Abstract
Kripke’s picture of how people use names to refer to things has been the dominant view in contemporary philosophy of language. When it is mentioned at all, Donnellan’s view of proper names is considered the same as Kripke’s. It is certainly true that both Donnellan and Kripke rejected descriptivism about proper names and appealed to historical facts to determine whom a speaker is referring to by using a proper name. However, the relevant historical facts Kripke and Donnellan appeal to are ultimately quite different. In this paper, I argue that Donnellan’s view of proper name fares better than Kripke’s.
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Notes
“I want to present a better picture without giving a set of necessary and sufficient conditions for reference. Such conditions would be very complicated” (Kripke 1980: 94).
I borrow the formulation of DPN from Bianchi and Bonanini (2014: 188).
Bianchi (2015) defended and developed an account of proper names that is close to Kripke’s. In fact, Bianchi goes beyond it in trying to dispense with the role of the speaker’s intentions altogether. See also Marti (2015) for a point of view close to Bianchi. In this paper, I do not discuss Bianchi’s proposal, although, if I am right in my defense of Donnellan, Bianchi’s proposal must head in the wrong direction.
For instance, Marti (2015).
This is not to say that I do not need one. As early as (1978), Kaplan complained that “the notion of having someone in mind is not analyzed but used and [that] the connections with the body of knowledge concerning intensional logics—their syntax and semantics—are not explicitly made, so we cannot immediately see what Donnellan and intensional logic have to offer each other, if anything” (222). To be sure, Kaplan was not alone in feeling some uneasiness with Donnellan’s approach to reference. As an anonymous referee emphasized, in the early seventies bringing the mind of the speaker into play in questions of reference and semantics was frowned upon by most and it was seen as a virtue of Kripke’s approach that mental states of speakers and hearers were not made to play an essential part. Even if things have changed since then it is still important for a defense of Donnellan’s point of view on proper names and reference not to leave the notion of having an object in mind at a mere intuitive level; and, of course, investigating the relation between Donnellan’s observations about language and modern formal semantics is equally important. However, in a paper like this I hope that setting aside these two issues can be excused.
Philip Atkins made this objection to me. In their paper, Bianchi and Bonanini reject the suggestion that it would have been more appropriate for them “to compare Donnellan’s account with Kripke’s account of speaker’s reference by means of proper names” (2014: 198). This is because they find “indisputable that Donnellan’s main critical target in ‘Proper Names and Identifying Descriptions,’ which is the same as Kripke’s ‘Naming and Necessity,’ is a semantic claim about proper names” (198). That is, Bianchi and Bonanini deny that Kripke and Donnellan pursue different projects. Their whole point is that Kripke and Donnellan offer different answers to the same question, which they take to be a semantic question. I agree with them that Kripke and Donnellan are after the same phenomenon. I am not sure Bianchi and Bonanini would subscribe to the way I characterize the phenomenon of semantic reference.
It is perhaps worth pointing out that if semantic reference essentially involves what speakers do with proper names, then semantic reference is unlike the relation expressions of a formal language have with the values they receive when they are interpreted by a mathematical function. In the latter case it is totally bogus to wonder about speaker’s reference simply because speakers do not use symbols in a formal language. On the difference between natural and formal languages see Almog (2016, 2018). See also Almog (2014: 3–34) for a discussion of Kripke’s ambivalence between a model-theoretic approach and a natural-historical approach to language.
The reason has to do with “the existence of ‘improper’ definite descriptions such as ‘the table,’ where uniquely specifying conditions are not contained in the description itself” (Kripke 1977: 100) Kripke doubts that “such descriptions can always be regarded as elliptical with some uniquely specifying condition added” (100). On this point see Howard Wettstein (1981). For a contrary view see Soames (2005). Perhaps, I should add that more recently Kripke wrote that he “may have been too pessimistic in Kripke (1977)” (2013: 138 fn. 5) regarding the problem of improper definite descriptions. Kripke refers to Stephen Neale’s analysis in Neale (1990: 93–102) for a possible way of dealing with the problem. However, he also mentions Ostertag (1998 section VI) of the introduction, pp. 25–27 as a work “that may reinstate [his] original pessimism, though with qualifications” (138 fn. 5).
Here I find myself in agreement with Devitt (1981: 513).
I borrow the terminology from Wulfemeyer (2017a).
As Almog points out “[t]o re-ferrer in Latin alludes to returning to the original cause of something ferried-carried to you” (2016: 44).
I offered some considerations in support of Donnellan’s view of definite descriptions in Capuano (2016).
See also Almog (2012) for such a point.
Donnellan (1970: 68–9) introduced the case of “Aston-Martin.”
One issue that is affected by the fact that two individuals can have the same name is that of belief sentences, as it is witnessed by the case of “Paderewski,” which Kripke himself introduced in the literature. See Kripke (1979).
Emar Maier thinks that Kripe’s view “entails that the many people named John Smith actually all have different names, each connected with a different baptism, but these names just happen to sound the same” (2015: 327). This seems to me too strong. It is true, however, that on Kripke’s approach to names it quite natural to say that different people named “John Smith” have different names.
This is Kaplan’s position in Kaplan (1990).
One anonymous referee raised the following worry: If the speaker has both Smith and Jones in mind, and Smith is raking the leaves and Jones is not, is the sentence “Jones is raking the leaves” true or false? I think that all one can say is that the speaker has said something true about Smith and something false about Jones.
Almog et al. (2015: 369).
What Kaplan says about true demonstratives can be said about proper names: “One does feel initially that in the use of a true demonstrative … the connection between demonstrative and object, call this reference, is … extraordinarily direct compared with the connection between a definite description and its denotation. Demonstratives are transparent, whereas descriptions are visibly at work, searching, searching, searching” (1989: 573).
Of course, I think that in NN Kripke has convincingly argued that descriptivism about proper names is wrong. In doing so, however, he did not just appeal to the fact that the relation a name has to its bearer is of a different kind from the relation a definite description has with whatever satisfies it. Kripke did not just assume that the two relations are different. If anything, he showed this.
“Whether a term would be withdrawn in the presence of correct information (without changing the language) is a good intuitive test for divergence of semantic reference and speaker’s reference” (Kripke 1977: 117 fn. 25). Thanks to Atkins for pressing me on this point.
See Donnellan (1968: 39–45) on this point.
As Andrea Bianchi pointed out to me, Kripke’s example was not meant to question Donnellan’s views of proper names. At the same time, one should keep in mind that, like Bianchi and Bonanini make clear in their paper, Kripke takes Donnellan’s views on proper names to be close to his views. If he had distinguished his views from Donnellan’s the way Bianchi and Bonanini do, I believe he would have thought of the “Jones” case as an objection to Donnellan’s views on proper names.
See Bianchi and Bonanini (2014: 198).
Although closer to the case of “Madagascar,” it is not really of the same kind. In the case of “Madagascar” a name that was used to speak of the Somali peninsula at one point became a name of the African Island and ceased being used as a name for the Somali Peninsula. In this case the name “Aston-Martin” is sometimes used to talk about the famous philosopher and sometimes about the man met at the party.
Before Evans, the point occurred to Kripke himself: “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 the saint” (1980: 93). See also Kripke (1980: 96–7). Of course, Kripke did not think this was decisive against his own view of proper names. Although, in fairness to Evans, he did not think so simply because he did not think he offered a causal theory of reference. Besides being causally related with an original baptism further conditions must obtain for proper names to refer to things. Unfortunately, Kripke never supplemented such further conditions. In fact, some of the things he says to account for cases like that of “Madagascar” may even seem in tension with the historical picture. In any event, whether it reflects or not Kripke’s ultimate views on the matter, it is undeniable that KPN has been extremely influential in the subsequent literature and has been taken to be Kripke’s view. For this reason, it is I believe especially important to show that there is an alternative historical picture, DPN, that is to be preferred to KPN.
For a look at the facts of the Madagascar case see Burgess (2014: 196–7).
Ibn-Battuta was a Moroccan scholar who widely travelled the medieval world and near the end of his life dictated an account of his journey in A Gift To Those Who Contemplate the Wonders of Cities and the Marvels of Traveling.
Marco Polo “tells us that South of Madagascar lies Zanzibar, but that it is difficult to travel any further south than that, owing to dangerous currents and gryphons. If this is what his informant told him, it is doubtful that they themselves had ever travelled as far south of Zanzibar as Madagascar, which hosts exotic fauna unmentioned in the Travels, but no gryphons” (Burgess 2014: 197).
In fact, “[t]he large African isle was reached in the first decade of the 1500s by Portuguese explorers. The local inhabitants had no native name for the huge island as a whole. The explorers named it after Saint Lawrence, on whose feast day they landed … Cartographers decided that, despite its location south rather than north of Zanzibar, this island must be the one Marco Polo meant, since exploration has shown there is no other off the East African coast” (197).
“What was ‘misunderstood by Marco Polo’ (or his scribe Rustichello da Pisa) was that the region in question is part of the Somali Peninsula, and not an island. A more recent work (Room 1997: 217) suggests more specifically a mistranslation of the Arabic jazira, meaning primarily ‘island’, secondarily ‘peninsula’ (as with the Qatari broadcasting network, al-Jazeera, ‘the [Arabian] Peninsula’)” (Burgess 2014: 196).
“What started out as a new speaker’s referent might become habitual practice of the speaker, who adopts it again and again. The speaker may have started out by mistaking one man for another, but the practice may become so habitual that it might over time be called the ‘general intention’ of the speaker. It might be suggested that in some cases the speaker’s referent then takes over and becomes the semantic referent. If this becomes so in a wide enough community, a linguistic change has occurred” (Kripke 2013: 136).
“[P]eople regard themselves, in using a name or species name, as responsible to the linguistic practices of other people who speak the same language … But all they’re responsible to is the practices accepted by speakers of that language at their time. They are not responsible to what people said 100 years ago, or 600 years ago, at all. I [Dummett] think that completely falls away” (Harman et al. 1974: 517).
I believe that this is what Howard Wettstein always felt both about Kripke’s picture and the subject of how people use proper names to refer to things. The causal chain of communication is not at the heart of the matter. See Wettstein (2004: 109–111).
See Wulfemeyer (2017b) for a discussion of the “Madagascar” case from a point of view like Donnellan’s.
I find it surprising that Kripke does not consider the possibility that there are two names for “Madagascar.” He himself claimed that “distinctness of the referents will be a sufficient condition for the distinctness of the names” (1980: 8 fn. 9). Presumably this is because at no point Polo or later speakers went through a baptism ceremony. Devitt (1981: 9–10), Santambrogio (2014) and Almog (2016: 49–50) in different ways suggest that in the “Madagascar” case no shift in reference occurred but that another name was introduced in the language.
“If words are individuated, by their world histories rather than by their sound or spelling, a name might almost serve as its own Fregean Sinn … Words are undoubtedly denizens of cognition. If, through their history, they also provide the worldly link that determines the referent, then except for serving as content, they do all that Fregean Sinn is charged with” (Kaplan 1989: 599).
Recently, the view that proper names function as predicates gained some interest among philosophers of language and linguists. The view can be traced back to Quine (1960). It was defended in Burge (1973), and revived by Geurts (1997), Matushansky (2008), and Fara (2015). In this paper, I focus only on the contrast between Kripke and Donnellan. It goes without saying that a full blown defense of Donnellan’s view on proper names cannot simply ignore the idea that names are predicates. I hope to discuss the issue in a different paper. Two other proposals that deserve to be discussed are Cumming (2008) and Kamp (2015).
Among many others, one concern involves the treatment of empty names. On this issue a starting point is Donnellan (1974).
I presented versions of this paper at the University of Buenos Aires, at Universidad de los Andes, and at Auburn University. I am grateful to all participants. I’d like to thank three anonymous referees for this journal, Philip Atkins, Paolo Leornardi, and especially Andrea Bianchi for their comments and suggestions.
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Capuano, A. In Defense of Donnellan on Proper Names. Erkenn 85, 1289–1312 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-018-0077-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-018-0077-6