Names and Attitudes

Abstract

Arthur Burks was one of the first philosophers to recognize the inadequacy of the traditional “Description Theory” of proper names inherited from Frege and Russell; he was also one of the first to suggest a plausible revision of that theory (Burks [5]). His suggestion — that proper names be viewed as indexical definite descriptions — anticipated by nearly three decades the general drift of accounts of proper names such as those currently offered by Tyler Burge (in [4]) and Stephen Schiffer (in [22]). Description Theories, however, have recently come under frontal attack from proponents of so-called Causal-Historical Theories (e.g., Kripke [13] and Donnellan [10]), who urge a radically different account of the mechanisms of reference. Whatever one may think of this attack — and its success is by no means uncontested (cf. McKinsey [19]–[20] and Boor [2]) — Description Theories still have many enthusiastic supporters (including Burks in [6]). Nor do they lack ammunition for a counteroffensive. Their most powerful weapon is derived from the well-known tangle of problems attending the interpretation of names in propositional attitude contexts, which they increasingly point to as evidence against the Causal-Historical Theorists’ contention that names “merely designate” and do not “express (descriptive) senses” (cf., e.g., Loar [18]).