Abstract
Around 1970, both Keith Donnellan and Saul Kripke produced powerful arguments against description theories of proper names. They also offered sketches of positive accounts of proper name reference, highlighting the crucial role played by historical facts that might be unknown to the speaker. Building on these sketches, in the following years Michael Devitt elaborated his well-known causal theory of proper names. As I have argued elsewhere, however, contrary to what is commonly assumed, Donnellan’s and Kripke’s sketches point in two rather different directions, by appealing to historical or causal facts of different sorts. In this paper, I shall discuss and criticize Devitt’s causal theory, which confuses things, I shall argue, by mixing, so to speak, Donnellan’s and Kripke’s sketches.
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Notes
- 1.
In this context, it is perhaps worth noting that in the later “A Puzzle about Belief,” Kripke himself wrote that the argument from ignorance is “the clearest objection” (1979: 246) to the description theory.
- 2.
For a discussion of the reasons why Kripke abstained from refining his picture “so as to give more exact conditions for reference to take place” and thus from offering a theory, see Bianchi 2015: 94–95.
- 3.
Because of this, one should be careful, when offering a causal theory of proper names, not to talk of the cause, or the origin, of a proper name token. Although certainly aware of this (“[o]bjects can be involved in the causal explanation of a name in various ways without being the object the name designates” (Devitt 1981a: 177), so the aim is “to distinguish (in nonsemantic terms) the semantically significant d[esignating]-chains from other causal connections between singular terms and the world” (129)), in his first writings even Devitt sometimes slips up, for example when he says that “we look to the cause of the utterance to determine reference” (1974: 197; see also p. 193 and 1976: 413).
- 4.
“Two people see Smith in the distance and mistake him for Jones. They have a brief colloquy: ‘What is Jones doing?’ ‘Raking the leaves.’ ‘Jones,’ in the common language of both, is a name of Jones; it never names Smith. Yet, in some sense, on this occasion, clearly both participants in the dialogue have referred to Smith” (Kripke 1977: 263).
- 5.
For an interesting discussion of the many causal chains involved in this and other cases, see Almog et al. 2015: 368–374.
- 6.
- 7.
Following Donnellan’s inclination, our original formulation took reference to be a relation between speakers and individuals: “In using a proper name N at the time T a speaker S refers to an individual X if and only if S’s having X in mind is appropriately involved in the explanation of S’s use of N at T” (188). The formulation I am giving here in terms of tokens, which I have chosen for ease of exposition, is equivalent.
- 8.
See Bianchi and Bonanini 2014: 200. Capuano 2018 tries to defend a Donnellanian treatment of these cases. Wulfemeyer 2017a uses the “Madagascar” case to argue in favor of Donnellan’s answers to our ‘causal’ questions. As is well known, the “Madagascar” case was introduced by Evans to argue against what he called the Causal Theory of Names (1973: 11).
- 9.
See in particular Almog 2012, 2014: ch. 3; Capuano 2012a, 2012b, 2018; Pepp 2009, 2012; Almog et al. 2015; Wulfemeyer 2017a. For criticisms, see Martí 2015 and my “Reference and Language,” forthcoming. Pepp 2019 defends Donnellan’s answers and argues against Martí’s views and my own attempt (Bianchi 2015) to develop Kripke’s answers, filling in some of the details needed to transform it into a full-blown theory.
- 10.
As a matter of fact, Devitt continued to be mistaken about this (as many others are – for some examples, see Bianchi and Bonanini 2014: 176 n. 2). Here is what he wrote many years later in an encyclopedic entry on reference : “Kripke and Donnellan followed their criticism of description theories of names with an alternative view. This became known as the ‘causal’ ‘historical’ theory, although Kripke and Donnellan regarded their view as more of a ‘picture’ than a theory” (1998: 157–158). And he continued: “The basic idea of this theory is that a name designates whatever is causally linked to it in an appropriate way” (158). What Bonanini and I have argued is precisely that Kripke and Donnellan had very different ideas on what the “appropriate” causal link is, hence that they did not offer one single picture, but two rather different ones.
- 11.
- 12.
- 13.
In fact, Bonanini and I ended our article by claiming that Donnellan’s historical explanation theory can be seen as anticipating some radical theses later defended by Donald Davidson (1986, 1994):
we believe that according to Donnellan there are no languages at all, at least from a semantic point of view. What there are, in the end, are just uses of expressions, aimed at communication. There are present uses, and there are past uses. Before using an expression in order to communicate something, it is certainly helpful to consider preceding uses of it – if they succeeded in communicating what we want to communicate, they may succeed again. But, as we have seen in the case of proper names, past uses do not determine the semantic properties of the expression at all. In order to communicate, anything goes, if it may reasonably succeed. (Bianchi and Bonanini 2014: 201)
I criticize this aspect of Donnellan’s theory in my forthcoming “Reference and Language.”
- 14.
- 15.
- 16.
For more on Kripke’s distinction, the Gricean project, and Devitt’s perspective with regard to them, see Bianchi 2019.
- 17.
On this issue, see also Hinchliff 2012.
- 18.
Kaplan jokingly writes that “[i]n our culture, the role of language creators is largely reserved to parents, scientists, and headline writers for Variety; it is by no means the typical use of language as the subjectivist semanticists believe” (602). As a matter of fact, things are not so simple, because of the phenomenon of inadvertent creation exemplified by the “Madagascar” case (see Bianchi 2015: 104–106 for a discussion).
- 19.
Another aspect of Devitt’s causal theory that is relevant in this context is that, according to it, proper names can be grounded in objects not only at the moment of their introduction, but on many later occasions. As Devitt writes, in fact, “Nana is involved in the causal network for her name at more points than its beginning at her naming ceremony; the network is multiply grounded in her” (1974: 198; 1981a: 56). These later groundings are semantically relevant: “[d]ubbings and other first uses do not bear all the burden of linking a name to the world” (2015: 114). Thus, speakers who produce a token of a name already in use do play, at least sometimes, a semantic role, according to Devitt. This, again, seems to militate against considering Devitt’s semantics as fully consumerist (as I take Kripke’s to be).
- 20.
I presented drafts of this paper at the Barcelona Language and Reality: Themes From Michael Devitt workshop and at the Dubrovnik Philosophy of Linguistics and Language course, both of which took place in September 2018. I am grateful to all those who intervened on those occasions. I would also like to thank Antonio Capuano and Michael Devitt for their comments. Notwithstanding the disagreement expressed in it, I hope that the paper made it clear how great my intellectual debt to the latter is.
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Bianchi, A. (2020). Reference and Causal Chains. In: Bianchi, A. (eds) Language and Reality from a Naturalistic Perspective. Philosophical Studies Series, vol 142. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-47641-0_6
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