Essentialism about Meaning: Empty Names

Abstract

A possible undesirable consequence of the direct reference theory is that its truth would imply empty names, e.g. Zeus, Santa Claus, lack significance. An advantage of Frege’s theory is that it makes good sense of the fact that we ordinarily treat empty names as significant, and perfectly able to function in discourse. It is argued that the direct reference theorist need not resort to denying that empty names have semantic significance, or to maintaining that propositions with empty names as constituents are intact – say something – but have gaps in the subject position. Essentialism about meaning declares that it is an essential condition for being a proper name of a language that it has a bearer; Wettstein proposes to drop this requirement in favor of a paradigm-centered approach in order to dissolve the problem about empty names. The advantages of this approach with regard to fictional names and negative existentials are discussed.