“Literal” Uses of Proper Names

Abstract

In each case, we have a proper name occurring in a position reserved for count nouns like ‘hunter’ and ‘bear’. The proper names here occur as complements to quantificational or numeric determiners or as bare plurals. Let us call these predicate positions. We will call a name when it is in such a position a predicative name and when one is used in such a position, we will say that it is being used predicatively. And we will use these same expressions for names in similar determiner-name phrases, whether with or without a modifier (‘a weary Alfred’, ‘the Alfred I know’, ‘most Alfreds’, ‘which Alfred’, ‘that sultry Alfred’, et cetera). From the perspective of compositional semantics, we want to treat the proper names here—proper names in predicate position—as having the same type of semantic value as that of other count nouns, namely, the semantic value of a predicate. I will assume for concreteness and simplicity that this is the predicate’s extension, by which I mean the set of individuals of which the predicate is true. Meanwhile, from the perspective of meaning analysis, we want to treat the proper names here as multiply applicable predicates that are true of just those things that are bearers of the name. For the truth of (1) it has to be that some individuals with the name ‘Alfred’ are crazy and that some individuals with the name ‘Alfred’ are sane. For the sake of having a uniform compositional semantics for proper names, predicativists treat proper names as predicates even when they appear in an argument position—as in ‘Alfred is crazy’. We’ll call these “referential” proper names (or proper