Deferred reference, meaning transfer or coercion? Toward a new principle of accounting for systematic uses of proper names

Abstract

Proper names are typically considered to be devices of individual reference. Since Frege (1882), the debate has mainly concerned the proper semantic characteristics of this individual reference. Burge (J Philos 70:425–439, 1973) challenged this focus by highlighting the predicative uses of proper names and proposed that names are predicates even if they appear as bare singulars in the argument position. In turn, this unificatory account was subjected to criticism by Böer, Jeshion, and others, who provided counterexamples to the predicativist analysis of proper names. In this paper, I want to analyze the nonreferential uses of proper names, which, by being nonreferential, provide a challenge for both predicativism and referentialism about proper names. I critically examine the processes proposed as possible accounts of the problematic examples, i.e. deferred reference, meaning transfer, and coercion, and argue that they do not provide an adequate analysis. I propose an interpretive mechanism that accounts for these problematic uses of proper names, as well as a new principle for classifying the kinds of uses of proper names based on the interpretive mechanisms underlying those uses and which includes all of the kinds of uses discussed in the literature.