding proper names, insofar
as they belong to their clusters. These proper names are respectively (i)
Rui Barbosa, (ii) Floriano Peixoto, (iii) Aristotle, (iv) Julius Caesar, (v)
Paris, and (vi) Earth. Despite the strength of the association, established by
the place of group B definite descriptions in the clusters and, in this way,
also the conditions constituted by the identification rules of the
corresponding proper names, these descriptions do not need to be satisfied by
the same objects referred to by the corresponding proper names in all possible
worlds where those objects exist. After all, it is certain that there are
possible worlds where Rui Barbosa stopped undertaking diplomatic missions,
where Floriano Peixoto was a candid adept of the monarchy, where Aristotle did
not found a Lyceum, where Julius Caesar tenaciously defended the Republic,
where Paris was destroyed in the fourteenth century, never becoming the City of
Light, and (let us imagine) where a planet Vulcan really existed, Venus was the
third planet from the Sun, and the Earth was consequently the fourth planet
from the Sun. However, these proper names do not cease to apply to their
respective objects in all these conceivable world-circumstances, since they are
rigid designators, continuing to satisfy the respective identification rules
that we have derived from MIRf.
A
consideration of this point would surely lead us to reject a Millian-Kripkian
explanation of definite descriptions, according to which they would be
accidental because they denote accidentally or flaccidly. According to Mill
they denote indirectly, based on connotative properties, and not
directly-rigidly, as is the case with proper names. Thus we see that a definite
description is not, if taken alone, accidental, and it is called accidental
with respect to the association we make between the definite description and
some proper name. More precisely, it becomes accidental by being loose, contingent,
and not necessarily associated with the proper name to whose cluster it belongs. This is a conclusion that is valid
not only for auxiliary descriptions, but even for fundamental descriptions
belonging to proper names, since the identification rule allows the possibility
of dissociation between the application of a proper name and any isolated
application of both kinds of description.
We can
further clarify this idea by saying that virtually any description belonging to
the cluster of descriptions represented by a proper name has a contingent semantic association with the
rest of the description-rules constituting the name’s informative content. This
association is made because we consider such a definite description to be
connected with, and often a contributor to, the identifying description-rule.
The latter is considered whenever a proper name is applied in the fully
referential act characteristic of a self-sufficient reference. That is,
contrary to DD and the many combinations of descriptions belonging to its
possible factual applications, descriptions of the cluster are accidental in
the sense that they are not an indispensable aspect of a proper name’s
self-sufficient reference. This being so, a definite description belonging to a
cluster and the proper name with which it is associated only tend to
refer to the same object, not necessarily doing so (e.g., the founder of the
Lyceum, as well as the philosopher who died in Chalkis in 322 BC, tend to refer
to the same object as does the name Aristotle).
Of
course, the sameness of the referent is something we assume to be the case; but
we can easily imagine counterfactual situations where it does not exist. This
is why the auxiliary description ‘Herphyllis’s lover’ applies to the reference
of the name ‘Aristotle’, as far as we know, but it is not impossible to
imagine, for instance, that the surviving texts constituting Aristotle’s
heritage were incorrectly transcribed... In our world, the characterizing
description of Aristotle is ‘the author of the Aristotelian opus’. But in
another possible world, Aristotle could have died before reaching Athens and
consequently never wrote the Aristotelian opus. This description – for speakers
in that world – will lack the semantic association it has here with the semantic
content of the proper name ‘Aristotle,’ even if it is a fundamental (but not
indispensable) portion of our identification rule for that name. In other
words:
Because of a possible disconnection between the
reference of the proper name and the reference of definite descriptions that
are in different degrees loosely associated with it, these descriptions become
capable of designating another or perhaps none of the expected references in
other possible worlds where the proper name associated with them continues to
apply or even ceases to apply to the same reference. It is only for this
trivial comparative reason that proper names are called rigid designators, and
the associated definite descriptions not. Only the description DD, expressing
the proper name’s identification rule, remains a rigid designator.
An example can be useful here. A description
such as ‘the first Roman emperor’ expresses part of the description-rule
defining the character of Julius Caesar (he was de facto the first Roman
emperor). As the DD (or the MIRf-‘Julius Caesar’) for the identification of
Julius Caesar is more complete, allowing us to identify the object much more
specifically, we consider the description ‘the first Roman emperor’ to express
a contingent, albeit important, property of Julius Caesar. It is contingent
because according to its identification rule, expressed by DD, Caesar can be
identified as such even if that description-rule could not be applied. That is
the only reason why the description ‘the first Roman emperor’ is accidental,
namely, because there could be counterfactual circumstances where he did not
become the first Roman emperor. Thus, for instance, there could be conceivable
world-circumstances where Pompey won the Battle of Pharsalus against Caesar and
became the first Roman emperor, or even did not become one… or a possible world
where Julius Caesar was a vigorous defender of the Republic and where this
institution persisted until the end of the Empire.
Of course, we could also stipulate that the proper name ‘Julius
Caesar’ abbreviates the definite description ‘the first Roman emperor’. In this
case, the description becomes a rigid designator, for it will designate the
first Roman emperor in any possible world where he comes into existence. Such
an artificial strategy can be applied to any other description associated with
a proper name, if there is a reason for doing this. However, in the case of
descriptions belonging to group A above, rigidity is a natural feature.
Consider A-(iii): ‘the Third Cavalry Corps of the Grande Armée’. Because of the
tacit conventions established by our specialized practice, this localizing and
characterizing description will always apply to the same object in any possible
world where that regiment can be found. The given explanation shows why this is
the case. Since the descriptions of the A group are unassociated with
the semantic content of any proper name to be related to them, they cannot
refer to objects other than those referred to by them in any possible worlds
where their objects of reference exist, which makes them rigid designators. We
see, therefore, that quite unlike the implications of Kripke’s arguments, the
relationship between a description/accidental designator and a proper
name/rigid designator has nothing to do with a difference between the indirect
(connotative in Mill’s sense) reference mechanism of the definite description
and a mysterious direct-rigid reference mechanism of proper names resulting from
some form of baptism. But this holds only for the relationship between a
definite description and the proper name with which it is loosely associated.
One
point to be added is that in cases where a definite description is auxiliary
regarding a proper name, the rule of connection to the referent is not
qualified to identify it as the object referred to by the proper name
associated with it. A definite description such as ‘the Eagle of The Hague,’
for example, is not capable, by its explicit content, of identifying Rui
Barbosa independently of the identification rule usually associated with this
proper name, because this honorific description does not have enough
descriptive content to do so. Moreover, the speaker who applies the description
‘the Eagle of The Hague’ usually also has in mind at least part of the
localizing and the characterizing description-rules for Rui Barbosa when using
it, though not necessarily associating these rules with the definite
description (suppose he was mistaken about the association, as often occurs).
Moreover, in differently conceivable world-circumstances, an auxiliary
description such as ‘the Eagle of The Hague’ can more easily become contingent;
it can easily be associated with another proper name, say, Joaquim Nabuco,
belonging then to the semantic halo of this last name.
Now we
also clearly know why the descriptions of group (B) do not resist the rigidity
test. It is because we are able to unwittingly associate one of their
occurrences with the proper name and not the others within the rigidity test’s
statement. Applying the test to B-(i) we get “Something other than the Eagle of
The Hague [Rui Barbosa] might have been the Eagle of The Hague [e.g., Joaquim
Nabuco].” (In fact, the distinction was first suggested by the Baron of Rio
Branco for Joaquim Nabuco.); applying the test to B-(iii) we get “The founder
of the Lyceum [?] might have been other than the founder of the Lyceum
[Aristotle]”. These two statements are also true, since the first occurrences
of the descriptions in them can be detached from the proper names with which
they are weakly associated. And B-(vi) “The second planet of the solar system
[?] could have existed without having been the second planet of the solar
system [Venus]” is also true, for instance, if the second planet were replaced
by a rogue planet in the 3rd century AD without any visual
confirmation. It is the weak association that we make with the proper name and
the possibility of disassociation that leads us to regard these statements as
non-contradictory and consequently true, failing to pass the rigidity test.
Finally, we can add a very clarifying explanation of the loose semantic
association between description and name by using the Wittgensteinian
distinction between primary criteria and symptoms or secondary
criteria already explained in the present book (Chapter I, section 4).
Repeating what we saw there, criteria are regarded by Wittgenstein as defining
properties (1958: 24; 2001: 28)[34].
Once identified as given, they constitute conditions that for us guarantee the applicability of a conceptual term. Symptoms or secondary
criteria, in contrast, are properties that once accepted as given make the
applicability of the conceptual term only more or less probable. For instance: plasmodium falciparum in a patient’s
blood can serve as a criterion of malaria, while intermittent fever is only a
symptom.[35] A criterial rule
necessitates (for us) the satisfaction of criteria for its application, for
which reason the term ‘criterion’ is ambiguous: it means both what the
criterial rule requires for its application and what satisfies this requirement
– an ambiguity that extends to symptoms or secondary criteria.
Now, the
identification rule of a proper name is its proper criterial rule. We see
that the changing t-properties or t-property bundles required for the effective
applicability of the identification rule of a proper name are valid as criteria
guaranteeing the name’s applicability. The tropical properties required by
definite description-rules belonging to the bundle of descriptions associated
with a proper name are only probabilizing symptoms for the application of
the name, since they only make that application probable. These
considerations allow us to predict that the dependency a definite description
has on the semantic context of the corresponding proper name should diminish in
proportion to its irrelevance for the identification of the object. This makes
most descriptions in the bundle weaker but helpful symptoms, probabilizing the
application of the identification rule. It is easier to consider separately
accidental and generally unknown definite descriptions like ‘Alexander’s tutor’
or ‘Achaeon’s grandson’ or ‘Herphyllis’s lover’ as symptoms of the referent of
the name ‘Aristotle’, since they play a secondary role in determining the
reference of the name ‘Aristotle’. But it will be less easy, although still
possible, to do the same in the case of fundamental descriptions such as ‘the
author of the Metaphysics’ and ‘the Greek philosopher born in Stagira in
384 BC’. And if the definite description contains in the right way all that is
essential for the content of the proper name to which it is subordinate, it
will inevitably become rigid. This is only the case with DD-rules. Thus, the
DD-‘Aristotle’ is the descriptive formulation of the identification rule for
the name ‘Aristotle’, which, as we have seen, is a rigid designator: the
primary criterion.
If an
accidental designator is derived from the contrast of a description with the
associated proper name, we can ask ourselves if it could also occur as a
contrast between one proper name and another. This should be the case for two
proper names of the same object, when one of them contingently includes in its
cluster all the descriptions belonging to the other. Indeed, this happens,
especially in the case of nicknames. Consider the case of a young schoolboy, call
him Bud, who because he has trouble figuring things out, was for some time
nicknamed by mean-spirited schoolmates ‘Anvil-head’, or for short, ‘the Anvil.’
There are possible worlds where Bud was not an inept pupil or had no malevolent
schoolmates, or where his friend John was the actual recipient of that
nickname. In these worlds, the nickname ‘Anvil’ either does not apply or
identifies someone other than Bud. The nickname ‘Anvil-head’ is – if considered
in contrast to most common proper names – an accidental designator, an
accidental proper name, which is only a symptom of the person who bears Bud’s
name.
The
above explanation for the difference between the semantic behavior of proper
names and that of definite descriptions is much more clarifying than the
obscure causal-referentialist theory. The latter suggests that through an act
of baptism a proper name comes to refer by possessing some secret and
inscrutable intimacy with its object. The former explanation is more powerful,
since it justifies exceptional cases. According to it, the rigidity of the
proper name ceases to be suggested as something arising from a mysterious
property of the baptized object in abstraction from its cognition and without
the resource of properties. Instead, rigidity arises from the identification
rule as its t-property of being applicable in any conceivable world-circumstance
where criterial configurations generated by it are satisfied by criterial
t-properties belonging to the bundle of compresent t-properties constitutive of
the referred object.[36]
This
is the way the concept of rigid designator loses its mysterious aura. It is
deflated, since in the end any singular term (and, in fact, any general term)
is a rigid designator, namely, a term applicable in any conceivable
world-circumstance (possible world) where it can be applied effectively to an
object (in which its object of reference exists not only as something conceived
but also as objectively given). A definite description only refers, either
because it is detached from the proper name and consequently seen as rigid, or
because it is regarded as belonging to the cluster of descriptions of a proper
name in the application of the identification rule of that name.
16. Autonomous definite descriptions
Finally, there is the question of how to
analyze autonomous definite descriptions. The most plausible hypothesis is
that, to work independently of proper names, these descriptions need to have
their own identification rules constructed upon fundamental conditions, which
are their localizing and characterizing description-rules. In fact, the same
MDRf we apply to the clusters of descriptions of a proper name should be
applied to an autonomous definite description, insofar as, being a singular
term working independently of any proper name, it needs to be a rigid
designator and, in this way, able to identify an individual. The difference
regarding proper names is not just that in the case of autonomous definite
descriptions the rule is in some way made explicit through symbolic forms as
their connotations or meanings. The difference is that the identification rule
is usually less complex.
Consider first the definite description ‘the Last Glacial Period.’
Because it is autonomous, the fundamental descriptions belonging to the
identification rule contain a localizing and a characterizing description. The
first one is the following:
Localizing description-rule: the last glacial period occurred on the
planet Earth[37] and lasted so long that
there has been no other ice age from its end until the present day.
Although it occurred during the Pleistocene
period, from approximately 115,000 to ~11,700 years before our time, and
although it was preceded by several other similar glacial periods, it could
have occurred in some other longer or shorter period, ending before or after.
But there is also a rule of characterization for the last glacial period, even
if it is redundant. Here is how we can summarize it:
Characterizing description-rule: a long period of decrease in the temperature
of the Earth’s surface and atmosphere, resulting in the expansion of
continental and polar ice sheets, as well as glaciers and alpine snowfields.
Because the autonomous description ‘the last
glacial period’ functions as a proper name, its application requires enough of
the complexity needed by an identification rule, which is not needed by
auxiliary descriptions used in place of names, as is the case with ‘the City of
Light’ parasitically used (Someone can know nothing more of the City of Light
than that it must be a beautiful city, taking the description literally).
Now we
can present a complete example of an identification rule of an autonomous
definite description. Consider the description: ‘the 52nd Regiment
of Foot’. It has the following (summarized) localizing description-rule:
The 52nd Regiment of Foot existed
from 1757 to 1881 and was stationed in Oxfordshire; it saw active duty
particularly during the American War of Independence, the Anglo-Mysore wars in
India, and the Napoleonic Wars.
The
characterizing description-rule for the 52nd Regiment of Foot can be
summarized as follows:
The 52nd Regiment of Foot was a
highly regarded regiment whose troops were recruited chiefly from Oxfordshire,
consisting of one or two battalions of light infantry, each comprising
approximately 1,000 men.
The whole identification rule of this
autonomous definite description will be the following:
RIF-‘the 52nd regiment of
foot’:
The autonomous definite description ‘the 52nd
regiment of foot’ refers properly to an object x belonging to the class of military units,
iff
(i-a) x
satisfies the localizing description-rule of having existed from 1757 to 1881,
and ws stationed in Oxfordshire; it saw active duty particularly during the
American War of Independence, the Anglo-Mysore wars in India and the Napoleonic
Wars,
and/or
(i-b) x
satisfies the characterizing description-rule of having been a highly regarded
regiment whose troops were recruited chiefly from Oxfordshire, consisting of
one or two battalions of light infantry, each comprising approximately 1,000
men,
(ii) x
satisfies the disjunction (i-a) and/or (i-b) to a degree that is overall
sufficient, and
(iii) x satisfies the
disjunction (i-a) and/or (i-b) better than any other military unit.
It also seems clear that in other possible
worlds the 52nd regiment of foot could consist of troops not
recruited in Oxfordshire, but, say, in Cambridgeshire (still in England), and
existing from 1726 to 1832… nevertheless satisfying sufficiently and more than
any other regiment important characteristics such as serving during the
American War of Independence and Anglo-Mysore wars, and made up of one or two
battalions of light infantry comprising approximately 1,000 men... This would
be sufficient for the identification of the 52nd regiment of foot in
that near possible world, even if it were regrettably non-Oxfordian.
But
then, what is the difference between the identification rule of autonomous
descriptions and that of proper names? Regarding fundamental descriptions, the
difference often lies in the complexity of the rule. But the main difference
concerns the auxiliary definite descriptions, which are so helpful to the work
of inserting a proper name into discourse. It is not that they cannot exist.
The 52nd regiment of foot was associated with the following
auxiliary laudatory definite description: ‘a regiment never surpassed in arms
since arms were first borne by men’. The use of this auxiliary description can
be sufficient to insert the description convergently into discourse. The same
surely applies to many other autonomous definite descriptions.
The
contrast is here with definite descriptions strongly associated with proper
names like the auxiliary descriptions ‘the City of Light’ with Paris, or ‘the
tutor of Alexander’ with Aristotle. We can also contrast them with definite
descriptions that express the fundamental description-rules, like ‘the
Stagirite’ or ‘the author of the Nicomachian Ethics, the Metaphysics,
and the Organon’. In these cases, the descriptions are viewed as
appended to the identification rules of the respective proper names, which
emphasizes the descriptions’ explicit meanings and eschews their possible
autonomy. As such, auxiliary descriptions are seen only as helpful though
unnecessary complements to the identification rules of their associated proper
names. Finally, we can always artificially abstract definite descriptions from
the proper names they are associated with, analyzing them as autonomous. One
could speculate as to whether or not this was what philosophers were trying to
achieve when they proposed we could rigidify descriptions by indexing them to
the actual world.
[1] See Bencivenga 1987.
[2] I use the term cognitive to
include tacit non-conscious cognitions. One does not need to be able to explain
the descriptions one has in mind by applying a proper name.
[3] The term ‘causal descriptivism’ was
coined by David Lewis in his 1984 article to designate mixed theories of proper
names. See also Kroon 1987.
[4] Russell 2010: 460.
[5] His words also serve as a warning
against some formalist overconfidences: “Our common stock of words embodies all
the distinctions men have found worth drawing, and the connections they have
found worth marking, in the lifetime of many generations: these surely are
likely to be more numerous, more sound, since they have stood up to the long
test of the survival of the fittest… we are looking again, not merely at words,
but also at realities we use the words to talk about: we are using a sharpened
awareness of words to sharpen our perception of reality… Certainly then,
ordinary language is not the last word: in principle, it can be everywhere
supplemented and improved upon and superseded. Only remember, it is the first
word” (1979: 182-185; for objections to the limits of this method, see Grice
1989, part I.)
[6] The fact that spatiotemporal
localizing rules have a privileged role has not gone completely unnoticed. Paul
Ziff, for example, argued that localizing descriptions or localizing
implications form a central part of the proper name’s reference mechanism (1960).
(Cf. also Tugendhat 1976: Ch. 21-25)
[7] I chose Wikipedia because of its ease of access; but any other encyclopedia
will highlight these kinds of data, often in a similar order.
[8] It is important to see how much
different is “the bearer of the name ‘N’”, as we understand it here, from the
non-homonimist sense that proper names receive in most of the so-called metalinguistic
theories of proper names, in which proper names are usually treated as
referential context-sensitive terms (see Gray: 2018). For instance, the name
‘John Smith’ will have as referents as many bearers as there are individuals
with this name in the world, varying its identification with the context.
Notwithstanding the fact that the word, the ‘proper name’, can also gain that
sense, the sense I am investigating in this book is that of an individual
constant, having as its referent an individual. This is also what we usually
mean with the term proper name.
[9] The main reason why the philosophy
of language is distinguished from linguistics is not as much the breadth of its
scope, which goes beyond a particular language, but the presence of
epistemological and ontological imports. It is in this sense that Frege’s
semantics, as much as the present discussion, are philosophical, unlike, for
example, Saussure’s linguistics (2016).
[10] I suppose here that the person
knows nothing about who Achaeon was and about when and where he lived, for this
already implies that he associates the name with descriptions such as a
Macedonian philosopher from the 3rd century BC.
[11] God could also be understood to
have no location, because he is said to be simultaneously everywhere. But this
is a problematic case, because either His existence is unverifiable, or His
nature distorted. On the other hand, there is another concept well expressed by
Baudelaire as he wrote, “Dieu est le seul
être qui, pour régner, n’ait même pas besoin d'exister.” [God is the only
being that to reign does not even need to exist.] (1867, 75-76).
[12] The tacit assumptions of the existence of
auxiliary descriptions and a supposed ultimate causal relation – not properly belonging
to the rule by means of which the referent is identified – will by reasons of economy
not be repeated.
[13] It could also be called ‘Theseus’
ship’ since a definite description without an associated proper name (which I
will call autonomous) should express an identification rule like that of
Calibdus.
[14] This is the version originally
proposed in Plutarch’s Theseus.
[15] It should be noted that the
Kripkian theory of baptism would also find it difficult to explain our
preference for the second Aristotle in W2. This theory would not be
able to distinguish the true Aristotle, for it would not have at its disposal
enough descriptive resources to privilege it; it couldn’t explain why the real
Aristotle happens to be the first one in W3.
[16]
The cognitive, epistemic, or informative meaning (Sinn or Erkenntniswert) of a word is much more
than the literal meaning, and according to the adopted ontology, it should be
taken as constituted by internal tropes (like psychological criterial
conditions) able to be equally repeated in the same or in different minds.
[17] It should be noted that there are
specialized dictionaries or lexicons for proper names, such as those that
explain the etymological meanings of peoples’ proper names and even provide
generic information about their best-known bearers. An etymological meaning,
however, is precisely what we are not searching for, since it might
belong to a proper name’s sensible mark, independently of what it can refer to
regarding each circumstantially different bearer.
[18] It is not always
so transient, as is attested to by the well-known scathing remark of a London
critic about James Joyce and his almost illiterate wife: “I was introduced to a
sick old man accompanied by a cow.” (O’Brien, 2011)
[19] For an impressive example of a
biography being fully scrutinized in a court trial, see the documentary The
Staircase, about a writer named Michael Peterson, who apparently tried for
murdering his wife in 2001.
[20] According to Smith, this appeal to
a division of linguistic labor can be found in writings of philosophers like
John Locke and C. S. Peirce. A closer look shows that Locke was emphasizing the
frequent inadequacies in our ability to reflect on the different aspects of our
ideas using words. He thought that ideas corresponding to words can be
inadequate and faulty in different minds, distant from the patterns or
archetypes they should refer to (II, 31, 4-5). For him, ideas that are
collections of simpler ideas can be attached to names in ways that are distant
from those who use the names in their most proper signification (II.32.12), and
confused complex ideas are bound to render the use of words uncertain
(II.29.7). Thus, many do not use such words in their precise sense, which often
defeats real communication (III.10.22). Children often learn imperfect notions
of our complex ideas, and as adults sometimes remain ignorant of aspects, so
that, although they master our grammar, they may still use certain words improperly…
(III.11.24).
[21] See Appendix of the present book, sec. 7
[22] This also occurs frequently when we
hear scientific expressions like ‘quantum entanglement’ or ‘string theory’. The
little that most of us know of physics allows us at least to share a similar locus
in our cognitive networks.
[23] I am detailing something that John Searle
already noticed this point as he considered the transference of relevant
information from speaker to hearer in order to secure reference: “…the type of
thing named by the name – whether it is a mountain or a man or a mouse or
whatever – is generally associated with the name even in the parasitic cases;
and if the speaker is wildly mistaken about this we are disinclined to say that
he has really succeeded in referring”. (1983: 249)
[24] Cf. Appendix, sec. 6 to 9 for criticism of
Putnam’s externalism and an examination and analysis of the meanings of general
terms’.
[25] Notice that a similar problem could
be found with causal-historical views: there could be a half-Aristotle
unjustifiably baptized or labeled, etc.
[26] The existence of a pervasive,
unproblematic, and inevitable vagueness in natural language was insistently
pointed out by the later Wittgenstein (1984b: sec. 72-108). Although the
admission of vagueness in a proper name’s reference mechanisms seems to offend
some logical instincts, it is unavoidable. In a similar case, inescapable
vagueness can be found in scientific fields, for instance, in the statistical
mechanics, or, more famously, in the uncertainty in our observations of
subatomic events in quantum mechanics, making probabilism the only way to
access microphysical events.
[27] Although today there is a wide
range of literature opposed to the higher-order view of existence, I still
consider first-order views unnecessary and their conclusion that one cannot
deny existence self-destructive. For a detailed discussion, see Costa 2018, pp.
213-217.
[28] Frege regarded a concept as an
incomplete abstract object on the level of reference of a predicative
expression. This view left him unable to say anything about the corresponding
sense of the predicative expression, which intuitively should be its expressed
concept. I prefer to locate the term concept on the level of sense or meaning,
placing referred particularized properties or tropes on the level of reference.
(Frege 1891, Cf. also Searle 2008, p. 186.)
[29] I take this terminology from my
reconstruction of J. S. Mill’s definition of matter as “the permanent or
warranted possibility of sensations”. What I call ‘effective applicability’ is
the property of the rule of having its applicability warranted by some form of
direct or indirect verification within an assumed domain of entities. For
details, see Costa 2018, pp. 204-233.
[30] This is the only way I can
interpret Kripke’s supernaturalistic explanation of how we identify
individuals, as presented on pages 52-53 of his Naming and Necessity.
[31] An uppercase first letter is an indicator that
a definite description is being used as a proper name.
[32] To be sure, the claim that they are
applicable in all possible worlds seems to be nothing more than a manner of
speaking, since if something is abstractly applied, it is not being effectively
applied in a possible world – assuming we understand a possible world as any
conceivable world-circumstance. To understand this better, consider again the
description ‘the square root of nine’: then imagine yourself in a
counterfactual situation doing the same abstract math in your head; this does
not need to have anything to do with the world-circumstance we are conceiving.
[33] A difficulty is that too many
descriptions can be associated with proper names. Thus, using Google Search I
now see that the easternmost point of South America can also be called by the
name ‘Cabo Branco’, a place I once visited in João Pessoa. However, it is not
difficult to find more adequate examples. Thus, we can replace (ii) by (ii’)
‘the easternmost point of Iceland’, to counter the objection.
[34] The precise interpretation is
controversial; here I give my own (Costa 1990: 147-167; Cf. Baker 1974).
[35] Wittgenstein suggests that the
confusion between criteria and symptoms is a source of philosophical confusion
(1958: I). To illustrate: the face and body of a person are symptoms of her
identity, though at first view seeming to be criteria.
[36] Remember that according to Donald
Williams’s trope theory, the whole world, including anything usually called
“abstract” (things like rules or even the applicability of rules…) must be
constituted by tropes. For my attempt to explain natural numbers in terms of
tropes, see Appendix II.
[37]
Notice that the Earth can be a different planet in a differently
conceivable world circumstance (possible world).
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