Issues in the Philosophy of Proper Names

Abstract

Among words commonly classed as names, proper names form a certain natural class which is interesting because of its semantic, psychological, and cognitive role. Proper names are par excellence expressions used in everyday language, and — in the field of scholarship — expressions used in the language of historiography and other humanities. This is due to the basic function of proper names, which consists in naming individual objects that have a certain personality or else a quasi-personality or pseudo-personality. As such, proper names are accordingly most closely connected with man and his conscious activity, for they are either names of human individuals (‘Peter’, ‘John’, etc.), whether real or fictitious (such as names of literary characters), or names conventionally given by human beings to other objects in order to single out their individual character and to bring out their historical continuity. For instance, we give proper names to domestic or domesticated animals with which we have personal contacts: dogs, cats, hedgehogs, etc. We give such names to old trees which are objects of worship (such as the ‘Devaitis’ oak in medieval Lithuania), to inanimate objects which are of special value to us and have a history of their own (cf. the names of knights’ swords, such as Roland’s ‘Durandal’, or precious stones, such as ‘Kohi-noor’, etc.). Proper names are also given to topographical objects, such as towns, rivers, mountains, etc., and in such cases serve to denote certain individual objects connected with man and his past.