Abstract
One cannot understand the word 'dog' unless one knows how to distinguish dogs from other objects, unless one has a way of discriminating between dogs and non-dogs. We may well be quite in the dark about how we come to possess such criteria and how we come to share them with other people, but we can hardly help assuming that we do possess and share them. For what can my understanding of 'dog' consist in if not a link in my mind between the word and a suitable dog-discriminating procedure? And how can my uttering 'Fred is not a dog' convey what I mean to Jones unless he associates with 'dog' the same criterion as I do? The same, for that matter, applies to 'Fred'; only here it is perhaps more suitable to speak of an identification procedure, since, in carrying it out, we pinpoint one single individual-Fred. The dog-discriminating procedure can, of course, be thought of as an identification procedure as well: as a procedure whose application to an individual results in identification of one of two objects, say truth and falsehood; moreover, applied to all individuals in the universe of discourse, it identifies a definite class-the class of dogs. In the name-intension-extension triangle it is the second vertex that has always been a matter of controversy. However, equating the intensions of terms like 'dog' and 'Fred' with identification procedures in the above sense may well be one of the least suspicious ways of construing them. Such procedures undoubtedly belong to the realm of abstract entities but possibly to the least objectionable section thereof. While I do believe that an ontological split of the world into things and identification procedures is an inevitable prerequisite to any satisfactory philosophy of language, this is not a point I intend to press here. What I am out to show in this paper is that thinking of intensions as identification pro-
Published Version
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