A central thread in 20th-century philosophy is the debate over proper names. Naively, a name is just a tag or label for an object in the world – but the obvious question then concerns names for objects that are nowhere in the world, names like ‘Zeus’, ‘Sherlock Holmes’, ‘Vulcan’ etc. To avoid the Meinongian thesis, ‘there exist non-existent objects’, Russell bestowed us with ‘that paradigm of philosophy’, the descriptive theory of names. Yet against this, Kripke famously argued that a name is not equivalent to a definite description, as seen in modal contexts. Kripke’s argument has proved highly influential. But...
Sunday, March 4, 2018
Descriptions and Disimplicature
Speranza
A central thread in 20th-century philosophy is the debate over proper names. Naively, a name is just a tag or label for an object in the world – but the obvious question then concerns names for objects that are nowhere in the world, names like ‘Zeus’, ‘Sherlock Holmes’, ‘Vulcan’ etc. To avoid the Meinongian thesis, ‘there exist non-existent objects’, Russell bestowed us with ‘that paradigm of philosophy’, the descriptive theory of names. Yet against this, Kripke famously argued that a name is not equivalent to a definite description, as seen in modal contexts. Kripke’s argument has proved highly influential. But...
A central thread in 20th-century philosophy is the debate over proper names. Naively, a name is just a tag or label for an object in the world – but the obvious question then concerns names for objects that are nowhere in the world, names like ‘Zeus’, ‘Sherlock Holmes’, ‘Vulcan’ etc. To avoid the Meinongian thesis, ‘there exist non-existent objects’, Russell bestowed us with ‘that paradigm of philosophy’, the descriptive theory of names. Yet against this, Kripke famously argued that a name is not equivalent to a definite description, as seen in modal contexts. Kripke’s argument has proved highly influential. But...
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