Although Kripke’s œuvre has had a major impact on analytic philosophy and nearly every aspect of his studies has been thoroughly examined, this does not hold for his schmidentity argument, which, so far, has been widely neglected. To the extent to which it has been treated at all, it has been for the most part radically misunderstood. I hold that this argument, in its correctly reconstructed form, has general relevance for a treatment of Frege’s Puzzle and points towards a fundamental (...) methodological restriction for philosophy of language and especially for semantics, as far as informativity and the general topic of cognitive significance are concerned. To show this, I will briefly set out the context of the schmidentity argument and, in Sects. 2 and 4, sketch a reconstruction thereof, including some criticisms of the argument, and an excursion about Kit Fine’s semantic relationism, which stands in stark contrast to this paper’s central claim. Moreover, I will draw a genuinely new and probably quite unexpected conclusion from all the above, to finally give a glimpse at a bigger picture of where this conclusion should lead our thinking about a theoretical treatment of informativity and a linguistic expression’s cognitive value. (shrink)

In “On Referring” Peter Strawson pointed out that incomplete descriptions pose a problem for Russell’s analysis of definite descriptions. Howard Wettstein and Michael Devitt appealed to incomplete descriptions to argue, first, that Russell’s analysis of definite descriptions fails, and second, that Donnellan’s referential/attributive distinction has semantic bite. Stephen Neale has defended Russell’s analysis of definite descriptions against Wettstein’s and Devitt’s objections. In this paper, my aim is twofold. First, I rebut Neale’s objections to Wettstein’s and Devitt’s argument and argue that (...) Neale’s attempt to provide an account of referential descriptions within a Russellian framework fails. Second, contra Devitt and Wettstein, I argue that the problem posed by incomplete descriptions shows that Donnellan was right in believing that referential descriptions refer even if the definite description fits nothing. (shrink)

Famously, both Saul Kripke and Keith Donnellan opposed description theories and insisted on the role of history in determining the reference of a proper name token. No wonder, then, that their views on proper names have often been assimilated. By focusing on reference borrowing—an alleged phenomenon that Kripke takes to be fundamental—we argue that they should not be. In particular, we claim that according to Donnellan a proper name token never borrows its reference from preceding tokens which it is historically (...) connected to. On the contrary, its reference is always fixed anew on who or what the speaker has in mind when he or she produces it. In fact, what is important to realize is that Donnellan and Kripke took two different histories to be relevant: that of the proper name token produced by the speaker , and that of the cognitive status of the speaker when he or she produces it . We end by suggesting that this difference between Kripke’s and Donnellan’s accounts of proper names rests on a more general difference in their approach to language. (shrink)