On Quasi-Proper Names

This paper offers a developmental account of Peirce's theory of proper names. It identifies two main dimensions of Peirce's thinking on proper names, a "taxonomic dimension," concerning the place of proper names within the taxonomy of signs, and a "maturational dimension," concerning the different "stages of maturity" a proper name goes through when interpreted. These two dimensions also constitute distinct phases of Peirce's (continuously evolving) theory of proper names. The chronological reconstruction offered in the paper is also shown to solve some apparent inconsistencies in what Peirce wrote about proper names.

Evans' theory of proper names has paradoxical consequence; some of those who can perfectly use a proper name to refer to its referent cannot properly understand statements containing that name. In this paper, I try to avoid this counter-intuitive consequence by taking into account to what Evans fails to appreciate, i.e., contributions of social character of proper names to entertaining thought about their referents - we can use a proper name as a tool for discriminating an object. I also illustrate a type of thought component, 'proper name concept', as I call it, that Evans didn't consider of. The proper name concept is objectfile that contains 'descriptions' or 'information' of referent and is connected to the referent by social convention rather than description.

De la description définie au nom propre de personne : sur un apport possible de l'anthroponymie historique à la théorie du nom propre modifié 1. Objectif, méthode, base documentaire 1.1.Cette contribution à la réflexion sur la modification du nom propre entend renouer le dialogue entre onomastique historique et théorie du nom propre, deux disciplines dont le divorce est déjà ancien 1 , mais dont les résultats respectifs, pensons-nous, sont appelés à s'enrichir mutuellement.1.2.Le corpus sur lequel nous nous appuierons est constitué de la partie consacrée à la France d'oïl de la base de données anthroponymiques élaborée dans le cadre du projet PatRom (Patronymica Romanica.Dictionnaire historique de l'anthroponymie romane).Ce projet réunit une quinzaine d'équipes de chercheurs d'expression romane, du Portugal à la Roumanie 2 ; il a pour but l'étymologisation du noyau commun du stock anthroponymique d'origine lexicale des différents pays européens de langue romane 3 .Pour le domaine qui nous intéresse, la base de données PatRom regroupe 172.464 occurrences tirées de 184 sources historiques (cartulaires, rôles de taille, obituaires, dénombrements, etc.) du 11 e au 18 e siècle 4 .Ce corpus, qui a été établi selon des critères philologiques solides, permet de saisir les noms propres de personnes français dans leur usage réel à travers les siècles.En dépit de sa richesse et de sa fiabilité, cette base est encore largement sous-exploitée : pour l'heure, elle n'a été utilisée que pour l'élaboration des 290 articles (ALACER, ALAMANNUS, ALBUS, AMĀ-RUS, AURICULA, BALBUS, BECCUS, *BLANK, *BLUND, BRITTUS, CABALLUS, CATALĀNUS, etc.) du dictionnaire PatRom en cours de publication.Notre recherche en constitue une exploitation d'un autre ordre, syntaxique plutôt que lexical.Le recours à ce vaste corpus fiable s'imposait d'autant plus que la réflexion des théoriciens du nom propre s'appuie bien souvent sur une base documentaire assez restreinte et en général limitée à l'époque contemporaine.1.3.Concrètement, nous nous proposons de réfléchir au statut de l'article défini non agglutiné sur lequel s'ouvrent certains noms propres de personne médiévaux.Retenant ce seul critère comme indice de modification, nous nous rangeons donc résolument du côté des théoriciens du nom propre qui privilégient l'approche syntaxique, au détriment de l'approche sémantique, qui se prête moins bien à l'analyse d'états de langue anciens (cf.Noailly 1999, 109-111 pour une discussion des deux points de vue).Voici quelques exemples relevés dans les sources patromiennes 5 :1 Cf.Chambon 1988, 177 : «On signale ici ce numéro de Langages [...].Les onomasticiens auxquels il aurait échappé s'y reporteront avec profit.Non seulement parce que les cinq contributions [...] illustrentpartiellement -la diversité des approches actuelles du nom propre (en logique, en philosophie du langage, en psycholinguistique, en anthropologie, notamment), mais encore parce qu'ils verront comment leur discipline est perçue de l'extérieur [5, 103, 104, 105].L'absence de représentation de l'onomastique en tant que discipline historico-philologique [...] est symptomatique.L'onomastique française serait-elle en passe de se laisser évincer -sans même, peut-être, s'en apercevoir -de son propre domaine ?» 2 Cf.

Yes, Aristotle was named ‘Aristotle’. I want to show that since ‘Aristotle’ is a proper name, this is true by definition. My theory of proper names is a version of Russell's, a theory that a name is equivalent in meaning to definite description(s) which single out the individual, if there is one, to which the name refers. (“When I say,e.g. ‘Homer existed’, I am meaning by ‘Homer’ some description, say ‘the author of the Homeric poems’ .”) Braithwaite at one time said that the proper name ‘Aristotle’ meant the description ‘the individual named “Aristotle” ’. This theory, which makes it contradictory to suppose that Aristotle was not (the individual) named ‘Aristotle’ I will argue is the correct one. This will involve some explanation of what naming is, which I will carry out in the first two sections. My contention is that naming is an activity that can be done either explicitly or non-explicitly. And names can be conferred either (a) on the basis of acquaintance or (b) by associating the name with descriptions.

The difficulties in classifying family names such as dad, mum, uncle, son, etc., as proper names or common names take on a new dimension if we integrate certain uses of undetermined common names such as baby (ex: If mom is okay, baby is okay). The main objective of this article is to use these examples to bring about some changes in the theories of proper names and common names. Starting from Alan Gardiner’s proposal, which gives a central role to proper names’ signifiers, and adding the concept of “validity sphere” inspired by Benoît de Cornulier, this work lays the foundations of a unified description.

Saul Kripke in his revolutionary and influential series of lectures from the early 1970s (later published as the book Naming and Necessity) famously resurrected John Stuart Mill's theory of proper names. Kripke at the same time rejected Mill's theory of general terms. According to Kripke, many natural kind terms do not fit Mill's account of general terms and are closer to proper names. Unfortunately, Kripke and his followers ignored key passages in Mill's A System of Logic in which Mill enunciates a sophisticated and detailed theory of natural kind terms that anticipates and is in some ways superior to Kripke's.

In this article, I defend a non-classical version of descriptive theory of reference-fixing for proper names against objections raised by Kripke. I consider that descriptive information associated by speakers with a proper name has semantic value and thus should be taken into account by any theory of proper names. I do not defend any one descriptive theory in particular, only general assumptions that can underpin different elaborations of a descriptive theory of names. The structure of this paper is as follows. In the first part, I will briefly explain the notion of descriptivism and how taking temporal parameters into account influences the formulation of the theses of descriptivism. Next I will explain why Kripke’s modal objection does not apply to a descriptive theory of reference-fixing, formulate assumptions of the descriptive theory defended in this paper and respond to Kripke’s epistemic objection. In the second part (to be published in the next issue), I respond to particular strands of Kripke’s semantic objection and show that the defended version has all the virtues traditionally associated with descriptive theories.

Many philosophers and linguists have been attracted to counterpart theory as a framework for natural language semantics. I raise a novel problem for counterpart theory involving simple declarative sentences with proper names. To resolve this problem, counterpart theorists must introduce the notion of a counterpart in the semantics of the non‐modal fragment of language. I develop my preferred solution: a novel theory of proper names as counterpart‐theoretic individual concepts. The resulting view highlights a hitherto unnoticed fact: counterpart theorists should formulate their theory, not by modifying the standard semantics for modal operators, but by modifying the standard semantics for names and variables.

This paper embeds a theory of proper names in a general approach to singular reference based on type-free property theory. It is proposed that a proper name “N” is a sortal common noun whose meaning is essentially tied to the linguistic type “N”. Moreover, “N” can be singularly referring insofar as it is elliptical for a definite description of the form the “N” Following Montague, the meaning of a definite description is taken to be a property of properties. The proposed theory fulfils the major desiderata stemming from Kripke's works on proper names.

Literature on Personal Names in English, 1954

The aim is to reveal the role of personal names in creating comic effect in different types of humorous discourse. A special focus is placed on J.S. Mill’s, A. Gardiner’s, B. Russel’s theories of proper names. Emphasis is also laid on the contribution of H. Spencer, Ch. Darwin, B. Jonson and W. Shakespeare to the development of the general theory of humour. The basic research methods are semiotic, linguo-stylistic and etymological analysis, data interpretation, website traffic analysis. Theoretical works by British philosophers, scientists and writers can be used as a methodological foundation for studying personal names in humorous discourse. Analysis of English onomastic jokes, puzzles, articles from British magazines and internet-memes proves the pervasive nature of onomastic humour in English. The author hypothesizes that the interest of the most outstanding British thinkers taken in personal names and humour are hardly accidental and can be explained by the uniqueness of British culture and national identity.

In order to by-pass immaterial historical bickering I shall stipulatively mean by ‘Radical Millianism’ just this much more than what Katz in his recent article in The Philosophical Review, ‘Names without Bearers’ (for short, NWB), means by the unqualified term, ‘Millianism’; namely, whereas Katz means by ‘Millianism’ that theory of proper names (proper nouns) which holds that proper names (nouns) ‘have no linguistic meaning,’

My chief purpose here is to offer a somewhat comprehensive account or theory of proper names as they function in ordinary experience. Since the way any standard piece of language functions in experience hinges on the meaning of that piece of language, we are here concerned both with the main pragmatic roles of proper names and with the fundamental semantic properties. Because we aim at comprehensiveness, as well as correctness, we will collect rich and diversified data, capable of exhibiting some important conceptual and psychological patterns of our uses of proper names; we will also collect rich and careful exegesis so as to distill criteria of adequacy that can guide us in developing a good account of such patterns. I really want to know how proper names function in daily life. The resulting theory is called the Restricted-VariablelRetrieval View of Proper Names.

In Marty’s Untersuchungen zur Grundlegung der allgemeinen Grammatik und Sprachphilosophie (Marty 1908, 438f., henceforth ‘U’) there is a long footnote about the semantic status of proper names. This footnote occasioned a remarkable defence of the thesis that proper names have meaning. The discussion, found in L. Landgrebe’s work on Marty (Landgrebe 1934, § 16), presents strong arguments against the currently popular causal theory of proper names. These arguments, which have an obvious relevance to Kripke’s views, will be discussed in what follows. I will not go into Landgrebe’s critique of Marty’s views. Instead, I will emphasize the shared strand of systematic argument. But before we come to the relevant passages, a few basic reflections about Kripke’s work on proper names are in order.

In his Naming and Necessity, Saul Kripke puts forth a series of arguments against theories of proper names he calls Frege‐Russell theories. As the title reveals, Kripke takes Gottlob Frege's theory of sense and Bedeutung to be a good representative of these theories. In this essay, I characterize how Frege might have answered Kripke. I agree with Kripke that presumably Frege thought that the sense of a proper name is the same as some definite description. I, however, question his assumption that Frege's theory of proper names was a theory of meaning as he uses the term. I go even further and suggest that it is not so obvious that Frege thought, at least always, that the role of the concept of sense in his theory is a semantic concept at all. This constitutes the heart of my reconstruction of Frege's answer. I argue that this, together with Frege's conception of natural languages, would have allowed him to hold that the sense of a proper name may sometimes be the same as the sense of an indefinite or even a wrong description. This makes Frege's theory immune to Kripke's counter‐arguments.