Millianism and Translation
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Millianism and Translation Andrea Raimondi1 Accepted: 6 September 2020 © Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract According to Millianism about proper names, what a proper name semantically contributes to the sentence in which it figures is simply its referent; therefore, co-referring proper names are intercheangable salva veritate and salva significatione. In their 2019 paper published in Topoi, Felappi and Santambrogio formulate a thought-provoking argument against Millianism. Their argument aims at establishing that our normal practice of translation shows that Millianism cannot be correct. I argue that Millians can successfully reply. I will address in turn two versions of Felappi and Santambrogio’s argument, focusing especially on the second one, which apparently raises a more challenging problem for Millianism. Finally, I will consider two objections against my own strategy, and I will reply to them. Keywords Millianism · Proper names · Translation · Direct/indirect reports · Logophors 1. In their 2019 paper published in Topoi, Felappi and Santambrogio formulate a thought-provoking argument against Millianism, the view that what a proper name semantically contributes is simply its referent. In this paper, I show how Millians can reply. Felappi and Santambrogio’s argument comes in two versions. I consider them in turn. In the first version, Felappi and Santambrogio observe that the standard English translation of (F), a passage from Frege (1892, p. 32), is (T): (F) Der Gedanke des Satzes “der Morgenstern ist ein von der Sonne beleuchteter Körper” verschieden von dem des Satzes “der Abendstern ist ein von der Sonne beleuchteter Körper”. Jemand, der nicht wüsste, dass der Abendstern der Morgenstern ist, könnte den einen Gedanken für wahr, den anderen für falsch halten. (T) The thought in the sentence “The morning star is a body illuminated by the Sun” differs from that in the sentence “The evening star is a body illuminated by the Sun.” Anybody who did not know that the evening star is the morning star might hold the one thought to be true, the other false. Then, they consider a translation (T*) that is identical to (T) except for the fact that the last occurrence of “the morning * Andrea Raimondi [email protected] 1
Department of Philosophy, University of Nottingham, Nottingham NG7 2RD, UK
star” is substituted by “the evening star”. If Millianism is correct, (T) and (T*) are semantically equivalent (assuming that “the morning star” and “the evening star” are proper names). However, no actual translator would translate (F) as in (T*). According to Felappi and Santambrogio, this suggests that there is some semantic difference between (T) and (T*), contrary to what Millianism holds. Millians can reply by distinguishing between two kinds of translation. One preserves just the semantically encoded information of a piece of linguistic material (e.g., in the case of a declarative sentence, the proposition it expresses). The other one preserves the pragmatically imparted information (i.e., the point t
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