Abstract
In her recent defense of predicativism for proper names, Delia Graff Fara proposes the following non-metalinguistic being-called condition (BCC) for the applicability of names as predicates: A name ‘N’ is true of a thing if and only if it is called N. The BCC is supposed to hold for names only. In this essay I criticize Fara’s BCC by arguing that the word ‘called’ is ambiguous, and that the BCC holds only for the particular sense of ‘calling’ as naming. I revise accordingly Fara’s BCC and propose in its place a non-metalinguistic being-named condition (BNC). I also argue, against Fara, that being-named conditions are not unique to proper names: they hold for (at least some) mass nouns, common count nouns, as well as for family names, which I distinguish from surnames. Finally, I discuss honorific titles and propose a being-entitled condition according to which a title ‘T’ (when a predicate) is true of a thing just in case it is dubbed T. I conclude the paper with pragmatic, syntactic, as well as semantic considerations in favor of the thesis that names are a subspecies of non-hereditary, honorific titles.
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Acknowledgements
I owe the greatest debt of gratitude to Delia Graff Fara, whose profoundly creative work on names has deeply inspired me. I am also grateful to Paul Hovda, Ori Simchen, and David Liebesman for detailed feedback on previous versions of this paper, and to an anonymous referee of this journal whose comments have been crucial in helping me formulate this final version. I thank the audiences at the UVic colloquium, the UBC-Okanagan Colloquium, the DEX4 Davis Philosophy Conference, the University of Bologna conference in honor of Ernesto Napoli, the Unicamp IV Conference of the Brazilian Society for Analytic Philosophy, and the Pacific APA 2017 meeting, where previous versions of this paper have been presented.
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Ballarin, R. The naked ‘duchess’: names are titles. Linguist and Philos 42, 349–379 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10988-018-9250-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10988-018-9250-2