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Proper Names: Ideas and Chains

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Josep Macià
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Extract

Chains, well I can't break away from these chains[… ]

And they ain't the kind that you can see.

(“Chains,” Gerry Goffin and Carole King)

The main aim of this paper is to present a certain notion — that of Coordination — and an associated requirement — the Coordination Requirement (CR) —,and to show how they help us to better understand the communicative role of proper names. A second aim of the paper is to use these notions to defend the kind of view I favour regarding the meaning of proper names — a certain kind of descriptivist theory — by showing that this view is not subject to two seemingly powerful considerations against it that have been provided from two different camps: one from the anti-descriptivist camp (by Saul Kripke in Naming and Necessity), another from the neo-Fregean camp (by Richard Heck in The Sense of Communication). In dealing with these matters, I will have to discuss the role that complex individual concepts (or ideas) play in allowing us to understand and use proper names.

Type
Part A: Language
Information
Canadian Journal of Philosophy Supplementary Volume , Volume 30: New Essays in The Philosophy of Language and Mind , 2004 , pp. 129 - 155
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 2004

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