Philos Stud (2014) 168:119–150 DOI 10.1007/s11098-013-0264-x The use-conditional indexical conception of proper names Dolf Rami Published online: 20 December 2013 Ó Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2013 Abstract In this essay I will defend a novel version of the indexical view on proper names. According to this version, proper names have a relatively sparse truth-conditional meaning that is represented by their rigid content and indexical character, but a relatively rich use-conditional meaning, which I call the (contex- tual) constraint of a proper name. Firstly, I will provide a brief outline of my favoured indexical view on names in contrast to other indexical views proposed in the relevant literature. Secondly, two general motivations for an indexical view on names will be introduced and defended. Thirdly, I will criticize the two most popular versions of the indexical view on names: formal variable accounts and salience-based formal constant accounts. In the fourth and final section, I will develop my own use-conditional indexical view on names in three different steps by confronting an initial version of this view with three different challenges. Keywords Proper names Á Indexicals Á Determination of reference Á Reference to past bearers of a name Á Multiple bearers of a name Á Empty names 1 Setting the stage: Indexical views on proper names Indexicals are linguistic expressions whose semantic reference depends in a certain way on specific parameters of the context of use. Therefore, an indexical expression can have different semantic referents relative to different contexts of use. Prototypical and uncontroversial examples of indexicals are expressions like ‘I’, ‘here’, ‘now’ and ‘this’. The view that proper names are indexical expressions is D. Rami (&) Department of Philosophy, King’s College London, Strand, London WC2R 2LS, UK e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected] D. Rami Department of Philosophy, University of Go¨ttingen, Humboldtallee 19, 37073 Go¨ttingen, Germany 123 120 D. Rami controversial. Several important and influential contemporary philosophers of language1 explicitly reject this view or at least hold a view that is incompatible with it; and, I think, it is safe to say that the majority of philosophers holds the view that proper names are non-indexical expressions. There is only a comparatively small group of people that have explicitly argued for an indexical view on proper names.2 We can distinguish between two different general varieties of an indexical view on proper names that can be found in the relevant literature: informal and formal variants. A defender of the first kind of variant identifies certain natural language expressions that are unquestionably indexical and claims that they are semantically equivalent to proper names. Typically, such an equivalence claim is put forward without providing a formal semantic representation of the proposed equivalent indexical expression.3 The following claim is an example of such a view: ‘Alfred’ is semantically equivalent to ‘the present bearer of ‘Alfred’’. A formal variant of the indexical view on proper names makes use of a formal semantic framework that is suitable for the representation of indexical expressions and conceives of proper names as indexical expressions according to this framework. The distinction between formal and informal variants of an indexical view on names is obviously not exclusive. There could also be mixed variants. A more interesting and exclusive distinction is the distinction between distinctive formal and informal or mixed variants. A distinctive formal variant holds that proper names are a distinctive kind of indexical expression in natural language such that there aren’t any other indexical expressions in natural language that are not proper names (like complex demonstratives4 or indexical definite descriptions5), but are seman- tically (or truth-conditionally)6 equivalent to names. I will provide some reasons in favor of such a distinctive view in the second, third and fifth section of this essay. A formal constant indexical account on names represents names formally as simple7 or complex8 non-logical constants with an indexical semantics. The best- known formal semantic framework amenable to such an approach is Kaplan’s logic of demonstratives—in the following abbreviated as KLD.9 I will defend a novel 1 Some examples: Bach, Fine, Donnellan, Kaplan, Kripke, Perry, Sainsbury, Salmon and Soames. 2 C.f.: Burks (1951), Burge (1973), Cohen (1980), Sommers (1980), Zimmermann and Lerner (1991), Recanati (1993), Pelczar and Rainsbury (1998), Dever (1998), Pelczar (2001), Elbourne (2005), Cumming (2008), Matushansky (2008), Sawyer (2010) and Tiedke (2011). 3 C.f.: Burks (1951), Cohen (1980), Sommers (1980) and Sawyer (2010). 4 E.g.: ‘That Alfred‘or ‘That bearer of ‘Alfred’’. 5 E.g.: ‘The present bearer of ‘Alfred’’. 6 Typically, two expressions are considered as semantically equivalent if they make the same contribution to truth-conditional content. But if we accept additional non-truth-conditional aspects of meaning, and I will argue for such an additional layer of meaning in this paper, truth-conditional equivalence is only a necessary condition for semantic equivalence. 7 Pure indexicals like ‘I’ are conceived of as simple individual constants in Kaplan (1978, 1989). 8 True demonstratives like ‘that’ are represented as complex expressions of the form ‘dthat[the /]’ in Kaplan (1978, 1989). 9 C.f.: Kaplan (1978, pp. 86–97; 1989, pp. 541–553). 123 Indexical view on proper names 121 version of a formal constant approach of the indexical view on names that is based on KLD and holds that names are a distinctive kind of indexical expression. It is reasonable to distinguish a truth-conditional from a use-conditional layer of meaning. The truth-conditional meaning of an expression concerns its contribution to the truth-conditions of a sentence that contains such an expression. The use- conditional meaning, on the other hand, concerns its contribution to the semantically correct use of a sentence relative to a context of use. According to KLD, every expression has two different aspects of truth-conditional meaning: content and character. Contents are a certain kind of generalization of what is classically called an intension. An intension is a (total or partial) function from possible worlds into extensions. Contents are functions from circumstances of evaluation into extensions. In the minimal sense of circumstances of evaluation, they are just possible worlds. But a circumstance of evaluation can contain additional parameters; for example, also a time parameter. In the case of a singular term, the extension is identical to the referent of this term. A content of a singular term is rigid if the output of this function is the same relative to every possible world. Character is a second layer of truth-conditional meaning additional to contents. It is a total function from contexts of use into contents. Kaplan conceives contexts of use as ordered quadruples consisting of (a) the agent, (b) the place, (c) the time and (d) the possible world of the context of use of a specific expression. It might be necessary to extend these parameters to capture the character of specific indexical expressions in an adequate way.10 A character is non-indexical if it has the same output relative to every context of use; it is indexical if not. In addition to these two truth-conditional layers of meaning, I will add a third use-conditional layer. I will call this additional layer (contextual) constraint.11 A constraint is a (proper) subset of the set of all contexts of use. That is, the contextual constraint of an expression e restricts the set of all possible contexts of use of e to the set of all contexts of use of e relative to which e is used in an acceptable or felicitous way. According to the indexical view on names that I will defend in this paper, proper names are non-logical constant expressions, with a rigid content, a specific indexical character, and a specific contextual constraint. It will be the main concern of this paper to characterize the specific indexical character and contextual constraint of proper names. My defence and development of the proposed use-conditional version of the indexical view on names will proceed in the following way: Firstly, I will provide two different general motivations for an indexical view on proper names. The first motivation will concern the so-called problem of shared names. The second motivation concerns the mechanisms that determine the referent of a proper name. Secondly, I will criticize the two most popular versions of the indexical view on 10 C.f.: Predelli (2005, p. 20; 2012, p. 550). 11 This view is inspired by Predelli (2012, p. 555). 123 122 D. Rami names: formal variable accounts12 and salience-based formal constant accounts.13 Apparent bound anaphoric uses of proper names are the main motivation for the former accounts. I will try to undermine this motivation and point out some problems of two different paradigm variable accounts defended in Elbourne (2005) and Cumming (2008). After that I will be concerned with salience-based accounts based on KLD as they are defended most prominently in Zimmermann and Lerner (1991), Recanati (1993), Pelczar and Rainsbury (1998) and Pelczar (2001). These views have different individual problems, but I will also try to show why salience- based variants are in general inadequate. Thirdly and finally, I will develop my own version of a formal constant indexical view on names that is based on pluralism about the determination of reference of a proper name, a view that I will introduce and defend in the second section of this paper, and a specific development of a suggestive analogy between names, complex demonstratives and third person personal pronouns. I will confront a preliminary version of this view with three problems and develop on this basis the proposed use- conditional variant of my formal constant indexical view on names.