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Notes
There is another difference between the typical uses of (1) and (2) with which I will not be concerned in this essay: the typical interpretation of (2) is fictive or textual, namely, it conveys a fact of the fictional story as stated in the mythical narrative, whereas (1) is typically interpreted as meta-fictive or meta-textual, that is, as alluding to a fact that is part not of the fictional story but of the external world. For this distinction, see, por example, Bonomi (2008) and García Carpintero (2015).
I will use brackets to designate all kinds of propositions.
Along this essay, I abide by the authors’ proposal of taking utterances to be the main bearers of meaning and truth-value.
Singular concepts are also commonly called mental files. For a theory of files, see, for instance, Recanati (2012).
All the the subsequent quotes of Korta and Perry also belong to the book published in2011.
To simplify the reconstruction of the analysis, I am omitting the facts concerning the identity of the speaker (also considered in Chap. 7 of Korta and Perry 2011).
Kripke 1980, conference II.
As mentioned at the beginning of this essay, the coco-referential relations may also link uses of different kinds of singular terms, such as when someone, upon perceiving María, refers to her by means of the demonstrative ‘that person’, a token that coco-refers with previous utterances of the name ‘María’, and gets thereby inserted in the network leading to her. This tends to happen when the speaker has what the authors call a buffer, namely, a perceptual notion associated with a certain individual.
As should be clear, the truth-conditions cannot be rendered in terms of.
(11’) ??? [∃x∃y, such that x is the origin of NJupiter and y is the origin of NJuno and x and y are married to each other].
We may think that we are dealing with two different metaphysical layers, according to which causal chains would be the physical implementation of semantic relations of coco-reference. I leave this metaphysical problem aside, since it is not the main focus of my considerations regarding the CP position.
Jaimes advances a related objection in his unpublished manuscript “Una solución reflexivo-referencial al problema de los nombres no referenciales”.
For further details about the differences between individual notions (or mental files) and Fregean senses, you could check my Orlando (2017).
I would like to thank an anonymous referee for pressing me to clarify the objections presented in this section.
See the following fragment from the book: “Unless the referentialist can find some other objects to serve as Jupiter and Juno –a strategy we don’t favor–it looks as if he has no plausible candidate for the proposition that Alice comes to believe when the professor says that Jupiter and Juno were husband and wife, and no candidate for the proposition whose accuracy, whatever that may amount to, accounts for the fact that the correct answer to the exam question, “Were Jupiter and Juno married?”is“Yes”” (p. 89; my emphasis).
This idea has been defended in Predelli (2022).
See also the following fragment: “I say that ‘Holmes’, as it occurs in Sign, is a fictional name. But I say so with a crucial accompanying caveat: fictional names are no more a special kind of names than fake diamonds are a type of diamonds. As mentioned in chapter one, I employ ‘empty’ in ‘empty name’ as subsective, in the sense that, if anything is an empty name, it is a (somewhat special) name. ‘Fictional’, at least in the privative sense in which I use this term, is nothing of this sort. Not being at all names, fictional names are of no greater interest to a semanticist than fake diamonds are to gemmologists or, to cite a historically dignified analogy, than stage thunder is to meteorologists” (Predelli 2020, p. 4; emphases in the original).
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Acknowledgements
The research leading to these results received funding from the Agencia Nacional de Promoción Científica y Tecnológica (Argentina) under Grant Agreement PICT 2018–02843, RESOL-2019-40,“New Conceptions of Meaning: Questions under Discussion, Topics and Truth-Conditions”, and from the Secretaría de Ciencia y Técnica, Universidad de Buenos Aires (Argentina) under Grant Agreement UBACyT 20020170100649BA, Res. 1041/2018, “Normative Predicates: from Statements of Taste to Aesthetic Judgments”. I want to thank Stefano Predelli for his insightful comments to a previous version.
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Orlando, E. Critical Pragmatics on Fictional Names. Some Problems Concerning Network Content. Topoi 42, 925–933 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-022-09881-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-022-09881-3