Proper Names

Philosophy of Language » Lecture 4

Today

Rigid Designation

Kripke on Rigid Designation

Let us call something a rigid designator if in every possible world it designates the same object, a nonrigid or accidental designator if that is not the case. (Kripke 1980: 48)

A test for rigid designation

\(t\) is a rigid designator iff the sentence

The individual that is (was) actually \(t\) could not have existed without being \(t\), and nothing other than the individual that is (was) actually \(t\) could have been \(t\)

expresses a truth. (Soames 2003: 342)

A confusion about rigid designation we ought to avoid

If Aristotle is a rigid designator, referring to the same possible individual at each possible world, how is it possible that Aristotle might not have named Aristotle? If Aristotle names Aristotle at each possible world, how is it possible that Aristotle not be the name of Aristotle?

Kripke on this potential confusion

When I say that a designator is rigid, and designates the same thing in all possible worlds, I mean that, as used in our language, it stands for that thing, when we talk about counterfactual situations. I don’t mean, of course, that there might’t be counterfactual situations in which in the other possible worlds people actually spoke a different language. One doesn’t say that ‘two plus two equals four’ is contingent because people might have spoken a language in which ‘two plus two equals four’ meant that seven is even. Similarly, when we speak of a counterfactual situation, we speak of it in English, even if it is part of the description of that counterfactual situation that we were all speaking German in that counterfactual situation. … in describing that world, we use English with our meanings and our references. (Kripke 1980: 78)

Frege’s Referentialism Revisited

An old paradox

The Electra Paradox

  1. Electra does not know that the man in front of her is her brother.

  2. Electra knows that Orestes is her brother.

  3. The man in front of her is identical to Orestes.


  1. Electra both knows and does not know that the same man is her brother. (Allwood, Andersson, and Dahl 1977: 126)

Rigidity, Intensions, and Extensions

Twain and Clemens

Sense (‘Sinn’) and Reference (‘Bedeutung’)

It is natural, now, to think of there being connected with a sign (name, combination of words, written mark), besides that to which the sign refers, which may be called the reference [Bedeutung] of the sign, also what I should like to call the sense [Sinn] of the sign, wherein the mode of presentation is contained. … The reference of ‘Evening Star’ would be the same as that of ‘Morning Star’, but not the sense. (Frege 1892: 24)

The sense of a proper name is grasped by everybody who is sufficiently familiar with the language or totality of designations to which it belongs. … The same sense has different expressions in different languages or even in the same language. (Frege 1892: 24–25)

Senses

Direct and Indirect Occurrences

words are used indirectly or have their indirect reference. … The indirect reference of a word is accordingly its customary sense. (Frege 1892: 25)

The case of an abstract noun clause, introduced by ‘that’, includes the case of indirect quotation, in which we have seen the words to have their indirect reference coinciding with what is customarily their sense. In this case, then, the subordinate clause has for its reference a thought, not a truth value; as sense not a thought, but the sense of the words ‘the thought, that …,’ which is only a part of the thought in the entire complex sentence. (Frege 1892: 32)

Attitudes to Senses

Solving the puzzles

Informative Identities

Trivial and Non-Trivial Identity

Frege’s Sophisticated Referentialism Revisited

Descriptivism

Descriptivism: Names and Descriptions

The Cluster of Descriptions Theory of Names

[T]hough proper names do not normally assert or specify any characteristics, their referring uses nonetheless presuppose that the object to which they purport to refer has certain characteristics. But which ones? Suppose we ask the users of the name ‘Aristotle’ to state what they regard as certain essential and established facts about him. Their answers would be a set of uniquely referring descriptive statements. Now what I am arguing is that the descriptive force of ‘This is Aristotle’ is to assert that a sufficient but so far unspecified number of these statements are true of this object. … To use a proper name referringly is to presuppose the truth of certain uniquely referring descriptive statements, but it is not ordinarily to assert these statements or even to indicate which exactly are presupposed. (Searle 1958: 170–71)

Motivating Descriptivism: Establishing Reference

What is the meaning of a proper name?

Weak Descriptivism (Soames 2010: 81)

Kripke Against Descriptivism

Kripke’s Modal Argument Against Descriptivism

Frege and Russell certainly seem to have the full blown [Descriptivist] theory according to which a proper name is not a rigid designator and is synonymous with the description which replaced it. … If ‘Moses’ means ‘the man who did such and such’, then, if no one did such and such, Moses didn’t exist;… [But] it’s clear that that is not what is meant by ‘Moses didn’t exist’, because we can can ask, if we speak of a counterfactual case where no one did indeed do such and such, say, lead the Israelites out of Egypt, does it follow that, in such a situation, Moses wouldn’t have existed? It would seem not. For surely Moses might have just decided to spend his days more pleasantly in the Egyptian courts. He might never have gone in to either politics or religion at all; and in that case maybe no one would have done any of the things that the Bible relates of Moses. That doesn’t in itself mean that in such a possible world Moses wouldn’t have existed. (Kripke 1980: 58)

The Modal Argument Clarified

  1. If Descriptivism is correct, there is some cluster of descriptions \(D\) such that If Moses existed, then Moses satisfied sufficiently much of \(D\) is necessary (Soames 2003: 338).

  2. Moses is a rigid designator of Moses, no matter what that guy might have done instead of what he actually did.

  3. It is possible that Moses could have existed and done none of the things popularly associated with him, meeting none of \(D\). (From 12; cf. (Abbott 2012: 310–11))

  4. If Moses existed, then Moses satisfied sufficiently much of \(D\) is not a necessary truth. (13, semantic ascent)

  5. Therefore: Descriptivism is not correct. (From 11 and 14, modus tollens)

Rigid Names and Propositions

What About Weak Descriptivism?

Against Uniqueness

Consider Richard Feynman, to whom many of us are able to refer. He is a leading contemporary theoretical physicist. Everyone here (I’m sure!) can state the contents of one of Feynman’s theories so as to differentiate him from Gell-Mann. However, the man in the street, not possessing those abilities, may still use the name ‘Feynman’. When asked he will say: well he’s a physicist or something. He may not think that this picks out anyone uniquely. I still think he uses the name ‘Feynman’ as a name for Feynman. (Kripke 1980: 81)

Against needing to satisfy the description

Let’s suppose someone says that Gödel is the man who proved the incompleteness of arithmetic … In the case of Gödel, that’s practically the only thing many people have heard about him – that he discovered the incompleteness of arithmetic. Does it follow that whoever discovered the incompleteness of arithmetic is the referent of ‘Gödel’?…

Suppose Gödel was not in fact the author of this theorem. A man named ‘Schmidt’, whose body was found in Vienna under mysterious circumstances many years ago, actually did the work in question. His friend Gödel somehow got hold of the manuscript and it was thereafter attributed to Gödel.… So, since the man who discovered the incompleteness of arithmetic is in fact Schmidt, we, when we talk about Gödel, are in fact always referring to Schmidt. But it seems to me that we are not. (Kripke 1980: 84)

What is Going On?

The Causal Theory of Reference

Attaching names to things: the Causal Picture

Causal Pictures of Reference and Theories of Meaning

Weak Descriptivism and the Causal Theory

  1. For any name NN and speaker \(S\), the description \(S\) associates with NN is ‘the referent of those previous uses of NN, whichever they may be, from which my present use acquires its referent’ (Soames 2010: 87).

Obviously the name is passed on from link to link. But of course not every sort of causal chain reaching from me to a certain man will do for me to make a reference. There may be a causal chain from our use of the term ‘Santa Claus’ to a certain historical saint, but still the children, when they use this, by this time probably do not refer to that saint.

An initial ‘baptism’ takes place. Here the object may be named by ostension, or the reference of a name may be fixed by a description [e.g., Neptune or Jack the Ripper]. When the name is ‘passed from link to link’, the receiver of the name must, I think, intend when he learns it to use it with the same reference as the man from whom he heard it. If I hear the name ‘Napoleon’ and decide it would be a nice name for my pet aardvark, I do not satisfy this condition. (Kripke 1980: 93–96)

Problem: Reference Change

Change of denotation is … decisive against the Causal Theory of Names. Not only are changes of denotation imaginable, but it appears that they actually occur. We learn from Isaac Taylor’s book Names and their History, 1898:

In the case of ‘Madagascar’ a hearsay report of Malay or Arab sailors misunderstood by Marco Polo … has had the effect of transferring a corrupt form of the name of a portion of the African mainland to the great African Island.

A simple imaginary case would be this: Two babies are born, and their mothers bestow names upon them. A nurse inadvertently switches them and the error is never discovered. It will henceforth undeniably be the case that the man universally known as ‘Jack’ is so called because a woman dubbed some other baby with the name. (Evans 1973: 195–96)

What’s the problem

Rigid Accounts of Names

What’s the Alternative?

Descriptivism really is a nice theory. The only defect I think it has is probably common to all philosophical theories. It’s wrong. You may suspect me of proposing another theory in its place: but I hope not, because I’m sure it’s wrong too if it is a theory. (Kripke 1980: 64)

Direct Reference is not the only kind of Rigid Designation

Rigidified Descriptions

Direct Reference and Identity

Application: Quine’s Problem with Modality

A Quinean Puzzle (Quine 1980)

  1. Possibly, Nixon might not have been the president in 1972. (premise)

  2. So: Nixon has the property of being possibly not the president in 1972. (17, property abstraction)

  3. But Nixon is the president in 1972. (premise)

  4. So: the president in 1972 has the property of being possibly not the president in 1972. (18, 19, substitution of co-referring expressions)

  5. So: Possibly, the president in 1972 isn’t the president in 1972. (20, property reduction)

Abstraction and Reduction

Solving the Quinean Puzzle

Where Quine Goes Wrong

Suppose that someone said, pointing to Nixon, ‘That’s the guy who might have lost’. Someone else says ‘Oh no, if you describe him as “Nixon”, then he might have lost; but, of course, describing him as the winner, then it is not true that he might have lost’. … The first man would say, with great conviction, ‘Well, of course, the winner of the election might have been someone else. The actual winner, had the course of the campaign been different, might have been the loser… So, such terms as “the winner” and “the loser” don’t designate the same objects in all possible worlds. On the other hand, the term “Nixon” is just a name of this man’. When you ask whether it is necessary or contingent that Nixon won the election, you are asking the intuitive question whether in some counterfactual situation, this man would in fact have lost the election. (Kripke 1980: 41)

Thinking About Possibilities

One thinks, in this picture, of a possible world as if it were like a foreign country. One looks upon it as an observer. Maybe Nixon has moved to the other country and maybe he hasn’t, but one is given only qualities. … So we had better have a way of telling in terms of properties when we run into the same thing as we saw before; we had better have a way of telling, when we come across one of these other possible worlds, who was Nixon. (Kripke 1980: 43)

References

Abbott, Barbara (2012) ‘Names’, in Gillian Russell and Delia Graff Fara, eds., The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Language: 307–17. Routledge.
Alama, Jesse and Johannes Korbmacher (2023) The Lambda Calculus, in Edward N Zalta and Uri Nodelman, eds., The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2023/entries/lambda-calculus/.
Allwood, Jens, Lars-Gunnar Andersson, and Osten Dahl (1977) Logic in Linguistics. Cambridge University Press.
Burgess, John P (2014) ‘Madagascar Revisited’, Analysis 74: 195–201. doi:10.1093/analys/anu036.
Elbourne, Paul (2011) Meaning: A Slim Guide to Semantics. Oxford University Press.
Evans, Gareth (1973) ‘The Causal Theory of Names’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volume 47: 187–208. doi:10.1093/aristoteliansupp/47.1.187.
Frege, Gottlob (1892/1993) ‘On Sense and Reference’, in Adrian Moore, ed., Meaning and Reference: 23–42. Oxford University Press.
Frege, Gottlob (1918/1956) ‘The Thought: A Logical Inquiry’, Mind 65: 289–311. doi:10.2307/2251513.
Kripke, Saul (1980) Naming and Necessity. Harvard University Press.
Lewis, David (1988) ‘Vague Identity: Evans Misunderstood’, Analysis 48: 128–30.
Nelson, Michael (2024) Propositional Attitude Reports, in Edward N Zalta and Uri Nodelman, eds., The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2024/entries/prop-attitude-reports/.
Putnam, Hilary (1975) Mathematics, Matter and Method, vol. 1. Cambridge University Press.
Quine, Willard van Orman (1980) ‘Reference and Modality’, in From a Logical Point of View, 2nd edition: 139–59. Harvard University Press.
Searle, John R (1958) ‘Proper Names’, Mind 67: 166–73. doi:10.2307/2251108.
Soames, Scott (2003) Philosophical Analysis in the Twentieth Century, vol. 2: The Age of Meaning. Princeton University Press.
Soames, Scott (2010) Philosophy of Language. Princeton University Press.
Williamson, Timothy (2013) Identity and Discrimination. Blackwell.