Proper names as identical twins

A while ago I discussed the Bunuel film where different actresses play the same character, and I discussed later how we try to identify people by their faces, or by the sound of their voice. Dogs do the same by their sense of smell, perhaps.

The difference between the film and reality is that Bunuel signifies the identity by convention. The actresses don’t look that alike, certainly not as identical twins look alike. But Bunuel uses cinematic conventions to convey the identity. One actress is seen opening the door, the other is seen walking through the other side. With actual perception the identity is signified naturally.

Before printing, we identified proper names in the same way. Here are two tokens of the word 'Plato' in Worcester 13 9rb and 11vb. With electronic printing, we are used to the same word looking exactly the same, which is guaranteed by the computer representing the five letters in the name 'Plato' by the ASCII characters 80, 108, 97, 116 and 111 respectively. This is what allows us to search an electronic document for the same name, or perform a Google search for ‘Plato’. Even printing on paper guarantees that the letters will look nearly the same.

Before that, we recognised proper names just as we recognised faces.

The primacy of proper names

Bill Vallicella argues here that a pronoun inherits its referent from the noun of which it is the antecedent. I say ‘John left the party saying he was ill.’ My use of ‘John’ makes an extra-linguistic reference to some person who is not a part of speech or a bit of language. ‘He’ also refers extra-linguistically. But the pronoun ‘he’ inherits its referent from John. It has no independent referential role to play, no role independent of that of ‘John.’

The scholastics might have expressed his point by saying that the proper name refers per se, ‘through itself’, whereas the pronoun refers per alium, or ‘through another’, i.e. through the proper name ‘John’.

I am not sure. There is a strange passage in Mark 14:51-2 about a man who is not mentioned anywhere else in Mark, nor in the other gospels.

[51] And a young man followed him, with nothing but a linen cloth about his body. And they seized him, [52] but he left the linen cloth and ran away naked.

If Vallicella is right, i.e. if the reference of the pronoun is always per alium, through another, and if the ‘another’ is always a proper name, it follows there must be some proper name that ‘he’ (intralinguistically) refers back to. But there isn’t. The man is never mentioned by name, and there is no other reference to him anywhere in the New Testament. Absolutely everything we know about him is from these two verses. The pronoun seems to inherit its reference from the indefinite description ‘a young man’.  I shall discuss the reference of such indefinite noun phrases later.

What if Mark had given the man in the linen cloth a proper name, as Luke does to Zacheus in chapter 19 of his gospel?

[2] And behold, there was a man named Zacheus, who was the chief of the publicans: and he was rich […] [5] And when Jesus was come to the place, looking up, he saw him and said to him: Zacheus, make haste and come down: for this day I must abide in thy house.

Yet there is still the problem that Zacheus is introduced via the indefinite description ‘a man named Zacheus’.  Why shouldn’t the pronoun in ‘he was rich’ and the proper name in ‘Zacheus, make haste’ both inherit their reference from the indefinite description. What is so special about proper names?

Sometimes Mark, like the other gospel writers, introduces people without such an indefinite introduction. Mark 15:40 says “There were also women looking on from a distance, among whom were Mary Magdalene, and Mary the mother of James the younger and of Joses, and Salome.

But what is the sense of the very first occurrence of a proper name in a narrative? Does it tell us which individual its predicate is true of? Not at all. ‘Simon the leper’ is mentioned only once in Mark 14:3. ‘While he was in Bethany, reclining at the table in the home of Simon the Leper, a woman came with an alabaster jar of very expensive perfume, made of pure nard’. What information does the first and only use of the name convey about Simon? Nothing at all, beyond the fact that he was called ‘Simon’, and that he presumably suffered from leprosy. The passage could have read ‘reclining at the table in the home of a man called “Simon the Leper”‘ without loss of meaning.

In summary, in a narrative context there is nothing special about proper names that distinguishes them from pronouns. Both have to identify an individual in order for them to have their full sense, but they can only identify an individual by inheriting their reference from a previously occurring noun phrase. They cannot refer per se, only per alium.  And ultimately they can do this only through indefinite noun phrases. These alone, by their very nature, are unable to inherit reference.  That suggests that they refer per se, but this raises the question of whether ‘a man’, ‘a certain woman’, ‘one of the disciples’ can refer at all. I shall discuss this in the next post.

This useful page itemises all the characters, both named and anonymous, who are mentioned in Mark.

Sentences as names

I regularly visit Vallicella’s place although no longer comment there due to the sometimes alarming responses. Today’s one caught my eye. I stopped right at the first leg of his aporetic triad, and went no further.

1. 'Al is fat' is the name of the fact of Al's being fat.

Come off it. The expression ‘the name of the fact of Al's being fat’ is the name of the fact of Al's being fat. As for 'Al is fat', it names nothing. Although it does express the proposition that Al is fat.

Translating ordinary language into predicate logic.

Vallicella has now apparently accepted my arguments against grammatically proper names being translatable into the ‘logical constants’ of modern predicate logic (MPL). But this leaves him with the problem that there are also strong arguments against translating them into the predicates of MPL.  I summarised these arguments earlier in June, as follows.

Argument 1 was that a proper name does not signify something that is repeatable, therefore does not signify a property. Therefore it signifies an object. A reply is here.

Argument 2 was that a name cannot be significant or intelligible to another unless the idea of what the name applies to is in the other person’s mind. But we can only have the idea of a particular thing by being acquainted with that thing, which is only possible if that thing actually exists. A reply is here.

Argument 3 was that definition proceeds by genus and specific difference. Therefore a proper name cannot be defined, for they name individuals, and individuals are not species. They have no specific difference, and can only be distinguished by the proper name itself.  A reply is here.

Argument 4 was that truth-conditional semantics rests on the assumption that the conditions for the truth of a sentence give the sentence’s meaning or significance. But there is no truth evaluable content when reference failure occurs. If there are no truth conditions, then there is no meaning or significance. I have not replied to this argument yet.

If Vallicella accepts these arguments as well as those he summarises in his post, he is apparently left with the problem that ordinary language cannot be translated into MPL at all. Is that a problem?

Ad secundum

I reply to the second argument of the four arguments for direct reference. The argument was that a name cannot be significant or intelligible to another unless the idea of what the name applies to is in the other person’s mind. Thus the meaning of most proper names is unknown to nearly all people in the world; they have no corresponding words in other languages. We can only have the idea of a particular thing by being acquainted with that thing, which is only possible if that thing actually exists. It follows that the meaning of a proper name involves direct acquaintance with the individual for which it is a name.

There a number of things to criticise in the argument. For example, the assumption that we use language as it were to evoke the ‘same idea’ in someone else’s mind. This goes back at least to Aristotle – “Just as all men have not the same writing, so all men have not the same speech sounds, but the mental experiences, which these directly symbolize, are the same for all, as also are those things of which our experiences are the images” (On Interpretation, ch. 1). This is questionable – as Frege argued, the distinction between things, meanings and ideas is analogous to that between the moon, which is publicly observable, the image of the moon in a camera or telescope, which is publicly observable, and the retinal image, which is not.

The reference of a proper name is the object itself which we designate by its means; the idea, which we have in that case, is wholly subjective; in between lies the sense, which is indeed no longer subjective like the idea, but is yet not the object itself. The following analogy will perhaps clarify these relationships. Somebody observes the Moon through a telescope. I compare the Moon itself to the reference; it is the object of the observation, mediated by the real image projected by the object glass in the interior of the telescope, and by the retinal image of the observer. The former I compare to the sense, the latter is like the idea or experience. The optical image in the telescope is indeed one-sided and dependent upon the standpoint of observation; but it is still objective, inasmuch as it can be used by several observers. At any rate it could be arranged for several to use it simultaneously. But each one would have his own retinal image [On Sense and Reference].

But that would take us too far afield. The objection errs in assuming that the meaning of a proper name cannot be communicated to another person, other than by direct acquaintance with the object that it names. But of course it can. As I commented here, the first time we encounter a proper name in a particular context, it signifies (for us) no more than a general idea - “Some Trojan warrior called ‘Aeneas’” perhaps. But every subsequent time we encounter the name, it has a definite and singular sense: the very same person as that Trojan warrior. It signifies merely that every sentence containing it is true – if true at all – of a single person. It signifies no more than that. And we easily learn this signification without being ‘acquainted’ – whatever that means – with the person who is named. That is how we learned the signification of the name ‘Jesus’, as I argued here and elsewhere.

On the fact that the meaning of most proper names is unknown to most people in the world, this is no more significant than the fact (assuming it is a fact) that eskimos have many different words for types of snow. And proper names are a part of a language if they are a significant part of the literature of that language. My Latin dictionary contains the Latinised form of all the main characters in Latin literature. Many of these are fictional, of course. All reference, I claim, is story relative reference.

Charley’s (single) ant

And here is another interesting paper by Greg Frost-Arnold, “Too much reference”. He considers the case in some way opposite to empty singular terms: where a singular term ‘refers to’ more than thing.

He writes:

Suppose a person purchases an ant colony. There are many small ants in the colony, and two big ants, Ant A and Ant B. However, the owner of the ant colony does not realize that there are actually two big ants, because he only sees one big ant at a time. (We assume the ants’ behavior is coordinated to satisfy this condition.) The owner believes that there is one big ant in the colony, and the owner decides to name this ant ‘Charley.’ The philosophical issue such a story raises is this: what is the semantic status of sentences that include the term ‘Charley’?

This is a case I discussed, with reference to a Bunuel film, here and here. There are actually two people (Carole Bouquet and Angela Molina) playing the same character (Conchita). Does the name ‘Conchita’ refer to two people – for once you have realised the trick, it is obvious that there are really two characters – or one? Or (pace Greg) to none at all?

If the theory of reference (the ‘Frodo’-Frodo theory) I have argued for is correct, this sort of multiple reference is impossible. The meaning of a name is exhausted by its function of purporting to signify the same thing. To understand the sentences ‘Fa’ and ‘Ga’ is to understand that if they are both true, then “some F is G” is also true. And, because they do not imply that some Fs are G, they they can only imply that one F is G. To say that there are two F’s is to say that there is an F, and there is another F. The word ‘another’ is the complement of a singular term. It always means a different thing, and for there to be one different thing means there being at least two different things.

What about the ants? Can’t it plausibly said that the proper name ‘Charley’ refers both to Ant 1 and to Ant 2? No, because, as I have argued, reference is not a semantic relation between language and reality. As I have argued, we can regard the two ant images as visual proper names. I see ant 1 walking out of the colony, and entertain the visual proposition ‘Here is an ant’. Ant 1 goes back, and ant 2 now comes out. I entertain the visual proposition ‘Here is the same ant’. Since I cannot understand this visual singular as applying to more than one singular, i.e. because I understand it always as meaning ‘the same …’, I cannot understand it as multiple reference. Thus it cannot be multiple reference. Singular terms always refer to singular things.

Is Atlantis West of London?

I just spotted this excellent post from May 2008, by philosopher Greg Frost-Arnold. He says that, in negative free logic (a variety of which I have argued for here, across too many posts to mention), all atomic sentences containing non-denoting names are false. But this leads to the following problem, he says. Assume, as seems probable, that 'Atlantis' is a non-denoting name.  Then in negative free logic, all three of the following sentences must be false.

(1) Atlantis is West of London.

(2) Atlantis is East of London.

(3) Atlantis and London have the same longitude.

But 'x is west of y' means the same as 'x is not east of y, and x does not have the same longitude as y', and now we have a problem.

If 'Atlantis is west of London' is false (as the free logician says), then at least one of 'Atlantis is east of London' or 'Atlantis and London the same longitude' has to be true -- but that contradicts the earlier assumption (of the negative free logician) that all of (1)-(3) are false.

He asks "Does anyone see a good response to this objection on behalf of the proponent of negative free logic?"  I answer: the objection relies, first, on the perfectly valid assumption that if p is equivalent to "~q and ~r", then ~p is equivalent to "q or r".  Second, it relies on the invalid assumption that "Atlantis is West of London" is equivalent to a conjunction of two negatives.  On the contrary, it is equivalent to the conjunction of two affirmatives. It is equivalent (according to our variety of NFL) to "something which is identical with Atlantis is West of London".  This in turn is equivalent to "something which is identical with Atlantis is neither East of London nor has the same longitude as London".  And the negation of that is

(4) It is not the case that something identical with Atlantis is not East of London, or it is not the case that something identical with Atlantis does not have the same longitude as London.

Now if (1) is false then (4) is true, and if Atlantis exists, it follows that Atlantis is East of London, or that Atlantis and London have the same longitude (I will omit the proof, which is elementary).  But if Atlantis does not exist, both (2) - which is equivalent to "something which is identical with Atlantis is East of London" - and (3) - which is equivalent to "something which is identical with Atlantis has the same longtitude as London" - are false.  For the presumption is that nothing is identical with Atlantis. 

This requires the negative free logician to bite a bullet, but it is not the unpalatable one that Frost-Arnold suggests.  We have to concede that sentences like "Atlantis is large" and "Atlantis is not large" are not true contradictories, but contraries.  The second is not the negation of the first. The true negation of the first is "notthing is Atlantis or Atlantis is not large".  But there cannot be simple solutions in philosophy.  When we have exhausted everything that is wrong, what remains must be right.

Direct Reference - ad primum

I reply to the first argument of the four arguments for direct reference.  The argument was that a proper name does not signify something that is repeatable, therefore does not signify a property. Therefore it signifies an object.

I reply: the argument relies on the assumption that a a term signifies either a property (which is repeatable) or an object (which is not).  This is false.  As I have argued before, the entire significance of a proper name is to signify that (if we are talking about anything at all) we are talking about a single thing.  In other words, Fa and Ga imply that some F is G, if 'a' is functioning as a proper name.  Thus it cannot signify anything repeatable like a property, by reason of its peculiar semantic function. 'Fa' and 'Ga' always imply that 'F' and 'G' apply to a single thing. Thus it makes no sense to say that this individual is Socrates on Tuesday, but that someone else is Socrates on Wednesday. Or that this individual is Socrates today, but might not have been Socrates.

Nor does a proper name signify an object.  Sentences containing the same proper name, accepted in the same sense, are true of the same thing, if they are true at all. But they do not have to be true of anything at all, in order for us to understand this.

Auden on proper names

“Proper names are poetry in the raw. Like all poetry they are untranslatable.” – W.H. Auden. On the 'untranslatability' of proper names, see also argument 2 of the arguments for direct reference.

The roots of direct reference 3

Argument Three.  A definition must provide the genus of the thing defined, and the specific difference by which the species defined is distinguished from every other species belonging to that kind. Thus only a species can be defined.  But a proper name be defined, for individuals are not species.  They have no specific difference, and can only be distinguished by the proper name itself.  Thus the meaning of a proper name is the individual it names.

Suggested by Reid again.  Of the Intellectual Powers, pp 219-20.  See also Argument 1, argument 2.

The roots of direct reference - argument 2

Argument Two (argument 1 is here).  When words in different languages mean the same thing, this reflects a common reality.  Thus, most human languages have words for sky, water, nose, earth, tree, animal etc.   Even when these are words for individuals (sun, moon, pole star), it is because the individuals are well known to all people in all (or most) places.  But most individuals are local, known only to the persons inhabiting that place, and so do not reflect a common reality.  Thus words for individuals - proper names - are confined to a corner of the world. 

Thus the meaning of most proper names is unknown to nearly all people in the world; they have no corresponding words in other languages; and they are not even reckoned to be words of their own language*. It follows that the meaning of a proper name involves direct acquaintance with the individual for which it is a name.

* The substance of this argument is almost entirely borrowed from Thomas Reid, T., Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man, The Works of Thomas Reid, Edinburgh 1846, Essay V, p. 389.  See also this amusing page on awesomely untranslatable words, although the explanation of each word is entirely clear, suggesting that it is translatable after all.  E.g. the Japanese Kyoiku mama clearly, and somewhat perversely, means what I call a 'Chinese mother'. 

PS I looked at my notes and also found this by Locke (Essay III. iii. 3. Pringle-Pattison p. 227).

Men learn names, and use them in talk with others, only that they may be understood: which is then only done when, by use or consent, the sound I make by the organs of speech, excites in another man's mind who hears it, the idea I apply it to in mine, when I speak it. This cannot be done by names applied to particular things; whereof I alone having the ideas in my mind, the names of them could not be significant or intelligible to another, who was not acquainted with all those very particular things which had fallen under my notice.

The Roots of Direct Reference

I’ve talked for a while about why the theory of Direct Reference may be false. (For the purpose of this discussion, call ‘Direct Reference’ the theory that part or all of the meaning of a proper name requires the existence of a named object). The primary reason for believing that it is false is the fact that fictional names are meaningful. I have discussed this a few time, but particularly here. The information that a proper name communicates to us is exhausted by what it would communicate us even if it had no ‘referent’ at all. The mere fact of the existence of a referent adds no further information to what the name already tells us, as is shown by meaningful texts like the New Testament, where we cannot be completely sure whether any of the proper names have a referent at all.

Even though the primary reasons for believing the theory is false are manifest and obvious, we must talk about the reasons that people have thought that theories of direct reference are true, for these are prima facie objections to any theory that is opposed to direct reference.

Argument One.  A term signifies either a property or an object*.  But properties are repeatable.  A property like being white, or running, or being bald can be instantiated by many individuals.  Even a property that can only be had by one individual at a time (being the tallest living philosopher) can be instantiated by different individuals at successive times, or could be instantiated by a different individual than the one that possesses it now.  If a proper name like 'Socrates' signified a property, even a unique property, it would make sense to say that this individual is Socrates on Tuesday, but that someone else is Socrates on Wednesday.  Or that this invidual is Socrates today, but might not have been Socrates.  But that makes no sense.  A proper name does not signify something that is repeatable, therefore does not signify a property.  Therefore it signifies an object.  Therefore an object is part or all of the meaning of a proper name, and the theory of Direct Reference, as defined above, is true.


* François Recanati defines singularism as the doctrine that ‘our thought is about individual objects as much as it is about properties’ (‘Singular Thought: in Defence of Acquaintance’ in Jeshion (ed.) New Essays on Singular Thought Oxford University Press 2010, 141-90, p. 142).

Intentionality and Proper Names

The Maverick Philosopher has an insightful post on modes of being, haecceity and proper names. Proper names are the real difficulty for a theory of intentionality. We can express the difficulty by means of the following ‘aporetic tetrad’. (I define ‘empty name’ as a proper name that does not signify an existing object).

1. An empty name signifies something
2. Every thing is an existing thing
3. A name does not signify a concept
4. A (significant) term signifies a concept or an object.

Taken together, the four are inconsistent. If (1) an empty term signifies something, and if (2) every thing is an existing thing, then an empty term signifies an existing thing. But (3) that existing thing is not a concept, so (4) an empty name signifies an existing object. But (from the definition of ‘empty name’) an empty does not signify an existing object. Contradiction.

Yet each of the four propositions has a strong claim to our acceptance. (1) Surely the semantics of an empty name are no different from a non-empty one. We can’t tell whether there was such a person as John the Baptist by analysing the meaning of the name as used in the New Testament. (2) There is plenty of evidence for the ‘Brentano thesis’ that I have discussed frequently. (3) There are plausible arguments against proper names signifying concepts – see Maverick’s argument, for example. (4) The distinction between concept and object is practically a given. No contemporary philosopher of language has seriously challenged it, as far as I know.

There are three known resolutions to the tetrad, according as philosophers have denied proposition 1, 2, or 3 respectively. Direct reference theorists deny (1). They hold (implausibly, to my mind) that an empty name does not signify. To the argument that we cannot tell whether a name (e.g. ‘John the Baptist’) is empty from its semantics alone, they reply that this is ‘Cartesianism’. If there is no such person as John the Baptist, direct referentialists claim that we know this, even though we utter things like ‘we do not know whether the name ‘John the Baptist’ signifies or not’. The Maverick and other Meinongians-in-denial deny (2), by driving a wedge between being a thing, and being a thing that exists. And (3) people like Mark Sainsbury, and indeed Edward Ockham himself, argue that proper names signify ‘singular concepts’.

In posts for this month (March 2011), I will put forward some arguments in defence of singular concepts. More later!

God and Allah

I came across an internet discussion where they were earnestly discussing whether 'God' and 'Allah' have the same reference. There are three positions that a Christian - who believes that the name 'God' has a reference, and that it refers to the supernatural and all-powerful being who is mentioned in both the Old and New Testament - could take on this.

1. 'Allah' is an empty name, referring to nothing. If you are a Christian description theorist, you believe that all propositions containing 'Allah' have an implicit existence claim, and so are all false. If you are a (direct) referentialist Christian, you hold that all such propositions are senseless, since they cannot have truth-value.

2. 'Allah' refers to a supernatural and powerful (though not all powerful) being who is not identical with God. Thus all the claims of Islam implying an identity with God, such as this passage where Allah speaks to Adam and Eve, are false. Others may be true.

3. God and Allah are identical, but Islam says many things about God that are not true. The only true things are the those relating to the Old Testament. For example, Allah expels Adam and Eve from Eden: God did do this, and Allah is identical with God, ergo etc.

What if 'God' and 'Allah' are both empty names? Can we make sense of such claims to identity or difference? I favour a 'haecceity predicate' theory of proper names. Being the very individual that you are cannot be a property of you. Otherwise, as Bill Vallicella has pointed out, all sorts of absurdities follow. How could the the 'thisness' of an individual exist even if the individual whose thisness it is does not exist?

But if proper names are not descriptions, haecceity is clearly a predicate, since we can make a predicate from any proper name thus: '-- is identical to Socrates' (or 'God' or 'Allah'). That is the only way we can make sense of narratives like the Koran and the Old Testament, which mention the same supernatural being as the same being throughout.

Aquinas on the names of God

Brandon here has pointed out that it is not inconsistent to hold that there are three persons in the Trinity, but only one God. For the following statements are consistent:

Jack has an F
John has an F
Jack /= John
There is only one F

However, this is true so long as we do not read 'is God' in 'the Father is God' as an identity statement, but as something like ' has the divine nature'. If, on the other hand, we read 'God' as a logically proper name, and 'the Father is God' as an identity statement, it is clearly inconsistent to hold that three things (the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost) are identical with a fourth thing (God).

Is that right? It is certainly consistent with what Aquinas says here, that no name signifying any individual thing is 'properly communicable to many', except by way of similitude; as a person can be called "Achilles". Thus the name 'God', can only be communicated by way of similitude. 'But if any name were given to signify God not as to His nature but as to His "suppositum," accordingly as He is considered as "this something," (hoc aliquid) that name would be absolutely incommunicable; as, for instance, perhaps the Tetragrammaton among the Hebrew; and this is like giving a name to the sun as signifying this individual thing.'

It suggests that our ordinary words for God only signify by description (as philosophers now say) not 'by reference'. But is that right?