3 - Names and Their Meaning, Sentences and Descriptions

Summary

Names

We saw in the last lecture that the Philosophical Investigations begins by sketching out the widely accepted, but misguided, ideas that words are essentially names and sentences are essentially combinations of names. The function of names is to stand for things. Names have a meaning and their meaning is the thing they stand for. The function of sentences is to describe how things stand. We saw that many philosophers, both linguistic realists and linguistic idealists, have succumbed to the charms of this conception. I tried to show how very tempting these ideas are. But great though the temptation is, it must be resisted, for this syndrome of ideas is misconceived.

To show that it is misconceived, what needs to be done is to survey the concepts of name, description, sentence and utterance, definition and explanation, meaning and use. When these notions have been clarified, we shall turn to the psychological notions of meaning something by a word, knowing what a word or utterance means, understanding and interpreting sentences uttered. Today, I shall start by examining the concept of a name and the idea that words are essentially names, and that the essential function of words is to stand for the things they name.

The category of names is not sharply circumscribed. Grammarians distinguish among names, between proper names and common nouns. Proper names include names of people, pets, places, times, artefacts, names of books and other works of art. Common nouns include names of kinds of things, both natural like ‘dog’ and artefactual like ‘car’. These are all count nouns – what they name are countable. Hence, they admit of plural form and take such quantifiers as ‘many’, ‘most’, ‘a few’ – as in ‘many dogs’, ‘most trees’ and ‘a few cars’. Their plural form allows combination with plural indexicals, such as ‘these’ and ‘those’, and with cardinal numbers greater than one. In addition to count nouns, there is a further category of non-count nouns, which may be concrete or abstract. Concrete non-count nouns are names of stuffs.