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Naming, and Naming God

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2008

Jerome I. Gellman
Jerome I. Gellman
Affiliation:
Department of Philosophy, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, P.O.B. 653, 84105 Beer-sheva, Israel
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Abstract

In what follows I wish to make a contribution to the clarification of the logic of the name ‘God’. I will do so in two stages. In the first stage I will be investigating the meaning of names in general, and how names refer. In the second stage I will attempt to apply the findings of the first stage to the name ‘God’, in light of the way that name functions in religious discourse.

Type
Research Article
Information
Religious Studies , Volume 29 , Issue 2 , June 1993 , pp. 193 - 216
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1993

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References

1 Two earlier essays that deal with a similar topic are: William, Alston, ‘Referring to God’, International Journal for Philosophy of Religion, XXIV (1988), 113–28Google Scholar and Miller, Richard B., ‘The reference of “God”’, Faith and Philosophy, III (1986), 3–15CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 These objections are to be found in Donnellan, Keith S., ‘Reference and definite descriptions’, Philosophical Review, LXXV (1966), 281–304CrossRefGoogle Scholar and in Donnellan, Keith S., ‘Speaking of nothing’, Philosophical Review, LXXXIII (1974), 3–32CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Both are reprinted in Schwartz, Stephen P., Naming, Necessity, and Natural Kinds (Cornell, Ithaca and London, 1977)Google Scholar. Page references will be to the latter. These objections can also be found in Saul, Kripke, Naming and Necessity (Blackwell, Oxford, 1980)Google Scholar.

3 Kripke, pp. 83ff.

4 Donnellan, ‘Reference and definite descriptions’, p. 48.

5 Donnellan, ‘Speaking of nothing’, p. 238.

6 See Kent, Bach, Thought and Reference (Clarendon, Oxford, 1987), ch. 4Google Scholar.

7 Note that this observation may not count against the ‘sufficient descriptions in the associated set’ version of descriptivism.

8 Thought and Reference, ch. 7.

9 Kripke, p. 96, footnote.

10 Bertrand, Russell, ‘The philosophy of logical atomism’, in Logic and Knowledge (London, Macmillan, 1956), p. 201Google Scholar.

11 See Jaegwon, Kim, ‘Perception and reference without causality’, Journal of Philosophy, LXXIV (1977), 606–20Google Scholar.

12 Kim, p. 617.

13 Kim, p. 617.

14 Kim, p. 617.

15 Devitt, , Designation (Columbia, New York, 1981)Google Scholar.

16 Devitt, p. 133.

17 Devitt, p. 133.

18 McGinn, , ‘The mechanism of reference’, Synthese, IXL (1981), 157–86CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

19 McGinn, pp. 174–5.

20 St. Anselm's Proslogion (Notre Dame University Press, Notre Dame and London, 1965),Google Scholar translated by M. J. Charlesworth, p. 117.

21 My reading of Proslogion has been influenced by Anselm Stolz, ‘Anselm's Theology in the Proslogion’, translated by Arthur, McGill, in Hick, John H. and McGill, Arthur C., The Many-Faced Argument (Macmillan, New York, 1967), pp. 183–206Google Scholar.

22 Charlesworth, p. 117. Here, Anselm uses ‘something’ and not ‘that’ than which, etc. But in the ensuing argument ‘that’ appears regularly, and I have put it in here for the sake of familiarity.

23 Charlesworth, p. 119.

24 Anselm seems to be assuming that God does not have necessary existence until it can be proved otherwise.

25 Charlesworth, p. 119.

26 Charlesworth, p. 121.

27 Charlesworth, p. 120–1.

28 Charlesworth, p. 117.

29 For simplicity's sake I will ignore the fact that Anselm never employed the word ‘God’.

30 For ease of presentation, in what follows I will tend to write as though ‘God’ is a successful rigid designator.

31 Charlesworth, p. III.

32 Actually, this must be somewhat qualified by Anselm's statement, also in the opening chapter, that ‘… You have created Your image in me … But this image is so effaced and worn away by vice, so darkened by the smoke of sin, that it cannot do what it was made to do unless You renew it and reform it’ (Charlesworth, p. 115).

33 I do not mean to endorse this mode of reasoning about the fool, but do mean to suggest that this is the way Anselm is thinking about the matter. It is at least as coherent as the text itself.

34 In truth, the question is whether it has semantic meaning aside from the uninteresting, nominal meaning it might have. In what follows I will tend to ignore the nominal theory, for simplicity of presentation.

35 See Donnellan, ‘Reference and definite description’, pp. 51–2, for an example where I believe that Jones is Smith's murderer, yet succeed in using ‘the murderer of Smith’, in a non-rigid way.

36 Similarly, obviously the argument can be coherently stated if ‘God’ is taken to be semantically equivalent to ‘the creator’.

37 William, Alston, Perceiving God (Cornell, Ithica, 1992)Google Scholar.

38 George, Mavrodes, Belief in God, A Study in the Epistemology of Religion (Random House, New York; 1970), pp. 67–8Google Scholar.

39 One such theory is Hilary Putnam's, concerning the ‘division of linguistic labor’. See, Putnam, , ‘The meaning of meaning’, in Gunderson, K., ed., Mind, Language, and Reality (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1975),CrossRefGoogle Scholar ch. 12, and Putnam, , Representation and Reality (Cambridge, MA, London, England: MIT Press, 1988), pp. 22ffGoogle Scholar.

40 A possibility not explored here is that some names of God do have semantic meaning, and others do not. There is a strand of thinking in the Jewish tradition, for example, according to which the names, ‘Elohim’, and ‘Adonai’, have semantic meaning, while the name, ‘YHVH’, does not.