Abstract
Arthur Burks was one of the first philosophers to recognize the inadequacy of the traditional “Description Theory” of proper names inherited from Frege and Russell; he was also one of the first to suggest a plausible revision of that theory (Burks [5]). His suggestion — that proper names be viewed as indexical definite descriptions — anticipated by nearly three decades the general drift of accounts of proper names such as those currently offered by Tyler Bürge (in [4]) and Stephen Schiffer (in [22]). Description Theories, however, have recently come under frontal attack from proponents of so-called Causal-Historical Theories (e.g., Kripke [13] and Donnellan [10]), who urge a radically different account of the mechanisms of reference. Whatever one may think of this attack — and its success is by no means uncontested (cf. McKinsey [19]–[20] and Boör [2]) — Description Theories still have many enthusiastic supporters (including Burks in [6]). Nor do they lack ammunition for a counteroffensive. Their most powerful weapon is derived from the well-known tangle of problems attending the interpretation of names in propositional attitude contexts, which they increasingly point to as evidence against the Causal-Historical Theorists’ contention that names “merely designate” and do not “express (descriptive) senses” (cf., e.g., Loar [18]).
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Boër, S.E. (1990). Names and Attitudes. In: Salmon, M.H. (eds) The Philosophy of Logical Mechanism. Synthese Library, vol 206. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-0987-8_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-0987-8_6
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