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Chapter 14
Names
William G. Lycan
In school we were taught that nouns are divided mon nouns and proper
nouns, and that a proper noun is ‘the name of a person, place or thing.’ More
generally, philosophers and logicians speak of singular terms, expressions which
purport to denote or designate particular individuals – people, places, or physical
objects, or other items–as opposed to general terms such as ‘horse’ or ‘fat’ that
normally apply to more than one thing. Singular terms include proper names
(‘Franklin D. Roosevelt,’‘Marge,’‘Afghanistan,’‘adilly,’‘1,217’), definite
descriptions (‘the fat horse in the barn,’‘the prime minister of Israel,’‘the third
cinder block from the end’), singular personal pronouns (‘you,’‘she’), demon-
strative pronouns (‘this,’‘that’), and a few others.
This article will concentrate on proper names, and will address two main issues:
(1) In virtue of what does a proper name (hereafter just ‘name’) designate or refer
to its bearer? Call this ‘the Referring Question.’(2) What and how does a name
mean or signify? What does it contribute to the meaning of a sentence in which it
occurs? That I label ‘the Meaning Question.’(As Devitt (1989) argues, it is
important to distinguish theories of the meanings of names from philosophical
accounts of referring.)
How Does a Name Refer? The Description Theory
The Referring Question may seem strange; some readers may find themselves
answering ‘It just does. A person’s name is that person’s name; what else is there
to it?’ Of course when a person is born and given a name, the name es that
person’s name – normally, but not always, for life. But our question is more
general: When a speaker utters a sentence containing a name, what determines
who that name refers to? To see that there are difficulties here, consider ambiguous
names, names that mon to more than one per