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Prior and Particulars

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 January 2009

William Godfrey-Smith
William Godfrey-Smith
Affiliation:
The Australian National University
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Extract

Arthur Prior is perhaps best known for his contributions to the philosophy of time. I shall argue here that his views about reference are not easily reconciled with his views about time, and suggest that his views about existence and his acceptance of some dubious Cartesian epistemological principles led him to increasingly bizarre and counter-intuitive claims about the sufficient conditions for successful reference to particulars. First he seems to have claimed that we cannot refer to individuals which no longer exist; then that we can refer only to individuals which stand in a direct perceptual relationship to us; and finally that one can really only talk about oneself. In this paper I shall trace the development in Prior's thought which led him to this extraordinary conclusion.

Type
Articles
Information
Philosophy , Volume 53 , Issue 205 , July 1978 , pp. 335 - 342
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1978

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References

1 Cf. Prior, A. N., Past, Present and Future (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Papers on Time and Tense (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968).Google Scholar

2 Prior, , Time and Modality (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1957), 31.Google Scholar

3 Prior, , Objects of Thought, Geach, P. T. and Kenny, A. J. P. (eds.) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), 169.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

4 Geach, P. T., ‘Form and Existence’, in God and the Soul (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969), Ch. IV.Google Scholar

5 Prior, , ‘Changes in Events and Changes in Things’, in Papers on Time and Tense, 13.Google Scholar

6 Cf. Time and Modality, 36 ff.Google Scholar

7 Prior, , ‘Oratio Obliqua’, in Papers in Logic and Ethics, Geach, P. T. and Kenny, A. J. P. (eds) (London: Duckworth, 1976), Ch. 15.Google Scholar

8 Prior, , ‘I’, in Khanbhai, B. Y. et al. (eds), Jowett Papers 1968–69 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1970), 6 f.Google Scholar

9 Prior, , ‘Oratio Obliqua’, 154.Google Scholar

10 Ibid.

11 Ibid.

12 Peirce, C. S., Collected Papers, Hartshorne, C. and Weiss, P. (eds) (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1931–1935), 2.337.Google Scholar

13 Kripke, S., ‘Naming and Necessity’, in Davidson, D. and Karman, G. (eds) Semantics of Natural Language (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1972), 253–355.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

14 Prior, , ‘Oratio Obliqua’, 157.Google Scholar

15 Ibid., 155.

16 Russell, B. A. W., ‘Knowledge by Acquaintance and Knowledge by Description’, in Mysticism and Logic (London: Longmans Green & Co., 1918), 224.Google Scholar

17 Ibid., 224, note 2.

18 Prior, , ‘I’, 6.Google Scholar

19 Prior, , Past, Present and Future, 19.Google Scholar

20 Prior, , ‘Thank Goodness That's Over’, in Papers in Logic and Ethics, 78.Google Scholar

21 Prior, , ‘Oratio Obliqua’, 156.Google Scholar

22 ‘Names, Indices, and Individuals’, Analysis 37 (10 1976), 1–10.Google Scholar