Abstract
The purpose of this paper is to solve the simple sentence puzzle about proper names. (1) Superman leaps more tall buildings than Clark Kent. (2) Superman = Clark Kent. (3) Superman leaps more tall buildings than Superman. Even when (1) and (2) are true, (3) is false. It will be shown that this is not a real puzzle, because (i) (1) and (3) do not express singular propositions, and (ii) the identity statement in (2) only concerns singular propositions. In (1) and (3), the proper names refer to aspects of an individual at the level of explicature, while identity statements of the form X = Y mean that Y can be substituted for X salva veritate, only in singular propositions about X /Y. Given this difference in reference between (1)/(3) and (2), the conjunction of (1) and (2) does not entail (3), in accordance with our intuition.
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Notes
- 1.
Even if (i) and (ii) are true, (iii) can be false. (i) John believes that Cicero was a great orator. (ii) Cicero = Tully (iii) John believes that Tully was a great orator. Similarly, the truth of (ii) and (iv) does not entail that of (v). (iv) John wants to meet Cicero. (v) John wants to meet Tully.
- 2.
“Aspects” are also called “(temporal) phases” or “modes of personification”.
- 3.
This is consistent with Wittgenstein’s remark ([28]: 3.3): “Nur der Satz hat Sinn: nur im Zuzammenhange des Satzes hat ein Name Bedeutung.” (Only propositions have sense. Only in the nexus of a proposition does a name have sense.) This view sharply contrasts with descriptivism whereby the name Romulus, for example, is interpreted as a truncated description such as “a person who did such-and-such things, who killed Remus, and founded Rome” ([21]: 79).
- 4.
This is an application of the Optionality Criterion given by Recanati (2004: 101): “Whenever a contextual ingredient of content is provided through a pragmatic process of the optional variety, we can imagine another possible context of utterance in which no such ingredient is provided yet the utterance expresses a complete proposition.”
- 5.
The semantic approach we have seen in 3.1 above interprets Superman and Clark Kent in (15–16) as standard names, that is, as Superman (+) and Clark Kent (+).
- 6.
Yoshiki Nishimura (University of Tokyo) and Sayaka Hasegawa (Seikei University) object to this observation by saying that (1) and (4) express different propositions depending on whether the interpreters are enlightened or not, to the extent that unenlightened people’s construal of Superman is different from enlightened people’s (p.c., 2015). Here the term ‘construal’ is taken from Cognitive Linguistics [12]. This view, however, is incompatible with the Millian view on proper names as assumed in this paper, because it forces us to consider that the truth-conditional meaning of a proper name consists of an individual as well as its construal. If, on the contrary, the construal is taken to be external to the truth-condition of the proposition in which the name occurs, enlightened and unenlightened speakers can, as against Nishimura and Hasegawa’s claim, fully entertain one and the same proposition, no matter how different their construal of the name may be.
- 7.
Wittgenstein summarizes the nature of the puzzle raised by identity statements as follows ([28]: 5.5303, emphases in the original): “Beiläufig gesprochen: Von zwei Dingen zu sagen, sie seien identisch, ist ein Unsinn, und von Einem zu sagen, es sei identisch mit sich selbst, sagt gar nichts.” (Roughly speaking, to say of two things that they are identical is nonsense, and to say of one thing that it is identical with itself is to say nothing at all.) As will be shown below, the definition given in (17) enables us to solve the puzzle.
- 8.
In the approach defended here, sentences of the form X is Y as in (2) and sentences of the form X is (not) X as in (21–22) receive different interpretations. While the latter present the speakers’ subjective view on extra-linguistic states of affairs, the former correspond to metalinguistic comments on the substitutivity of the terms X and Y as articulated in (17).
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Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Daisuke Bekki (Ochanomizu University/JST CREST/National Institute of Informatics), who kindly gave me the opportunity to present this paper at LENLS 12, held at Keio University, Yokohama, Japan, on November 15–17 2015. This work was supported by JSPS KAKENHI Grant Number 25370437.
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Sakai, T. (2017). What Do Proper Names Refer to?. In: Otake, M., Kurahashi, S., Ota, Y., Satoh, K., Bekki, D. (eds) New Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence. JSAI-isAI 2015. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10091. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-50953-2_2
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