Another Look at Proper Names

Abstract

Some twenty years have elapsed since Saul Kripke's influential work Naming and Necessity effected a dramatic revolution in the philosophical understanding of proper names, replacing a widespread prior descriptivist consensus with a account of nominal reference that has meanwhile become almost a philosophical commonplace. Yet, although Kripke's new orientation has undeniably illuminated many traditional philosophical puzzles arising in connection with proper names, I remain unconvinced of the ultimate cogency of his causal-historical story, especially when considered from an epistemological perspective. My aim in this essay is, first, to explain my continued reluctance to accept this new picture of nominal reference tout court and, second, to sketch, very briefly, an alternative to it. Before I can do this, however, we must command a sufficiently clear view of Kripke's account itself, and the best way to do that, I think, is to survey the considerations which originally led him to it. Paramount among them was the arguable failure of the dominant received philosophical account of the referential functioning of proper names, Descriptivism. Compactly put, Descriptivism holds that the relation of reference obtaining between a proper name and an object is derivative from relations of satisfaction obtaining (uniquely) between that object and one or more descriptions. The descriptions are said to constitute the sense of the proper name, and an object, x, uniquely satisfies a description, 'o' just in case the sentence 'x, and only x, is O' is true. Kripke formulates this view and its consequences in the form of six theses, of which only the first four, constituting the core of the theory, are of interest here (pp. 64-5; 71)1: