Name: Encyclopedia II - Name - Philosophical accounts of names

Name - Philosophical accounts of names

Proper names function in the same way as common nouns do in many natural languages. Philosophers have thus often treated the two as similar in meaning. In the late nineteenth century, Frege argued that certain puzzling features of both names and nouns could be resolved if we recognized two aspects to the meaning of a name (and, by extension, other nouns): a sense, which is equivalent to some sort of description, and a referent, the thing or things that meet that description. So the sense of dog might be "domestic canine mammal", and the referent would be all the dogs in this world. Proper names would then be special cases of nouns with only one referent: the sense of Aristotle might be, "the author of de Caelo", while its referent would be the one person, Aristotle himself. (See Sense and Reference.)

Bertrand Russell rejected Frege's position, and claimed instead that true names must never be equivalent to a description. However, he conceded that most of the apparent "names" in English really were equivalent to descriptions, specifically to definite descriptions. (These are descriptions which contain the claim that they apply to only one object: see Theory of descriptions.) If there were any real names they probably were more like "this" and "that". This position is perhaps more fairly glossed as the view that there are two different functions nouns can serve: (1) describing (and perhaps indirectly referring); and (2) referring (directly, without description); and that all or almost all English names really do the former. This position came to be known as Descriptivism with respect to singular terms, and was prominent through much of twentieth-century analytic philosophy.

In 1970 Saul Kripke gave a series of lectures arguing against Descriptivism, and holding, among other things, that names are rigid designators--expressions that refer to their objects independently of any properties those objects have. Of course, we must often use descriptions to pick out our references--to explain to others which object we are talking about, by reference to some property we both agree it bears; but it does not follow that any of these properties constitute the meaning of the name.

Kripke's work led to the development of various versions of the Causal theory of reference, which in various forms claims that our words mean what they do not because of descriptions we associate with them, but because of the causal history of our acquisition of that name in our vocabulary.

Name - Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet

In Shakespeare's play Romeo and Juliet, Juliet says (speaking about Romeo, because of the tension between their families),

   'Tis but thy name that is my enemy;
   Thou art thyself, though not a Montague.
   What's Montague? it is nor hand, nor foot,
   Nor arm, nor face, nor any other part
   Belonging to a man. O, be some other name!
   What's in a name? that which we call a rose
   By any other name would smell as sweet;

Of course, she is saying that names mean little, only substance really matters. If we called a rose anything but, would it not remain as sweet smelling? Here, Shakespeare is saying that names are not important.

Name - Whitman's Mannahatta

In Walt Whitman's poem, Mannahatta, in the first three lines of the poem, Whitman conveys a large amount of information about names.

   I was asking for something specific and perfect for my city,     
   Whereupon, lo! upsprang the aboriginal name!  
 
   Now I see what there is in a name, a word, liquid, sane, unruly, musical, self-sufficient;

Here, he is saying that the name Mannahatta (or, Manhattan) is the perfect name for such a city, because it is so descriptive of its true essence. This contrasts with Shakespeare's idea that names are not important; Whitman believes that they are just as important as the thing itself.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Philosophical accounts of names", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki