In Defense of Donnellan on Proper Names
- PDF / 807,100 Bytes
- 24 Pages / 439.37 x 666.142 pts Page_size
- 19 Downloads / 199 Views
In Defense of Donnellan on Proper Names Antonio Capuano1 Received: 20 April 2017 / Accepted: 15 October 2018 © Springer Nature B.V. 2018
Abstract Kripke’s picture of how people use names to refer to things has been the dominant view in contemporary philosophy of language. When it is mentioned at all, Donnellan’s view of proper names is considered the same as Kripke’s. It is certainly true that both Donnellan and Kripke rejected descriptivism about proper names and appealed to historical facts to determine whom a speaker is referring to by using a proper name. However, the relevant historical facts Kripke and Donnellan appeal to are ultimately quite different. In this paper, I argue that Donnellan’s view of proper name fares better than Kripke’s.
1 Introduction Kripke’s picture of how people use names to refer to things has been the dominant view in contemporary philosophy of language: “An initial ‘baptism’ takes place. Here the object may be named by ostension, or the reference may be fixed by a description. When the name is ‘passed from link to link’, the receiver of the name must … intend when he learns it to use it with the same reference as the man from whom he heard it” (1980: 96).1 When it is mentioned at all, Donnellan’s view of proper names is considered the same as Kripke’s. Notoriously, neither Kripke nor Donnellan offered necessary and sufficient conditions for reference.2 In this sense, they did not offer a theory but something like a better picture of reference and the working of proper names. To find necessary and sufficient conditions for how people use names to refer to things was a task left for philosophers to come. As Kripke anticipated,3 the task turned out to be very difficult 1
Even proponents of the predicate view of proper names “are happy to accept a broadly Kripkean, i.e. causal historical, account of reference determination” (Gray 2014: 211). See Fara (2015: 73). 2 In some passages they even suggest that it may not be possible to give necessary and sufficient conditions for reference. See Kripke (1980: 94) and Donnellan (1970: 76). 3 “I want to present a better picture without giving a set of necessary and sufficient conditions for reference. Such conditions would be very complicated” (Kripke 1980: 94). * Antonio Capuano [email protected] 1
Department of Philosophy, Auburn University, Auburn, USA
13
Vol.:(0123456789)
A. Capuano
and, still many years later, we do not have a rigorous formulation of the KripkeDonnellan picture of reference.4 In fact, it is even worse: there is not a single picture of reference for which to seek a rigorous formulation. As Andrea Bianchi and Alessandro Bonanini have recently argued, “the similarities between Kripke’s and Donnellan’s accounts [of proper names] have been vastly overestimated” (2014: 176). It is certainly true that both Donnellan and Kripke rejected descriptivism about proper names and appealed to historical facts to determine who a speaker refers to by using a proper name. However, the relevant historical facts Kripk
Data Loading...
