David Bourget (Western Ontario)
David Chalmers (ANU, NYU)
Rafael De Clercq
Jack Alan Reynolds
Learn more about PhilPapers
Philosophers of language have lavished attention on names and other singular referring expressions. But they have focused primarily on what might be called lexicalsemantic character of names and have largely ignored both what I call the lexicalsyntactic character of names and also what I call the pragmatic significance of the naming relation. Partly as a consequence, explanatory burdens have mistakenly been heaped upon semantics that properly belong elsewhere. This essay takes some steps toward correcting these twin lacunae. When we properly distinguish that which belongs to the lexical-syntactic character of names, from that which belongs to the lexical semantic character of names, from that which rests on the pragmatics of the naming relation, we lay to rest many misbegotten claims about names and their presumed semantic behavior. For example, though many believe that Frege’s puzzle about the possibility of informative identity statements motivates a move away from a referentialist semantics for names, I argue that the very possibility of Frege cases has its source not in facts about the lexical-semantic character of names but in facts about the lexical-syntax of the naming relation. If I am right, Frege cases as such are insufficient to justify the introduction of the distinction between sense and reference. In a similar vein, I offer a new diagnosis of the widely misdiagnosed felt invalidity of the substitution of coreferring names within propositional attitude contexts. That felt invalidity has been taken 1 to justify the conclusion that an embedded referring expression must be playing some semantic role either different from or additional to its customary semantic role of standing for its reference. I argue, to the contrary, that failures of substitutivity have their source not in the peculiar semantic behavior of embedded expressions but entirely in certain pragmatic principles.
|Keywords||No keywords specified (fix it)|
No categories specified
(categorize this paper)
Setup an account with your affiliations in order to access resources via your University's proxy server
Configure custom proxy (use this if your affiliation does not provide a proxy)
|Through your library||
References found in this work BETA
No references found.
Citations of this work BETA
No citations found.
Similar books and articles
Ora Matushansky (2008). On the Linguistic Complexity of Proper Names. Linguistics and Philosophy 31 (5):573-627.
Kimberly A. Jameson & Nancy Alvarado (2003). The Relational Correspondence Between Category Exemplars and Names. Philosophical Psychology 16 (1):25 – 49.
Dale Jacquette (2011). Frege on Identity as a Relation of Names. Metaphysica 12 (1):51-72.
M. Pelczar & J. Rainsbury (1998). The Indexical Character of Names. Synthese 114 (2):293-317.
Heidi Tiedke (2011). Proper Names and Their Fictional Uses. Australasian Journal of Philosophy 89 (4):707 - 726.
J. Van Brakel (1982). Conventions In Naming. Philosophy Research Archives 8:243-277.
Gil Anidjar (2006). Traité de Tous les Noms (What Is Called Naming). Epoché: A Journal for the History of Philosophy 10 (2):287-301.
Richard Coates (2009). A Strictly Millian Approach to the Definition of the Proper Name. Mind and Language 24 (4):433-444.
Yu Izumi (2008). Some Remarks on an Implementation of the Burgean View of Proper Names. Proceedings of the Xxii World Congress of Philosophy 39:79-88.
Aleksandra Horecka (2007). Nazwy puste u Tadeusza Kotarbińskiego. Filozofia Nauki 1.
M. W. Pelczar (2001). Names as Tokens and Names as Tools. Synthese 128 (1-2):133 - 155.
Added to index2010-12-22
Total downloads13 ( #133,099 of 1,413,167 )
Recent downloads (6 months)3 ( #67,254 of 1,413,167 )
How can I increase my downloads?