HOW PROPER NAMES
REALLY WORK
by
Claudio F. Costa
Since I believe that I have the most
convincing theory of proper names in the
market, and since I am an aspie living far
away from the so-called civilized world, I
feel myself compelled to make some
advertisement of it.
What follows is a summary of my paper “A
Meta-Descriptivist Theory of Proper
Names”, published in the journal Ratio,
XXIV, 3, 2011.
As you probably know, according to the old
theory of proper names (defended by Frege,
Russell, Wittgenstein, Strawson and Searle), a
proper name abbreviates a cluster of
descriptions, which builds its meaning.
According to Searle, who defended this theory in
its most sophisticated form, when you use a
proper name like ‘Aristotle’ you are applying
some indefinite sub-set of an open set of coreferential identifying descriptions.
‘ARISTOTLE’ =
The tutor of Alexander
The author of the Metaphysics
The greatest disciple of Plato…
My first point against this form of cluster theory
is that the cluster is completely disordered. My
first aim is TO PUT AN ORDER IN THIS MESS…
In order to achieve this aim I build a rule to
regulate the cluster. This rule must be a meta-
rule, and its expression is a meta-description,
since the descriptions belonging to the cluster are
expressions of cognitive rules helping us to
identify the object.
The aim of this meta-descriptive-rule is to show
what are the most fundamental descriptions, how
they work together, and what are the merely
auxiliary descriptions.
But how to find the most fundamental
descriptions?
To find what them all that you need is to
use an incredibly simple method: look what
the encyclopedias have to say about proper
names!
Consider, for example, the entry about
Aristotle in the Wikipedia.
The first thing that you will read is that
Aristotle was born in 382 b.C. in Stagira
and died in 322 b.C. in Chalcis, and that he
produced the major philosophical system of
antiquity.
Here you already see that philosophers like
Gottlob Frege where lead astray by the choice of
irrelevant descriptions like ‘the tutor of Alexander
the Great’ to replace the name ‘Aristotle’.
What we will find at the top of encyclopedia
enters are two fundamental descriptions-rules:
a LOCALIZING and a
CHARACTERIZING description.
The LOCALIZING DESCRIPTION gives us the
spatio-temporal location and career of the object.
And the CHARACTERIZING DESCRIPTION gives
us the properties which are the reason why we
use the name.
Although fundamental, none of these rules is
essential in the sense of being necessarily
applicable.
1) It is possible that in a possible world
Aristotle does not satisfy the characterizing
rule, for example, in the case he died as he
were very young and never wrote his opus.
2) And it is also possible that Aristotle does
not satisfy the localizing rule, for example,
in a possible world where he was born and
wrote his work two hundred years later in
Rome. Kripke was prone to note this point!
Nevertheless, at least in some degree a
disjunction of these two fundamental
description-rules must be always satisfied,
and this is the point Kripke was not prone
to note…
- I cannot say that Aristotle was a Greek man
who seduced Callas and married Jackeline.
- I cannot say that Aristotle was not a
philosopher, but a fishmonger who lived in the
late Renaissance, to borrow an example from
John Searle. The reason is: in these cases
neither the localizing nor the characterizing
rule is minimally satisfied.
The final form of the meta-descriptive rule to be applied
to any given cluster of descriptions presented by a proper
name name is more sophisticated, and I do not have time
to demonstrate it here in any detail.
Nevertheless, here it goes:
MDR:
A proper name N is used to refer to the object X
belonging to a certain class C of objects
Iff
It can be assumed that X rightly originates
(normally causal historically) our awareness that
- X satisfies the localizing description for N
and/or
- X satisfies the characterizing description for N
sufficiently and more than any other object
belonging to the class C of objects.
Applied to the name ‘Aristotle’ this general metadescriptivist (form of) rule generates the rule of
identification for the name ‘Aristotle’, which is:
RI-’Aristotle’:
The name ‘Aristotle’ is applied to refer to a man
iff
it rightly (causally) originates our awareness
that this man was born in Stagira in 382 b.C. lived
part of his life in Athena and died in Chalcis in
322 b.C.
and/or
he was the author of the main ideas of the
Aristotelian opus,
and that this (these) condition(s) is(are) satisfied
by this man sufficiently and more than by any
other man.
Of course, not all users of the name will know this
rule.
Indeed, people may use the name ‘Aristotle’
knowing only auxiliary descriptions like ‘the
teacher of Alexander’, ‘the grandson of Achaeon’,
‘the husband of Pythias’, ‘the master of those
who know’, ‘the philosopher mentioned by the
professor’… or even wrong (but convergent)
descriptions like ‘a Greek general’.
But there must be PRIVILEGED USERS who know
this rule at least in parts, and people who use the
name without knowing what they are saying
must rely on the knowledge of these privileged
users.
Without this the reference simply collapses!
The first advantage of the adoption of this rule of
identification is that is easy to see that the
meaning as FREGEAN SENSE (as INFORMATIONAL CONTENT, ERKENNTNISWERT) of a proper
name is NUCLEARLY constituted by its
LOCALIZING and CHARACTERIZING descriptionrules.
Only SECONDARILY, in its FRINGES, the content
of meaning is enriched by the AUXILIARY
DESCRIPTION-RULES.
It is intuitive that Aristotle is much more
necessarily ‘the Greek philosopher who wrote the
aristotelian opus’ than ‘the founder of the
Lyceum’ or ‘the lover of Herphylis’, since those
descriptions convey to us only very contingent
information.
The second advantage of rules of
identification of this form is that they allow
us to explain rigidity within descriptivism!
Indeed, this rule of identification
(differently from any detached description)
can be applied in all possible worlds where
Aristotle exists.
This rule can be even changed in the form
of a descriptive sentence that is analytic
and necessary, if you wish.
A third great advantage of the proposed
definition is that it can better explain why proper
names are rigid while descriptions are flaccid.
It is simply because many descriptions are
LOOSELY LINKED WITH A PROPER NAME, SO
THAT THIS LINK CAN BE DISSOLVED IN A
DIFFERENT POSSIBLE WORLD…
So, we think that Aristotle was ‘the founder of
the Lyceum’ in our world, but since no
description is necessarily linked with the proper
name, it can be that in a different world he never
founded anything of the kind… remaining
however our Aristotle.
This can be proved when we consider that when
you choose descriptions that have no proper
name to be put in their place and they are
fundamental descriptions, they turn to be rigid.
For example:
‘The assassination of the Austrian archduke
Ferdinand in Sarayevo in 1914’.
or
‘The last Ice Age’.
Since these descriptions are not linked to any
proper name, they will designate the same events
in any possible worlds where these events occur.
Finally, all counterexamples to descriptivism
imagined by can find a more complete
descriptivist answer.
Consider, for example, Kripke’s famous Gödel’s
counterexample.
Since the name Gödel is linked with the
description ‘the inventor of the incompletness
theorem’, and, Kripke supposes, it has been
discovered that he has stolen this theorem from
Schmidt, Kripke claims that according to
descriptivism Gödel should be Schmidt.
But we all know that even in this case Gödel
remains Gödel and should not be called ‘Schmidt’
Considering our rule of identification for Gödel,
we see that Schmidt is far from satisfying its
proper identifying rule…
for the person who satisfies the localizing
description for Gödel continues to be ‘the
man who was born in 1905 in Brünn, who
studied in Wien and died in 1976 in
Princeton’.
Moreover, Gödel continues to satisfy
partially (by 2/3) the characterizing rule
for Gödel, since the discovery of the
incompletness theorem was surelly not the
only relevant thing he did as a logician.
He also married the beautiful Adele.
Of course there are a lot of other problems
that you will see, if you are an informed
reader,
but in this case I suggest you read the
paper...