The paper explores what it could mean to speak of love as involving a delight in ‘the simple actuality’ of another, or, as Buber does, of the ‘touchable’ human being as ‘unique and devoid of qualities’. Developing strands in Merleau-Ponty’s treatment of perception, it is argued that the relation between recognising this as a particular individual and recognising particular qualities in her may be close to the reverse of what might be supposed: a recognition of this distinctive smile being dependent (...) on a recognition of who this is. The fundamental place of particulars, as opposed to kinds, in our thought about those we know and care for is developed in part through a phenomenological treatment of our perception of faces. That treatment is set in a context of the justification of our judgements about who someone is, and is linked with a critique of treatments of proper names of individuals in the spirit of Frege. It is in our speaking to those we know that we find a relation to a particular that is direct—not mediated by a description of its properties—that Russell sought in ‘knowledge by acquaintance’. (shrink)

In “Naming and Necessity” Saul Kripke describes some cases which, he claims, provide counterexamples both to cluster theories and, more generally, to description theories of proper names. My view of these cases is that while they do not provide counterexamples to cluster theories, they can be used to provide evidence against single-description theories. In this paper I shall defend both of the claims involved in my view.

While engaged in the analysis of topics such as the nature of knowledge, meaning, or justice, analytic philosophers have traditionally relied extensively on their own intuitions about when the relevant terms can, and can't, be correctly applied. Consequently, if intuitions about possible cases turned out not to be a reliable tool for the proper analysis of philosophically central concepts, then a radical reworking of philosophy's (or at least analytic philosophy's) methodology would seem to be in order. It is thus not (...) surprising that the increasingly critical scrutiny that intuitions have received of late has produced what has been referred to as a "crisis" in analytic philosophy. This paper will argue, however, that at least those criticisms that stem from recent work on semantic externalism are not as serious as their proponents have claimed. Indeed, this paper will argue while the conceptual intuitions (and the analyses that result from them) will have to be recognized as fallible, they still have a prima facie claim to correctness. A naturalistic and externalistic account of concepts thus merely requires that the methodology of conceptual analysis be reinterpreted (from a 'Platonic' to a 'constructive' model) rather than given up. (shrink)

Summary of Anna Pilatova’s doctoral thesis A User’s Guide to Proper Names, Their Semantics And Pragmatics The origins of this work go all the way back to my reading of Kripke’s Naming and Necessity in 1993. It had left me with a feeling of dissatisfaction that lingered long enough to inspire my MA thesis (on Internalism and Externalism in the Theories of Reference), and finally inspired the current work. Over time, I became acquainted with other influential accounts of reference of (...) proper names, but my unease with essentialism and wariness of direct designation remained. In the User’s Guide to Proper Names, I seized the opportunity to analyse what I thought was problematic with the mainstream theories of reference of proper names. I tried to tease apart a number of related doctrines about the behaviour of proper names, and thus arrive at a better understanding of how the various parts of the theories of reference I chose to analyse are related. This helped me to develop my own proposal regarding both the semantics and the pragmatics of proper names. The Guide is organised around a particular approach to the tasks of a semantic theory. According to this view, proposed by Stalnaker, a semantic theory dealing with proper names should account for the descriptive semantics of names, their foundational semantics, and the semantics of modal statements in which they figure. Descriptive semantics focuses on the contribution a proper name makes to the truth-value of sentences in which it occurs. Based on such an analysis, a proper name is assigned a semantic value, which is supposed to provide us with an interpretation of that name. A crucial part of this task is to see just what kind of thing the semantic value of a proper name is. In interpreting sentences containing proper names, one can, and often does, use the notion of possible worlds. This is especially true if the sentences in question are modal. There are various approaches to modality, which carry with them different sets of presuppositions. An analysis of the systematic features and presuppositions of various possible-world frameworks is a part of the task of the semantics of modal statements. Another task of semantics of modal statements is to investigate whence the constraints on possible worlds used in analysing these statements should derive, that is, whether, and to what degree, they should derive from the descriptive or the foundational part of the semantic enterprise. Both of these parts of a semantic theory have the potential to make predictions about the foundational semantics of proper names, which deals with the speaker’s behaviour and communication. Foundational semantics aims at answering the following question: What makes it the case that the language spoken by a particular individual or community has the very descriptive semantics it has? In this investigation, one looks at the speaker, her intentions and communicative goals, and tries to look at the strategies she uses to get her (linguistic) point across. To show the usefulness of organising the User’s Guide to Proper Names around these distinctions, and to provide their proper characterisation, is the task of the first part of the introductory first chapter, Outlining the Field and Introducing Some of the Players. In the second part of the same chapter, Setting the Scene, I give a preliminary outline of some of the notions needed to describe the theories of reference that are later investigated, that is mainly the theories proposed by Kripke, Kaplan, Lewis, and Stalnaker. The second chapter, Descriptive Semantics, focuses on the descriptive semantics proposed by Kripke and Kaplan for proper names. In the first part of the chapter, I introduce several arguments in favour of rigid designation. A closer look reveals that none of the three arguments in question -- the modal, the epistemological, and the semantic one -- is actually an argument for rigid designation. They all just argue against some forms of descriptivism. Moreover, in the case of the modal and the epistemological argument, it is relatively easy to find forms of descriptivism that are immune to the lines of reasoning proposed in these arguments. The semantic argument seems to be the strongest of the three. An analysis of a direct argument for rigid designation highlights the connection between rigid designation and certain preconceptions about the identity of individuals. A further investigation of the notion of identity of individuals across possible worlds emerges at this point as an important issue to tackle. It also becomes clear that rigid designation alone cannot fully determine the Kripkean picture of names as non-descriptive entities referring without a mediation of any sort of conceptual content. In the second part of Chapter 2, I introduce the basic notions of Kaplan’s approach to the descriptive semantics of proper names. It turns out that in order to derive the familiar Kripkean picture of proper names, one has to presuppose direct reference for names and at least some version of haecceitism for the individuals in question. While, as we show, Kaplan’s framework does not work well for proper names, it gives us conceptual tools that help us in our undertaking. In the third chapter, Modal Statements, Individuals, and Essences, I analyse three different approaches to building a possible-world framework, Lewis’s, Kripke’s, and Stalnaker’s. In each case, the same questions are asked: What is the motivation and intended field of application of this framework? What are the ontological commitments of the approach? What form of essentialism, if any, does it imply? How does it deal with the notion of an individual? In Lewis’s case, the main problem turns out to be the theory of counterparts, which is, as I show, an integral part of his approach. The concept of an individual implied by it does not seem to correspond to any intuitive reading of counterfactual statements involving individuals. The investigation of Kripke’s framework focuses on describing the weakest form of essentialism that has to be presupposed to make the proposal work. Once that is concluded, I analyse the essentialism Kripke actually proposes, and the motivation and presuppositions on which it rests. I conclude that its motivation cannot be said to come from an analysis of language and that it presupposes a particular form of scientific realism. The rest of the chapter is devoted to a reconstruction and analysis of Stalnaker’s possible world framework, which turns out to be rather more cautious about metaphysical presuppositions and more suited for an analysis of natural language. As in the two previous proposals, I try to reconstruct the notion of actual world that is presupposed here. In the fourth chapter, Foundational Semantics, I investigate the notion of proposition implied by Lewis’s, Kripke’s, and Stalnaker’s approach. I focus on propositions containing proper names, and analyse the way in which each of the conceptions mentioned above is vulnerable to the problem of logical omniscience. An analysis of Lewis’s framework reveals that the concept of proposition implied by it is so weak as to be rather uninteresting. An investigation of Kripke’s concept of proposition deals not only with the systematic issues, but also with the Pierre puzzle and various attempts at solving it. I present a number of different approaches to the problem and compare their merits. Stalnaker is very worried about the problem of logical omniscience, and yet it turns out that his conception is less vulnerable to the adverse consequences of the problem of logical omniscience than other frameworks we investigate. I point out that various pragmatic features of Stalnaker’s framework (the epistemic nature of his possible-world framework, the Gricean principles built into the notion of assertion) help to counterbalance and mitigate the scope of the problem of logical omniscience within it. In Chapter 5, User-friendly Descriptive Semantics, I present and motivate my own proposal for the descriptive semantics of proper names and the treatment of modal statements in which they figure. Basically, the aim is to preserve the notion of names as rigidly designating expressions while admitting as little metaphysics as possible. Working with epistemic possible worlds whose domain is in each case co-determined by a particular context enables me to develop a very intuitive plausible notion of individual, to which a name can be said to refer rigidly. The interpretation of modal statements is then driven not by essentialist constraints in the common sense of the term, but by context-derived limitations, which seems to be a more natural approach. In the sixth and last chapter, Names, Indexicality, and Ambiguity, I develop a view of foundational semantics inspired by the pragmatic observation that in common parlance one can say that a name, `John Smith’ for instance, can refer to numerous individuals. A lot of attention is given to the ontology of names, and the question `What is a name?’ delivers answers which are then used in a discussion about whether names should be seen as indexical or ambiguous. I adopt the ambiguity view, and propose a way of using a Stalnakerian possible-world framework to derive intuitively plausible results for some difficult cases. The weight of the discussion all through the guide rests in an examination of different kinds of presuppositions implied by various possible-world frameworks and the notion of the individual used in accounts of the behaviour of proper names. In my own account of these issues, I do without any metaphysical assumptions and aim at describing communication in terms accessible to its participants. (shrink)

Anselm's argument for the existence of God in Proslogion Chap.II starts from the contention that `lq when a Fool hears `something-than-which-nothing-greater-can-be-thought', he understands what he hears, and what he understands is in his mind. This is a special feature of the Pros.II argument which distinguishes the argument from other ontological arguments set up by, for example, Descartes and Leibniz. This is also the context which makes semantics necessary for evaluation of the argument. It is quite natural to ask `lq What (...) is understood by the Fool, and what is in his mind? It is essential for a proper consideration of the argument to identify the object which is understood by the Fool, and so, is in his mind. A semantics gives answers to the questions of `lq What the Fool understands? and `lq What is in the Fool's mind? If we choose a semantics as a meta-theory to interpret the Pros.II argument, it makes an effective guide to identify the object. It is a necessary condition for a proper evaluation of the Pros.II argument to fix our universe of discourse, especially since, in the argument, we are involved in such talk about existing objects as Anselm's contention that `when a Fool hears `something-than-which-nothing-greater-can-be-thought', he understands what he hears, and what he understands is in his mind. The ontology to which a semantic theory commits us will be accepted as our scope of objects when we introduce our semantic theory to interpret the Pros.II argument, and this ontological boundary constrains us to identify the object in a certain way. Consistent application of an ontology, most of all, is needed for the evaluation of the logical validity of an argument. If we take Frege's three-level semantics, we are ontologically committed to intensional entities, like meaning, as well as extensional entities. Sluga contends that Frege's anti-psychologism for meanings should not be interpreted as vindicating reification of intensional entities in relation to Frege's contextualism, that Frege's anti-psychologism with his contextualism is nothing but a linguistic version of Kantian philosophy for the transcendental unity of a judgement. There is, however, another possible interpretation of Frege's contextualism. According to Dummett, the significance of Frege's contextualism must be understood as a way of explanation for a word's having meaning. If Dummett's view is cogent, we could say that Frege's contextualism does not prevent our interpreting his semantics as being committed to intensional entities. We need not worry that Frege's over all semantics, especially with his contextualism, would internally deny the ontological interpretation of his theory. We see Anselm's argument for the existence of God in Pros.II is an invalid argument if we introduce Frege's three-level semantics, i.e. if we acknowledge meanings of words as entities in our universe of discourse. We can also employ extensional semantics for the interpretation of the Pros.II argument. According to extensionalists, like Quine and Kripke, we need not assume intensional entities, like meaning, to be part of our ontological domain. They argue that we can employ our language well enough without assuming intensional entities. If we choose extensional semantics as a meta-theory to interpret the Pros.II argument, it commits us only to extensional entities as objects in the Universe of our interpretation. In Sections 1.4 and 1.5, I show that extensional semantics makes the Pros.II argument a valid argument for the existence of God. `lq Necessary existence is the central concept of Anselm's argument for the existence of God in Proslogion Chap.III. It has been said that, even if the argument is formally valid, it cannot stand as a valid argument for the existence of God, since `lq necessary existence is an absurd concept like `lq round square. And further that even if there is a meaningful combination of concepts for `lq necessary existence, it cannot quality as a subject of an a priori argument. As objections to the interpretations which make the Pros.III argument valid, it has been argued that even if there is a concept of `lq necessary existence which is meaningful and there is another concept of `lq necessary existence which is suitable as a subject of an a priori argument, there is no concept of `lq necessary existence which is meaningful and at the same time suitable as a subject of an a priori argument. In Chap.2 and Chap.3, I try to show that there can be concepts of `lq necessary existence which are proof against these objections. Anselm's arguments for the existence of God in Proslogian Chap.II and Chap.III are logically valid arguments on some logical principles. Some fideists, K. Barth, for example, argue that Anselm's arguments for the existence of God in Proslogion are not proofs for the existence of God even if they are logically valid arguments. I raise the question how this attitude could be possible, in Chap.4 and Chap.5. Barth's fideistic interpretation of Anselm's Proslogion arguments does not find any flaw in the validity of the arguments, and it accepts the meaningfulness and truth of the premises even to the fool in Proslogion. If this is the case, i.e. if Barth's interpretation accepts the validity of the arguments and the truth of the premises, I raise the question, how can the arguments not be interpreted as proofs for the existence of God? How is it possible that the function of the arguments is not that of proving the existence of God? According to Wittgensteinian fideism, premises in the arguments should not be intelligible to those who do not believe in God's existence already, and so the real function of the arguments is the elucidation, the understanding of believer's belief, rather than proving articles of belief to unbelievers. Barth's fideistic interpretation of the arguments, however, fully recognizes the meaningfulness and truth of the premises in the arguments as well as the validity of the arguments. I argue that there could be a justification for the Barthian fideism. As Malcolm notices, there are still atheists who understand Anselm's arguments as valid, but the only possibility for the people who recognize the validity of Anselm's arguments still to remain atheists has been thought to be to challenge the truth of premises employed in the arguments. Now, of the atheistic possibility, we can change the direction of our attention, that is, to the question about the function of a logically valid argument itself. What has not been thought of in relation to Anselm's arguments is the significance of logical truth or the logical validity of an argument. We have not asked such questions as `lq What does a logical truth say? and `lq What does a logically valid argument guarantee with true premises? Let us assume that even the premises are accepted by atheists. Do they all convert to theism? If that were so, the disagreement between atheist and believer over the ontological arguments should turn only on the truth of premises. If that is not so, there is some point in raising this other question. If there are people who, recognizing the premises and validity of an argument, are still reluctant to accept the conclusion, we have reason to question the function of a valid argument. I argue that there is a way of being consistently reasonable while accepting the premises and the validity of the ontological arguments and yet remaining an atheist or an agnostic. (shrink)

The paper mainly deals with the problem of reference of proper names. Unlike definite descriptions, proper names in themselves possess no exact necessary and sufficient conditions for making successful performance of reference. This is the consequence of the fact that proper names just name their bearers and do not describe them. It is argued that Frege’s theory violates this fact, and therefore can be taken only as a view about the meaning of proper names, not as a theory of reference. (...) Two conceptions of Strawson designed to solve the problem are mentioned – the cluster description theory and the communication chain theory. The second one is refused immediately, as unrealistic view on referential behaviour of proper names. Then Searle’s version of cluster description theory, more elaborate one than Strawson’s, is analyzed. However, it is shown that this conception is unsatisfactory as well, because either it invokes Kripke’s and Donnellan’s objections against any description theory or its explanation of reference of proper names is circular. (shrink)