Abstract
Kevin Mulligan has defended the view that perception is necessary for proper names to refer to spatiotemporal objects and, if the disjunctivist account of perceptual content is accepted, then the category of object-dependent singular terms must also be accepted, and proper names belong to it. I intend to take a different, more direct, route to reach the conclusion that proper names are object dependent. To ask whether, e.g., if Nixon had not existed, the name Nixon would have existed or whether the same name could have undergone a change in referent, is to ask whether it is a mere accident that the name Nixon as we have it now, names Nixon. Could our name Nixon have named, say, David Kaplan, either because it was originally given to him or because, at a certain stage, it changed its referent? This is what the issue of object dependence, as I understand it, amounts to. Here, I only address one half of the problem, namely the possibility of a change in referent. A familiar case of apparent change is that of the name Madagascar, first brought to our attention by Gareth Evans, and then briefly discussed by Saul Kripke in Naming and Necessity. Was it a real change in referent or was a new name created? I claim that the latter is the case. The chapter is mainly intended to clarify the Madagascar example, without drawing any general conclusion. But the issue has some obvious bearing on a number of well-known problems, including Kripke’s puzzles about belief and linguistic consumerism.
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Notes
- 1.
For a systematic treatment of the notion of modal dependence, see Mulligan and Smith (1986).
- 2.
It is well known that some direct reference theorists, Kaplan for one, think that Kripke has misdescribed his own concept (Kaplan 1989a, p. 493).
- 3.
The distinction is clearly made by Kripke (1980, p. 114, note 57).
- 4.
It is doubtful that every time a name is repeated, the speaker must have the intention to use it with the same reference as the man from whom he heard it. Michael Devitt (1981) pointed out that Kripke requires this intention to be contemporary with learning the name, but he does not require later uses of the name to be governed by an intention looking backward to the acquisition of the name. In any case, even if a speaker has the intention of preserving the reference of a name when learning it, this hardly prevents his subsequent using it to dub another individual. Note that, if it can be shown—as I intend to—that a name cannot change its referent, which is thus inseparable from it, the intention to use an extant name is ipso facto the intention to use it with the referent it in fact has. Whenever a change in referent occurs, the speaker is either helping herself to a different name or creating a new one. Later on, I shall point that, in some cases, it might not be entirely transparent to the speaker which name she is in fact using.
- 5.
The original example is as follows: “Two people see Smith in the distance and mistake him for Jones. They have a brief colloquy: ‘What is Jones doing?’ ‘Raking the leaves’ ” (Kripke 1977, p. 263). In my version, it is, crucially, only A who mistakes Smith for Jones.
- 6.
As in the example, considered by Donnellan (1966, p. 290), of the usurper whom everyone call “the king.”
- 7.
I find it hard to reconcile this remark of Kaplan’s with his characterization of consumerism quoted above, from “Afterthoughts.”
- 8.
The case bears some similarity to one all too briefly discussed by Kripke in Naming and Necessity: “More exact conditions [for reference to take place] are very complicated to give. They seem in a way somehow different in the case of a famous man and one who isn’t so famous…. If … the teacher uses the name ‘George Smith’—a man by that name is actually his next door neighbor—and says that George Smith first squared the circle, does it follow from this that the students have a false belief about the teacher’s neighbor? The teacher doesn’t tell them that Smith is his neighbor, nor does he believe Smith first squared the circle. He isn’t particularly trying to get any belief about the neighbor into the students’ heads. He tries to inculcate the belief that there was a man who squared the circle, but not a belief about any particular man—he just pulls out the first name that occurs to him—as it happens, he uses his neighbor’s name. It doesn’t seem clear in that case that the students should have a false belief about the neighbor, even though there is a causal chain going back to the neighbor (Kripke 1980, pp. 95–96).” The teacher seems to have created a new name, if only because he intended to discontinue using George Smith with its semantic referent, and the students defer to him.
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Acknowledgments
I have benefited greatly from discussions with Andrea Bianchi, who has also read and commented parts of this chapter. I would like to thank Giulia Felappi for her helpful comments on an earlier version of it.
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Santambrogio, M. (2014). Did Madagascar Undergo a Change in Referent?. In: Reboul, A. (eds) Mind, Values, and Metaphysics. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-05146-8_28
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