Against semantic multi-culturalism

Abstract

Kripkean anti-descriptivism about proper names has recently come under attack. The attack is not the result of theoretical considerations: a group of philosophers who practice what has come to be known as experimental philosophy, E. Machery, R. Mallon, S. Nichols and S. Stich [MMNS], contend that there is empirical evidence casting doubt on the claim that proper names are not descriptive. MMNS's conclusions and, specially, the method by which they have been reached have, we are told, ‘rudely challenged the way professional philosophers think of themselves’ (Appiah 2007). MMNS argue (2004 and forthcoming) that intuitions as regards how the reference of a proper name is determined vary from culture to culture. Their argument is based on an experiment that compares the intuitions about proper name use of a group of fluent English speakers in Hong Kong with those of a group of non-Chinese American students. On the basis of the result MMNS conclude that whereas Westerners are prone to rely on intuitions that match the causal-historical picture proposed originally by Donnellan and Kripke, East Asians appear to be driven by pure old-style descriptivism. It is tempting to conclude that MMNS's results suggest that in some cultures speakers use names according to what is predicted by descriptivist theories, the very same theories that we have been taking as refuted by Kripke. If so, the alleged intuitions that inspire Kripke's stand on proper names are circumscribed to a cultural group, and the theory of reference that emerges from them is not a general theory of reference for proper names. The causal-historical picture is but one way to explain how names connect to their referents and room needs to be made for classical descriptivism.