Programme & Abstracts

Aiden Gray, Name Dynamics

This talk will explore the idea that what is characteristic of names is that they are devices for achieving reference to individuals across a range of contexts. Names, on this view, refer to cross-contextual discourse referents; that is, entities which are assumed to be available for reference, with the name in question, in arbitrary contexts. After characterizing this notion, I will examine: i) whether there is any evidence for it, and ii) what approaches to the semantics of names are consistent with it.  I will tentatively conclude that approaches to names that treat their dynamic role as analogous to pronouns, demonstratives, or definite descriptions are ill-suited to capturing this feature. 

Jessica Pepp, Proper Names and The Referential-Attributive Distinction

In virtue of what does a use of a proper name on a particular occasion (i.e., a linguistic utterance, inscription, token, or particular) refer to whatever it in fact refers to? Saul Kripke (1980) and Keith Donnellan (1970, 1974) sketched different answers to this question. To put things roughly, Kripke takes proper name tokens to refer to what the name names—for Kripke, the thing to which the name was given at the origin of a chain of communication of which the current speaker is a part. Donnellan, on the other hand, takes proper name tokens to refer to the thing that explains a speaker’s use of the name on a given occasion—the thing a speaker  “has in mind”. In Kripke’s view, the difference between him and Donnellan over the reference of proper names is resolved by distinguishing speaker’s reference from semantic reference. Donnellan’s view is then said to concern the former while Kripke’s concerns the latter. A different resolution, which Kripke dismissed, is that not only definite descriptions, but also proper names, have a semantically significant referential use, as well as an attributive use, extending Donnellan’s (1966) distinction. Donnellan’s view then concerns the referential use, while Kripke’s concerns the attributive use. This talk develops this other resolution.

Nikhil Mahant, What's Left of Rigidity?

I will argue that given some plausible assumptions about natural language and philosophical methodology, the following theses about names cannot be true together: (a) the same ('proper') name can be borne by distinct objects/individuals, and (b) names of natural language are rigid designators but definite descriptions are not. The main assumptions that my argument appeals to are: (i) fragments of language (e.g., names) do not themselves refer, but can be used to refer, and (ii) every assumption involved in assessing whether names are (or are not) rigid designators must be preserved in the corresponding assessment for definite descriptions.

Laura Delgado, On Meaning More With Names

A fun fact about our everyday conversations is that we often want to communicate more than one content simultaneously. We may want to insinuate something; withhold information; or send covert messages to certain part of our audience without everybody realizing’ exploiting different mechanisms to do this – for example, by saying one thing and implicating another. A relative unexplored mechanism would exploit the fact that a sentence or word can have more than one meaning, and use this ambiguity to communicate two contents at the context. In previous work (Delgado and Picazo, ms) we present a number of cases including jokes, slogans, insinuations, strategic ambiguity, and dogwhistles, where speakers exploit ambiguity to express more than one content at the context. More controversially, there might be cases of ambiguity exploitations involving proper names. I will discuss three cases in which more than one content for a given proper name is activated in the context, for some communicative goal. Even though I don’t propose this data to be central to theorizing about names, given that these cases are arguably possible, I do believe that current theories should be able to accommodate them, or at minimum, not rule them out. However, it is not clear how the main theories on offer would accommodate this data, as it seems incompatible with predicativism, contextualism and the homonymy view about proper names.

Stefano Pugnaghi , Millianism, Exceptionalism and Reference Determination

The idea that names are special and exceptional has been mentioned by many in the literature, but this issue seldom receives some systematic discussion. Assuming a broad referentialist Millian perspective on proper names, I will further explore this issue by discussing whether there is some sense in which names might be considered genuinely special among the words in our languages, possessing some feature which make them unique. In partial disagreement with other authors, I do not believe that names can be set apart from other terms on the basis of their syntax, semantics or metaphysics. However, I will argue that a certain understanding of the metasemantics of names indeed supports the conclusion that names have some exceptional characteristics. In particular, I will argue that, assuming a Millian view, names might be considered special in that their meaning/reference is determined in complete independence from conventional considerations, partially supporting the view that names do not belong to single languages.

Manuel Garcia-Carpintero, Proper Names: the Meta-homonym View vs Indexicalism

In previous work (GC 2000, 2018, 2021) I have defended a metalinguistic-descriptivist account of proper names (and other referential expressions including indexicals) that I claim does better on abductive reckoning than Millian views on which “a proper name is, so to speak, simply a name. It simply refers to its bearer, and has no other linguistic function. In particular … a name does not describe its bearer as possessing any special identifying properties” (Kripke 1979, 239-240). The view agrees with Direct Reference that the contribution of names and indexicals to at issue content is just the referent, if any; but it ascribes a reference-fixing semantic role to a metalinguistic descriptive condition, identified as constituting a presupposition lexically triggered by the name. The expression in the condition is a linguistic particular that speakers are assumed to relate non-representationally, by acquaintance. In the case of indexicals, that particular is an occurrence or token of the expression(-type). In the case of names, it is the name(-type) itself, individuated by a “launching” episode (Predelli 2017) – on my view, a naming speech act. In my contribution, I’ll first observe that many fellow defenders of metalinguistic descriptivist views of names are unclear whether what goes into the description is an orthographic or phonetic shape, or the homonym name itself as I claim (Cumming (2023) is a good illustration; cp. Cumming (2008), Justice (2001, 362)). I’ll argue that the first view is a non-starter. Then I’ll rehearse arguments I (2018, §6) articulated earlier against views that, unlike mine, assimilate names to indexicals in that, if x and y are properly referred to with both ‘Alex’ or ‘she’, then there is a semantically individuated lexeme with a specific character (semantic rule of use) that applies to both. I’ll take into consideration more recent publications by defenders of views that share that feature, including Delgado (2019), Rami (2022) and Schoubye (2020). Finally, I’ll show that my account explains data about “coordination” or “co-reference” (GC 2024) highlighted by Cumming (ms), without the need of the specific conventions that he states.

Dolf Rami , A Use-Sensitive Account of Bare Demonstratives and Bare Proper Names

In this paper, I argue why both bare names and bare demonstratives should not be treated as context-of-utterance sensitive expression in the sense of Reichenbach or Kaplan but as less automatic and more use- and user-dependent use-sensitive expressions. I will argue that bare names and bare demonstratives have a similar semantics, but a significantly different meta-semantics and use-conditional meaning.