Abstract
In his lectures on logical atomism Russell maintains that (1) the proper names of natural language are really definite descriptions, and (2) indexicals are also definite descriptions, to the extent that they are used to refer to ordinary objects. In spite of the dominant referentialist trend championed by Kripke and Kaplan, there are good reasons to still think that Russell is right in holding these views. However, Russell’s descriptivist account of proper names and indexicals makes their meanings unpalatably idiosyncratic or subjective. This essay discusses and compares some ways in which this subjectivism can be avoided.
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Notes
- 1.
As we shall see, Russell also acknowledges logically proper names and indexical terms that work as logically proper names, understood as directly referential expressions. In the following, by “proper name” and “indexical” I shall mean ordinary proper names and indexicals, unless otherwise indicated. In the category of indexicals I include both deictic terms such as “I” and “here” and demonstratives such as “this” or “that.”
- 2.
I wrote that the hook property has typically nothing to do with bearing the name in question, because Russell occasionally considers properties such as being called N, where N is a certain proper name.
- 3.
As is well-known, Frege holds a similarly subjectivist form of descriptivism.
- 4.
Descriptive contents can be viewed as certain kinds of denoting concepts, which Russell accepted in Principles of Mathematics, but rejected in “On Denoting.” (See Cocchiarella 1982.) As explained in my book Singular Reference, I take descriptive contents to be denoting concepts understood pretty much in Cocchiarella’s sense, i.e., as properties of properties.
- 5.
The first of these two options is essentially the one proposed in Bach (1994), which I have followed in Orilia (2000, 2003) (although only in the latter work I explicitly relied on Bach’s notion of conversational impliciture). This line is however subject to a problem of choice analogous to the one that will be discussed below in relation to proper names. Accordingly, in SR I favored the second option, and then proceeded to characterize in token-reflexive terms the pragmatic meaning of incomplete definite descriptions and more generally of incomplete determiner phrases. (See Orilia 1910: Section 5.3.) I still think that the second option is better, but I would now avoid the recourse to token-reflexivity, as we shall see in more detail in discussing proper names and indexicals.
- 6.
This is the view that in Orilia (2010: Section 3.7), I attribute to Russell.
- 7.
I am assuming that a proper name “N ” is a phonological word in the sense of Lyons (1968: 69). If we understand “word” in this way, a token of “Aristotle” that is used to refer to the philosopher, and another token that is used to refer to the husband of Jacklyn Kennedy, are tokens of the same word. Similarly, a token of “take” used as a noun and a token of “take” used as a verb are tokens of the same word.
- 8.
- 9.
We may add of course other reasons, e.g., anti-essentialist motivations. (See Landini 2011: 211 ff.) But we may set them aside for present purposes.
- 10.
The sense datum can be taken to be directly referred to by the token in question.
- 11.
See Orilia (2010: Section 3.3).
- 12.
Even though Soames corrects in his own way the referentialist paradigm and recognizes an element of truth in descriptivism. (See Soames 2010: 171.)
- 13.
Causal descriptivism has been proposed by many authors. See (Orilia 2010: 155, no. 12 for references).
- 14.
This is so to the extent that “N ” is viewed as a proper name. The theory also acknowledges that a proper name can function as a general term.
- 15.
Frigerio (2017) objects to my descriptivist approach as follows. He notes that a sentence of the form “N might not be called N,” where “N ” is a proper name, does not have a contradictory de dicto reading, and charges that my approach wrongly predicts that it does. It seems to me, however, that it cannot be taken for granted that there is no such de dicto reading, unless we beg the question against the descriptivist by ruling out that “N ” is a definite description. Of course, the de dicto reading is most unnatural, but this can be explained by appealing precisely to its contradictory nature.
- 16.
Here I rely on proposals made in Orilia (2010, Chap. 6).
- 17.
See Orilia (2010: 180), for a more precise characterization of an interdoxastic domain, which explains why this term is adopted.
- 18.
See Orilia (2010: Section 2.10), for a more precise characterization of contextual times and places of tokens.
References
Works by Other Authors
Cocchiarella, Nino B. (1982). “Meinong Reconstructed versus Early Russell Reconstructed.” Journal of Philosophical Logic, Vol. 11: 183–214.
Frigerio, Aldo (2017). “Francesco Orilia: Singular Reference: A Descriptivist Approach.” Axiomathes, 27: 731–733.
Landini, Gregory (2011). Russell. London and New York: Routledge.
Lyons, John (1968). Introduction to Theoretical Linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Orilia, Francesco (2000). “The Property Theoretical Performative-Nominalistic Theory of Proper Names.” Dialectica, 54: 155–176.
Orilia, Francesco (2003). “A Descriptive Theory of Singular Reference.” Dialectica, 57: 7–40.
Orilia, Francesco (2010). Singular Reference: A Descriptivist Perspective. Dordrecht: Springer.
Pears, D. F. (1985). “Introduction.” In The Philosophy of Logical Atomism, Bertrand Russell, ed. D. F. Pears. Open court: La Salle, Ill. 1–34.
Smith, Janet Farrell (1989). “Russell on Indexicals and Scientific Knowledge,” in C. W. Savage and C. A. Anderson, eds., Rereading Russell: Essays in Bertrand Russell’s Metaphysics and Epistemology, Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol. 12, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 119–137.
Soames, Scott (2010). Philosophy of Language. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
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Orilia, F. (2018). Russell’s Descriptivism About Proper Names and Indexicals: Reconstruction and Defense. In: Elkind, L., Landini, G. (eds) The Philosophy of Logical Atomism. History of Analytic Philosophy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-94364-0_11
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