Abstract
This paper studies the uses of proper names within a communication-theoretic setting, looking at both the conditions that govern the use of a name by a speaker and those involved in the correct interpretation of the name by her audience. The setting in which these conditions are investigated is provided by an extension of Discourse Representation Theory, MSDRT, in which mental states are represented as combinations of propositional attitudes and entity representations (ERs). The first half of the paper presents the features of this framework that are needed to understand its application to the account of names that follows. N-labelled entity representations, where N is a proper name, play a pivotal part in this account: A speaker must have an N-labelled ER in order to be in a position to use a name N, and the interpreter must either have such a representation, or else construct one as part of his interpretation. The paper distinguishes different types of name uses in terms of what they presuppose about the role of N-labelled ERs on the side of the interpreter.
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Notes
I hasten to say that in the present paper I will have nothing concrete to say about this kind of integration either, but from what I will have to say it should be reasonably clear how verbalisation of thoughts should go at least in simple cases and how the choice of a noun phrase to refer to something the thought is about can be seen as an integral part of these verbalisations.
It is also possible to strip DRT of all its cognitive pretences and treat it as just an alternative method for abstract characterisations of truth conditions. And some of the uses that have been made of DRT have been in this soberer and more abstract spirit. But in order that DRT can serve as a basis for the story that is to be told in this paper its cognitive claims are essential.
One difference between a logical form theory like DRT and ‘direct semantic value assignment’ theories such as Montague Grammar, in which the syntactic structure of natural language expressions is the input to the direct, recursive assignment of semantic objects such as propositions, properties and the like, is the way these theories account for compositionality. In Montague Grammar the compositionality of the natural language under study is explicated as composition of semantic values: The semantic values of the daughters of a syntactic mother–daughters configuration are combined, through application of a rule that is determined by that configuration, into the semantic value of the mother node. In DRT compositionality is explicated as composition of logical forms: it is the logical forms of the daughter nodes that get combined, through the application of general principles, into the logical form of the mother node.
Note that the construction of (1.b) as representation of any particular utterance \(u\) of (1.a) only makes use of the form of (1.a), abstracting away from any properties that distinguish \(u\) from other possible utterances of (1.a). So (1.b) is the semantic representation of any utterance of (1.a). It therefore must capture the character of (1.a), in the sense of Kaplan (1989). (One could make the sense in which (1.b) specifies the character of (1.a) visible in more familiar terms by treating \(n\) as a variable ranging over times and ‘prefixing’ (1.b) with a ‘lambda prefix’ \(\lambda n.\) to indicate that the representation is to be read as the representation of a function from (utterance) times to truth conditions.) The only respect in which the truth conditions of an utterance of (1.a) may differ from one another is the utterance time. In general that is not so—think for instance of sentences which contain the words I or you. It should be clear, however, that what has just been said about the dependence of utterance content on utterance time can be generalised straightforwardly to other familiar dependencies on utterance context, such as those created by 1st and 2nd person pronouns.
In some cases the term ‘referent identification’ may invoke the wrong connotations. For instance, anaphoric pronouns are, on the present account, among the definite noun phrases and the signal they convey is that the pronoun’s ‘referent’ should be identified by identifying the pronoun’s anaphoric antecedent and then identifying the pronoun’s ‘referent’ with the ‘referent’ of that antecedent. But the anaphoric antecedent need not be a definite noun phrase; it can be a quantifying NP, say, and have no referent properly speaking, but only a (discourse referent acting as a) bound variable, as for instance in the sentence ‘Every boy in my class fancied a girl who couldn’t stand him’. In DRT, such cases of the ‘referent’ identification requirement that comes with the anaphoric pronoun are like those where the anaphoric antecedent does have a referent in the way the term ‘referent’ is normally understood, e.g. when the antecedent is the name of some real person or thing: In all cases of personal pronoun anaphora referent identification must take the form of identifying the discourse referent introduced by the pronoun with that introduced by its antecedent. Again, see Kamp and Reyle (1993) or other introductions to DRT.
I am thinking here in particular of the numerous philosophical publications on proper names since the epochal contributions by Kripke and Chastain. Rather than give a partial list of the publications on names that I am aware of and that I feel I grasp well enough to enable me to compare them responsibly with the proposal I am making in this paper, I will keep this for the companion paper, a substantial part of which will be devoted to such comparisons.
The way the fiancée relation is represented here—as involving a state that can hold at some times without holding at other times – is a way of doing justice to the obvious fact that this relation is time-dependent. (The whole point, you might say, of the fiancée relation is that it should come to an end not too long after it has come into effect.) Time dependence is a quite general feature of predications that involve non-verbal predicates (such as nouns, adjectives and prepositions). The time-dependence of such predications was systematically neglected in early versions of DRT, but is being catered for in the version we are currently using and for which a ‘release’ is in preparation (Kamp and Roßdeutscher 2015). In that document the time-dependence of non-verbal predications is made explicit by treating the predicate as having an argument for a state (in addition to the argument or arguments that would also be needed in a time-independent treatment); by temporally locating the state \(s\) filling this argument at a time \(t\) (via the condition ‘\(t \subseteq s\)’) we can then express that the predication holds at \(t\). In (2.c) and (2.d) the option to treat non-verbal predicates as having a state argument has been exercised only for the predicate word fiancée; and furthermore it is assumed that this predication holds, like the predication expressed by the verb of its clause, at the utterance time \(n\). For the other common nouns occurring in (1.a) our notation implies that the predications in which they are involved are time-independent
Like the subscript on the presupposition in (2.a), the subscripts in (2.c) are to be understood as stand-ins for the missing stories about how their presuppositions may be resolved- Once again, the stories are complicated, and they have been extensively discussed, if often in different guises, in the literature on definite descriptions and pronouns. The possible resolutions of (the presuppositions of) pronouns have played a prominent part in the philosophical and linguistic literature of the past 35 years or so, starting with the work of Evans (1977, 1980) on ‘E-type pronouns’. (But we could just as well take the starting point to have been Geach’s discovery of the ’donkey pronoun’ problem and his realisation of its implications for logical theory [Geach (1962 (Third revised edition: 1980)]. For a recent overview see [Chen (2012)]. The literature on definite descriptions goes back much farther, to the work of Frege and Russell, with important contributions from, among others, Russell (1905), Strawson (1950), Donnellan (1966), Kripke (1979b), Neale (1990). A curious and noteworthy fact about the history of the literature on pronouns and definite descriptions is that for most of it the two have been treated in very different ways. An exception to this in some sense are the E-type accounts first proposed by Evans, Cooper and others, which treat donkey pronouns as concealed descriptions. But these reductions are supposed to apply to donkey pronouns only and to bring out in what sense they are special, and different from the ‘genuine’ pronouns; and the ‘genuine’ pronouns are treated as variables, just as in other approaches. The truth about definite descriptions, however, is that they often behave much more like pronouns than in the manner that is attributed to them in much of the linguistic and especially the philosophical literature. An adequate theory of pronouns and descriptions must do justice to the similarities between them as well as to the differences, and it must account for the diversity of either. An account of the kind I envisage will explicate the different uses of pronouns and definite descriptions in terms of different forms and resolution constraints of their respective identification presuppositions. I will address these matters in a forthcoming essay.
On this point I can only speak for myself. There is a close similarity between DRT and the File Change Semantics of Irene Heim, and occasionally ‘DRT’ has been used as a term to cover both. But I do not think that Heim ever endorsed a psychological dimension to her proposals, of the kind that is at issue here.
An aspect of (4.b) that I cannot go into here but that the reader should at least be alerted to is the symbol \(i\) that occurs in the content representation of the belief. \(i\) is an indexical discourse referent, but it is indexical in a different sense than the occurrences of \(n\) in (1.b) discussed in Sect. 2.1. \(i\) is a psychological indexical. It represents the agent’s self from his own, internal, perspective. Thus a DRS that contains \(i\) expresses a self-attribution in thought—a de se thought, in the usual philosophical jargon. (It is only when a thought representation takes the form of a predication of \(i\) that the agent can express it using the first person pronoun I to refer to the bearer of the predication.) The occurrences of \(n\) in the different attitude specifications of (4) are instances of a psychological indexical as well. (The use of the symbol ‘\(n\)’ in (4) on the one hand and in (1.b) and the representations in (2) on the other is strictly speaking an abuse of notation. The two uses are different and should be carefully distinguished.) Each of these occurrences represents the agent’s ‘psychological present’ (as it is often called). Thus the belief represented by the \(BEL\) component of (4) is to the effect that a fish will be caught by the agent at some time in the future of the time at which the agent entertains that belief. (One of the anonymous reviewers of the paper notes that this way of explaining the difference between the two uses of \(n\) may be somewhat misleading. The occurrences of \(n\) in (1.b) is different from its occurrences in (4) only insofar as the DRS (1.b) is regarded as a semantic representation of (1.a) in a non-psychological sense. If (1.b) is taken as part of the representation of the mental state of some agent—for instance as the specification of the content of one of the agent’s beliefs – then its occurrences of \(n\) must of course also be understood as representing the agent’s ‘psychological present’ at the time of the mental state in question.)
One of the reviewers raises the question whether perceptually anchored entity representations may not go awry in another way as well: There is an object that gives rise to a visual perception which in its turn yields an anchored entity representation for what is being perceived, but the internal anchor of this representation quite radically misdescribes the relation between the object and the agent—so much so that it becomes doubtful whether the representation qualifies as a representation of the object at all. It is not easy to know what to do with this question, and it is something that has bothered me for many years (as it seems to have the reviewer who raises the question). A good answer to the question should provide some criteria for when the information contained in the internal anchor of an entity representation is so far off the mark that it disqualifies the entity representation as a representation of the object. But I do not quite know how and where to draw the line. As with relations of acquaintance, we theoreticians find ourselves on a slippery slope which offers little to hang onto for those who do not want to slide all the way to the bottom.
From the internal perspective of the agent the complex of propositional attitudes of her mental state as described by (7) is of course just as meaningful and just as much a source of practical reasoning and action as when the internal anchor is ‘true to its word’ and there is a corresponding external anchor. The logic and psychology of practical reasoning are independent of matters of external anchoring and have to be analysed as such—as involving narrow rather than wide content. This is yet another thing that I can’t go into here.
For a detailed recent discussion of the file card model for entity representations see Recanati (2012).
This same relation is also used by E. Maier in Maier (2014). If Maier’s proposal was known to me at some level of consciousness at the time when I introduced it, I was not consciously aware of it then. I am more inclined to think that this is a case of natural convergence between two independently developed accounts (but which have much in common in spirit).
The DRS in (8) isn’t quite what we want. It fails to capture that \(e\) is the utterance that \(S\) has just made and that is the input to the very interpretation process that leads to (8) as anchor for the entity representation involved in the interpretation of the noun phrase that is part of that utterance. To capture this information within the DRT-based framework we are using requires the introduction of a certain amount of additional machinery. I have decided to forego this, so as not overload the paper with technicalities that might detract from its central message.
Thanks to Mark Sainsbury, who drew attention to the undesirable implications of this sort that were carried by the—very non-neutral and very non-minimal – proposal for the form of vicarious anchors that I made at the 2011 workshop on proper names in Göttingen where I presented an earlier version of this paper. According to that proposal it is part of the content of such an anchor that the referring agent \(a\) has herself an anchored representation which represents the entity that she is using \(\alpha \) to refer to. But why should a speaker \(b\) who wants to base his thoughts of and references to some entity \(r\) on the referential act of some other speaker \(a\), but who has never reflected on what that means, let alone adopted the proposals of the present paper, be assumed to represent \(r\) in a form that explicitly mentions an entity representation on the part of \(a\)?
It is convenient to adopt the following convention: When the third component of an entity representation is not the empty set, then the first component may be written as ‘[ANCH,x]’ instead of ‘[ENT,x]’. With this alternative notation anchored representations look again much as they did up to now. The only difference is that anchored representations have their second as well as their third component, which may be a non-empty DRS that ascribes one or more properties to \(x\).
There are entities that we encounter on a regular, maybe daily basis. With each encounter our familiarity with the entity is confirmed and refreshed. If what I have just said about recognition was literally true, then our entity representations for such familiar entities are burdened with huge internal anchor sets. From a psychological point of view this is quite implausible: nobody keeps track of all the different encounters he has had with her spouse, the doorman of the building where she works, her car or her electric toothbrush. A more realistic account of the ways in which such entity representations are anchored to their referents presumably involves generic information about the situations in which the referent is typically and regularly encountered, in combination perhaps with a few internal anchors of the sort discussed in the main text, which record salient and memorable actual encounters. (The first time you met your husband; the last time you kissed him goodbye.) As things are, I have no good story to tell about the form or forms that anchoring of representations of the familiar and overly familiar can take. In what follows I will ignore this matter. For what I have to say here the idealisation of the main text, according to which anchored representations are anchored to their referents via a set of one or a few discrete internal anchors, which grows with each new encounter, will do well enough.
An open problem of rather long standing is what the repertoire of such conditions should be: What is the right DRS language for internal anchors? I have been shunning this question and will be grateful for any proposals or useful suggestions.
As a rule there will be much more information that \(B\) has about his conversation partner Mary than (11) specifies. (For instance, if they are talking face to face, he will see her facial expression, what she is wearing and so on; and if they already knew each other, there will be things he remembers about her.) This is a general feature of mental state descriptions: they provide only partial information about the states they describe. In fact, such descriptions tend to be incomplete along two dimensions. Not only do they typically mention only a small number of the components from which the state is made up. They also underspecify the individual components they mention. This is just as true for the descriptions from our formalism as it is for the attitude reports that people produce in daily life. (11) illustrates both points in that (a) it mentions only one of the components of \(B\)’s state and (b) its presentation of that component is incomplete in that it leaves out much of what is in the descriptive component of the entity representation it describes. And there is the further question whether the description of the internal anchor component may be incomplete as well.
Among the latter cases are some where \(S\), by introducing some person \(r\) to \(H\), draws \(H\)’s attention to the existence of \(r\) in the very act of making him familiar with the name of \(r\) she mentions. A special kind of case of this sort are definitions. Typically a definition introduces a new entity, through an exhaustive characterisation of it in the definiens while at the same time providing the entity with a name. Here too, the recipient should, as a result of taking the definition in, end up with a labelled entity representation. Examples in (12) are (12.d)–(12.f). Most definitions, however, present a further complication in that the entities that they introduce (together with their names) are concepts and not particulars. (In (12) there is only example of this, viz. (12.f). But it represents the far more common case; (12.d) and (12.e) are the exception, not the rule.) As noted in passing by Kripke in Kripke (1972), definitions are a case of name giving that merits special attention. But this is a topic for another paper..
One of the anonymous reviewers observes that (12) throws together two ‘fundamentally distinct’ types of case—that in which the name is quoted or mentioned and that in which it is not. This difference is illustrated most clearly by the pair (12.e), (12.f). (12.f) has the form of a statement about a certain expression, ‘Aldebaran’, to which it attributes a certain semantic property, that of being the name of the brightest star in the constellation Taurus. (12.e) in contrast is a statement about a certain star, viz. Aldebaran, of which the statement says that it is the brightest star in the constellation Taurus. In this second sentence ‘Aldebaran’ is used referentially (as traditional terminology has it), in the first it is not. What motivates me in listing all the examples under (12) as instances of a single category is that they all share the property of not coming with a presupposition that the interpreter should already have a suitable \(N\)-labelled entity representation (where \(N\) is the relevant name). That is what sets these cases apart from the ‘standard referential’ uses of names and that is the distinction that is my concern at this point. But what the paper does not spell out in as much detail as one might have wanted is how the recipient of an utterance containing an occurrence of a name \(N\) comes to recognise that the use of \(N\) is of the \(\hbox {introductory}_{1}\) type, and what part the form of the sentence containing the given occurrence of the name plays in such recognitions. When a name is quoted or mentioned, recognising that it is will, if I am right, be all that is needed to infer that its use does not carry the presupposition that comes with the standard referential use. Such purely formal recognition criteria do not apply to a sentence like (12.e). In fact, there are uses of this sentence in which its subject ‘Aldebaran’ is used in the standard referential way: The speaker presupposes that her addressee knows that Aldebaran, Betelgeuse, Syrius and Deneb, say, are stars and gives him information about the constellations to which these stars belong. Recognition that the use of ‘Aldebaran’ as part of a particular utterance of (12.e) is of the \(\hbox {introductory}_{1}\) type therefore cannot be just a matter of sentence form. The reviewer is also right in noting that from the perspective of use-type recognition (12.f) is more like the \(\hbox {introductory}_{2}\) uses than it is like (12.e) and other examples in (12) which don’t involve quotation or mentioning.
Coming up with a name for an existing or prospective entity need not be something that an agent doesn’t do all on her own. Parents may debate the name to be given to the expected child—endlessly, in some cases—before they agree on one, and when the choice is finally made it is a joint decision, not one that either parent can be said to have made on her or his own. Such decisions fall under the heading of (the executions of) ‘we-intentions’. They are not private in the strict sense of involving one agent only. But they depart from privacy in this strict sense only in the way in which two or more individuals can, in relation to some matter that requires action, act and present themselves to the world as a single agent. [See for instance Searle (1990).]
A careful analysis of the syntactic properties of naming predicates with proper names as complements can be found in the work of Ora Matushansky (e.g. Matushansky (2005)). The main result of this work that is relevant for our concerns in this paper is that names that occur as complements of verbs like ‘call’ or ‘name’ do not have the status of full argument phrases. I will address this matter in the announced companion paper to the present paper.
According to the proposal of Kamp and Bende-Farkas (unpublished manuscript) the entity representations introduced in response to epistemically specific uses of indefinites are always vicariously anchored and that proposal extends to the \(\hbox {introductory}_{2}\) uses spoken of here. It is just that in this last case the descriptive content of the indefinite will contribute a naming condition to the description component of his vicariously anchored entity representation. With \(\hbox {introductory}_{1}\) uses of names the construction principles involved are different in that there an entity representation for the interpretation of the name is supposed to be available independently—e.g. on the basis of \(H\)’s visual perception of the name’s bearer. \(H\)’s assumption that he is dealing with an \(\hbox {introductory}_{1}\) use then leads him to add the vicarious anchor that reflects this assumption to the anchor set of this independently grounded entity representation. In this regard the \(\hbox {introductory}_{1}\) use is like the standard use: either use leads to the addition of a vicarious anchor to an entity representation whose origin is established on independent grounds. The difference between the \(\hbox {introductory}_{1}\) use and the standard use is that the former also prompts the addition of a naming condition to this entity representation, whereas the latter presupposes that this naming condition is already in place.
This depends on at least two things. First, is it possible for the speaker of (15.d) to transmit the information she got from the news bulletin in the way she does without having formed, in response to what she listened to, an ER for the man named Johnson that the bulletin spoke of? If that is a possibility, and she didn’t form such an ER, then her own use of the phrase a man named Johnson cannot have been specific in our sense of ‘specific’. But even if we assume that a sentence pair like that in (15.d) could not be used by a speaker who hadn’t formed such an ER, that does’t mean that her use of a man named Johnson must have been a specific one. There is no reason why a speaker could not use the descriptive information contained in an ER as the descriptive content of a non-specific indefinite. (Thanks to Dolf Rami for suggesting this point.)
Another point that should have become clear by now, but that deserves to be made explicit, is that I am using the word ‘name’ to refer to expressions: The identity of a name is not, as it often is in the philosophical literature, tied to a particular bearer. That is, I am not endorsing the view that when, say, you use the name John Smith on one occasion to refer to one person, and on a second occasion to refer to a different person who also has this name, then you are using two different names on these two occasions. On the view I am advocating, a name (i.e. an expression) becomes the name of an entity only when it is attached as label to entity representations for that entity in the minds of the members of a speech community. Naming predications, in which a name is linked with a bearer, are the manifestation of this socio-psychological process at the level of the language in which the members communicate.
The common noun uses of names I have in mind are uses of names where they behave syntactically like common nouns. Examples are shown in (16). From a semantic point of view there are two main types of such uses of names as common nouns. The first, highly productive use, illustrated in (16.a), is that where the common noun derived from \(N\) acts as the predicate ‘someone/something named \(N\)’. The second, illustrated in (16.b,c), is less productive. Here the common noun is used to refer to certain salient characteristics of salient bearers of the name \(N\).
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16.
(Common noun uses of names)
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(a)
If I get a Johnson or a Smith on the line, I always ask for their first name.
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(b)
These days he behaves like a real Napoleon.
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(c)
You can’t expect every physicist to be a Newton or an Einstein.
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(a)
There is much of interest that can be said about common nouns derived form proper names, but this is not the place.
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16.
More specifically, it is possible for \(S\)’s utterance to draw \(H\)’s attention to the individual \(c\) she is naming and that may be the first time \(c\) enters his field of awareness, so that \(H\) will form a new entity representation for \(c\) at this point and then attach the information that \(c\) goes by the name \(N\) to this entity representation right away—all as part of a single interpretation. event
The gluts of vicarious anchors that are implied by this picture of what is involved in the interpretation of standard referential uses of names are if anything even more unrealistic than the gluts of perceptual anchors that we assumed result from repeated recognition of the same object (see Footnote 18). Here too a more plausible treatment should allow for the bundling of many anchors into a single regularity or disposition. But to repeat, I do have an account of what form or forms such bundling could take.
This point should remain valid on a more sophisticated account of multiple anchoring according to which new anchors will often merge with existing ones, losing their individual identity. Once more compare Footnote 18.
Should we count the multiplicity of the ambiguity that \(N\) has for an agent \(a\) as the number of \(N\)-labelled entity representations the agent has in his library or as the number of individuals represented by such representations? Evidence that it is the number of \(N\)-labelled representations that an agent \(a\) has, and that he takes to represent distinct referents, rather than the number of actual individuals represented by these \(N\)-labelled representations he has comes from cases like Kripke’s Paderewski example, which will be reviewed in Sect. 4.2.1. The agent Peter of that example has two Paderewski-labelled entity representations that, contrary to what he believes, represent the same referent (the first prime minister of the Polish Republic that was founded after World War I, who also was a world-famous concert pianist, a combination of distinctions Peter thinks could not be found in one and the same person). Little reflection is needed to see that Peter’s grasp of the name Paderewski, as it figures in these two entity representations, is ambiguous—it has ambiguity multiplicity 2; it does not have multiplicity 1—i.e. it is not free from ambiguity—which would be the answer we would get if we were to count the set of referents of Peter’s Paderewski-labelled representations rather than the set of the Paderewski-labelled representations themselves.
In the communication-theoretic set-up of this paper, in which it is mental representations that have explicitly defined truth-conditional (or ‘propositional’) content and in which utterances are analysed as tools that speakers use to communicate their thoughts to others, there is no unequivocal way of talking about the truth conditions (or ‘propositional content’) of utterances as such. There are various ways in which such a notion can be introduced. But intuitively any such notion should have the property that when the speaker converts her thought into words in accordance with the rules of the language, the interpreter converts those words into a mental representation and the representations of speaker and hearer carry the same truth conditions, then those should also be the truth conditions of the utterance according to the definition chosen. In the cases that are being considered now, all three conditions are assumed to be satisfied. One of the reviewers wonders whether the requirement that the thought recovered by the recipient must match the thought expressed by the speaker in truth conditions might not be too strong. What, the query goes, are we to say when the recipient uses different contextual resources to recover the thought expressed from those that the speaker used when encoding her thought? What made me adopt the criterion as stated in the paper is the belief that while such differences in contextual input may make a considerable difference to the ways in which the content representations of the thoughts of speaker and recipient are formally embedded within their respective mental states, the truth conditions of those thoughts will in general not be affected. It is important in this connection that the thoughts we are concerned with in this paper are for the most part thoughts with singular content. They have singular content, content to the effect that some particular individual satisfies a certain predication, by virtue of ‘incorporating’ one or more entity representations. All that these entity representations contribute to the truth-conditional content of the propositional representations that they enter into is their actual referent. Differences between the forms of the speaker’s and recipient’s entity representations, and what other thoughts (of speaker and recipient, respectively) that they may enter into as well, are irrelevant to the truth conditions of the two thoughts in question. The truth conditions of singular thoughts are remarkably robust against variations in the form and construction of the entity representations that are responsible for their singularities.
I am counting the argument position for the state that occurs to the left of the Att-predicate as the first slot and the slot for the agent as the second.
One of the reviewers asks whether it isn’t possible to read occurrences of proper names in the scope of attitude predicates in a ‘de dicto’ fashion. On second reflection I think I can get such readings, but only when they are primed in the right way by the context in which the attribution is made. For instance, in the second sentence of (19) it is possible to understand the occurrences of Aldebaran and Betelgeuze as referring back to the labels of the entity representations that (on the present theory) Bill must have if the attribution made by the first sentence is true of him.
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19.
Bill thinks that Aldebaran and Betelgeuze are man-made space stations. And he thinks that Aldebaran is much more durable than Betelgeuze and is likely to be used until well in the twenty second Century, whereas Betelgeuze will be inoperable within a couple of decades.
That is, there would seem to be an interpretation of the combination of the two sentences in (19) that can be paraphrased roughly as: ‘Bill thinks that there are two space stations, named ‘Aldebaran’ and ‘Betelgeuze’, the first of which is much more sturdy than the second and ...’. This is a genuine de dicto reading insofar as the referential ties that are associated with ‘normal referential’ uses of names are ignored. When this kind of severance of a labelled entity representation from its external anchor is possible I do not really understand. Perhaps language users differ in subtle ways with regard to when and how easily they are prepared to assign truth conditions to utterances with names in which the referents of those names are bracketed (that is: to assign to such utterances what is often referred to as ‘narrow content’). Note in this connection that if the way in which Bill acquired the names Aldebaran and Betelgeuse was such as to commit him to their referring to the actual referents (i.e. the stars) Aldebaran and Betelgeuze, (because of the vicarious commitments he made when he acquired them), then it is not obvious how that link can be set aside in interpretations of attitude attributions to him which contain these names. Consider for instance the first sentence of (19) on its own. How do we ward off an interpretation of which it is part that Bill attributes to the actual referents of Aldebaran and Betelgeuse (i.e. to the stars) the property of being man-made space stations—even if these are properties that, as stars, they could not possibly have? Severance becomes easier when property assignments get more outrageously wrong, but how much outrage is enough for this?
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19.
The case in more detail: Peter has read about someone called ‘Paderewski’ on two different occasions. On the first occasion Paderewski is portrayed as a widely acclaimed pianist and composer; on the second Paderewski is presented as the first prime minister of the Polish Republic that was established after the end of World War One. Since it is quite unusual for someone to climb to such heights in areas as far apart as music and politics, Peter erroneously assumes that these Paderewskis are different individuals. This situation is supposed to give rise to a puzzle (or perhaps to several puzzles). Thus, Peter will have set up two distinct Paderewski-labelled entity representations that are both externally anchored to the same Jan Ignac Paderewski. But although these two entity representations refer de facto to the same person, they play their respective parts in the mental life of Peter just as they would have if the musician and the politician had in fact been different people. (For Peter the name Paderewski will behave as an ambiguous name, even if he has no other Paderewski-labelled entity representations besides these two: when Peter hears someone make a statement containing Paderewski he will be faced with the decision which of his two Paderewski-labelled representations to use in interpreting that occurrence just as much as he would have been had they stood for different persons.)
More carefully worded: If \(S\)’s audience also has an entity representation for London that is both London- and Londres-labelled, then either name may be expected to enable him to construct a truth-conditionally correct representation of the content of the attributed attitude.
One of the reviewers asks what becomes of the semantic contributions that fictional entity representations make to the sentences in which they occur: is the content of such sentences always just narrow content, or does anchoring of some kind make an impact here too? To address this question it would be necessary to say more about truth in fiction in general and especially about the role that models and/or possible worlds do (or don’t) play in such an account. I intend to address this issue in the companion paper mentioned earlier.
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Acknowledgments
The material of this paper was presented on a number of occasions, including the two workshops that led to the special issue of Erkenntnis in which it is now appearing. I thank the participants of those workshops as well as audiences at presentations in Amsterdam, Nancy, Göttingen and Stuttgart for helpful comments. Particular thanks go to Dolf Rami, Emar Maier, Mark Sainsbury and two anonymous reviewers (with apologies for multiple postings).
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Kamp, H. Using Proper Names as Intermediaries Between Labelled Entity Representations. Erkenn 80 (Suppl 2), 263–312 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-014-9701-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-014-9701-2