borges & infinite monkeys

there's an interesting possibility in the field of literature that can be approached through at least two different philosophical lenses. first, let me explain the possibility, then i'll talk about two immediate problems that arise from it.

the problem i'm going to talk about is the problem of the infinite monkeys. if a group of an infinite amount of monkeys sit on typewriters randomly smacking the keyboards, eventually, all known literary works (and all future ones too) will be produced.

the same intuition is elucidated in a story by borges about an infinite library that has every combination of characters and punctuation marks possible.

from these speculations i see two philosophically interesting questions arising. the first is mostly metaphysical: what ontological status, if any, should we give to stories when, if we take this possibility seriously, all coherent works in the literature already exist in some sense or another?

the second question that arises immediately is one from authorial intent and meaning, thus becoming a question in the philosophy of language. does the intent of the author really add anything to the work produced, given that an unintelligent mechanisms could produce the same works?

these two questions require a lot of thought, but my very preliminary answers depend heavily on the plausibility of the hypothetical. obviously infinite monkeys wouldn't do the trick, but even a computer that does this task forever wouldn't have the time to contain ALL possible works of literature, considering that the human mind's language abilities are infinitely generative. take, for example, simon roberts's book titled knickers, which was unique in that chapter fourteen only says the word "thanks". chapter fourteen, btw, is from page 52 to page 2069. would a computer do that? i don't know.

if my intuition is correct, the role of authorial intent becomes of hightened importance. however, i don't think it has any effect on the ontological question.

musical meaning

what is it in a song that has the ability to bring out meaning to its listener? is there anything in the song itself that has these properties, or is it all in the mind? i don't know if it's because i'm feeling particularly emo today, but i was listening to miles davis's classic ballad "blue in green". for the purposes of the post, listen to this one, at least in part:

all music is, at least if given a materialist ontology, is a series of noises of different frequencies arranged in a particular way in space-time. but then how is it that these noises carry what we each understand to have meaning of some sort? is this meaning external or internal? or some combination of both? i guess here i'm drawing a parralel to the philosophy of language. i suspect some answer to this can be arrived at if we take some ideas from frege. however, even this approach would be highly problematicc.

in frege's discussion of language, there are generally two aspects to names: their sense (the cognitive associations and dimensions of the name) and their reference (what those names actually refer to). but of course it isn't obvious that music refers to anything at all.

i'm honestly not in the mood for even trying to solve this puzzle right now, but i hope i have the effort to one day tackle this issue with the seriousness it deserves.

rabbits in the literature

is there any interesting connection between rabbits and 20th century analytic philosophy? obviously not, but i've found 2 interesting examples of philosophy and rabbits entering the same discussion:

quine's "lo, gavagai!"- the infamous thesis of the indeterminacy of translation. here's the situation: an anthropo-linguist is placed in a foreign land with some indigenous people speaking a language he has no remote clue about. they happen to find themselves in a field. the indigenous people point in a particular direction and exclaim "Lo, gavagai!" the linguist looks towards where they're gesturing, and he sees a rabbit. does this mean the indigenous people were talking about rabbits? or were they saying 'there goes dinner'? or maybe 'the village will have good luck this year'? well quine's idea is that there is no way to know what they were talking about. it's an epistemological point, from what i can tell.

wittgenstein's "duck-rabbit" - this example of wittgenstein, used to illustrate the difference between seeing AS and seeing THAT, is so famous a brewery is named in its honor. his main philosophical point was that there are some ambiguous symbols, and images, and in these cases (which are more commonplace than one might think), we have to see "as", meaning our own perceptions are necessarily imbued with personal concepts and whims. hopefully i didn't get wittgenstein TOO horribly bad in this brief characterization, although i probably did.

did 'naming and necessity' really defeat descriptivism?

When Kripke is starting the third lecture of Naming and Necessity, he takes a second to look back at the accomplishments of the previous lectures. By Kripke’s own account (N&N p. 106), he has thus far shown how descriptivism falls short, how names are reference-fixers, not synonymous to descriptions, and how identity is a property that should be considered de re instead of de dicto., all worthy topics where Kripke undeniably made some progress. However, the prospect of this paper is to show that, even though Kripke challenged the way philosophers were thinking about these issues at the time, the revolutionary interpretation of his work is a bit unfounded, as some of the important projects of the paper don’t manage to connect.

One of the most important accomplishments of the book is the questioning of the descriptivist theory of proper names. Under the influence of Russell and Strawson, descriptivists conceived of proper names as synonymous either to a definite description or a cluster of descriptions that may have either conjunctly or disjunctly added up to the name at hand. This analysis of names conflated statements of a priori and necessary truths. If, in fact, ‘W. Bush’ meant ‘The only former governor of Texas who became president as of 2002,’ then this apparently contingent fact about the person W. Bush becomes a necessary one. However, intuition makes us strongly want to disagree with these consequences, as we feel that, but of course, W. Bush could have lost to Gore in the 2000 election.

That being said, Kripke made us think twice about whether names could really be descriptions because then any cognitive or even linguistic association we have with a give name is not only contingent, but also incomplete. Most people would not be able to give a uniquely satisfying criterion to any proper name, even those of our most intimate acquaintances. At the very least it is not a necessary precondition for proper use of a given name. If I wish to refer to Bach, and all I know of him is that he is a German composer, I can still l properly use his name even though I probably wouldn’t be able to name a single particular work he has created. Nevertheless, I am still talking about him and there is no reason to believe I am in any way misguided in what a descriptivist would have to admit being a meaningless utterance.

However, what comes into question is Kripke’s methodology. Kripke lays out a formal, comprehensive, and rigorous theory regarding proper names under the guise of a proper Descriptivist agenda. To this set of 6 theses and 1 non-circularity satisfaction condition (p. 71), he goes on to prove how each thesis is either misguided or doesn’t satisfy the non-circularity condition. This is fair enough, given his presentation of the theses. However, even though he shows that descriptivism is not the right kind of theory or proper names, he goes on to attempt to prove that a descriptivist picture won’t do either. I’m not so sure he actually makes this point.

Descriptivism, as a picture of names--as opposed to a full on theory, would fail if one could prove that descriptions of any kind are not always necessary for the use of proper names in a language. Further, Kripke would have to show how descriptions are irrelevant to proper names. If there is a way to introduce a name without any descriptive element, the anti-descriptivist wins. Kripke shows us how a name could be used without there being descriptions immediately attached: through the causal or historical chain attached to the name and object. However, how is it thatnames come to be to begin with?

Kripke gives us with two possible alternatives, the first being completely descriptive. One can introduce a name into a language by fixing a reference from a rigid designator. If, for example, I want to talk about the northernmost point in the continental United States, I could designate the name “Tom” to that spot.[1] With this kind of name origination, the description is ever present and thus we should consider the other option.

The second (and last) way Kripke discusses introducing proper names in to a language is through the initial baptism. What does this ceremony entail? Well there is something in front of you, and there is some suggestive gesture that the person who originates the naming will, from that point forward, call that thing by some name. Now, suppose it is a puppy. The owner of the puppy presumably looks at it and says, or even thinks, “I shall name it ‘Max’.” But what is the it? Is it possible, as a Quinian might say, that one is actually naming the un-detached puppy head? Or is it possible that you’re actually talking about the stage of puppy-life when they are that young? Or perhaps even giving a part of the puppy-collective? Well, presumably, no. What one is naming is the puppy itself. So whether explicit or not, one is thinking “I shall name that puppy ‘Max.”

In introducing the name along with the ‘sortal’, one is at least providing some kind of descriptive element when introducing the name, even in the event of baptism. Otherwise it would be left arguably ambiguous what exactly one was naming in the act of the initial baptism. If in fact it is true that all of these cases of baptism involve a sortal, and if sortals are descriptive, then both options explored by Kripke would include descriptions and descriptivism, in some modified way, is still a force to be dealt with. Further, descriptivism would not have been completely defeated.

But are these two methods of introducing proper names exhaustive? A possible counter-example to this line of argumentation, and it would come from the likes of people who might assert that there are times when one privately baptizes things around them. Say one is found in a novel environment, alone, perhaps a foreign wilderness, where one is unfamiliar with the fauna around oneself. Then perhaps it would make sense that this person would look at something and name it in their own mind without externally expressing anything at all. Surely, here there is no descriptive element? Well I think I would argue against that. Perhaps one doesn’t vocalize any sortal description, perhaps one doesn’t even speak to oneself using any sortal terms. Nevertheless, one looks at the certain thing and decides about that thing, whether it is the head of that thing (a head is a thing, after all) or that fauna in its entirety, or whatever one decides of that thing to call it by a certain name. Otherwise the intention of naming something fails to stick on to anything, throwing names into the dark.

Now that we have shown that there is a good argument that even baptisms include descriptions, and that the two options presented are tentatively exhaustive. Also, the previously mentioned method of introducing names via definite descriptions includes descriptions too, thus making both name-introducing mechanisms Kripke proposes dependent on descriptions. Why shouldn’t this theory of proper names be just a peculiar type of descriptivism, perhaps a des-Kripke-vism? Well the answer to this is once again return to the text carefully analyze Kripke’s arguments. The main point of contention seems to be that even if we allow for descriptive elements present at the inception of a name, carrying descriptions through to every possible use of the name, that is, making original descriptions necessarily known at every instance of its use, would lead to unacceptable conclusions including but not limited to: a conflation of the a priori and the necessary, determinism, and circularity.

So how has Kripke fared so far? Well he has definitely pointed out some difficulties in the descriptivist theory of proper names as presented his own manner. As a complete theory, Kripke has irrefutably proven that it fails, especially given the non-circularity conditions. However, in the beginning of his third lecture Kripke is arguing that the descriptivist camp not only failed to provide a theory, but that it also failed to give an adequate picture. Well I guess here it a matter of definition what one means to say that the descriptivist picture has failed. If by descriptivist picture one just means to say that hey, descriptions do play a major part in any theory of names, then Kripke here is just flat out wrong, since even his anti-descriptivist manifesto cannot dispense with descriptions altogether.

On the other hand, if one considers showing that descriptivism was the wrong type of picture we were looking for when it came to proper names was just denying the descriptivism as presented by Russell and potentially his close followers, then I guess Kripke did a very good job. And considering the fact that a whole lot of people still had Russell's “On Denoting” in a special drawer reserved for canonical, unquestionable texts, this achievement alone is very impressive.

The causal theory of names presented by Kripke isn’t held to the same rigorous standards descriptivists are held to. After presenting a theory of descriptivism and refuting it, Kripke doesn’t really show that the picture of descriptivism, as a rough sketch, might be at least in part right. When he provides his alternative, he first doesn’t even provide the audience with a rigorous theory. This is acceptable: he doesn’t intend to provide a rigorous theory. However, the picture he gives us of the causal theory of names is quasi-descriptivist, or at least retains some of the descriptive elements he was setting out to refute. Sure, Kripke’s theory differs from Russell's and in significant ways. Reference and use of a particular name can be continued without uniquely identifying knowledge, and names are passed by mostly if not entirely through the historical connections of use of words in presence of others. The initial users of the name, whether through introduction by rigid designation or through baptism, did have some descriptive association that was necessary for the introduction of the name. When the names are passed down, this necessary descriptive connection could potentially be lost (and, often, it actually is lost). That these names gain new descriptive associations is also a part of the causal-historical chain. However, the original descriptions don’t have to be thereby the time you move to the nth person down the line.

It becomes difficult to me to decide whether or not Kripke’s theory of proper names completely takes descriptivism off the map or not. Ultimately it’s not for me to decide, as a lowly undergraduate student. The social element of passing down names and the potential loss of meaning or descriptive associations with the name was a significant step forward. Conversely, because even when providing a supposed antithesis of the Descriptivist program Kripke ends up relying on descriptions himself, I can’t really say descriptivism was fully eliminates the still-powerful intuition that names have to have been linked to some identifying description

Works Cited

Saul Kripke (1980). Naming and Necessity. Harvard University Press. Cambridge, Massachusetts.

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[1] There may be some ambiguity of scope here. I could be talking about the actual northernmost spot and naming it “Tom”, or I could be talking about the northern-most spot, whatever that may be, and naming that spot “Tom”. To clarify, I’m discussing the de dicto implications.

This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

incomplete answers to some queries

C (hey C!) asked some interesting and important questions which i will repost briefly. i will attempt to answer them as an exercise in critical engagement with the text.

he asks:

(1) what are the implications of when we are mistaken about concepts in this manner?

(2) Since employment of the two different concepts in the same linguistic instance results in the same answer, what is the fundamental difference between employing the two? Is the answer yielded actually the "same"?

(3) How does this differ from other forms of skeptical possibility, if at all? Does this generate a sort of skeptical problem similar to the Cartesian one?

ok. i think i'll try to answer (3) first, as it will make the answers to the other questions clearer. the skepticism kripkenstein presents is much more devastating than descartes's. this is because descartes's skepticism was epistemological in character, whereras this skepticism is both epistemological and metaphysical. descartes's skepticism was with the goal of establishing a certain, true set of beliefs from which to base the rest of his epistemological enterprise. foundationalist through and through, he designated an epistemically privileged set of propositions that he used to justify shakier propositions, so to speak. and much has been written (cs peirce, susan haack) about how this kind of cartesian epistemic skepticism was pretty much just bafoonery to get to propositions he wouldn't alter anyway because they were 'clear' and 'distinct' to him anyway, thanks to god.

however, kripkenstein's skeptical paradox is a more serious threat. not only does the quaddition example show that we, at this moment, don't know whether we are using addition or quaddition, an epistemic skepticism, there is no fact of the matter as to what mathematical function we are performing at the moment, a metaphysical skepticism. this of course extends to previous uses of the function and future uses of the function. and then the same principle carries over to not only addition, but ultimately every function, name, natural kind term, description, etc.

so, if we take a step back for a sec, what kripkenstein is actually doing is presenting to us a very real, encompassing, epistemological as well as ontological skepticism of meaning that pretty much runs the full sweep of both speech acts and mental acts. there is no fact of the matter concerning what we ever mean by any linguistic utterance. part of the problem here, of course, is that there is an underlying assumption that we have to explain meaning in terms of something else, but that problem isn't very relevant for the present discussion, so we'll just give it to him for now.

now to address (1). well the implication here is that we don't ever know what we're talking or thinking about because there is never any fact of the matter as to what we are talking or thinking about! the implications themselves are rather tough to formulate apart from this previous statement. my initial reaction was to say that "even if we think we know what we're talking about, we don't actually know because there is no fact to speak of." but the problems of saying this are pretty evident: i mean, communication in general would be a farse, but further even the possibility of cogent thought comes into question. if we take kripkenstein's skepticism seriously, then it is almost undeniably, irrefutably serious!

finally, for (2) i'm going to use another mathematical example. the functions (n+m), (n x m), and (n^m) are of course different functions. but if we happen to say for each of these functions n=2=m, then they all yield the same answer. the fundamental difference in them is the nature of the method of manipulating the numbers, but given specific circumstances they might coincide in output. the problem with kripkenstein's kind of skepticism is that all math, all communication through symbols, actually, is lacking meaning. if nothing has meaning, because there is no ontological fact concerning meaning, then every communicative act is a coincidence, just as those functions happened to coincide at 2.

well i hope i helped a bit, as it helped me understand kripkenstein a bit more myself.

kripkenstein's quaddition - exposition

oh kripke... or kripkenstein.. or whatever...

so here's the real deal. i have not read wittgenstein's philosophical investigations so take this entire post with a grain of salt--or a heap of it.

anyway the argument as it struck kripke goes somewhat like this:

suppose you've never performed the mathematical function "plus" with integers greater than 50. A is a teacher and YOU are B.

A: "17 plus 23 is..."
B: "40"
A: "yes! you got it! now, 58 plus 67 is..."
B [takes a bit longer. B computes in his head] "125."
A: "uh... i'm sorry. i don't think you understand. try again."
B [computes again]: "no i did it again in my head and.. well i was right. it's 125."
A: "uh... i think someone didn't teach you this right. 58 plus 67 is 5."
B: [baffled] "whaatt??"

so here's the trick. when you heard the word "plus" you thought that was a function where you combine numbers , such that

'plus (a,b)' = addition (a,b) --> 'a + b' when {x| -∞, ∞}

however, it is not logically inconsistent that "plus" really referred to the function of quaddition such that

'plus* (a,b)' = quaddition (a,b) ---> 'a+ b' when {x| -∞, 50} and '5' when {x| 50, ∞}

now, it's important to note that this skeptic who is proposing this skeptical scenario is not being a skeptic about the concept of addition. he's not saying that the concept of addition is vague in any way. he's just saying that it's not logically inconsistent to propose that it may be the case that whenever we use the word "addition" or the mathematical symbol of "+" we might be talking about quaddition instead of addition.

this skepticism, however, is not just an epistemological skepticism about whether we know we're adding or quadding, but it extends to a metaphysical skepticism about our own use of concepts. we can think we know what concept we're using but we could be mistaken.

i'm interested to see how or if kripke attempts to solve this...

the so-called death of descriptivism

for a very long time--actually from about russell's "on denoting" paper published in the 1900's (decade, not century) till circa 1980--descriptivism ruled the theory of proper names. names did not actually denote anothing according to this view, but were shorthand versions of descriptions. names were descriptions, which in turn gave meaning to the term. so a proper name gave a unique description to the individual in question and that's what the individual was. the main motivation for this position was a fregean reaction against the millian view of proper names where a name just meant that thing you're talking about.

then of course the young prodigy savior of modal semantics saul kripke came along and revolutionized the entire field of philosophy of language. as mcginn noted in his review of the book in philosophical review, either you hated naming and necessity, you loved it, or you were genuinely confused. this new causal-historical view of names was completely different from the descriptivism that preceded it and there was a huge party for those who feared metaphysical committment and nominalists were happy and ockam had a party in his grave and all that good stuff and blah blah blah blah blah.

but was this celebration justified? was descriptivism really defeated like kripke thought?

as that young, star-crossed poet juliet once said, "what's in a name? a rose by any other name would smell as sweet!" this insight would play right into the conniving hands of kripke, who would make it seem that it shows how names are arbitrarily chosen to baptize a particular entity, whether an individual or a natural kind or whatever. but then i guess the nature of the question shifts as one attempts to pinpoint how names are actually acquired.

according to kripke, in the second lecture of the book, delivered in princeton i believe it was the 22nd of january, 1970, proper names for particular entities or kinds are introduced into a language one of either two ways. the first way is by fixing the reference by means of description. in other words i might say, "i need a name for the hairiest cuban-american raised in miami currently studying in scotland. i shall name him 'G'." see what i did there was that i came up with a definite description. instead of using that definite description every single time i want to refer to this particular individual, i pretty much just came up with a shortcut of sorts.

the other way one can introduce a name into a language is by using ostensive gestures, pretty much. so in other words you might go ahead and visit your local animal shelter and pick out a puppy from there. you take it home and you point at it and you say "i shall name this dog, 'D'." you could just say "D" as you point at it but then, of course as quine might point out, you might be naming the dog, sure, but you also might be naming the puppy slice or the undetatched puppy part or whatever the fuck that crazy quine might say. so even if you don't downright say "the dog's name is 'D'," in your mind you make the connection between the name and the type of thing you're actually naming. however, including this 'type' categorization or as kripke calls it the 'sortal' word as well, you ARE including a descriptive element to the ostensive definition as well.

going back to the famous shakespeare quotation once again, sure that rose could have any other name and smell sweet. but whenever somebody decided to call it a "rose" they said hey, look at that fucking flower over there, i'm gonna name it "rose." so, at the very least in the introduction of the term, the name of the plant was coupled with a recognition of what they were talking about and thus a description.

so basically what i'm trying to say here is that, even in kripke's view, descriptions are INDISPENSABLE, and are thus built in to EVERY noun term--whether it be proper or categorical-- and kripke pretty much fails in debunking good ol' earl of russell.

identity and descriptive names

oooh crap well i was shaving today and i realized:

i've argued before for a descriptivist theory of proper names mostly based on my particular views on personal identity. My intuition has been that you wouldn't be the same person if you decided to play basketball instead of fencing, or if you decided to become a math major instead of a philosophy one.

but, as my dissentors have pointed out, this identity of personhood isn't the same sense identity is being used when describing the person, because one is an "identity" construed in a psychological sense of what defines a person and the other is a mathematical statement based on an equivalence relationship (you are you)... or is it??

check it out: if you decide to go eat dinner with your friends instead of working out, you are inhaling the atoms around the restaurant instead of those at the gym, you're eating the particular food you ate instead of burning some calories, you're stimulating your mind with the lively conversation with your friends instead of stimulating your muscle cells to grow or your lung capacity to increase. in other words, the course of actions you take does directly effect a difference in chemical composition of your body itself, which in turn in a very literal sense make you a different person, if looked at from an atomical perspective. and if you believe that difference in sub-particles affect difference in structure, then whabam! different person.

unless i'm jumping the gun here, this would mean that the descriptions associated with your name or mine are directly connected to some difference in chemical composition associated with those descriptions, effectively being a pretty good place-marker for your identity.

i still have to work out the kinks but i think this probably has some link to a deterministic argument :)

On Empty Names

Talking About What's Not There: Reference, Meaning, and Empty Names

'Pegasus has wings.' 'Sherlock Holmes lives in 221b Baker Street.' 'Hamlet kills Claudius." These sentences at first glance seem to be true in some sense, false in another, and meaningless in yet another. But which is right? More importantly, how are we to deal, in a systematic way, with the everyday habit found in natural languages of referring to empty names? Do they not have meaning? I will try to incorporate some of the views represented by the leading philosophers we've read in class (Kripke, Braun, Russell, Frege) yet advocate a position that, at least to my knowledge, would not coalesce with any of their views.

Before I continue I would like to make a distinction: there may be in fact two problems when talking about the problem of empty names. First and foremost, the proper name itself seems not to refer, so the use of the name, in itself, is a problem. I will refer to this problem as ENP1. However, an additional problem arises when using these empty names in sentences to express propositions. This shall be ENP2. In what comes I hope to spell out the consequences of both of these problems, some strategies used to solve either or both, and additionally attempt to give reasons why no account I've encountered so far is satisfactory.

Here is a brief, simple statement of ENP1: Usually, when using proper names, we are referring to objects. However, we sometimes use words that don't refer to existing objects. How does a theory of language explain this? Historical development of the problem rose to reactions against a theory of names proposed by John Stuart Mill. His theory was that a name's only purpose was to designate that which is being referred to. This seems to be the intuitive, pre-philosophical position. When uttering "Michael Jordan", we're simply talking about Michael Jordan. But the position gets complicated and downright contradictory very quickly: what if we're talking about a non-existing object? When I talk of "Frodo" I cannot be talking about an actual Frodo because "Frodo" does not denote any physical being; so either

(a) I am referring. By referring to 'Frodo' i am indeed referring to something that does not exist physically. This has the unfortunate consequence of a metaphysical explosion, where every and anything cognizable does exist and that which is physical just happens to subsist. Further, this view will force me to explain why or how any not materially-existing entity can have properties, if i wish to say anything about this non-existing entity. I will put this view aside for fear of ontological commitment. (From purely secondary sources, I understand this is the approach Meinong took). OR

(b) I am attempting to refer yet I am not. However, the name also carries with it some set of descriptions or a manner in which it was presented (a sense). The name, then, has no referent yet is not meaningless either (this is the approach Frege takes). OR

(c) I am attempting to refer yet i am not. Any name is replaceable with a definite description that insinuates its own existence. So any predicate attributed to this failed proper name would not hold because there's no subject to latch on to (this is the approach Russell takes). OR

(d) I am attempting to refer yet I am not. This makes the sentence meaningless. Attempting to attribute properties to nothing is impossible. (This is the approach Kripke et al. take)

The Causal theory of names gives the intuitive account of what a name means: its reference. In other words, 'meaning' and 'reference' are words which refer to the same concept. If this theory is true, then empty names are meaningless. 'Frodo', 'Santa Claus', and 'Pegasus' have no meaning. But surely we have some kind of ideas and mental properties associated with those words, even though they fail to refer to physical objects in the world. A person who uses the term 'Frodo' attempts to refer to some small hobbit; 'Santa Claus' attempts to refer to a jolly old man who gives presents in December; 'Pegasus' attempts to refer to a horse with wings. This theory has its problems, because if 'Frodo' fails to refer in the same way 'Pegasus' does, then they should be interchangeable within sentences where they're used without losing any significance. so 'Pegasus has the ring' and 'Frodo has wings' should be equally meaningless. However, this doesn't seem to go well with our intuitions.

The Descriptivist theory of names deals better with empty names than the causal theory, yet it has startling problems in other areas. It deals better with empty names because it equates these empty tags with descriptions of the intended properties of those tags, such that 'Santa Clause' would be translated as E(x) (Cx& Px & Jx & Rx) where C=is Chubby, P= gives Presents, J= is Jolly, R= is Red. The existential qualifier automatically implies 'Santa Claus' exists. Kripke pointed out that in effect these Descriptions which could be used as a strategy against saying empty names are meaningless would also make the properties attributed to the names necessary. Although I don't have much of a problem accepting this consequence, a lot of people do.

Neither of these two theories are satisfactory. The Descriptivist program ignores the fact that any proper name does have a causal link to that which is referred to, or at least attempted to refer. This is obviously and almost trivially true when the proper name accurately designates an individual in the real world. However, to properly use a name it seems as if we have to know something about exactly what we're talking about, not only have the ability to causally apply its use.

Take, for example, a case of mistaken identity in babies. Suppose a given woman has identical twins, and the mother has decided to name them 'Rex' and 'Fred'. At the time of birth, 'Rex' means Rex and 'Fred' means Fred. however, almost immediately afterwards a malignant nurse puts them in their cribs and switches their wristbands so that Rex's says 'Fred' and Fred's says 'Rex'. The entire rest of their lives Rex and Fred suffer from mistaken identity. But something seems wrong about this example, because it seems as though at some point the names that were originally intended for their persons becomes irrelevant, not only because of their repeated anchoring with a different name in such a way that the new name does begin to refer in other people's minds (as Evan's 1973 example of 'Madagascar'), but also because of the independent properties each individual twin begins to acquire and become associated with their new, supposedly incorrect names. That is to say, save talk of possible worlds, some properties do seem to have more of an anchoring in the individual than others: if Fred once saw a particular musician or Rex a particular sporting event, then them having done that doesn't seem to influence who they are very much. However, if Fred decided in grade 7 to become a physicist and Rex decided at a similar age to dedicate his life to practice of Fencing, then these bits of information seem indispensable to any moment of framing reference of the person at some point in the future. So there are in fact two ways here that the Causal Theory of Reference seems to make things a bit uneasy.

So how does this tie back in to the discussion of empty names? I guess in some ways I'm attempting to scale back on the sharp distinction Kripke made between the metaphysics and epistemology of reference, because I believe in order to accurately use any name, especially when it is an empty one, a certain knowledge of some of its properties in necessary in order to do away with the conclusion that the name is meaningless. This may be more in tune with the Frege's or Evans's Theory of Names more than Russel's or Kripke's.

ENP2 creates even more of a problem because empty names are being used in sentences, some of which are intuitively true and some aren't. Both 'Pegasus exists' and 'Pegasus does not exist' seem to, at a glance, express some proposition that is either true or false. Presumably, the former is false while the latter is true. Many of the same problems as in PEN1 return, yet there are some additional ones: If it is required of a proposition to include both a subject and a predicate for it to have meaning (and it seems to be so), then statements purportedly asserting some proposition which include a subject-term that does not refer do not actually express any proposition, under a strict causal theorist's view. So neither of the two statements previously mentioned actually express a proposition. Furthermore, if a statement does not express a proposition, it seems to be meaningless (at least according to Davidson), another conclusion we don't want to reach, both because of the examples of negative existential statements about empty names and from examples dealing with less technical examples such as 'Frodo exists.' We want to say that this statement is not meaningless yet not true either.

Perhaps what would be best as of this moment is to give a brief sketch of Davidson's theory of meaning, as it is an important one that elucidates the problem of empty names when applied used in declarative sentences. According to his theory of meaning, any proposition P stated in object language L by statement S has the following meaning: 'S' is true iff P. This seems to be true when applied to formal languages without self-reference and empty names and other sorts of messy stuff, which is why Tarski preemptively limited his theory of truth to those types of languages. But attempting to apply it to natural languages is not a false start either. Both 'S' and P must express some proposition with a subject and a predicate (ideally both 'S' and P share the subject, predicate and their appropriate relation). The given language is comprised of a set of axioms (reminiscent of Kripkean semantics for proper names) in such a way that any particular term only refers. But as soon as a term which includes an empty name is considered, or evaluated for its meaning, the biconditional is not true and thus the proposition fails to have meaning.

Let's use a concrete example: take into consideration the proposition that 'Santa Claus is jolly.' Let us name this proposition "Santa Claus is jolly." so that, to find its meaning, we must apply it in Davidson's meaning schema: "Santa Claus is jolly" is true iff Santa Claus is jolly. Now, if 'Santa Claus is jolly' is an illegitimate proposition, deemed so from the fact that Santa Claus doesn't refer to a physical object in the real world, then the proposition is meaningless and has no truth value. However, the left side of the biconditional asserts that that which we had just determined to have no truth value is in fact true, which turns out to be a false assertion (because the truth value of said proposition is undetermined). This makes the entire biconditional false and we have no meaning for the sentence. This is an undesired consequence because we do have certain cognitive associations with the proper name 'Santa Claus' that might give us reasons to believe he's either jolly or not.

Braun attempts to clean this problem up by proposing two possible solutions a supporter of the causal theory may adopt. The first option is ultimately to bite the bullet and say that this alleged proposition is in fact meaningless because of the fact that it isn't a proposition. Along with this option he proposes that there may in fact be a pragmatic replacement to what he calls the No Proposition view. If I understood him correctly, where a statement like 'Vulcan does not exist' may be uttered, the real content of the statement is a conditional along the lines of "If we were to check space at this location and time, there would not be a planet there." I am interested in this solution, yet he does not go into detail, so I will not consider it past this moment.

The alternative view, one that Braun himself prefers, is what he calls the Unfilled Proposition strategy. In this view, any statement using an empty name is in reality an attempt to attribute a predicate to something that is not there. However, it still saves the structure of propositional content and thus explains how we might be fooled into thinking that we are in fact expressing a proposition. Again, to give an example: 'Vulcan is a planet' is structurally similar to the assertion that 'Venus is a planet'. But where the latter has a propositional composition of <Venus, being a planet>, the former has a propositional composition of [ ____, being a planet]. However, even Braun himself brings up an objection to his theory, that give another empty name, any other empty name, the unfilled proposition would look identical. the statement 'McX is a planet' would also look like [ ____, being a planet] if McX doesn't refer.

At least on the face of it, Braun's argument in favor of the Unfilled Proposition view is at the very least susceptible to the very same arguments against Kripke-Millian views on proper names: if proper names only refer, then the use of empty names shouldn't make any difference in cognitive content, and statements about them should be equal in propositions expressed.

Again, the descriptivists run into big problems (outlined by Kripke) when dealing with positive propositions that assert properties onto things that obtain because these descriptions are doomed to be necessary. There is also the problem of circularity or reference, where the descriptivist might fall into a vicious circle if all he knows of a referent is the same property he uses to provide a definite description for the same referent. If 'Albert Einstein' is defined as 'The discoverer of the Theory of Relativity' and 'the Theory of Relativity' is defined as 'the theory discovered by Albert Einstein' and nothing else, then those two names would not be able to singularly pick out Albert Einstein and the Theory of Relativity, but would designate any two individuals with the relationship of discovery of a type of theory. These and many other problems make pure descriptivism inadequate for reference in most cases, yet for some of the same reasons this makes desciptivism strong explanatory-wise when it comes to empty names.

Is there a go-between, an intermediate position? Could it be that there is some theory that falls between these two arguably troubled enterprises that takes the best of both sides while being strong enough to defend against criticisms from both angles? I sure haven't found a perfect fit yet, but there is much to ask for a theory of meaning and reference. If there is one aspect I believe must be saved is the distinction between meaning and reference. Or if one aspect of meaning is just reference, maybe there is also an additional aspect to it that cannot be ignored. Even though descriptivism as described in Russell (1905) has been shown to be largely false, there's something in there that can be recovered. Likewise with Kripke, as his position saves many intuitions for non-empty names. Frege almost incorporated bits from both, but he also either left a lot of questions unanswered (how does a proper name tag an individual, or fail to?) or drew some unintuitive conclusions (that a sentence's reference is its Truth value). Either way, the role of fiction, meaning in context, metaphors, malapropisms, and countless other linguistic and semantic phenomenons have been left unaccounted for, and surely a complete theory of reference and empty names will have a lot of work to do.

Bibliography

David Braun. 1993. "Empty Names." Nous 27: 449-69.

-----. 2006. "Names and Natural Kind Terms." Handbook of Philosophy of Language. Lepore and Smith (eds). Oxford, EN; Oxford University press. Note: Found via Braun's website at URL: http://www.ling.rochester.edu/~braun/Papers/names.pdf

Donald Davidson. 1967. "Truth and Meaning" The Philosophy of Language. A.P. Martinich (ed). 3rd Edition, Oxford, EN; Oxford University Press.

Martin Davies. 2005. "Gareth Evans." The Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Donald Borchert (ed). 2nd Edition, McMillan Reference USA. Note: Found via Davies's website at URL: http://philrsss.anu.edu.au/~mdavies/papers/evans.pdf

Gareth Evans. 1973. "The Causal Theory of Names." The Philosophy of Language. A.P. Martinich (ed). 3rd Edition, Oxford, EN; Oxford University Press.

Gottlob Frege. 1892. "On Sense and Nominatum." The Philosophy of Language. A.P. Martinich (ed). Herbert Feigl (trans). 3rd Edition, Oxford, En; Oxford University Press.

Saul Kripke. 1980. Naming and Necessity. Cambridge, Ma.; Harvard University Press.

Marta Reimer. 2003. "Reference." Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Note: Found vie SEP at URL: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/reference/

Bertrand Russell. 1905. "On Denoting." The Philosophy of Language. A.P. Martinich (ed). 3rd Edition, Oxford, EN; Oxford University Press.

Alfred Tarski. 1944. "The Semantic Conception of Truth and the Foundations of Semantics." The Philosophy of Language. A.P. Martinich (ed). 3rd Edition, Oxford, EN; Oxford University Press.





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semantics and truth conditions

i have to admit sometimes i don't know why davidson thinks he can carry out a program similar to tarki's. tarski explicitly said his T-schema only applies to FORMAL languages with unambiguous predicates, no self-reference, and only a defined, pre-determined set of propositions and objects. davidson pretty much ignores this and goes ahead and tries to apply the T-schema to natural languages only to get meaning out of sentences. So we have something like:

(1) 'snow is white' is true iff snow is white.

which seems true, but doesn't really who much about meaning. but of course, because of the definition of an "if and only if" statement, it also makes sentences like

(2) 'snow is white' is true iff grass is green

true as well. of course this is absurd. yes, the biconditional is true, but it tells us nothing about the meaning because the name 'snow is white' doesn't designate whether grass is green. davidson kinda says that the precise theory of meaning wouldn't allow for cases like (2), or at least for not many of those cases, because each word in any statement will have a set of axioms that interpret the referent of words. for example, there will be axioms such as:

A1: 'dogs' refers to dogs
A2: 'snow' refers to snow
A3: 'is white' refers to the property of being white
...
An

such that cases similar to (1) will not occur (or at least not very often). but in effect all this does is equate meaning with (potentially mistaken) translations.

in effect, what i'm trying to say about davidson's adoption of tarki's t-schema adapted to get meaning is that it's both too strong and too weak. by this i mean that there are cases where the whole biconditional is met and we still don't want to say that we have meaning (such as in the case of (2)).

AND there are cases where the biconditional is not met yet we still want to say there is some meaning. this type of thing happens often in natural languages: self-reference, sentences without truth values, vague predicates, metaphors, similes, malapropisms, and other stuff.

this position i take against davidson is probably due to the fact that my idea of meaning is (not surprisingly) akin to peirce's, where the meaning of something is its effects... but that's for a post at another time...

truth theories

yeah... i've been hung up on beliefs lately. now comes some thoughts on truth. the way i'm gonna go about it is offering some theories of truth and me just basically running my yap about them. quickly, before i go on to do just that, i say i stand by what i roughly said last post, that if you believe homo sapiens evolved from australopithecus, then you'd say of the sentence "Homo sapiens evolved from australopithecus" that it is true. but what is being said to be true there? the sentence? the proposition expressed by the sentence? the belief? not sure yet. let's keep these questions in mind when we analyze these theories of truth

*truth as ideal (plato) -- what's true is what resembles some ideal of truth. well i think for something to be true it at the very least has to predicate on something in the (one) real world. so this gets thrown out almost immediately.

*truth as correspondence (russell, early wittgenstein, aristotle?) -- something is true iff it corresponds to the facts or the real world or something of the sort. i think there's something to this, although most of the time when expressed it makes you commit to some pretty insane metaphysics. logical atomism is the most extreme case here and it's just tough to swallow that there're pretty much two worlds matching in structure exactly, just one in the physical world and one in the logical world. again, seems a bit crazy if you adjust the theory with the metaphysics. the bad part is that if you don't commit to crazy metaphysics, the correspondence aspect of the theory seems kinda trivial, and doesn't make much of a difference. still, seems to be on to something.

*truth as semantic (tarski, davidson?) -- there are several ways to phrase this, but i'm gonna put it like this: "R" is true iff S, & R names S. in english: "snow is white" is true iff snow is white. this theory would run into a lot of problems except for the fact that he includes the addendum that R must be a name for S. anyway, this seems to agree a bit with what i was saying... in fact it's not far from it, really, although i was mentioning it in terms of beliefs being true. i'm not quite sure what "true" predicates over here, but i'll say this sounds about right.

*truth as disquotational/deflationary/redundancy (ramsey, quine?) -- seems very similar to the last one. ramsey said that for all p, it is true that p iff p. e.g. it is true that convertibles are a type of car iff convertibles are a type of car. this is what i believe to be the most harmless of the theories: it doesn't force you to adopt any outlandish metaphysics, it is still connected to the real world through real kinds, and it retains the concept of realness being an objective quality some things have while other things don't. possibly, the nonrealists and/or nominalists out there will still object due to the use of real kinds. [i might be running together theories that don't really belong... if you think i am then let me know]

*truth as final opinion (peirce) - quick overview of peirce: he used the pragmatic maxim, which stated that the meaning of x is the practical consequences x has. so to peirce, truth is that which will keep being affirmed by a hypothetically infinite (timewise) community of inquirers (coi). so if this coi were to say "dinosaurs became extinct due to a meteor" at some time far into the future, and there is little to no undermining evidence, then that is the truth. this kind of view compensates for the fallibility of the coi at any point before that which they gave their final opinion.

*truth as cash value (james) -- true is good in the way of belief. a true belief will benefit most. what's true is what's expedient in our thinking. these three formulations of vaguely the same idea seem to be interpretable in at least two ways: short-run and long-run. in the short term, it does seem to me that certain false beliefs could benefit more than true ones, making this theory contradictory. but in the long run the truth will be more useful than the false... at least to people seeking to understand reality. however, both in the short and the long run, it does seem to me that as a general rule truth is more valuable than falsity.

*truth as coherence (hempel, putnam, davidson?) - truth is what coheres to a set of logical statements. obvious objections: maybe p coheres with a set, and so does not p. this theory downplays the role the real world has when it comes to truth. it doesn't completely rule it out, but once you try to incorporate some connection between the real world and the coherent set, it starts to sound more like correspondence. eh... again, like the cash value, there does seem to be at least something here. at some ideal point in the future when we have most if not all true statements (statements about the world in some way), then they're bound to cohere, merely due to the fact that there couldn't both BE and NOT BE a real kind, or any certain thing. but this is kinda trivial.

*truth as conversational (rorty, late wittgenstein, foucault, french literary theorists) -- deny that truth is at all objective or even characterizable. all they say is that truth is what's "defensible from all comers" or "withstands all conversational objections" (quoting rorty here). some of these are more extreme than others, but all share a type of relativism that ultimately does away with truth and replaces it with whatever they prefer (tribes, games, power). although i'm convinced that this is wrong, there is a bit you can tease out which might be true. again, if seen from the long run, and if assumed that "truth" is a real predicate, then what happens to be true will be defensible from all comers, precisely because there will be irrefutable evidence (gathered from the real world). likewise, the truth will withstand all conversational objections but precisely because it isn't solely based on conversation, because it's anchored in the real world, somehow.

so.. i think most of these (all but one, actually) have something going for them, but some (probably redundancy and semantic) appeal to me more because they have some real-world element without making me commit to much. did i characterize any of these unfairly? which do you think is closer to the truth??

EDIT (11/1): i think i forgot to mention that i tried to organize the theories in order from making TRUTH a big deal to making it the least big deal.. well denying it. i kinda like ramsey's redundancy and the theories close to it most because it admits truth is out there, but it's not a big deal metaphysically. further, epistemologically speaking, ramsey's theory still allows for there to be an anchoring in the real world which requires inquiry to find out if something is true or not (or at least to gather evidence.)

reference, grice, and irony

this post might be a bit obscure and probably a lot shorter than it should be, but here goes anyway.

quick review about the nature of refernce give to specific words (as i understand it):

descriptivists and bundle theorists (russell, searle, maybe frege) think that proper names don't really refer, but are in fact abbreviations of descriptions. so a name like "stephen colbert" refers to {something that is a person & something that hosts a show right after jon stewart's show & something that is the subject of the website colbertnation.com & something that is running for president in south carolina &... etc}. this leads to somewhat deterministic view of names.

direct reference theorists (kripke, braun) say that proper names designate their objects and nothing else. so "sam clemens" in this context only works as a name that refers to the lump of atoms (or whatever people are) that was linguistically baptized "sam clemens" by his parents at his time of birth. but this runs into the problem of explaining how "mark twain" is "sam clemens" while explaining at the same time how this equation isn't trivial.

now comes the grice part: his approach to language is coming at it from a completely different angle. the idea is that language works because there are certain intentions in the speaker to create to the listener both a perceived meaning and the awareness of this intention of the speaker by the listener (by performing an utterance).

all righty... now to the irony part. while discussing grice, it came to me that certain expressions, or performance utterances follow grice's rules for non-natural meaning, that

1. person A intends person B to believe that x by uttering 'u'
2. A intends B to recognize A's intentions of B believing that x by uttering 'u'
3. B's belief that x is directly caused by A's utterance of 'u'

yet in certain situations, we still won't want to say that 'u' means x. and this is the type of situation that one calls a the village idiot, w, "brilliant." when we call w an idiot, we're attributing to him the quality of being an idiot. now how can we explain the fact that we understand the intention of the speaker while the words she's uttering are exactly the opposite of what she means?

if you adopt a direct reference theorist's ideas about names then the utterance "w is brilliant" is interpreted as the heterogenous set of:

<[the individual designated by a name, or w], the property of being brilliant>.

the direct theory of reference has little to say about metaphors, as far as i know (although i'll admit i haven't read davidson on metaphor just yet), so it seems to me that a theory of direct reference would have to provide a separate account of metaphors altogether.

however, if you adopt a descriptivist account of reference, then irony seems more explicable. consider just what "w is brilliant" might look like to them:

<[the descriptions that define w, including him not being brilliant], the property of being brilliant>

of course, in this view there would be an inconsistency in the properties being assigned to w and thus the ironic effect is captured, as that inconsistency.

i think this might be a point for the descriptivists :D