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SLT Philosophy Forum 3/2/2013
Alun David
The Meaning of Names
One of things that philosophy does is raise questions about the obvious; showing that things you
thought were familiar or banal are actually much more interesting, because you realise that
something you use every day is actually rather difficult and intriguing.
Names are a very common and familiar feature of ordinary languages. It seems of central
importance that language should enable us to make connections with the world, and names are a
major part of that, because they let us pick things out and talk about them. If we don’t understand
how this can be, then there’s a big gap in our understanding of language
Some definitions:
“Names are words or sets of words by which a person, animal, place or thing is known,
addressed, or referred to.”
“Meaning is what the source or sender expresses, communicates, or conveys in their message to
the observer or receiver, and what the receiver infers from the current context.”
In this presentation I will be talking only about “proper nouns”, i.e. the names we give to
individual persons, animals, places, or things (usually written with initial capital letters). This is
partly for the sake of time, and also because some of the most interesting philosophical
discussions of naming start from that point.
Approach 1: The Meaning of a Name is a Corresponding Description
In the early 20th-century, partly inspired by new developments in philosophical logic, Bertrand
Russell proposed a new theory of the meaning of proper names. According to Russell, a name
could be replaced by or “analysed into” a corresponding description. For example, the name
“Barack Obama” could be replaced by the descriptive phrase “the 44th President of the United
States”. In fact many such phrases could stand in for “Barack Obama”:
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The author of Dreams From My Father.
The first African-American president of the Harvard Law Review.
The husband of Michelle Obama.
It should be noted that each of these phrases uses the word “The” – this is significant, because in
Russell’s view this implies that there is only one person in the world who matches these
descriptions. Russell thought that all names must be replaceable by descriptions using the word
“the”, because they too correspond to single persons, places, or things.
The upshot of this account is that the meaning of a name is a cluster of descriptive phrases
satisfied by the bearer of the name. What does this imply about the way that we use names to
communicate something meaningful? According to one interpretation, Russell and his followers
are committed to the view that when I use a name in conversation, I must have in mind some kind
of description that the bearer of the name satisfies. At the same time, for conversational purposes,
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SLT Philosophy Forum 3/2/2013
Alun David
I must also make some assumptions about the descriptions available to you. Consider the
following dialogue:
A: Barack Obama is great.
B: Did you know that Barack Obama is the author of Dreams From My Father?
A: Oh really, I didn’t know that.
B must assume that Barack Obama satisfies some description known to A, which does not pertain
to this aspect of his literary career; otherwise, B’s question is redundant.
What are the advantages of a description-based theory of names? Russell thought it could be
brought to bear on various problems in the philosophy of language:
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The sentence “Eric Arthur Blair is George Orwell” appears to tell us something that “Eric
Arthur Blair is Eric Arthur Blair” does not. For a follower of Russell, this is because each
name can be broken out into different descriptions, e.g. “The second child of Richard
Walmesley Blair and Ida Mabel Limouzin” (for Eric Arthur Blair) and “The author of
Animal Farm and 1984” (for George Orwell).
Descriptions can be given for non-existing/fictional characters or places e.g. for Hogwarts
“The school for wizards attended by Harry Potter”. There is no such place as Hogwarts, so
nothing in the world satisfies that description, but that doesn’t mean the descriptive phrase
or the name is meaningless; it just means the sentences about Hogwarts are false.
Still, there might be a few questions about “description theory”, for example:
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Barack Obama, the person, was around for many years before he wrote his books, married
Michelle, etc. So there was a time in his life (e.g. when he was 10 years old) at which he
would not have satisfied any of the descriptions given above. What does that suggest
about the meaning of his name?
Suppose that Joe knows Michael Caine only as the star of the 60s film The Italian Job,
whereas his granddaughter Phoebe knows the actor only because of his role in the recent
Dark Knight films. Consider the following conversation:
Joe: Michael Caine is a great actor.
Phoebe: Michael Caine is rubbish.
According to the theory they are successfully talking about the same person. But they
mean something different by the words “Michael Caine”. Is that not a bit odd?
Question 1
Is the meaning of a name a corresponding set of descriptions?
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SLT Philosophy Forum 3/2/2013
Alun David
Approach 2: The Meaning of a Name is What it Refers to
In Naming and Necessity Saul Kripke offered a root-and-branch attack on description theory. I’ll
just give two of his examples (summaries borrowed from S. Marc Cohen, but I’ve changed some
names):
Most people who use the names “David Beckham” and “Wayne Rooney” cannot supply
descriptions that individuate these men. Many users of the name “Wayne Rooney” can
only say “Rooney is a famous footballer”; still, they use “Rooney” as a proper name of
Rooney.
Suppose Einstein had not discovered the theory of relativity, but that the work had been
done by a different man, named “Schmidt’”. Einstein managed to get a hold of the
manuscript, and passed the work off as his own. In this situation, the description “the man
who discovered the theory of relativity” would refer to Schmidt, not Einstein. But,
“Einstein” still refers to Einstein. We are imagining a situation in which Einstein did not
discover the theory of relativity. We are not imagining a situation in which Schmidt was
Einstein!
The first example shows that we may lack a description that is uniquely satisfied by the bearer of
a name, but we can still perfectly use it (note that the example speaks of “a famous footballer” –
there is no phrase involved using “the”). The second example shows that descriptive phrases just
don’t behave in the same way as names; all the descriptive phrases we think are satisfied by
Einstein might pick out another individual; but “Einstein” always refers to Einstein.
John Stuart Mill is often taken to have provided the basis for an alternative view that the meaning
of a name was the object (i.e. the person, animal, place, or thing) that it denoted. This view has
been taken up by a number of later philosophers, including Kripke.
Mill was keen to show that the meaning of a name could not be worked out by looking at the
meaning of its parts or its etymology. He gives the example of the place name “Dartmouth” which
refers to a town at the mouth of the river Dart. It seems that the town was named because of its
location. But suppose that canals and dams were built which completely changed the course of
the river, so that the Dart no longer flowed anywhere near Dartmouth. Even though it no longer
stood at the mouth of the Dart, the name “Dartmouth” would continue to denote the town.
Kripke also thinks that the object a name refers to is fixed at the moment when the name is
allocated. So there was a moment when the individual Einstein was named (presumably when he
was an infant). Thereafter, Kripke thinks, we can trace out chains of conversations in which one
of the speaker’s introduces the name with the intention of referring to this individual.
Fundamentally, that is all that is needed to determine what we are doing when we talk about
Einstein.
Questions for this approach: How does it help us with some of the cases mentioned above in
relation to description theory, i.e. the conversations about Barack Obama, George Orwell,
Hogwarts, and Michael Caine?
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SLT Philosophy Forum 3/2/2013
Alun David
Question 2: Is the Meaning of a Name the object that it refers to?
Approach 3: A Hybrid Theory
Gareth Evans provided an interesting contribution to the debate. Consider the island of
Madagascar. We owe its name, “Madagascar”, to a conversation between the Venetian explorer
Marco Polo and some inhabitants of East Africa he met on his voyage there. However, it has been
discovered that the Africans were using the word “Madagascar” to refer not to the island, but to a
port in Somalia (Mogadishu); Marco Polo had misunderstood their conversational intention.
This sounds a lot like the Einstein-Schmidt example. If Kripke is right then the sentence
“Madagascar is the only place in world where ring-tailed lemurs live in the wild” is false, or so
we would think when we discover the tradition of using the name as a tag for the Somali port.
However, Evans points out that we don’t worry about the origin of the name in this case; our use
of the name Madagascar reflects the information we have about the island, and not the history of
how it was designated in the past.
So, although Evans shares Kripke’s deep doubts about the idea that the meaning of names is a
corresponding description, he shares with Russell and his supporters a view that the use of names
is inextricably related to our information about the world. This is why his approach is known as a
hybrid theory of naming.
References
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Bertrand Russell, “On Denoting”, originally published in Mind (1905), available at
http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/On_Denoting
John Stuart Mill’s discussion of names, first published in his System of Logic (1843)
can be found at http://www.logicmuseum.com/connotation/millconnotation.htm
Saul Kripke, Naming and Necessity (2nd edition, 1981)
Gareth Evans, “The Causal Theory of Names” (1973), re-published in Collected
Papers (1985)
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