Abstract
As there were two approaches to natural language which we noted in Chapter One, there are roughly two seemingly opposing camps regarding the notion of reference. For convenience I shall again label these the logician’s view and the speech act theorist’s view. According to the logician’s view, reference is a relation between words and the world; however the link may be forged, there is a link between certain expressions of the language and certain entities. ‘Nine’ refers to the number nine, ‘Bertrand Russell’ to Bertrand Russell, and so on. This picture appears to be muddied a bit by the last-mentioned philosopher, who held that definite descriptions weren’t really referring expressions at all, but denoting expressions, expressions that disappear at the level of logical analysis. But as we saw in the final section of Chapter 1, this is really part and parcel of the same view, since the claim is that sentences containing expressions of the form ‘the (ϕ’ link up with objects in a certain way too — it’s just that the linkage is different from the one that operates with names.
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Notes
Fodor, Bever and Garrett, The Psychology of Language, p. 168.
Strawson, “On Referring”, p. 170.
Ibid,
Donnellan, “Proper Names and Identifying Descriptions”, p. 374.
Kripke, “Naming and Necessity”, pp. 298–99.
Ibid., p. 302.
Devitt, Designation, p. 27.
Ibid., p. 28.
Ibid., pp. 30–31.
Ibid., p. 31.
Ibid., p. 33. Devitt has a causal account of having an object in mind in using a name, roughly that this requires there being a d-chain accessible to the speaker underlying the name token which is grounded in that object. This is offered as an improvement on the description theorist’s account of ‘having in mind’. I think it is such, but that this detail is irrelevant to the present considerations.
Donnellan, “Speaking of Nothing”, p. 19.
Devitt, Designation, pp. 40–41 and 157–60. Such names are not causally grounded in their objects and do not have d-chains underlying them.
Kripke, “Naming and Necessity”, p. 302.
Ibid., p. 349, n. 42.
A. Pannekoek, A History of Astronomy, p. 359. In fact such speculation goes back to at least 1758, when Clairaut speculated that there might be such a planet. See Morton Grosser, The Discovery of Neptune, p. 49.
Kripke, “Naming and Necessity”, p. 347, n. 33.
In a letter to Johann Galle, the astronomer who observed the planet on the basis of Leverrier’s prediction, cited in G. Abetti’s The History of Astronomy, p. 216. Grosser suggests that there is good evidence that the Bureau did not assign the name however, and finds that “the name Neptune was certainly Leverrier’s own suggestion” (The Discovery of Neptune, p. 124.) So it seems most likely that Leverrier did name the planet, contrary to his own claims — but the name was in fact bestowed after the planet was first sighted by Galle.
Those attracted to the idea that names have senses will be interested to learn that Leverrier claimed that the Bureau rejected Galle’s suggestion, ‘Janus’, because “the latter would imply that this planet is the last one in the solar system, and there is no reason to believe that this is so”.
Although in what I have quoted thus far Leverrier refers to the cause of the perturbations as an object, he elsewhere uses the term ‘planet’. He in fact thought he had ruled out the other possible explanations — a resisting ether, an undiscovered massive satellite of Uranus, an altered law of gravitation, and a crucially timed collision with a comet — and was convinced that there was an undiscovered planet beyond Uranus. (See Grosser, The Discovery of Neptune, p. 100.)
One other fascinating aspect of this period deserves mention because of its philosophical implications. At the very same time Leverrier was at work, the English astronomer John Couch Adams predicted the existence of a planet at virtually the same place; he and Leverrier deserve to be known as co-discoverers, though the credit often goes solely to Leverrier. The philosophically interesting aspect of this is that, or so we may suppose, Adams and Leverrier used the same description (‘the cause of the perturbations…’ — or at any rate this and a translation of it) and might also have attached the same name to it. Were these descriptions to have been used referentially, there is no guarantee that Adams and Leverrier would have spoken of the same planet. If however it is correct to suppose that the uses were attributive, both astronomers had to be referring to Neptune.
Since the description reads ‘the object that…’, only an object could have been Neptune. This, I suspect, helps to explain why ‘Vulcan’ as it occurs in the lexicon of astronomy is an empty name. A planet was postulated to account for the change in the rate of the precession of the perihelion of Mercury, and we may suppose the name ‘Vulcan’ to have been chosen for this postulated planet. (Despite the usual story, it may be that we must counterfactually suppose this — according to at least one writer, the name ‘Vulcan’ was assigned only after a Dr. Lescarbault thought he had observed the planet. See Agnes M. Clerke, A Popular History of Astronomy pp. 248–49.) Thus, we have a baptism something like ‘Vulcan is whatever object causes the rate of the precession of the perihelion of Mercury’. But no object causes this shift, it results from the local curvature of space. Since nothing satisfies the attributive definite description, nothing was referred to. The attempted baptism failed, and ‘Vulcan’ is vacuous.
But since Leverrier elsewhere used the term ‘planet’ as well as ‘object’, what if a comet had been responsible — would ‘Neptune’ have then become a name of that comet? I think that we might have been willing to tolerate this as a “near miss” of the sort Donnellan allows for attributive definite descriptions in “Putting Humpty Dumpty Together Again” and answered in the affirmative. Not so with ‘planet’ or ‘object’ and the curvature of space.
From a letter to the Astronomische Nachrichten, no. 580 (October 12, 1846), reprinted in H. Shapley and H. Howarth, A Source Book in Astronomy, pp. 245–54.
As Devitt observes, the proper account of the passing along of the name is still given by the causal theory, although the initial link is not itself causal; Designation, p. 41.
Pannekoek, A History of Astronomy, p. 359 (emphasis added).
Ibid., p. 360.
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Bertolet, R. (1990). Prolegomenon to a Theory of Speaker Reference. In: What is Said. Philosophical Studies Series, vol 49. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-2061-3_4
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