Abstract
In the last decade a new debate concerning the foundations of reference and semantics emerged, which mainly focuses on how to interpret Donnellan’s seminal works and, in particular, on how it differs from Kripke’s influential contributions to so-called “direct reference”. In this paper, I focus on this “new” reading/understanding of Donnellan and how, as it is nowadays presented, differs from Kripke’s picture. I will discuss a Kripke-inspired picture and the way it differs from a Donnellan-inspired one and show that there is a tension between the views that: (i) the token of a name refers to the object conventionally (causally) linked with the tokened name and (ii) the token of a name refers to the object the speaker has in mind. I will end up suggesting that Korta and Perry’s (Critical pragmatics, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2011) critical referentialism/pragmatics and their name-notion network conception help to clarify this tension (and possibly evade it).
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Notes
One could argue, pace Russell, that if the speaker knows that the woman she is perceiving is Mary, in uttering ‘Mary’ she would be directly acquainted with the referent and, in such a case, ‘Mary’ could count as a genuine or logically proper name. As we will soon see, Russell’s strict epistemic conditions on acquaintance, when dealing with proper names, must be loosened.
This, though, does not mean that Frege and Russell presented their conceptions using this terminology. Furthermore, Frege’s (original) senses are abstract, Platonic, entities. Yet, if we follow Dummett’s (1973/1981) interpretation in giving up Frege’s Platonism, senses must be understood as being language dependent and, thus, intersubjective. They are, therefore, social entities. After all, Frege himself claimed that it suffices to know a language to grasp a sense. I want to thank an anonymous reviewer for pressing me on this point.
In the famous footnote on ‘Aristotle’ Frege claims: “In the case of an actual proper name such as ‘Aristotle’ opinions as to the sense may differ. It might, for instance, be taken to be the following: the pupil of Plato and teacher of Alexander the Great” (Frege 1892, p. 58).
Kripke’s modal argument against the descriptivist theory is well known. While proper names are rigid designators referring to the very same object in all possible worlds (or counterfactual situations) in which it exists, definite descriptions may pick out different objects in different possible worlds.
See also Donnellan (1970), Evans (1973), Kripke (1972/1980). As Devitt puts it: “[O]ur present uses of a name, say ‘Aristotle’, designates the famous Greek philosopher Aristotle, not in virtue of the various things we (rightly) believe true of him, but in virtue of a causal network stretching back from our uses to the first uses of the name to designate Aristotle” (Devitt 1981, p. 25).
“A rough statement of a theory might be the following: An initial ‘baptism’ takes place. Here the object may be named by ostension, or the reference of the name may be fixed by a description. When the name is ‘passed from link to link’, the receiver of the name must, I think, intend when he learns it to use it with the same reference as the man from whom he heard it” (Kripke 1972/1980, p. 96).
A reviewer suggested that Kripke does not say that a speaker’s mental states and intentions have no role to play in determining the referent of her use of a name, but simply says that reference determination depends not just on what we think ourselves. Yet, as I understand it [along with, e.g., Bianchi (2012), Wettstein (2012), Capuano (2012)] Kripke’s main point is that reference does not depend on what the speaker has in mind.
A name-using practice need not bring us to an existing object. Someone (like e.g. Urbain Le Verrier) can stipulate the existence of a planet, say Vulcan, that turns out to be inexistent. An author can introduce a fictional character and initiate a name using-practice for the latter without assuming that the latter exists: “[T]he notion of a baptism is extended to include cases in which no object is baptized. These will be the kinds of baptism involved in empty-name-using practices. It is also extended to include unwitting baptisms: events which originate a new name-using practice, even though the agent of the event had no such intention. A baptism has at most one referent. Each name-using practice involves exactly one baptism; baptisms metaphysically individuate practices, and thus fix the referent, if any, of a practice” (Sainsbury 2005, p. 106). See also Korta and Perry (2011) (and Perry’s 2012) on the way historical chains can end up in what Donnellan (1974) characterizes as blocks, i.e. when the causal chain does not bring us to an existing entity. Korta and Perry introduce the notion of conditional co-reference or coco-reference to explain the way names (and other devices of singular reference) relate to their bearers: “A later reference conditionally co-refers or coco-refers with an earlier one, if the second speaker’s intention is to refer to the same thing as the earlier utterance, if there is anything it referred to, and to refer to nothing, if it refers to nothing” (Korta and Perry 2011, p. 77). It goes without saying that the speaker need not be consciously aware of these intentions. The latter work, most of the time, at the subconscious level, viz. the level, as I take it, governing speakers’ competence in operating with the language they master.
This parallels the way we exploit language in general. As Putnam (1975) pointed out, the extension of common terms like ‘water’ or ‘tiger’ is also determined by the linguistic community, i.e. by the words belonging to the common practice. On Earth the extension of ‘water’ is H2O, while on Twin-Earth it is XYZ insofar as ‘water’ belongs to (or is embedded into) different linguistic communities and, thus, in distinct words-using practices.
“A speaker who uses a definite description referentially in an assertion … uses the description to enable his audience to pick out whom or what he is talking about and state something about that person or thing … the definite description is merely one tool for doing a certain job—calling attention to a person or thing—and in general any other device for doing the same job, another description or proper name, would do as well” (Donnellan 1966, p. 7). As Bach puts it: “When a speaker uses a description referentially, the referent itself, not how it is thought of or referred to, is essential to the identity of the (singular) statement that the speaker is making” (Bach 1987, p. 119).
“[O]n Strawson’s account, the result of there being nothing which fits the description is a failure of reference. This too, I believe, turns out not to be true about the referential use of definite descriptions” (Donnellan 1966, p. 6).
For the sake of simplicity, I ignore the fact that for Russell the objects we are acquainted with are sense-data. Besides, by “direct and unmediated contact with objects”, I mean “not guided or mediated by a Fregean sense or mode of presentation the referent ought to satisfy”. It is the object itself and not the mode of presentation that enters the referential content, the singular proposition expressed.
This idea finds empirical evidence in considerations on how we cognitively process proper names and how their processing differs from the processing of common nouns. Based on psycholinguistic evidence, Semenza claims that “proper names have only ‘token’ reference while common names carry ‘type reference’” (Semenza 2011, p. 278). Furthermore, studies on vision (see e.g. Pylyshyn’s 2007) theory of situated vision and, specifically, his notion of FINSTs (FINGers of INSTantiation) understood as (essential) mental indexicals point toward the view that the mind can enter into direct contact with the objects the speaker refers to. For more on this see Corazza (2018).
McKinsey makes a similar criticism: “Kripke’s account applies at best only to uses of names that are deferential, that is, uses in which the speaker relies on other speakers’ uses of the name to determine reference for his or her own uses. All of the cases that Kripke describes are like this, and all involve speakers who are either nearly completely ignorant of the referent’s characteristics or whose knowledge of the referent is quite limited. Such deferential uses of names are by no means uncommon, but they are generally restricted to uses of names by ordinary speakers to refer to famous or historical persons or objects with which the speakers are not acquainted, and about which the speakers know very little.
It is far from clear that such deferential uses of names are typical. What is clear is that uses of names that are not deferential are exceedingly common, and these represent a huge class of name uses to which Kripke’s account simply does not apply” (McKinsey 2011, p. 328).
These Donnellan-inspired ideas fit Devitt’s view: “The token designated that person in virtue of being immediately caused by a thought that is grounded in that person by a designating-chain. In these circumstances, I say that the designating chain ‘underlies’ the token” (Devitt 2015, p. 111).
To substantiate this point we could also mention the use of a proper name in a metaphorical or sarcastic way, like e.g. ‘Einstein’ in “Look, Einstein just entered the room” to refer to a not that bright person, say John Smith, who takes himself to be a genius. In that case the tokening of ‘Einstein’ picks up John Smith, the individual the speaker intends to talk about. For more on the use of metaphorical proper names see Corazza and Genovesi (2018, 2021).
See Martí (2015), though, for a contrasting view. Martí claims that reference is independent from the having in mind: “our speaker refers to B in spite of having A in mind. The having in mind is not necessary for the use of the name to refer (since she refers to B without having him in mind) and the having in mind is not sufficient (since she does not refer to A even though she has A in mind)” (Martí 2015, p. 81). Martí seems to implicitly endorse Kripke’s semantics reference vs. speaker’s reference, a distinction Donnellan refuses (more on this later on). Although I am sympathetic to Martí’s overall position that (semantic) reference does not rest on the having in mind, to deal with cases like ‘Claire’ and the poker-player, reference rests on the speaker perceiving (or being acquainted with) the relevant poker-player. In such a case ‘Claire’ can be assimilated to the referential use of a misguided description, like Donnellan’s ‘the man with the Martini’ example.
This example bears some similarities with Evans’s (1973) famous discussion of ‘Madagascar’. Marco Polo, we are told, in asking the native the name of the Island he landed on picked up ‘Madagascar’. Yet, by ‘Madagascar’ the native designated, unbeknownst to Polo, the mainland. In such a case Polo contributed to initiating a new convention linking the name with the island in the Indian Ocean. We can suppose that some confusions and some miscommunications arose between the explorers and the natives and that this subsisted for some time. Yet nowadays with ‘Madagascar’ we refer, in exploiting the convention initiated by Polo, to the Island. In other words, the practice of using ‘Madagascar’ for the island took over the natives’ convention. For a detailed discussion of Evans’s ‘Madagascar’ example and how we can deal with it within the causal theory of reference, see Devitt (1981, p. 138 ff.) and Gray (2014). As Devitt recently put it: “There are three stages in the history of ‘Madagascar’. (A) Before Marco Polo, the pattern was of grounding ‘Madagascar’ in the portion of the mainland by the locals … with the result that users of the name conventionally designated and, typically, speaker-designated that portion. (B) Then came a period of confusion following Marco Polo’s misidentification. There was a change in the pattern of groundings, some being in the island. During this period, Marco Polo and those influenced by him typically do not speaker-designate nor, after a while, conventionally designate either the island or the portion of the mainland with the name; they partially designate them both. The period may be short or long. (C) However long the period of confusion, the time came when the pattern of groundings in the designation-chains underlying our ancestors’ uses of ‘Madagascar’ were in the island. A new designation convention with the name had been born” (Devitt 2015, p. 122). We could develop our Claire example along these lines and imagine a situation in which John, in naming the relevant player ‘Claire’, contributes in initiating a new convention. We could even imagine that, were the player’s name ‘Pia’, a Frege-like puzzle could arise such that a statement of “Pia is Claire” would be informative. If one were to buy into Kaplan’s (1990) theory of names one would likely claim that in such cases a new name is introduced into the language. For Kaplan claims that ‘Aristotle’ used to designate the philosopher and ‘Aristotle’ used to designate the Greek magnate are two different names. Kaplan suggests that instead of the type-token model we should adopt a stage-continuant model. Thus, ‘Aristotle’ bringing us to the Greek philosopher and ‘Aristotle’ bringing us to the Greek magnate are not two tokens of the same type, but two stages of different names. What the philosopher and the Greek magnate share is a generic name (or lemma), like the ones we may encounter in books such as Thousand Ways to Name a Baby. If this is the case, instead of changing the reference of ‘Madagascar’ Marco Polo created a new name. In initiating a new name-practice, he introduced a new name into the language. Both names were around for some time until the name used by the natives died off and the one created by Marco Polo took over. As far as I can see, the picture concerning the causal chain I am proposing should be neutral on whether one subscribes to the type-token distinction or the stage-continuant one or, possibly, some hybrid of them. In other words, other considerations should enter the scene when deciding whether to subscribe to the type-token distinction or Kaplan’s currency model when dealing with proper names. For a recent discussion of this specific question concerning the individuation of a name through the name-practice see Rami (2015). For a defense of a theory of use of names qua types based on a presemantic notion of dubbing, see Predelli (2015). In short, Predelli proposed a double-context picture and defends the view that name-types are evaluated vis-à-vis a context of dubbing and a context of interpretation.
Since Donnellan does not frame his account using the speaker reference vs. semantic reference distinction, we face a tension. Actually, Donnellan assumes that we cannot divorce speaker reference from semantic reference when dealing with the way reference gets fixed. As we will soon see Korta and Perry’s critical pragmatics account and, in particular, their name-notion network, can help us deal with this.
For a detailed discussion about mental files see e.g. Recanati (2012) and the works he mentions.
As Perry puts it: “Examples Donnellan provides convince me that for any proper name A and any person Q, ‘Q refers to x with his use of A’ stands for a historical or causal property, and not the property of satisfying a set of descriptions held by Q or even Q’s linguistic community” (Perry 1980, p. 71).
“I can think of and talk about Aristotle because of a network involving notions, names, and other references to Aristotle that have been going on since he was born. My use of ‘Aristotle’ is supported by this network. Aristotle is the origin of the network. … Once we recognize the importance of network we can introduce a level of content, network content, that is, in a sense, between reflexive and referential content. The network is a public object, that exists independently of any particular utterance that exploits it. It is these networks, I claim, that provide the structure that allows us to speak of beliefs that are directed at the same object, even when there is no object at which they are directed” (Perry 2001/2012, pp 14–15).
Korta and Perry would argue that in such a case we have a mess: “The complications come from misidentifications. These occur when an utterance is both intended to be part of a coco-chain but independently refers to something other than the origin of the chain. In these cases, we have what we call a mess” (Korta and Perry 2011, p. 80).
For a discussion concerning mono-propositionalism and how it constitutes a dogma in contemporary semantic and pragmatic theories see Korta (2007). An interesting question, which transcends the scope of this paper, would be to see whether Kripke and Donnellan can be characterized as mono-propositionalists.
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An ancestor of this paper was presented in 2014 at the workshop Reference and the Elusive Self: more recent work of John Perry, at ILCLI-UPV, Donostia, The Basque Country (Spain). I thank the audience for useful comments and feedback. Fruitful discussions with Donnellan when visiting UCLA in 1994 have been instrumental in coming to appreciate his contribution to so-called “direct reference” and triggered some of my thoughts about the issues discussed in this essay. It has been, though, Korta and Perry’s (2011) Critical Pragmatics that helped me to clarify some of my original hesitations and, no doubt, confusions concerning the deepness of Donnellan’s insights and contributions in the way we nowadays consider problems pertaining to reference and singular thoughts. For comments and/or discussion I would also like to thank Kepa Korta, María de Ponte, David Kaplan, Howard Wettstein, John Perry, Ekain Garmendia, Chris Genovesi, Robyn Carston, Genoveva Marti, Stefano Predelli, Richard Vallée, and many others I forgot. Comments by two referees of this journal have also been helpful. It goes without saying that all the remaining mistakes and misunderstandings are mine. While working on the last version of this paper I have been partly supported by a grant from the Spanish Ministry: FFI2015-63719-P (MINECO/FEDER), the Spanish ministry of economy and competitivity (FFI2015-63719-P (MINECO/FEDER, UE)) and the Basque Government (IT1032-16).
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Corazza, E. The Name-Notion Network: On How to Conciliate Two Approaches to Naming and Reference-Fixing. Topoi 42, 961–974 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-023-09887-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-023-09887-5