No CrossRef data available.
Article contents
Essentialism and The New Theory of Reference
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 May 2010
Extract
Kripke, Putnam and others have proposed what is often called The New Theory of Reference. Professor Matthen thinks that this theory needs to be modified in various ways: (1) so as to avert misunderstandings about the New Theory's commitment to essentialism; (2) so as to clarify the semantic function of what he calls “nonconnoting terms”; (3) so as to answer Quinean doubts about the determinacy of ostension; (4) so as to correct Putnam's “simplistic” account of ostension; (5) so as to solve Kripke's puzzle about the seemingly inconsistent beliefs of the bilingual Pierre; and (6) so as to show how many ordinary names, contra Kripke and Putnam, can be treated as “equivalent” to definite descriptions. No doubt many of the other things he says in his paper are clever, and perhaps even true. But as to the six modifications I have listed, I have run into difficulties. To the extent that I am able to understand them, I have been forced to conclude that they are neither needed nor helpful.
- Type
- Articles
- Information
- Dialogue: Canadian Philosophical Review / Revue canadienne de philosophie , Volume 23 , Issue 1 , March 1984 , pp. 59 - 77
- Copyright
- Copyright © Canadian Philosophical Association 1984
References
1 Mohan Matthen, “Ostension, Names and Natural Kind Terms”, Dialogue 23 (1984), 43-58 (this journal and issue). Part I of my paper was presented as a reply to Matthen at the Western Canadian Philosophical Association Annual Colloquium, Winnipeg, University of Manitoba, on October 22, 1983. Part 2 was written at short notice in response to a referee's suggestion that I expand a bit on my own positive views. Both parts of my paper have benefited much from the careful scrutiny of my colleague, Ali Akhtar.
2 Kripke, Saul. “Identity and Necessity”, in Munitz, M., ed., Identity and Individuation (New York: New York University Press. 1972), 126.Google Scholar
3 Ibid.. 140.
4 Salmon, Nathan, “How Not to Derive Essentialism from the New Theory of Reference”, Journal of Philosophy 76 (12 1979).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
5 My own answer to these questions, given my understanding of “non-connoting”, will be given in Part 2.
6 As already noted, he believes that both names and kind-terms are non-connoting, and sees his paper as explaining how this can be. His explicit answer is: “Our explanation of this was that they are introduced by ostension and certain specifications” (56).
7 He writes: “Kripke and Putnam … postulate that non-connoting terms are introduced into language by initial baptismal acts in which the denotatum (in the case of names) or a sample thereof is ostended” (46).
8 See Matthen, “Ostension”, 49.
9 Kripke, Saul, “Naming and Necessity”, in Harman, G. and Davidson, D., eds., The Semantics of Natural Language (Dordrecht, Holland: D. Reidel, 1972).Google ScholarKripke's, original essay has been republished, with slight changes and the addition of an important Preface, as a book, Naming and Necessity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980).Google Scholar Page references here are to the earlier of these two.
10 By this I mean that it is unnecessary as a defence of The New Theory of Reference. I do not question its helpfulness as a defence of ostension itself.
11 Hilary Putnam, “Meaning and Reference”, Journal of Philosophy 70 (December 1973).
12 Matthen, “Ostension”, 52.
13 Kripke, Saul, “A Puzzle About Belief”, in Margalit, Avishai, ed., Meaning and Use (Dordrecht, Holland: D. Reidel, 1978).Google Scholar
14 Ibid., 249. In its weaker form “and only if” is omitted.
15 Kripke sums up by saying: “The fact is that the paradox reproduces itself on the level of the ‘uniquely identifying properties’ that description theorists have regarded as ‘defining’ proper names …” (“A Puzzle About Belief, 261). And again: “… it would be implausible at present to use the phenomenon to support a Frege-Russellian theory that names have descriptive ‘senses’ … differences of associated properties do not explain the problems in any case” (ibid., 270).
16 The argument will take a lot of fleshing out. But a hint may be in order. It finds the explanation of the fact that Pierre assents to “Londres est jolie” but dissents from “London is pretty” in a difference in his beliefs about the words “Londres” and “London”. I hope to develop this line of argument elsewhere.
17 I say “sometime conclusion” because 1 believe that, while Russell does sometimes draw it, at other times he does not. See footnote 19 below.
18 This argument from counterfactual truth-conditions yields something like an algorithm for determining whether a designator is rigid. Given a rigid designator, r 2, of a given object and another designator, t 2, of the same object, where the rigidity of t 2 is in question: construct two statements of the forms (i) t, has F,1 (ii) t 2 has F, where F stands for a genuine property of the object, and (i) and (ii) are both in fact true. Ask whether there is any counterfactual situation in which (1) and (2) would differ in truth-value. If so, then t 2 is not rigid. If not, then t 2 is rigid.
19 The standard interpretation has it that Russell held quite unequivocally that the only real or genuine names are not ordinary proper names but demonstratives like “this” and “that”. To the extent that it acknowledges passages, like those quoted above, at all, it tends to explain them away as misbegotten attempts by Russell to illustrate theses about real names by using more familiar ordinary ones. That this will not do should be evident from other passages, drawn from the same two or three pages, such as: “… if you take any other name which is just a name for Scott, then if the name is being used asa name and not as a description, the proposition will still be a tautology. For the name itself is merely a means of pointing to the thing … (245). … if I say ‘Scott is Sir Walter’, using these two names as names, neither ‘Scott’ nor ‘Sir Walter’ occurs in what I am asserting, but only the person who has these names, and thus what I am asserting is a pure tautology” (246). The italicized “as” is Russell's in both cases. I think that Russell believes that ordinary names like “Scott” are usually used as disguised definite descriptions, but that he wants also to insist that they can be, and sometimes are, used as names.
20 Russell, B., “The Philosophy of Logical Atomism”, in Marsh, R. C., ed., Logic and Knowledge (London: Allen and Unwin, 1956), 246–247.Google Scholar
21 Since the relations in which objects stand to one another give rise (as G. E. Moore observed) to relational properties, we can effect a certain economy of language by talking hereafter only of properties, leaving it to be understood that these include relational ones and that our talk, when necessary, can be spelled out in terms of the corresponding relations.
22 An impossible existent is not, of course, a particular kind of existent object but is rather an object which does not possibly exist. Talk of such objects is, of course, Meinongian: but it is, I believe, none the worse for that.
23 Bradley, R. D. and Swartz, N., Possible Worlds: An Introduction to Logic and its Philosophy (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing; Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1979), 90–91.Google Scholar
24 Kripke, “Naming and Necessity”, 269.
25 Mill, J. S., A System of Logic (8th ed.; London: Longmans, Green, 1965), 20.Google Scholar
26 To my knowledge, Keith Donnellan first drew attention to this problem in his “Substances as Individuals”, The Journal of Philosophy 70 (December 1972), 712.
27 A similar solution was arrived at independently, and developed in much more detail, by Bernard Linsky in his paper “General Terms as Rigid Designators”, also delivered at the Winnipeg conference, October 1983.
28 Terrance A. Tomkow, in Against Representation: A Theory of Language and Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming), has argued forcefully for this conclusion.
29 We shall, of course, need to remember that from the fact that a property or relation exists in a given world it does not follow that it is instantiated in that world; and further that even if it is instantiated by a certain object in a given world (and hence has that object as part of whole of its extension) it does not follow that it has that object as part of whole of its extension in every world in which it is instantiated.
30 For other examples, see Kripke, “Naming and Necessity”, 278; and Saul Kripke, “Speaker's Reference and Semantic Reference”, in Midwest Studies in Philosophy,vol. 2 (Morris, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1977), 259.
31 I think it plausible to suppose that it does suffice, but will not argue the point here.
32 Mill, A System of Logic, 22. As my subsequent explication makes clear I do not take Mill's talk of implying an attribute at face value, but take him rather to be talking about ascribing attributes.
33 Salmon. “How Not to Derive Essentialism”, 704.
34 Ibid., 704, footnote 2.
35 As John Passmore points out in his A Hundred Years of Philosophy (2nd ed.; Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1968), 344-345, W. E. Johnson contributed a number of neologisms—such as “ostensive definition”, “determinates” and “determinables”—to the philosophical literature. Determinable properties, such as having some mass, having some spatial location, occurring at some time, I hold to be essential properties of all those things, and kinds of things, which have them. They have, so far as I know, been largely neglected as instances of non-trivial essential properties. (But compare Wittgenstein's Tractatus 2.0131).
36 Ali Akhtar tells me that Quine, who first introduced this example into the literature, has now pointed out that this identity statement is in fact false. However, this belated discovery does not affect the conceptual points I am making.