The Properness of Proper Names
The anaphoric framework explains the properness of proper names better than Aristotelian or standard semantics, neither of which offers a compelling explanation of why proper names “properly” belong in the same sense to only one individual.
There is a long history of attempts to explain properness within the framework of Aristotelian semantics, of which perhaps the best known is Duns Scotus’s fourteenth-century thesis that a specific nature (e.g., man) has a unity that is less than numerical unity, and that a specific nature is made individual (i.e., this man, Socrates) by the addition of a positive individuating factor, which Scotus calls the individuating difference (differentia individualis), or haecitas—“thisness.”34 The idea has found support more recently from Alvin Plantinga, who has argued that the name “Plato” expresses an individual essence of Plato. The essence is “incommunicable to any other” (explaining its properness); moreover, an individual can have two or more essences, which are logically but not epistemically equivalent, explaining why “Hesperus is the evening star” and “Phosphorus is the evening star” express epistemically different propositions. Haecceity properties explain how negative existential statements could be logically possible, but raise the problem that, if Moses no longer exists, the name “Moses” expresses an unexemplified haecceity,35 which seems implausible. How can the haecceity property exist independently of Moses, floating around in the ether without a bearer? Other philosophers have also found the notion challenging.36
The alternative to the standard theory is to suppose that a proper name expresses some kind of property, or combination of properties.37 But as Mill argued (and Kripke after him), if “Moses” signifies the concept of a certain set of attributes that happen to be uniquely satisfied, one of two things follows. Either, if I meet a person who corresponds exactly to the concept I have formed of Moses, I must suppose that this person actually is Moses, and lived in the second millennium BC, or else I cannot think of Moses as Moses, but only as a Moses; and all those that are mistakenly called proper names are common names. “Either theory seems to be sufficiently refuted by stating it.”38
Moreover, if the name expressed some non-singular property, or set of such properties, we could coherently deny, using that name, that its bearer possessed it. It is not, as Wettstein puts it, that a description like “being the man who led the Israelites out of Egypt,” or “being the man who was found as a baby by Pharaoh’s daughter” and so on, searches the world, finds its satisfier, and attaches the name to it. For the referent itself, the man who really did lead the Israelites from Egypt might well have done something else.39 Moses might have chosen to stay in Egypt working for Pharaoh, and might not have led the Israelites out of Egypt. His mother might have decided to keep him, and so on. Kripke:
He might never have gone into either politics or religion at all; and in that case maybe no one would have done any of the things that the Bible relates of Moses.40
This doesn’t mean that in such a possible world, he wouldn’t have existed, he just wouldn’t have done those things. Hence, the existence of Moses cannot be reduced to the existence of a man with such attributes.
For similar reasons, Mill argued that a proper name signifies no attributes as belonging to its bearer, that it is more like a mark placed directly on the bearer and so, strictly speaking, has no meaning at all.41 It merely “answers the purpose of showing what thing it is we are talking about, but not of telling anything about it” (System I. ii. 5). This idea did not originate with him—elsewhere Mill cites Reid’s claim that a proper name “signifies nothing but the individual whose name it is,” and that when we apply it to an individual “we neither affirm nor deny anything concerning him”—which Reid himself probably got from the Greek grammarian Apollonius Dyscolus.42 But as I noted in the previous chapter, Mill does not explain how a mark can be meaningless, yet be connected in our mind with the idea of an object, nor does he explain what the idea of an individual object is.
The standard theory is a development of Mill’s theory, and is attended by the same difficulties. It explains properness by a semantic connection between proper name and bearer whereby the name can only signify that thing, but this leads to all the well-known difficulties mentioned in the last chapter, for example (i) how a large planetary body like Jupiter could be a part of a meaning or a thought, (ii) how identity statements involving different names for the same thing, such as “Hesperus is Phosphorus” can sometimes be informative, and (iii) how negative existential statements, which apparently deny a meaning for the name, are possible at all.
By contrast, the anaphoric hypothesis offers a simpler explanation of properness. On the anaphoric thesis, the semantic function of a proper name is to associate the proposition, which contains it with an antecedent anaphoric chain, such that any two terms in the chain, including the proper name in question, signify that if they have a referent at all, they have a single referent. Other singular terms such as definite descriptions and pronouns have a similar function, but a proper name has no other function, being simply a tag for its chain of antecedent terms. We can clearly see this if we express the content of the following single proposition:
A hobbit called “Bilbo” lives in a hole
by means of two separate “that” clauses, namely, (i) a hobbit is called “Bilbo” and (ii) Bilbo (or “he” or “this hobbit”) lives in a hole. It would be ridiculous to suppose that the proper name, when used, signifies some individual essence of a hobbit, or that it directly signifies the hobbit himself. If the single proposition does not express Bilbo-ness, which it cannot because it is an indefinite proposition, and if the propositions signified by the two “that” clauses express the same thing as the single proposition, then the two propositions cannot express Bilbo-ness either, despite the use of the proper name in the second “that” clause. But there is no need to run into the sorts of philosophical difficulties generated by individuating differences or direct reference, so long as we see the proper name as a mere tag that allows us to join two propositions into one, as above.
Hence, a proper name cannot have a plural. Or suppose it had. Then we could use the name to signify both that the same thing is such-and-such, and that a different thing is such-and-such. But a proper name cannot signify identity and difference at the same time, so it cannot have a plural. A common name, by contrast, can be used to signify both “the same F” and “another F,” because its purpose is not to continue an anaphoric chain. The anaphoric account has no philosophical difficulties at all. We run into such difficulties only if we suppose that a name signifies some essential property of an individual, or the individual itself, rather than a property of the language alone.
Summary
I have argued that co-reference is rule governed, and that it in no way depends upon any semantic relation between a text and extratextual items. The difficulty faced by computers in comprehending human texts does not conflict with this principle. The ability to understand a text like the Hebrew Bible presupposes the ability to keep track of which individual is which by assigning the right token of a singular term to the right subject. This requires not just knowledge of the syntax and semantics of the language, but knowledge of the genre, or of human nature itself. Such knowledge determines the “natural” reading of the text, deviation from which can only be justified if it justifies the same reading systematically across every passage of the scripture, and which other writers could emulate without going astray. For this reason, the proper names “Noah,” “Abraham,” and