Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-g7gxr Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-02T22:17:34.342Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Proper Names: Ideas and Chains

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Josep Macià
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Chains, well I can't break away from these chains[… ]

And they ain't the kind that you can see.

(“Chains,” Gerry Goffin and Carole King)

The main aim of this paper is to present a certain notion — that of Coordination — and an associated requirement — the Coordination Requirement (CR) —,and to show how they help us to better understand the communicative role of proper names. A second aim of the paper is to use these notions to defend the kind of view I favour regarding the meaning of proper names — a certain kind of descriptivist theory — by showing that this view is not subject to two seemingly powerful considerations against it that have been provided from two different camps: one from the anti-descriptivist camp (by Saul Kripke in Naming and Necessity), another from the neo-Fregean camp (by Richard Heck in The Sense of Communication). In dealing with these matters, I will have to discuss the role that complex individual concepts (or ideas) play in allowing us to understand and use proper names.

Type
Part A: Language
Information
Canadian Journal of Philosophy Supplementary Volume , Volume 30: New Essays in The Philosophy of Language and Mind , 2004 , pp. 129 - 155
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 2004

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Bach, K. 1987. Thought and Reference. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Byrne, A. and Thau, M. 1996. “In Defense of the Hybrid View.” Mind 105: 139-49.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Evans, G. 1982. The Varieties of Reference. Oxford: Clarendon Press.Google Scholar
García-Carpintero, M. 2000. “Fregean Sense and the Proper Function of Assertion: Comments on Textor.” Theoria 15: 303-16.Google Scholar
Heck, R.G. Jnr 1995. “The Sense of Communication.” Mind 104: 79–106.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Heck, R.G. Jnr 1996. “Communication and Knowledge: Rejoinder to Byrne and Thau.” Mind 105: 151-56.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kripke, S. 1980. Naming and Necessity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Loar, B. 1976. “The Semantics of Singular Terms.” Philosophical Studies 30: 353-77.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Macià, J. 1998. “Does Naming and Necessity Refute Descriptivism?” Theoria 13:445-76.Google Scholar
Recanati, F. 1993. Direct reference: From Language to Thought. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Wettstein, H. 1989. “Turning the Tables on Frege or How is it That ‘Hesperus is Hesperus’ is Trivial?” Philosophical Perspectives 3: 317–339.CrossRefGoogle Scholar