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The Mill-Frege Theory of Proper Names

Mind 127 (508):1107-1168 (2018)

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  1. Names are not (always) predicates.Laura Delgado - 2024 - Mind and Language 39 (3):330-347.
    A main selling point of predicativism is that, in addition to accounting for predicative uses of proper names, it can successfully account for their referential uses while treating them as predicates, thus providing a uniform semantics for proper names. The strategy is to postulate an unpronounced determiner that is realised with names when they appear to function as singular terms, making them effectively a concealed determiner phrase. I argue against the thesis that names are really predicates in referential uses. I (...)
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  • The Vagaries of Reference.Eliot Michaelson - 2022 - Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 9.
    Evans (1973)’s Madagascar case and other cases like it have long been taken to represent a serious challenge for the Causal Theory of Names. The present essay answers this challenge on behalf of the causal theorist. The key is to treat acts of uttering names as events. Like other events, utterances of names sometimes turn out to have features which only become clear in retrospect.
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  • The metaphysical burden of Millianism.Nikhil Mahant - 2022 - Synthese 200 (4):1-19.
    The Millian semantic view of names relies on a metaphysical view of names—often given the label ‘common currency conception’ —on which the names of distinct individuals count as distinct names. While even defenders of the Millian view admit that the CCC ‘does not agree with the most common usage’, I will argue further that the CCC makes names exceptional amongst the class of linguistic expressions: if the CCC is correct, then names must have a sui-generis metaphysical nature, distinct from the (...)
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  • Words on Kripke’s Puzzle.Maciej Tarnowski & Maciej Głowacki - 2022 - Synthese 200 (4):1-21.
    In this paper we present a solution to Saul Kripke’s Puzzle About Belief Meaning and use, Dordrecht, 1979) based on Kaplan’s metaphysical picture of words. Although it is widely accepted that providing such a solution was one of the main incentives for the development of Kaplan’s theory, it was never presented by Kaplan in a systematic manner and was regarded by many as unsatisfactory. We agree with these critiques, and develop an extension of Kaplan’s theory by introducing the notion of (...)
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  • Presupoositions as pragmames: the case of exemplification acts.Alessandro Capone - 2020 - Intercultural Pragmatics (17-1):53-75.
    This paper is an example of how contextual information interacts with the interpretation of noun phrases (NPs) in discourse. When we encounter an NP escorted by the definite article or a proper name, the expectation is triggered that the speaker is referring to some referent x that the hearer can normally identify. Strawson and Russell have agreed that a referent must be associated with a definite description so that the assertion containing it can be said to be true. In the (...)
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  • Anaphoric Dependence and Logical Form.Manuel García-Carpintero - 2020 - Disputatio 12 (58):265-276.
    In the core chapters 4–6, Iacona (2018) argues against the “Uniqueness Thesis” (UT), stating that “there is a unique notion of logical form that fulfils both the logical role and the semantic role” (39), where the former “concerns the formal explanation of logical properties and logical relations, such as validity or contradiction” (37), and the latter “concerns the formulation of a compositional theory of meaning” (ibid.). He argues for this on the basis of relations of coreference among referential expressions, names (...)
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  • Singular Reference in Fictional Discourse?Manuel García-Carpintero - 2019 - Disputatio 11 (54):143-177.
    Singular terms used in fictions for fictional characters raise well-known philosophical issues, explored in depth in the literature. But philosophers typically assume that names already in use to refer to “moderatesized specimens of dry goods” cause no special problem when occurring in fictions, behaving there as they ordinarily do in straightforward assertions. In this paper I continue a debate with Stacie Friend, arguing against this for the exceptionalist view that names of real entities in fictional discourse don’t work there as (...)
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  • Between singularity and generality: the semantic life of proper names.Laura Delgado - 2019 - Linguistics and Philosophy 42 (4):381-417.
    Although the view that sees proper names as referential singular terms is widely considered orthodoxy, there is a growing popularity to the view that proper names are predicates. This is partly because the orthodoxy faces two anomalies that Predicativism can solve: on the one hand, proper names can have multiple bearers. But multiple bearerhood is a problem to the idea that proper names have just one individual as referent. On the other hand, as Burge noted, proper names can have predicative (...)
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  • Co‐Identification and Fictional Names.Manuel García-Carpintero - 2020 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 101 (1):3-34.
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, EarlyView.
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  • On the Nature of Presupposition: A Normative Speech Act Account.Manuel García-Carpintero - 2020 - Erkenntnis 85 (2):269-293.
    In this paper I provide a new account of linguistic presuppositions, on which they are ancillary speech acts defined by constitutive norms. After providing an initial intuitive characterization of the phenomenon, I present a normative speech act account of presupposition in parallel with Williamson’s analogous account of assertion. I explain how it deals well with the problem of informative presuppositions, and how it relates to accounts for the Triggering and Projection Problems for presuppositions. I conclude with a brief discussion of (...)
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  • The cross‐linguistic uses of proper names.Nikhil Mahant - forthcoming - Theoria.
    A distinctive and widely recognized feature of proper names is that, unlike other words, names can be used across languages without modification. Yet, this feature of names—the prevalence and acceptability of their ‘cross‐linguistic’ uses—has been mostly overlooked within philosophy. This article highlights the theoretical importance of the cross‐linguistic uses of names in the debate concerning their syntax and semantics. It identifies an anomalous phonological feature of names in their cross‐linguistic uses and argues that the source of the anomaly is the (...)
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  • Reference and morphology.Gabe Dupre - 2022 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 106 (3):655-676.
    The dominant tradition in analytic philosophy of language views reference as paradigmatically enabled by the acquisition of words from other speakers. Via chains of transmission, these words connect the referrer to the referent. Such a picture assumes the notion of a word as a stable mapping between sound and meaning. Utterances are constructed out of such stable mappings. While this picture of language is both intuitive and historically distinguished, various trends and programs that have developed over the last few decades (...)
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  • David, Some Davids, and All Davids: Reference, Category Change, and Bearerhood of Real-Life Names.Laura Delgado - 2018 - Dissertation, Universitat de Barcelona
    This essay is devoted to the study of proper names. Although the view that sees proper names as referential singular terms is widely considered orthodoxy, there is a growing popularity to the view that proper names are predicates. This is partly because the orthodoxy faces two anomalies that Predicativism can solve: on the one hand, proper names can have multiple bearers. But multiple bearerhood is prima facie a problem to the idea that proper names have just one individual as referent. (...)
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  • Katherine and the Katherine: On the syntactic distribution of names and count nouns.Robin Jeshion - 2018 - Theoria: Revista de Teoría, Historia y Fundamentos de la Ciencia 33 (3):473-508.
    Names are referring expressions and interact with the determiner system only exceptionally, in stark contrast with count nouns. The-predicativists like Sloat, Matushansky, and Fara claim otherwise, maintaining that syntactic data offers indicates that names belong to a special syntactic category which differs from common count nouns only in how they interact with ‘the’. I argue that the-predicativists have incorrectly discerned the syntactic facts. They have bypassed a large range of important syntactic data and misconstrued a critical data point on which (...)
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  • Names vs nouns.Laura Delgado - 2022 - Philosophical Studies 179 (11):3233-3258.
    This paper takes issue with the predicativist’s identification of proper names and common count nouns. Although Predicativism emerges precisely to account for certain syntactic facts about proper names, namely, that they behave like common count nouns on occasions, it seems clear that proper names and common count nouns have different properties, and this undermines the thesis that proper names are in fact just common count nouns. The predicativist’s strategy to bridge these differences is to postulate an unpronounced determiner to go (...)
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  • A Hyperintensional Theory of (Empty) Names.Miloš Kosterec - 2021 - Erkenntnis 88 (2):511-529.
    This paper presents an original semantic theory of proper names that aims to cover both non-empty and empty proper names. According to the theory, proper names have simple assignable hyperintensions as their content. This content provides the referent (if there is one) for which the proper name stands. The paper further describes the role of the proposed content of (empty) proper names within the compositional semantics of problematic sentences. I stress the difference between the content of a sentence (i.e. its (...)
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  • The semantics of fiction.Manuel García-Carpintero - 2023 - Mind and Language 38 (2):604-618.
    The paper reviews proposals by Abell, Predelli, and others on the semantics of fiction, focusing on the discourse through which fictions are created. Predelli develops the radical fictionalism of former writers like Kripke and van Inwagen, on which that discourse is contentless and does not express propositions. This paper offers reasons to doubt these claims. It then explores realist proposals like Abell’s in which singular terms in fictions refer to fictional characters, understood as socially created representational artifacts, and irrealist alternatives (...)
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  • Predelli on Fictional Discourse.Manuel García-Carpintero - 2022 - Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 80 (1):83-94.
    John Searle argues that fictions are constituted by mere pretense—by the simulation of representational activities like assertions, without any further representational aim. They are not the result of sui generis, dedicated speech acts of a specific kind, on a par with assertion. The view had earlier many defenders, and still has some. Stefano Predelli enlists considerations derived from Searle in support of his radical fictionalism. This is the view that a sentence of fictional discourse including a prima facie empty fictional (...)
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  • Names.Sam Cumming - 2009 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
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  • Propositional attitude reports.Thomas McKay - 2008 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
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  • Deflating Predicativism Against the Small Clause Hypothesis for Proper Names.Katarzyna Kijania-Placek & Olga Poller - forthcoming - Acta Analytica:1-20.
    In this article, we challenge Matushansky’s (Linguistics and Philosophy,21, 573–627, 2008) small clause treatment of proper names in naming constructions. While she is widely credited with establishing, based on cross-linguistic evidence, that names should be viewed as predicates in naming constructions, we present a counterexample from Polish that questions the universal interpretation of the small clause hypothesis (SCH). This leads us to advocate for an alternative analysis of proper names in naming constructions, wherein they are considered components of the argument (...)
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  • Normative Fiction‐Making and the World of the Fiction.Manuel García-Carpintero - 2019 - Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 77 (3):267-279.
    In recent work, Walton has abandoned his very influential account of the fictionality of p in a fictional work in terms of prescriptions to imagine emanating from it. He offers examples allegedly showing that a prescription to imagine p in a given work of fiction is not sufficient for the fictionality of p in that work. In this paper, both in support and further elaboration of a constitutive-norms speech-act variation on Walton’s account that I have defended previously, I critically discuss (...)
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  • The Real Guarantee in De Se thought: How to characterize it?Manuel García-Carpintero - forthcoming - Philosophical Quarterly.
    Castañeda, Perry and Lewis argued that, among singular thoughts in general, thoughts about oneself ‘as oneself’—first-personal thoughts, which Lewis aptly called de se—have a distinctive character that traditional views of contents cannot characterize. Drawing on Anscombe, Annalisa Coliva has argued that a feature she calls Real Guarantee marks apart de se thoughts—as opposed to others including Immunity to Error through Misidentification that have been proposed for that role. I'll argue that, while her work points to a truly distinguishing feature of (...)
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  • Singular Terms in Fiction. Fictional and “Real” Names (III Blasco Disputatio).Jordi Valor Abad - 2019 - Disputatio 11 (54):111-142.
    In this introduction, I consider different problems posed by the use of singular terms in fiction (section 1), paying especial attention to proper names and, in particular, to names of real people, places, etc. As we will see (section 2), descriptivist and Millian theories of reference face different kinds of problems in explaining the use of fictional names in fiction-related contexts. Moreover, the task of advancing a uniform account of names in these contexts—an account which deals not only with fictional (...)
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  • The polysemy of proper names.Katarzyna Kijania-Placek - 2023 - Philosophical Studies 180 (10):2897-2935.
    Proper names are usually considered devices of singular reference but, when considered as word-types, they also exhibit other kinds of uses. In this paper I intend to show that systematic kinds of uses of proper names considered as word-types can be accounted for by a generalized rule-based conception of systematic polysemy, one which not only postulates a multiplicity of stable senses for an expression, but also a multiplicity of content generating rules, each of which determines potentially different contents in different (...)
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