فلسفه‌ی زبان موریس: چهار؛ کریپکی

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‘Naming and Necessity’

قسمت اول: مقدمه

Russell and Frege both thought that names and descriptions work in the same way. Indeed, they both seem to have thought that ordinary proper names were equivalent in meaning to definite descriptions. In this they were opposed to an elder and simpler view held by J. S. Mill, that proper names ‘do not indicate or imply any attributes as belonging to those individuals’ which they refer to. Then:

Millian view: There is no more to the meaning of a name than the fact that it refers to the object it does refer to. The most obvious difficulty for the Millian view is provided by the kind of case which led Frege to introduce the notion of Sense.

But the obvious problem with the description theory of names, that acknowledged by Frege, is that the same name will seem to be equivalent to different descriptions for different people. John Searle proposed a simple solution to this difficulty. We do not take a name as it stands in a linguistic community to be equivalent to a single identifying description: we take it to be associated with a (slightly indeterminate) cluster of descriptions.

In one form or another, the description theory of names held sway with little question for about half a century. In 1970 Saul Kripke gave three lectures at Princeton which have established a new orthodoxy on the topics of their title, naming and necessity. The first two lectures are concerned to argue that ordinary proper names work quite differently from definite descriptions. They also go some way towards re-instating something like Mill’s view of names.

 

قسمت دوم: تعهدات نظریات توصیفی از نظر کریپکی

Kripke identifies a range of basic commitments of the description theory as follows:

(DN1) If ‘O’ is a name which is meaningful for a speaker, S, there is a family of things which S believe to be true of O;

(DN2)If ‘O’ is a name which is meaningful for S, S must believe that some of the things which she believes to be true of O are true of only one thing;

(DN3)If ‘O’ is a name which is meaningful for S,then if most of the things which S believes to be true of O are in fact true of just one particular thing, then that particular thing is the referent of the name ‘O’ as S understands it;

(DN4)If ‘O’ is a name which is meaningful for S, then if there is not exactly one thing to which most of the things which S believes to be true of O in fact apply, then ‘O’, as S understands it, does not refer;

(DN5) If ‘O’ is a name which is meaningful for S, then S knows a priori that, if O exists, most of what she believes to be true of O is in fact true of O (as S understands ‘O’);

(DN6) If ‘O’ is a name which is meaningful for S, then it is necessarily true that, if O exists, most of what S believes to be true of O is indeed true of O (as S understands ‘O’).

Kripke associates one final commitment, (NC), that he argues that all of the basic commitments, apart from (DN1), are wrong, if we keep this commitment in place.

(NC) The things referred to in (DN1)-(DN6) as being believed by S to be true of O must not themselves involve the notion of reference in an in-eliminable way.

 

قسمت سوم: نقد کریپکی به (DN2), (DN3), (DN4)

Who was Cicero? He was a Roman orator. Who was Godel? He was the man who discovered the incompleteness of arithmetic. Most of us know almost nothing about these (and most other) famous people, and yet we seem able to use their names, apparently with understanding.

(DN2) - (DN4) are very quickly vulnerable, if we confine our attention to such descriptions as these. Consider (DN4). Surely there has been more than one Roman orator. So in this case, ‘Cicero’, as most of us understand it, fails to refer,which is absurd.

(DN2) is even worse. Which of us believes that there has been only one Roman orator? None of us: so (DN2), it seems, is simply false.

Kripke objects (DN3) by this way. Consider the case of the name ‘Godel’. Suppose that in fact the incompleteness of arithmetic was proved not by Godel, but by an obscure Austrian named Schmidt. Would that mean that the unheard-of Schmidt was Godel? Of course not.

 

قسمت چهارم: نقد کریپکی به (DN5), (DN6)

There is the distinction between contingent and necessary truths. This distinction is concerned with how things could have been, objectively: Kripke calls it a metaphysical distinction. And there is the distinction between a posteriori and a priori truths. This distinction is concerned with how things can be known: it is an epistemic distinction. These two distinctions were thought to coincide: all a priori truths were thought to be necessary, and vice versa; all a posteriori truths were thought to be contingent, and vice versa. But Kripke points out that since the distinctions are made in quite different ways, it shouldn’t be obvious that they coincide.

Consider (DN5). Do I know a priori that Cicero was a Roman orator? Surely not: I read it in a book.

Kripke’s most famous objection to the description theory of names is his objection to (DN6). Suppose that this is all I know about Godel:

(5) Godel discovered the incompleteness of arithmetic.

According to (DN6), the following is necessarily true:

(6) If Godel existed, Godel discovered the incompleteness of arithmetic.

But that is absurd. Even if you add the fullest range of descriptions which it’s plausible to imagine an ordinary speaker might associate with the name, you will still have only contingent truths.

Kripke complements his argument against the description theory of names with an alternative account of how proper names work. The description theory is at root individualist: it imagines each individual being capable of picking out the object referred to by means of what she herself knows about that object. The meaning of a name in community is nothing but the overlap between such individual conceptions. His account runs the other way. According to him, an object receives a name in some initial baptism, and that is then a device for referring to the object later on. Later uses of the name are intended just to refer to whatever was referred to by the earlier uses of the name. Individual speakers need know nothing significant about the object referred to: all they need to do is to tap into a historical tradition of use of the name.

 

قسمت پنجم: Sense and direct reference

If we reject every form of description theory of names, it seems that we have to think of names as directly referential:

(DR) An expression is directly referential if and only if:

(1)    It refers to a particular object; and

(2)    It does not refer to that particular object in virtue of that object’s satisfying some description.

If proper names are directly referential, does this mean we have to adopt a million view of names? It’s standardly assumed that it does, but in fact the issue is not clear. There is a way of offering a neo-Fregean theory which allows proper names to be directly referential and still have Sense.

Frege himself was inclined to explain Sense of proper names in terms of definite descriptions, and the descriptions he chose were the kind which would appeal to a description theory of reference. But if we start just from the idea that Sense is simply what marks difference of informativeness despite sameness of reference, it’s possible to give a different interpretation of the notion of Sense and mode of presentation.

If we are acquainted with an object, we are bound to be acquainted with it is some way: it may be by reading about it, but it may also be by direct perception. We can understand a mode of presentation as a way of being acquainted with an object. The fact that we’re acquainted with an object under a certain mode of presentation doesn’t mean that we’re only indirectly related to it. If this is accepted, it’s clear enough that if an object is real object, it must be possible to be acquainted with it in more than one way. And this is the basis of an alternative account of difference of Sense. So it seems that proper names can be directly referential and still have Sense. And that means that Kripke’s attack on the description theory of names is not yet a decisive argument for a Millian theory of names.

 

قسمت ششم: منابع بیشتر

1-      Proper Names, J. Searle

2-      Thought and Reference, K. Bach (ch.7 and ch.8)

3-      The Causal Theory of Names, G. Evans

4-      The Game of the Name, G. McCulloch

5-      Beyond Rigidity, S. Soames, (ch.2 and ch.3)