Abstract
There is an extremely plausible principle about proper names that many philosophers up to the present have either assumed or argued for. I will call it the ‘principle of identifying descriptions’. One illustration of it is in this passage from Strawson’s Individuals:
...it is no good using a name for a particular unless one knows who or what is referred to by the use of the name. A name is worthless without a backing of descriptions which can be produced on demand to explain the application.1
I am indebted to students and colleagues for comments and suggestions, in particular Professor John Perry and Mr. Theodore Budlong. I believe also that some departure from the traditional alternatives in theories about reference and proper names is ‘in the air’ and that views along some of the lines I take in this paper I may share with others, although the view I attack is still the dominant one. I believe that Saul Kripke has a very similar position, at least insofar as denial of the prevalent theories go. And, indeed, I think I may owe one of my counter-examples to him through a secondhand source (although I did not understand the relevance until much later). David Kaplan’s paper, ‘Quantifying In’, Synthese 19 (1969) 178–214, also seems to me to be in the same vein, though I am not sure I agree with a variety of details and the main purpose of the paper is not to mount an assault on theories of proper names.
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References
P. F. Strawson, Individuals, Methuen & Co. Ltd., London, 1959, p. 20.
Mind67 (1958) 166–173.
‘Lectures on Logical Atomism’ in Logic and Knowledge (ed. by Robert C. Marsh), George Allen & Unwin Ltd., London, 1956, p. 243.
Ibid., p. 252.
‘Proper Names’, op. cit., p. 171.
In ‘Reference and Definite Descriptions’, The Philosophical Review 75 (1966) pp. 281–304, and ‘Putting Humpty Dumpty Together Again’, The Philosophical Review 77 (1968) 203–215.
I assume here Russell’s definition of denoting, which I think makes it a well-defined relation and ought always to be kept in mind in discussions of reference so that other relations may be compared with it: An entity X is denoted by a definite description, ‘the φ’; just in case X uniquely possesses the property designated by ‘φ’.
Although I do not have space to develop it, my account of proper names in this paper seems to me to make what I called ‘referential’ definite descriptions (as discussed in ‘Reference and Definite Descriptions’, op. cit.) a close relative of proper names.
Below, Section VI.
E.g., in ‘The Thought: A Logical Inquiry’ (translated by A. M. and Marcelle Quinton), Mind 65 (1956) 289–311. Also in P. F. Strawson (ed.), Philosophical Logic, Oxford Readings in Philosophy, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1967, pp. 17–38.
That is to say, if what they refer to is a function of the set of identifying descriptions each possesses. In that case there would be the logical possibility of each speaker’s set picking out different objects, each possessing the properties one speaker would attribute to the referent, but not those the other would.
Individuals, op. cit., pp. 191–192.
Loc. cit.
Ibid., p. 182, footnote 1.
The last part of the remark is there simply to indicate that the parents need not even consider what the child says to be true; not only does the child not have a ‘backing of descriptions’, but the predicate in the sentence he uses need not apply. This connects up with the position suggested later in the paper.
Individuals, op. cit., p. 182.
In the example as presented I have the subject of the experiment introduce the names. Nothing hinges on this. The experimenters could just as well use the names and give the subjects ‘identifying descriptions’. Nor is there any importance in the fact that the example contains people, the experimenters, ‘in the know’. For all that, everyone concerned might have the inverting spectacles on that I introduce.
The idea behind this example originated with me from a conversation with Rogers Albritton in 1966 and may derive from Saul Kripke, who has, I believe, a view about proper names not dissimilar to the one in this paper.
For the purpose of keeping the example within limits, I compress the two uses of the name, that I claim refer, unknown to the speaker, to two different people, into one conversation. I have sometimes, however, found it useful to make the case stronger intuitively by supposing that the person met at the party, for example, who is not the famous philosopher, becomes a longer term acquaintance of the speaker (who continues under the illusion that he is the famous man). In subsequent conversation, perhaps months or years later and after his friends have met the bogus philosopher, his use of the name is even more clearly a reference to the man he met at the party and whom he continues to see. Yet if he claimed to know, as in my example, J. L. Aston-Martin, in circumstances where it is clear that the point of the remark has to do with claiming to know a famous man, I still think we would suppose him to have referred to Aston-Martin, the famous philosopher, and not to man he met at the party, who later is one of his close acquaintances.
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© 1972 D. Reidel Publishing Company, Dordrecht-Holland
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Donnellan, K.S. (1972). Proper Names and Identifying Descriptions. In: Davidson, D., Harman, G. (eds) Semantics of Natural Language. Synthese Library, vol 40. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-2557-7_10
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