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A Cognitive Theory of Empty Names

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Abstract

Ordinary use of empty names encompasses a variety of different phenomena, including issues in semantics, mental content, fiction, pretense, and linguistic practice. In this paper I offer a novel account of empty names, the cognitive theory, and show how it offers a satisfactory account of the phenomena. The virtues of this theory are based on its strength and parsimony. It allows for a fully homogeneous semantic treatment of names coped with ontological frugality and empirical and psychological adequacy.

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Notes

  1. Some have claimed that the passage is in fact not comprehensible. Even though I think the passage is obviously comprehensible, I am prepared to accept that it may not be so. Still, if we accept it is not, we are left with the problem of explaining how different readers may deliver the same or similar answer when asked, for example, if the book of sand has an infinite number of pages. If the passage were not comprehensible, readers should be unable to answer such questions.

  2. I owe this suggestion to an anonymous referee.

  3. Indeed, it is possible to have a productive and systematic non-compositional language. Consider L, its lexicon is made up of singular terms A and B, the monadic predicate IS F and the relational predicate BELIEVES THAT. By definition, every formula of L gets its truth-conditions determined partly by its structure and the content of its constituent parts and partly by pragmatic information that is not predetermined either in the syntax or the semantics of L. Now, any singular term-monadic predicate combination of the lexical items of L is an acceptable formula of L: “A is F”; “B is F”. And any singular term-relational predicate-acceptable formula combination of elements of L is itself another acceptable formula of L: “A believes that B is F”, “B believes that A is F” but also “A believes that B believes that A is F” and so on, ad infinitum. This accounts for productivity: there is an infinite number of acceptable formulas of L, we just cannot determine their truth-conditions independently of pragmatic information. Furthermore, every single lexical item of L makes the same contribution to the content of any formula of L in which it appears. This accounts for systematicity. Still, the truth-conditions of any given formula L may vary not because the constituent parts make different contributions but because such contributions (together with the form of the formula) are not enough to determine truth-conditions.

  4. I am not considering cases where there is a perceptually available salient object that is not the referent, and, yet, there is no ongoing pretense. I think these are unproblematic cases where the subject mistakenly takes the perceptually available salient object to be the referent.

  5. I am not claiming that fiction always requires the use of props and or CDs. This is something to be sorted out by a proper theory of fiction, which I do not intend to offer here.

  6. I do not intend to imply that all referential terms within fictional discourse are empty. Fictional discourse may use names of actual objects. In such cases the decoupler may not be involved in the interpretation process. Such cases, however, are not instances of C2. This leaves some questions open, all of which concern a proper account of fiction, which goes beyond my goal in this paper (see Walton 1990).

  7. Back in the 19th century Le Verrier observed disturbances in the orbits of Mercury and Uranus that were not predicted by the currently accepted laws. To explain away this trouble Le Verrier postulated that two different planets were responsible for this: Vulcan for Mercury and Neptune for Uranus. At the time of the postulation Le Verrier had no more evidence of the existence of Neptune than he had of the existence of Vulcan. Later research confirmed the existence of Neptune, and proved there was no Vulcan.

  8. Sainsbury 2005 also seems to claim that there is no difference between empty names that are not known to be empty and genuine non-empty names that are not known to be non-empty. His account, however, is substantially different in two ways: (i) it is semantic, not cognitive, and is committed to what he calls “Ockhamist truth-conditions” for sentences using names; and (ii) it makes use of a reference criterion, not props, in order to make sense of the intelligibility of empty names. The cognitive theory, in turn, is: (i) independent of any particular semantics for names, and so it is not committed to any view on the truth-conditions of sentences using names; and (ii) does not require that all names be interpreted by means of props or that they all be interpreted with the help of the decoupler.

  9. I am using the “mind-to-world” terminology as it is used by Platts 1979; Anscombe 1957; Humberstone 1992; Velleman 1992, according to which attitudes such as belief should fit the world (i.e., mind-to-world direction) whereas attitudes such as desire are such that their goal is for the world to fit them (i.e., world-to-mind direction).

  10. As for attitudes that are clearly concerned with fictions, such as pretense, their conditions of adequacy will vary depending on the fictional context itself. For example, if we pretend of a particular doll that it is the Queen, pretending that the Queen has a dirty face may be adequate depending on the properties the doll actually has.

  11. For a similar view that individuates representational content according to the cognitive mechanism responsible for its production see Leslie 2008. On Leslie’s 2008 view, generics (i.e., representations of the form ‘K’s are F’s’) are essentially the product a default mechanism of generalization.

  12. That is, of course, unless you endorse some or other Free Logic (see Sainsbury 2005). Part of my goal is to offer an account of the interpretation and truth-value of sentences involving empty names without giving up on classical logic. For reasons that will be clear in section 2.4, I am not considering so called “descriptivist” accounts of empty names.

  13. I say “convey” in order to avoid semantic notions normally associated with words such as “express.” The representations produced and communicated thanks to the decoupler are not semantic. So it may be useful to take these representations (or contents) not to be expressed.

  14. The claim that the same mechanism may inform belief-like and pretense-like mental states may seem strange to the reader. They seem to be radically different kinds of mental states. The former is meant to produce accurate representations of the environment while the latter may produce deviant ones. But there are important similarities among them. First of all, they are both meant to represent the environment. Even if deviant, subjects “play along” with what they pretend. Second, they may both be part of inferential processes, pretense states may be part of the development of a game of make-believe. Third, belief and pretense (accurate and deviant representational mental states) also follow a similar developmental path (see Shatz 1994 on the development of language and ToMM from infancy to toddlerhood; see Bosco et al. 2006, on the development of pretense).

  15. Put in logical terms: ∀x {(‘Holmes’Rx ≡ x = Holmes) ∧ Dx}.

  16. For a convention of use of a referential term to have an origin, according to Perry, it is for the term to have a referent.

  17. There are, of course, several different anti descriptivist theories of empty names. Soames 2002; Salmon 1998; Braun 2005; Reimer 2001b; Adams and Stecker 1994; Taylor 2000; Walton 2000; Sainsbury 2005, and perhaps even Stalnaker 1978 are but an example. Many other accounts have been offered that appeal to different pragmatic, metaphysic, and even semantic notions. My goal is not to defend any one of them, but to offer an alternative account that follows a path that (as far as I know) has not been seriously explored in the philosophical literature on empty names: that of cognitive psychology.

  18. Some (see Taylor 2000; Braun 2005; Reimer 2001b) claim that something is semantically expressed: i.e., an incomplete or gappy proposition. These authors appeal to gappy propositions precisely because that allows them to keep a referentialist semantics for names. Yet, to account for the intuitions, they are forced to appeal to extra ingredients—pragmatic enrichment (Taylor), ways of believing (Braun), and subconscious Meinongianism (Reimer)—for which there is little independent evidence. Since my theory is cognitive—and, hence, independent of any semantic account of names—it need not appeal to gappy propositions to achieve the same goal, for the semantically determined content is not what explains the intuitions. It, of course, appeals to mental representations produced by the decoupler mechanism, for which there is independent empirical evidence from psychological studies on pretense and cognitive development (see Leslie 1987).

  19. I am not considering belief reports that exhibit substitution failure.

  20. For a familiar causal account of “similar content” see Everett’s notion of thin-aboutness in Everett 2000. His general theory of empty names, however, is one I disavow.

  21. The theory does claim that empty names, in particular, demand more than just linguistic resources. There are independent reasons to think that competent use of these resources (i.e., something like the decoupling mechanism) doesn’t appear until some time between the second and third year of age (see Friedman and Leslie 2007). The cognitive theory suggests, then, that competent use of empty names will not appear until some time between the second and third year of age, once the decoupling mechanism is in use. There is, to my mind, no evidence against this, but there is some evidence that speaks on its behalf. On this view, competent use of empty names appears at about the same age that children begin understanding and engaging in acts of pretense, and it is also about that same age when they understand identity claims and false belief (see Perner, Rendl, and Garnham 2007). All these notions seem important to understand what speakers do with empty names.

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Correspondence to Eduardo García-Ramírez.

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The author would like to thank Marilyn Shatz, Kirareset Barrera, Ángeles Eraña, Axel Barceló, Claudia Lorena García, and two anonymous referees of this journal for substantially improving this paper with their comments. Thanks also to Agustín Rayo, Ricardo Mena, Raúl Saucedo and the attendants at the 2nd meeting of the AAMPh at CUNY, the associate students at my empty names seminar, as well as to the members of the Thursdays’ Seminar at the Instituto de Investigaciones Filosóficas, UNAM. The author was supported by the research projects: CONACYT-083004, PAPIIT-IN401611, and PAPIIT-IN401411.

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García-Ramírez, E. A Cognitive Theory of Empty Names. Rev.Phil.Psych. 2, 785–807 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-011-0078-8

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