Language, Philosophy of – Page 3 – Maverick Philosopher

Did Kepler Die in Misery?

Either he did or he didn't. Suppose I say that he did, and you say that he didn't. We both presuppose, inter alia, that there was a man named 'Kepler.' Now that proposition that we both presuppose, although entailed both by Kepler died in misery and Kepler did not die in misery is no part of what I assert when I assert that Kepler died in misery.

Why not?

Well, to proceed by reductio, if what I assert when I assert that Kepler died in misery is that (there was a man named 'Kepler' & he died in misery), then what you assert when you contradict me is that (either there was no man named 'Kepler' or that he did not die in misery). But the latter is not what you assert, and the former is not what I assert. That is because we take it for granted that there was a man who rejoiced under the name 'Johannes Kepler.'

What I assert is that Kepler died in misery, and what you assert is that Kepler did not die in misery. But we both presuppose that there was a man named 'Kepler.' The proposition that we both presuppose, while entailed by what we each assert, is not part of what we each assert.

That, I take it, is Frege's famous argument in Ueber Sinn und Bedeutung.

It seems pretty good to me.

Assertion and Presupposition: An Argument for a Distinction

1) Someone, such as Sophomore Sam, who asserts that there are no truths does not assert that there are truths.

And yet

2) That there are no truths entails that there is at least one truth. (Why? Because it is impossible for the first proposition to be true and the second false.)

Therefore

3) If someone S asserts that p, and p entails q, it does not follow that S asserts that q. (Assertion is not closed under entailment.)

4) Although Sam does not ASSERT that there is at least one truth when he assertively utters the sentence 'There are no truths,' he is in some relation to the proposition that there is at least one truth. I will say that he PRESUPPOSES it.

Therefore

5) There is a distinction we need to make and it is reasonably labelled the distinction between ASSERTING a proposition and PRESUPPOSING a proposition. An act of asserting can carry a presupposition that is not asserted. Sam's act of asserting that there are no truths presupposes but does not assert that there is at least one truth.

If you don't accept this argument, tell me which premise(s) you reject and why.

Is Assertion Closed Under Entailment? Assertion and Presupposition

Suppose a person asserts that p. Suppose also that p entails q. Does it follow that the person asserting that p thereby asserts that q? If so, and if p and q are any propositions you like, then assertion is closed under entailment. If assertion is not closed under entailment, then there will be examples in which a person asserts that p, p entails q, but the person does not assert that q.

By 'entailment' I understand a relation between propositions. P entails q iff it is impossible for p to be true, and q false. By 'assertion' I mean a speech act, an act of asserting, a concrete, datable, linguistic performance, not a proposition. By 'the content of an assertion' I mean the proposition expressed when a person makes an assertion. A proposition is not the same as a sentence. 'The war has come to an end' is a sentence in English. 'Der Krieg hat zu Ende gekommen' is a sentence in German. The sentences are different, both at the type level and at the token level. And yet they can both be used to express one and the same thought. That same thought is the proposition. By 'thought' here I do not mean an occurrent episode of thinking, but the accusative (direct object) of such an act of thinking. You could also call it a 'content' although that term is ambiguous for reasons I won't go into now.

Preliminaries aside, back to our question.

That James no longer works for Amazon has among its entailments that James worked for Amazon, that someone named 'James' worked for Amazon, and that someone no longer works for Amazon.

Now suppose I assert that James no longer works for Amazon. Do I thereby assert that James worked for Amazon? I say No.

Here is a more striking example. Sophomore Sam asserts that there are no truths. The content of his act of assertion, namely, the proposition that there are no truths, entails that the content of his assertion is not true. But surely the latter is no part of what Sam asserts.

So assertion is not closed under entailment.

Suppose that Tom asserts that he is glad that Trump beat Hillary. The content of the assertion entails that Trump beat Hillary. But that Trump beat Hillary is not what Tom asserts. We can say that Tom's act of assertion presupposes that Trump beat Hillary. But neither Tom nor his act of assertion is a proposition. So if Tom's act of assertion presupposes that Trump beat Hillary, then presupposition is not a relation between propositions, but a relation between a non-proposition (a person or his speech act) and a proposition.

On the other hand, that Tom is glad that Trump beat Hillary entails that Trump beat Hillary. This is a relation between propositions and it makes some sense to say that the first presupposes the second.

This raises a question. Is presupposition primarily something that people do, or is it primarily a relation between propositions?

A Weird ‘Fregean’ Ontological Argument

London Ed asks:

Which step of the argument below do you disagree with?

a) If a sentence containing a proper name is meaningful, then the proper name is meaningful, i.e. it designates.

This is a standard assumption about compositionality.

BV: I have a problem right here. I accept the compositionality of meaning. But a proper name can have meaning without designating anything. As I see it, meaning splits into sense (Sinn) and reference (Bedeutung). And I don't see any need to distinguish between reference and designation. So there can be a proper name that has meaning (sense) without designating anything. 'Vulcan' (the planet) is an example. Here is another:

'Kepler died in misery.' The sentence is meaningful; hence, by compositionality, 'Kepler' is meaningful. Now assume that presentism is true and that only present items exist. Then Kepler does not exist. (Of course he does not exist now; the presentist implication is that he does not exist at all.) If Kepler does not exist at all, then he cannot now be referred to or designated. But when I now assertively utter 'Kepler died in misery,' I assert a proposition that is true now and is therefore meaningful now. It follows that the meaning of 'Kepler' is not exhausted by its designatum. 'Kepler' is not a mere Millian tag. There may be Millian tags, but ordinary proper names are not such.

Now London Ed is, I think, a presentist. If so, he ought to be open to the above argument.

b) If the proper name does not designate, the sentence containing it is not meaningful (contraposition).

BV: That is the case only if the meaning of a name = its referent, the thing designated. That cannot be. Consider 'Vulcan does not exist.' It's true, hence meaningful. So 'Vulcan' has a meaning, by compositionality. If so, and if meaning = referent, then 'Vulcan' does not have meaning. Contradiction. Ergo, a proper name can have meaning without designating anything. Negative existentials are a real problem for Millian theories of names.

c) If ‘God does not exist’ is true, then ‘God’ does not designate.

BV: No doubt.

d) If ‘God does not exist’ is true, then ‘God does not exist’ is meaningless.

BV: That is the case only on the assumption that the meaning of a name is exhausted by its reference, i.e., that the meaning of a name just is its designatum. The assumption is false.

e) ‘God does not exist’ is not meaningless. (it is something debated over many centuries, no firm conclusion so far)

BV: That's right!

f) ‘God does not exist’ is meaningful, but not true (d and e above)

BV: That follows, but (d) is false.

g) ‘God does exist’ is true (excluded middle)

BV: Valid move, but again (d) is false. So argument unsound.

h) Therefore God exists (disquotation)

BV: Valid inference, but again unsound.

A Christological and Mariological Query That Leads into the Philosophy of Language

Theme music: What If God Was One of Us (just a slob like one of us)?

My favorite Oregonian luthier, Dave Bagwill, checks in:

Karl White wrote in your post of 12-6-18: "If Jesus is a person of the Godhead then it must hold that his essence is immutable and above contingent change, particularly in response to human actions." In what way COULD "Jesus" be a 'person of the Godhead'? If I understand the classic narrative correctly, Mary, his mother, was a virgin who was made pregnant by the "overshadowing" of the Holy Spirit. So: there was an egg! A contingent egg, with DNA. And something fertilized it, supernaturally.

That's right. On the classical narrative, Jesus was born of a virgin without a natural father. The fertilization of the ovum in Mary was by a supernatural, miraculous, process. So while Jesus came into the world the way the rest of us poor schleps do, inter faeces et urinam nascimur, born between feces and urine, the pregnancy that eventuated in his birth was caused by the third person of the Trinity acting supernaturally upon natural material, namely the contingent ovum in contingent Mary, who is of course a creature who wouldn't have existed at all if nothing material had been created.

That was the moment of Jesus' conception. An eternal, pre-existent entity named 'Jesus' could not have existed before that conception, unless of course Mary's DNA contribution was of no account - but in that case, we were not given 'the man Jesus Christ, made in every way like his brothers so that He might be merciful and faithful as High Priest'. Heb. 2.27. Also see 1 Tim. 2.5,6. Because – to be made like us 'in every way' either means just that, or it doesn't. He was made in every way like us. If Mary made a DNA contribution at the moment of conception, then her son 'the man Jesus Christ ' did not pre-exist. Am I at all thinking clearly here?

Yes, Dave, you are thinking quite clearly, and I agree with you. But there are some nuances that give rise to questions that lead us into the philosophy of language and metaphysics.

You and I take 'Jesus' to refer to a particular man, a composite of human soul and human body, born of a woman at a particular place at a particular time. And I take it that we understand 'born' to imply that an entity that is born first comes into existence when it is born and did not exist before it was born. To be born, then, is not for an immaterial Platonic soul-substance to acquire a material body, but for a soul-body composite to come into existence. On this 'Aristotelian' conception of being born, nothing that is born pre-existed its being born. Being born is not an alterational (accidental) change, a change in an already-existing substratum/subject of change, but an existential (substantial) change, whereby something first comes into existence.

But couldn't someone who accepts the Chalcedonian one person-two natures view say that 'Jesus' refers to the Son, the second person of the Trinity? In the earlier thread, Fr. Kirby says, "The man Jesus is a person of the Godhead, if we understand 'the man Jesus' to be denominative rather than descriptive." I take it that a denominative term is one whose reference is not determined by the descriptive content, if any, that the term bears or suggests. Such a term refers directly as opposed to a descriptive term that refers via a description that an entity must satisfy in order to count as the referent of that term. If we take 'the man Jesus' to be denominative, then 'man' plays no role in determining the term's reference. The reference can succeed even if the referent is not a man. (And of course the Son, taken in himself and apart from the Incarnation, is not a man, i.e., does not have a human nature, but only a divine nature.) If so, then the following identities hold and hold necessarily:

The Son = the man Jesus.

The Son = Jesus.

It then follows that Jesus or the man Jesus is a person of the Godhead. To clarify this further we need to dip into the philosophy of language.

How does 'Jesus' refer? Does it refer via a description that the name abbreviates, or does it refer directly? Suppose by 'Jesus' we mean the Jewish carpenter born in Bethlehem to the virgin Mary by the agency of the Holy Spirit. The italicized phrase is what Russell calls a definite description, and his thesis about ordinary proper names is that they are definite descriptions in disguise. On this theory, 'Jesus' refers to whomever satisfies the description we associate with the name. It follows that the referent of the name must have the properties mentioned in the description. For example, 'Jesus' cannot refer to anything that was not born of a woman. Now the second person of the Trinity, necessary, co-eternal with the Father, etc., was not born of a woman, or born at all, nor was he from all eternity a carpenter, etc. Recall how I explained 'born' above: an entity that is born first comes into existence when it is born and did not exist before it was born. If this is what is meant by 'born,' then the Son (second person of the Trinity, Word, Logos) cannot be born. But then how are we to understand the Incarnation? The idea, of course, is that God the Son came into the material world by being born of a virginal human female. But how is this possible if nothing that is born pre-exists its being born?

We seem faced with an aporetic triad:

Jesus was born;

The Son of God was not born;

Jesus is the Son of God.

What's the solution? There is no problem if two different senses of 'born' are in play. I suppose I will be told that the Son is born in the following sense: the pre-existent Son which has prior to the Incarnation a divine nature only, acquires at the Incarnation a human nature in addition to the divine nature. Thus there is one person (suppositum, hypostasis), and that person is the second person of the Trinity, God the Son who, before the Incarnation has exactly one nature, the divine nature, and after the Incarnation exactly two natures, one divine the other human. Being born, for the Son, is then an alterational change in the Son: the pre-existent Son acquires a second nature.

The trouble with this answer is that it implies that Jesus is not "made in every way like his brothers." He is born in a different way. He is born in a Platonic or rather quasi-Platonic way whereas we are born in the 'Aristotelian' way. Dave and I did not exist before we were born/conceived. Jesus did exist before he was born/conceived assuming that 'Jesus' is used denominatively as opposed to descriptively. When we were born/conceived, we didn't acquire something that we lacked before, human nature; we were nothing at all before. But when Jesus was born he acquired something he did not have before, human nature.

My interim conclusion is that it is deeply problematic to take 'Jesus' as referring to God the Son. Insofar forth, Dave is vindicated against Karl. Jesus is no member of the Godhead.

Literal and Figurative

Suppose I am giving an argument while leading a hike. The guy directly behind me says, "I'm not following you." The sentence is ambiguous. In one sense — call it the first — it is plainly false; in the other sense — call it the second — it could be true. If the hiker behind me is not joking or lying, he is stating that he doesn't understand my argument, or see how the premises support the conclusion.

Obviously, we have here two different uses of 'follow.'

My question is: Is the second use literal or figurative?

Cast your vote for one of the four candidates below:

A. Both uses are literal.
B. Both uses are figurative.
C. The first is literal, the second is figurative.
D. The first is figurative, the second is literal.

(The same problem arises with respect to my use of 'see' above. Literal or figurative? If I see or don't see how a conclusion follows from premises, is that a literal or a figurative use of 'see'?)

See my Facebook page for the votes.

Of ‘Shit’ and ‘S**t,’ Type and Token

How many words immediately below, two or one?

cat

cat.

Both answers are plausible, and indeed equally plausible; but they can't both be right. There can't be both two words and one word. The obvious way to solve the problem is by distinguishing between token and type. We say: there are two tokens of the same type. One type, two tokens. That's a good proximate solution but not, if I am right, a good ultimate one. But that's a long story for another time.

Some write 's**t' to avoid writing 'shit.' Aren't they two tokens of the same word type? How then can one token be offensive and the other not? Or one more offensive than the other?

Here is a dilemma for your delectation:

Either we have two tokens of the same type or we don't. If the former, then both are offensive, and nothing is gained in point of politeness by writing 's**t' instead of 'shit.'

If, on the other hand, the inscriptions are not two tokens of the same type, then 's**t' cannot substitute for 'shit' in a manner that conveys the same meaning that 'shit' conveys to the English speaker.

We seem to have sunk into some really deep shit/s**t!

(Crossposted at my FB page where I expect some discussion to erupt.)

Millianism and Presentism: An Aporetic Pentad

A Millian about proper names holds that the meaning of a proper name is exhausted by its referent. Thus the meaning of 'Socrates' is Socrates. The meaning just is the denotatum. Fregean sense and reasonable facsimiles thereof play no role in reference. If so, vacuous names, names without denotata, are meaningless.

Presentism, roughly, is the claim that present items alone exist. This implies that no past or future items exist in the sense of 'exists' that the presentist shares with the eternalist who maintains that past, present, and future individuals all exist. What exactly this sense is is a nut we will leave for later cracking.

Now Socrates is a wholly past individual: he existed, but he does presently exist. It follows on presentism that Socrates does not exist at all. The point is not the tautology that Socrates, who is wholly past, does not exist at present. The point is that our man does not exist, period: he is now nothing at all.

We now have the makings of an aporetic pentad:

1) 'Socrates' has meaning. (Moorean fact)

2) The meaning of a proper name is its referent. (Millian thesis)

3) If a name refers to x, then x exists. (Plausible assumption)

4) 'Socrates' refers to a wholly past individual. (Moorean fact)

5) There are no past individuals. (Presentism)

It is easy to see that the pentad is logically inconsistent: the limbs cannot all be true. Which should we reject?

Only three of the propositions are candidates for rejection: (2), (3), (5). Of these three, (3) is the least rejectable, (5) is the second least rejectable, and (2) the most rejectable.

So I solve the pentad by rejecting the Millian thesis about proper names.

You might budge me from my position if you can give me a powerful argument for the Millian thesis.

Here, then, we have an 'aporetic' polyad that is not a genuine aporia. It is soluble and I just solved it.

The Recalcitrant Ostrich will probably disagree.

Does the Validity of an Argument Depend on the Order of its Premises?

Suppose you have a valid argument. Can you render the argument invalid by changing the display order of the premises?

I should think never. The Dark Ostrich, however, offers the following putative counterexample. He says he got it from Sainsbury; I should like to see a reference. And if there is a literature on this, I should like to see a bibliography.

(A) Some Greek is called ‘Mark’, Mark is an evangelist, therefore some Greek is an evangelist. (VALID)

(B) Mark is an evangelist, some Greek is called ‘Mark’, therefore some Greek is an evangelist. (NOT VALID)

(A) is valid and (B) is not. But this is not evidence that premise order affects validity. For while the sentences are the same, the premises of the two arguments are not the same. Made explicit, (A) becomes

(A*) Some Greek is called 'Mark', this same individual called 'Mark is an evangelist, therefore some Greek is an evangelist.

Clearly, (A*) and (B) have different premises. So it is not the different order of the premises in (B) that causes it to be invalid.

A Most Remarkable Prophecy

The Question

Suppose there had been a prophet among the ancient Athenians who prophesied the birth among them of a most remarkable man, a man having the properties we associate with Socrates, including the property of being named 'Socrates.' Suppose this prophet, now exceedingly old, is asked after having followed Socrates' career and having witnessed his execution: Was that the man you prophesied?

Does this question make sense? Suppose the prophet had answered, "Yes, that very man, the one who just now drank the hemlock, is the very man whose birth I prophesied long ago before he was born!" Does this answer make sense?

An Assumption

To focus the question, let us assume that there is no pre-existence of the souls of creatures. Let us assume that Socrates, body and soul, comes into existence at or near the time of his conception. For our problem is not whether we can name something that already exists, but whether we can name something that does not yet exist.

Thesis

I say that neither the question nor the answer make sense. (Of course they both make semantic sense; my claim is that they make no metaphysical or broadly logical sense.) What the prophet prophesied was the coming of some man with the properties that Socrates subsequently came to possess. What he could not have prophesied was the very man that subsequently came to possess the properties in question.

What the prophet prophesied was general, not singular: he prophesied that a certain definite description would come to be satisfied by some man or other. Equivalently, what the prophet prophesied was that a certain conjunctive property would come in the fullness of time to be instantiated, a property among whose conjuncts are such properties as being snubnosed, being married to a shrewish woman, being a master dialectician, being accused of being a corrupter of youth, etc. Even if the prophet had been omniscient and had been operating with a complete description, a description such that only one person in the actual world satisfies it if anything satisfies it, the prophecy would still be general.

Why would the complete description, satisfied uniquely if satisfied at all, still be general? Because of the possibility that some other individual, call him 'Schmocrates,' satisfy the description. For such a complete description, uniquely satisfied if satisfied at all, could not capture the very haecceity and ipseity and identity of a concrete individual.

We can call this view I am espousing anti-haecceitist: the non-qualitative thisness of a concrete individual cannot antedate the individual's existence. Opposing this view is that of the haecceitist who holds that temporally prior to the coming into existence of a concrete individual such as Socrates, the non-qualitative thisness of the individual is already part of the furniture of the universe.

My terminology is perhaps not felicitous. I am not denying that concrete individuals possess haecceity. I grant that haecceity is a factor in an individual's ontological 'assay' or analysis. What I am denying is that the haecceity of an individual can exist apart from the individual whose haecceity it is. From this it follows that the haecceity of an individual cannot exist before the individual exists.

But how could the non-qualitative thisness of a concrete individual be thought to antedate the individual whose thisness it is? We might try transforming the non-qualitative thisness of a concrete individual into an abstract object, a property that exists in every possible world, and thus at every time in those worlds having time.

Consider the putative property, identity-with-Socrates. Call it Socrateity. Suppose our Athenian prophet has the power to 'grasp' (conceive, understand) this non-qualitative property long before it is instantiated. Suppose he can grasp it just as well as he can grasp the conjunctive property mentioned above. Then, in prophesying the coming of Socrates, the prophet would be prophesying the coming of Socrates himself. His prophecy would be singular, or, if you prefer, de re: it would involve Socrates himself.

What do I mean by "involve Socrates himself"? Before Socrates comes to be there is no Socrates. But there is, on the haecceitist view I reject, Socrateity. This property 'deputizes' for Socrates at times and in possible worlds at which our man does not exist. It cannot be instantiated without being instantiated by Socrates. And it cannot be instantiated by anything other than Socrates in the actual world or in any possible world. By conceiving of Socrateity before Socrates comes to be, the Athenian prophet is conceiving of Socrates before he comes to be, Socrates himself, not a mere instance of a conjunctive property or a mere satisfier of a description. Our Athenian prophet is mentally grabbing onto the very haecceity or thisness of Socrates which is unique to him and 'incommunicable' (as a Medieval philosopher might say) to any other in the actual world or in any possible world.

But what do I mean by "a mere instance" or a "mere satisfier"?

Let us say that the conjunctive property of Socrates mentioned above is a qualitative essence of Socrates if it entails every qualitative or pure property of Socrates whether essential, accidental, monadic, or relational. If Socrates has an indiscernible twin, Schmocrates, then both individuals instantiate the same qualitative essence. It follows that, qua instances of this qualitative essence, they are indistinguishable. This implies that, if the prophet thinks of Socrates in terms of his qualitative essence, then his prophetic thought does not reach Socrates himself, but only a mere instance of his qualitative essence.

My claim, then, is that one cannot conceive of an individual that has not yet come into existence. Not even God can do it. For until an individual comes into existence it is not a genuine individual. Before Socrates came into existence, there was no possibility that he, that very man, come into existence. (In general, there are no de re possibilities involving future, not-yet-existent, individuals.) At best there was the possibility that some man or other come into existence possessing the properties that Socrates subsequently came to possess. To conceive of some man or other is to think a general thought: it is not to think a singular thought that somehow reaches an individual in its individuality.

To conceive of a complete description's being satisfied uniquely by some individual or other it not to conceive of a particular individual that satisfies it. If this is right, then one cannot name an individual before it exists.

Proper Names

The Ostrich maintains:

1. Proper names have a (context dependent) sense. Context dependent, because ‘Mars’ can mean the god, or the planet, depending on context.

BV: Agreed.

2. The object itself cannot be part of the sense, although the mainstream view is that it is.

BV: What is being called the mainstream view, I take it, is the direct reference view according to which the semantics of a proper name is exhausted by its reference. That is, there is nothing more to the meaning of a proper name than its referent. There is not, in addition to the referent, a (reference-mediating) sense that the name has whether or not it has a referent. This implies that an empty (vacuous) name has no meaning.

The formulation of (2) leaves something to be desired. If we distinguish sense from reference/referent, as we must, then it is trivially true that the object, the planet Mars say, cannot be part of the sense. What's more, (2) misrepresents the mainstream view. No direct reference theorist holds that proper names have reference-mediating senses. No such theorist can be maintaining that the object itself is part of a reference-mediating sense. So (2) might be read like this:

2*. The object itself cannot be part of the MEANING of the name, although the mainstream view is that it is.

The trouble with (2*) is that it is false. Surely Mars is part of the MEANING of 'Mars' inasmuch as Mars is the referent of 'Mars.'

The Ostrich's argument seems to perish at this point of an equivocation on 'sense' as between 'sense' in the sense of Frege's Sinn and MEANING where the latter embraces both Sinn und Bedeutung, both sense and reference in Fregean jargon.

3. Nor can the sense signify some property, or collection of properties. Not a collection, for the reasons Kripke has cogently argued. Not a single ‘haecceity’, for the reasons you have argued.

BV: Right, if you mean sense as opposed to reference/referent.

4. The only remaining candidate (in my view) is that a proper name acquires its meaning via anaphora (i.e. ‘back reference’). In all cases.

BV: What do you mean by 'meaning'? Do you mean sense as opposed to reference/referent? My verdict is that your argument is still too murky to be evaluated.

Use and Mention

You should never use 'progressives' without sneer quotes because 'progressives' are destructive leftists who confuse change with progress.

The offensive term is mentioned in the first independent clause, and then used in the second, albeit in an altered sense. When I write that 'progressives' are destructive, mendacious, devoid of common sense, and so on, I am talking about a certain bunch of malcontents; I am not talking about a word.

What is Ed’s Puzzle?

This just in from London:

A man called ‘Socrates’ is running and Socrates is debating.

Clearly if anyone verifies ‘a man called ‘Socrates’, and if ‘a man who is debating’ verifies that same person, then the conjunction appears to be true. And any number of men can be called ‘Socrates’, and be running and debating. But there’s the puzzle. The sense, the meaning, the semantics of ‘Socrates’ seems simply to ensure sameness of reference, or rather sameness of predication. ‘Is running’ and ‘is debating’ must be true of the same individual. But then the sense of the name is the same, whoever the sentences are verified of. Which paradoxically contradicts the classical theory of proper names, namely that a proper name cannot apply to different individuals in the same sense. Mill, A System of Logic:

Thus man is capable of being truly affirmed of John, George, Mary, and other persons without assignable limit; and it is affirmed of all of them in the same sense; for the word man expresses certain qualities, and when we predicate it of those persons, we assert that they all possess those qualities. But John is only capable of being truly affirmed of one single person, at least in the same sense. For, though there are many persons who bear that name, it is not conferred upon them to indicate any qualities, or any thing which belongs to them in common; and can not be said to be affirmed of them in any sense at all, consequently not in the same sense.

BV: More puzzling than Ed's puzzle is the puzzle of what Ed's puzzle is supposed to be. Call the latter 'the meta-puzzle.' I will try to solve it.

It is a datum that there are many men and animals who rejoice under the name 'Socrates.' When we philosophers invoke the name in philosophical contexts, we refer to the famous teacher of Plato. But there is also Socrates Jones, the rather less distinguished fellow who failed to get tenure at Whatsamatta U. There is also Socrates of Scranton, the resident bullshitter at the famous coffee house Insufficient Grounds. And so on.

In short, there are many men who bear the name 'Socrates.' Consider any one of them. Any one of them could verify (make true) the conjunctive proposition:

A man called ‘Socrates’ is running and Socrates is debating.

But then 'Socrates' in the second conjunct of the conjunctive proposition would appear not to refer to a particular person such as Socrates Jones in contradistinction from Socrates of Scranton, Socrates the teacher of Plato, etc. The name refers to any one person who verifies or make true both halves of the conjunction. This suggests to Ed, assuming I understand him, that the semantic function of 'Socrates' in the second conjunct is exhausted by its anaphoric or back-referential function. If so, the semantic function of 'Socrates' is wholly intralinguistic.

But let's not worry now about Ed's positive theory. Let's just ruminate over the puzzle he takes as (part of the) motivation for his positive theory. We can set it forth as an aporetic dyad:

A. A proper name cannot apply to different individuals in the same sense. (J. S. Mill)

B. A proper name can apply to different individuals in the same sense.

The limbs of the dyad are logical contradictories. And yet both limbs are very plausible.

Mill's point is that once we fix on a uniform usage of 'Socrates' to refer to one single thing such as the famous Greek philosopher who taught Plato, then that name in that sense cannot be used to refer to anything else. Pretty obvious, eh? Otherwise there would be no proper names. What makes a proper name proper is precisely that it cannot have more than one bearer.

Ed's point is that a proper name can apply to different individuals in the very same sense in that the 'Socrates' used in the second conjunct has the very same sense as the 'Socrates' mentioned in the first conjunct.

At this point Ed must tell me whether I have finally grasped his puzzle and thereby solved the meta-puzzle as to what his puzzle is.

If he returns an affirmative answer to this question, then we can proceed. If and only if.

A Reference Puzzle

Ed submits the following:

Suppose I am looking at a crowd of people and cry ‘there is a man in the crowd!’. Well very likely, and clearly I have some man in mind. But the predicate ‘is a man in the crowd’ is not just true of him, but of every man in the crowd. So what I have said is true of each of the men, at least in one sense of ‘true of’.

Yet on the other hand. I go on to say ‘he is wearing a red scarf’. And suppose three men are wearing red scarves. So what I say is true of just three men, but still more than one. Finally I say ‘the man is carrying a poster of Che’, and suppose only one red scarved man is carrying such a poster. So it is now clear who I am talking about. But wasn’t I talking about the same man all along? So in another sense of ‘true of’, my initial statement ‘there is a man in the crowd’ was true of just one man, namely the one in the red scarf, carrying the Che poster.

Difficult. It is this sort of consideration that led Sommers (and Brandom and Chastain and probably others) to suppose that some existentially quantified sentences ‘refer’. Geach disagreed, he had a famous and very bitter dispute with Sommers in the TLS, although I haven’t been able to find this.

You see a man in a crowd, wearing a red scarf, and carrying a poster of Che. You don't see some man or other, but a definite man, one and the same man singled out in a series of visual perceptions. You exclaim, 'There is a man in the crowd' and your utterance is true. Not only is it true, it records (part of) the content of your perception.

The problem, I take, it is to find a way to avoid the following contradiction: 'There is a man in the crowd' is about any man in the crowd and yet it is about exactly one man. (We are assuming that there is more than one man in the crowd.)

Perhaps something like the distinction between speaker's reference and semantic reference will help. I say to you: 'The man in the corner with champagne in his glass is the new dean.' I have managed to refer, successfully, to a particular man and draw your attention to him. Moreover, I have supplied you with a bit of correct information about him. And yet there is no man in the corner with champagne in his glass. For what there is in his glass is acqua minerale.

The reference has failed, and yet the reference has succeeded. Contradiction. Solution? The distinction just mentioned. The definite description 'The man in the corner with champagne is his glass' lacks a semantic referent which is to say: the definite description considered apart from the speaker and his intentions does not refer to anything since nothing satisfies it. But the description does have a speaker's (and a hearer's) referent.

Similarly, we can say that the existentially general sentence 'There is a man in the crowd,' considered by itself apart from the perceptual situation in which the speaker visually singles out a man with a red scarf holding a Che poster, is not about any particular man such as Manny Manischewitz. For it could just as well be about Kasimir Bonch-Osmolovsky or Giacomo Giacopuzzi. (All three gentlemen are in the crowd.) Absent this abstraction from the perceptual situation, however, the existentially general sentence is about the one definite man in the red scarf, etc.

On the Reference of Proper Names

London Ed writes and I respond in blue:

Still thinking about how to frame the main argument, so please help me out here.

There is a woman called ‘Clinton’. Clinton is a politician.

I claim there is a semantic connection between the name ‘Clinton’ that is used in the second sentence, but mentioned in the first sentence. It is this connection which licenses the inference to ‘some woman is a politician’. My central claim is that this exhausts the semantics of the proper name. The function of the name is simply to connect the second sentence to the first.

My question is, what arguments best support my claim. Some ideas.

(1) It’s just obvious that ‘Clinton’ refers back to the first sentence. The meaning of the two sentences is unchanged whether we write ‘he’ or ‘the man’. But since ‘he’ is just a pronoun, whose only function is to back-refer, it follows that ‘Clinton’ here is no primary reference.

BV: Your second example, then, is this:

There is a man named 'Clinton.' He is a politician.

And so 'Clinton' in the second sentence of the first example is merely a device of back reference. Is that what you are maintaining?

We agree, of course, that 'he' is a pronoun the antecedent of which is 'Clinton.' And so 'he' refers back to 'Clinton.' Back reference is a word-word relation. The antecedent of a pronoun is a word, not the (extralinguistic) thing to which the word refers, assuming it refers to something. What I deny is that 'he' in this context merely back refers. I maintain that it also refers to Bill Clinton, a chunk of extralinguistic reality, where 'refers' picks out a word-WORLD relation.

Back reference is an intralinguistic relation; reference is an extralinguistic relation. The reference of 'he' piggybacks on the reference of 'Clinton.' It picks up the reference of 'Clinton.'

But it is more complicated than this. For there is reference, not back reference, within a language. For example,

" 'Red' " refers to 'red.'

There is nothing to stop us from naming words. This is a case of intralinguistic reference, not back reference. Therefore, one cannot identify intralinguistic reference with back reference. All back reference is intralinguistic, but not all intralinguistic reference is back reference. A fortiori, one cannot identify extralinguistic reference with back reference.

It is also worth noting that 'back' in 'back reference' is an alienans adjective.

It is not clear what your thesis is. Are you an eliminativist about extralinguistic reference? That is, do you deny that proper names refer extralinguistically? Or perhaps you are an identitarian. Perhaps you hold that there is extralinguistic reference of proper names but that it reduces to back reference. (Some say that there are mental states all right, but that what they are are brain states. This is an identitarian, not an eliminativist, position. Notionally they are different even if it can be shown that identitarianism collapses of necessity into eliminativism.)

Or perhaps you maintain neither of these theses. I'd guess you are an eliminativist from your opening statement. I take it that you accept that there is a real world of concrete things external to language. If language 'hooks on' to these things, then presumably not via proper names. How then? Via bound variables in the Quinean way? Or do you hold that language does not hook on to language-external things at all?

I suggest that you will never gain a hearing for your ideas unless you can answer convincingly questions such as the foregoing.

For most of us it is a datum that there is extralinguistic reference to existing concrete things in space and time. We take it as given that in the paradigm cases reference is a word-world relation. The theoretical problems, then, are to understand how reference is possible and how it is achieved. But you seem to be denying the datum: you seem to be denying that there is extralinguistic reference, or at least, extralinguistic reference via proper names.