Abstract
In the selections included here, Mill offers a broad taxonomy of “names:" general versus singular, concrete versus abstract, merely denoting versus also connoting. His discussion of names is especially famous because he urges that proper names, genuine singular terms, are directly about the object referred to, with no additional conceptual content. That is, such names merely denote, they do not also connote. In addition to discussing the variety of names and their contrasting meanings, Mill also presents an account of how names come to mean what they do. That is, to use contemporary terminology, he provides not just a semantics but a metasemantics. His position is a very interesting melding of internalist idea theories with externalist causal theories. Being an Empiricist, experience takes centre stage, with every thought about an object being ultimately grounded therein. Importantly, however, experience is caused by external things. Linguistic reference is then grounded in such thoughts about objects, via an intention to refer. It’s important to stress that without this mental intermediary, there would merely be the kind of causal “meaning” of tree rings, without any genuine intentionality/semantics; the latter comes into play because “ideas” do. Their essential role in metasemantics notwithstanding, the semantic content of the “name” is not an idea, but the external object that the agent intends.
Text from System of Logic excerpted from: Robson, J.M. ed. 1974. Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, Vol VII. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
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Notes
- 1.
[…] I grant that the decision of questions of Existence usually if not always depends on a previous question of either Causation or Coexistence. But Existence is nevertheless a different thing from Causation or Coexistence, and can be predicated apart from them. The meaning of the abstract name Existence, and the connotation of the concrete name Being, consist, like the meaning of all other names, in sensations or states of consciousness: their peculiarity is that to exist, is to excite, or be capable of exciting, any sensations or states of consciousness: no matter what, but it is indispensable that there should be some. It was from overlooking this that Hegel, finding that Being is an abstraction reached by thinking away all particular attributes, arrived at the self-contradictory proposition on which he founded all his philosophy, that Being is the same as Nothing. It is really the name of Something, taken in the most comprehensive sense of the word.
- 2.
The doctrines which prevented the real meaning of Essences from being understood, had not assumed so settled a shape in the time of Aristotle and his immediate followers, as was afterwards given to them by the Realists of the middle ages. Aristotle himself (in his Treatise on the Categories [see Ch. 5]) expressly denies that the δεύτεραι ούσιαι or Substantiae Secundae, inhere in a subject. They are only, he says, predicated of it.
- 3.
[Of Human Understanding. In Works. New ed. London: Tegg, 1823, Vol. 1.]
- 4.
The always acute and often profound author of An Outline of Sematology [London: Richardson, 1831] (Mr. B. H. Smart) justly says, “Locke will be much more intelligible, if, in the majority of places, we substitute ‘the knowledge of’ for what he calls ‘the Idea of’” (p. 10). Among the many criticisms on Locke’s use of the word Idea, this is the one which, as it appears to me, most nearly hits the mark; and I quote it for the additional reason that it precisely expresses the point of difference respecting the import of Propositions, between my view and what I have spoken of as the Conceptualist view of them. Where a Conceptualist says that a name or a proposition expresses our Idea of a thing, I should generally say (instead of our Idea) our Knowledge, or Belief, concerning the thing itself.
- 5.
This distinction corresponds to that which is drawn by Kant and other metaphysicians between what they term analytic, and synthetic, judgments; the former being those which can be evolved from the meaning of the terms used.
- 6.
[See Etienne Bonnot de Condillac. La Logique. In Oeuvres completes. 31 vols. Paris: Dufart, 1803, Vol. 30, pp. 14lff. (Part 2, Ch. 6).]
- 7.
[See Georges Cuvier. Le Règne animal. 4 vols. Paris: Deterville, 1817, Vol. 1, p. 81.]
- 8.
In the only attempt which, so far as I know, has been made to refute the preceding argumentation, it is maintained that in the first form of the syllogism,
A dragon is a thing which breathes flame,
A dragon is a serpent,
Therefore some serpent or serpents breathe flame,
“there is just as much truth in the conclusion as there is in the premises, or rather, no more in the latter than in the former. If the general name serpent includes both real and imaginary serpents, there is no falsity in the conclusion; if not, there is falsity in the minor premise,” [Anon., “Mill’s System of Logic,” British Quarterly Review, 4 (Aug., 1846), p. 16.]
Let us, then, try to set out the syllogism on the hypothesis that the name serpent includes imaginary serpents. We shall find that it is now necessary to alter the predicates; for it cannot be asserted that an imaginary creature breathes flame; in predicating of it such a fact, we assert by the most positive implication that it is real and not imaginary. The conclusion must run thus, “Some serpent or serpents either do or are imagined to breathe flame.” And to prove this conclusion by the instance of dragons, the premises must be, A dragon is imagined as breathing flame, A dragon is a (real or imaginary) serpent: from which it undoubtedly follows, that there are serpents which are imagined to breathe flame; but the major premise is not a definition, nor part of a definition; which is all that I am concerned to prove.
Let us now examine the other assertion—that if the word serpent stands for none but real serpents, the minor premise (a dragon is a serpent) is false. This is exactly what I have myself said of the premise, considered as a statement of fact: but it is not false as part of the definition of a dragon; and since the premises, or one of them, must be false, (the conclusion being so) the real premise cannot be the definition, which is true, but the statement of fact, which is false.
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Laycock, H. (2017). John Stuart Mill. In: Cameron, M., Hill, B., Stainton, R. (eds) Sourcebook in the History of Philosophy of Language. Springer Graduate Texts in Philosophy, vol 2. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-26908-5_40
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