Naming and Contingency, and Some Implications for Begriffsgeschichte

Abstract

The contingency of proper names has implications for the history of concepts (‘Begriffsgeschichte’), especially with regard to the transmission of discourses among cultures and languages. “Pragmatic” theories of language that take account of hearers and social contexts are especially open to the problematics of contingency, but so is the New Theory of Reference proposed by Saul Kripke in Naming and Necessity (1972/1980). Slavoj Žižek and Judith Butler have explored the social, psychological, and political factors affecting the stability of proper names in their responses to Kripke's antidescriptivist account of reference; Michel Foucault addresses similar ideas in his reflections on the name of the author. There is an even more fundamental openness to contingency in Kripke's model than these theorists suggest. The contingency of naming and reference is explored briefly by way of the circulation of the terms “improvvisatore” and “improvisation” in the multicultural context of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe.