You read this

 

That is clearly true. If you are Bob, what is true is that Bob read that title (and if you are Bill, that Bill read that title, and similarly if you are Ben, etc.), because that initial ‘You’ clearly refers to one when one reads it. So now imagine Bob reading ‘You, Bob, are mistaken.’

Bob would presumably take that ‘You’ to be referring to some particular person called ‘Bob’ (and would wonder if that person was he), but why should I not have called (rightly or wrongly) each of the people called ‘Bob’ who reads it mistaken (for wondering which of them was meant)? That was certainly my intention and so, pretty much as the initial ‘You’ did, that ‘You’ also refers to each element of a set of people (in this case not all those who read it, just those called ‘Bob’). And therefore that ‘Bob’ (in that sentence) also refers to each element of that set.

One proper name, on one occasion of its use, may refer (directly, presumably) to many different things—note that ‘Bob’ was indeed the proper name of each element because (i) it was not being used as a common name (it was not ‘You, if you are a Bob, are mistaken’), and (ii) all those Bobs had the same name (even when Bob is not Bob, ‘Bob’ = ‘Bob’). There was one proper name, ‘Bob’; and since, for each Bob, that instance of it (on that occasion of its use by the author) would refer to Bob upon Bob’s reading of it, hence it was Bob’s proper name (for each Bob) when the author used it (with that very intention). Also note that such referring was not due to the presence of the ‘You’ (which was only there for analogical purposes), as follows.

Imagine that Bill and I are visiting the Houses of Parliament, and that I want to take a photograph of Bill standing next to someone called ‘Ben’ (if Ben is tall, or fat or small), whence I call out “Ben!”  Just as the initial ‘You’ referred, as you read it, to you (for all that others reading it would rightly think of themselves being referred to), so for each person called ‘Ben’ who heard it, that ‘Ben’ referred to him—at least, that was certainly my intention, that each of them would have been called by his proper name. Suppose I had said “Ben!” to just one stranger, guessing his name correctly, would I then have used his proper name? Clearly I would not have said: “How are you, you who are, I venture, a Ben?” And while it would have been a guess, it would have been a correct guess (made by using his proper name). And while I would not have known Ben, to use a proper name one need not know its bearer, not if proper names refer directly.

(Incidentally, I tend to use single quotation marks to make names, so as to refer to the enclosed words—as when I invited you to “imagine Bob reading ‘You, Bob, are mistaken,’ ” to begin with—and double quotation marks for quotations, since they often merge into the surrounding sentence in a much simpler way—as when I quoted myself just then.)

Anyway, I tell that story (about Bill and I) to several people, and it gets passed around, and eventually it winds up getting told as just that, a story (although it actually happened, so to speak). One night, a stranger tells that same story (which the stranger heard, and now retells, as a fiction) to Bill, who recognises it as being about what happened to us in London (since rather surprisingly none of the names or events have altered with the story’s retellings). That is, Bill takes that ‘Bill’ to be referring to himself, even though it was uttered as an empty name (with the stranger’s intention to refer to a fictional character). In fact, Bill imagines that the story was never a fiction, that that ‘Bill’ had always (in the story’s retellings) referred to himself; even though the fact that the name never changed (as the story was told and retold as a fiction) was quite accidental (the crucial name in the story being ‘Ben’).

Still, maybe proper names do not refer directly, but rather via the senses that are attached to them, via the meanings that they have for us, such as our descriptions of the named object. After all, Kripke’s (1972) objections to such description theories of names—which concerned analyticity (necessity and the a priori) and non-identifying (indefinite or misdirecting) descriptions—were answered pretty well by Searle, as I shall now argue.

 

Names are used to refer to objects.

(Searle 1983: 258)

They function not as descriptions, but as pegs on which to hang descriptions.

(Searle 1969: 162)

 

In our utterances and writings, we use proper names to refer to particular objects, so that we can communicate thoughts about them. Consequently we need to be able, given a particular token of a name (and the context in which we hear or see it), to think about the named object, if we are to understand that communication. But in themselves, particular tokens of names are just physical sounds or shapes, so how do they enable us to communicate our thoughts?

Roughly, we identify a given token as a name by recognising, from its context, that there is, in our linguistic community, the intention to use such a physical token as a name. We thereby become part of the name-using practice—to use Evans’ (1982: 384) term—that includes that particular token. Although Evans was not a description theorist, his analysis shows how there would usually be available to us at least one definite description of the object (if any) named—roughly, the object (if any) that the others, in the name-using practice that includes this token, are using this name to refer to. (The examples above can easily be accommodated, as a variation on the same general theme.)

But of course, we would usually have available to us more than that. In general, the more we know about the named object, the more we understand by any use of its name (and vice versa). At one extreme—Evans’ (1982: 376) producers—the users of the name are acquainted with the named object (e.g. by baptising it). As Searle (1969: 171) noted, producers may associate very different descriptions with a name. But for each producer some description will describe only the named object—those definite descriptions need not be linguistic because “in some cases the only “identifying description” a speaker might have that he associates with the name is simply the ability to recognise the object” (Searle 1983: 233), e.g. by comparing it with some sensory patterns (which may in principle be described) that the speaker associates with the name.

More importantly, at the other extreme—Evans’ (1982: 377) consumers—the users of the name need never meet the named object. As Russell said (1912: 59), “it is plain that Julius Caesar himself is not before our minds, since we are not acquainted with him.” Consumers’ reference is parasitic (Searle 1969: 89) upon producers’ reference; but therefore there are some definite descriptions available—e.g., the famous man that we call ‘Julius Caesar’; which is not much of a description, but it would at least serve to make the conjunction of all the other true descriptions associated with that name by each consumer definite (and even if all the other things that one had learnt about Julius Caesar were false they would then have been falsities about Julius Caesar).

Within our everyday name-using practices, names like ‘Bob’ refer (to Bob) in a very direct way, at least superficially; but to think that that refutes description theories could be akin to thinking that our perceptions of objects as being within Euclidean space are enough to refute Einstein—what is needed for such a refutation is that all our uses of names refer directly, whereas Frege originally introduced senses because there is, for example, the problem of cognitive value:

‘Hesperus’ and ‘Phosphorus’ (the Babylonian names for the Evening Star and the Morning Star respectively) both name the planet Venus, and if description theories are incorrect then ‘Hesperus’ and ‘Phosphorus’ have no descriptive content, whence both names would mean nothing more than Venus (referring directly to it via causal links, according to Kripke). But then the identity Hesperus = Phosphorus would, rather implausibly, mean no more than the trivial Hesperus = Hesperus.

 

Now, although it is the great variation that is possible, in the senses or descriptions associated with a name by its users, on the various occasions of its use, which allows us to learn so much about the wider world, Kripke objected that proper names always denote (or designate) the same object, even in different possible worlds—they are modally rigid—whereas definite descriptions usually do not.

E.g., suppose that Bob uses the name ‘Julius Caesar’ with only the definite description ‘the first Roman Emperor’ in mind. It is intuitively obvious that the first Roman Emperor might not have been Julius Caesar, but if ‘Julius Caesar’ meant the first Roman Emperor then it would be a necessary truth (for Bob) that Julius Caesar was “the first Roman Emperor” (and furthermore, it would be a truth that Bob could know a priori).

Nonetheless, although Bob had only that definite description in mind—in his conscious mind—he would presumably have also known implicitly, had he been treating ‘Julius Caesar’ as the name of the first Roman Emperor (and were he able to use correctly such elementary aspects of our public language as names), a proposition such as that ‘Julius Caesar’ denotes the man known famously by that name. Now, since a proposition like that would have been part of the whole meaning of ‘Julius Caesar’ for Bob, it would not have been, for him, a necessary truth that Julius Caesar was the first Roman Emperor. And alternatively, had Bob been misusing ‘Julius Caesar’ as an abbreviation for ‘the first Roman Emperor’ then, while Bob would indeed have known Kripke’s necessary truth, such knowledge would not have threatened a description theory of names.

That does not entirely solve the problem, because the man known famously as ‘Julius Caesar’ might not have been Julius Caesar, but as Searle (1983: 258) noted, “any definite description at all can be treated as a rigid designator by indexing it to the actual world,” e.g. the man who actually is known famously as ‘Julius Caesar’, or the man who actually was the first Roman Emperor, and the object satisfying those descriptions satisfies them in all possible worlds. Because one would normally add such italicised phrases only in order to rule out such things as, for example, Shakespeare’s fictional Caesar (whenever the context did not rule them out, which would be very rarely), Kripke clearly should not have assumed that the descriptions given in the literature were not supposed to be modally rigid.

Rather ironically, Kripke wrote (regarding his example of Nixon) that “the actual winner, had the course of the campaign been different, might have been the loser” (1972: 265). And for example from the preceding literature, Searle (1969: 161) had considered the meaningful supposition “that the author of Waverley had never written Waverley,” which he contrasted with the contradiction of supposing “that there were one and only one thing which wrote Waverley and that thing did not write Waverley” (1969: 162), showing that he had regarded ‘the author of Waverley’ as synonymous with ‘the man who actually was the author of Waverley’.

 

Kripke’s (1972) other objections were, firstly, that a description might fail to pick out one object, and secondly, that it might pick out the wrong object. Regarding the former, Kripke considered asking someone who Feynman was: “When asked he will say: well he’s a physicist or something. He may not think that this picks out anyone uniquely. I still think he uses the name ‘Feynman’ as a name for Feynman.” (Kripke 1972: 292) But therefore he could have said: “the famous man, associated with physics, called ‘Feynman’,” which would have picked out Feynman via that very name-using practice. Because it would normally be uninformative to give such descriptions, they are easily overlooked when thought-experiments like this are considered.

Kripke’s (1972: 293-295) example for the latter objection was odd, but it resembled the more familiar idea that Bacon wrote the plays that are widely attributed to Shakespeare, so suppose that Bob (thinks that he) knows about Shakespeare only that he wrote all those plays, which were (we are to suppose) actually written by Bacon. Then the objection is that, although Bob describes Shakespeare as “the author of Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and so forth” (which is a definite description of Bacon), he presumably refers to Shakespeare when he uses the name ‘Shakespeare’.

Searle’s (1983: 251) response was twofold. Firstly, if Bob does refer to Shakespeare, then that is surely because he is part of the name-using practice that originated with Shakespeare’s baptism, and so Bob would have been able to give a definite description of Shakespeare (had he but thought of it), e.g. “the man called ‘Shakespeare’ by those from whom I got the name.” That description picks out Shakespeare via people who would have had similar descriptions of Shakespeare, but who would have picked him out via different sets of people. Those people would have had similar descriptions of their own, and so forth, such connections going all the way back to the producers at Shakespeare’s baptism.

More interestingly, Bob might have wanted (e.g. whilst discussing Hamlet) to refer to whosoever wrote the Shakespearean plays. He would then have been part of a secondary name-using practice, in Evans’ (1982: 395) terminology, using ‘Shakespeare’ as short for “the author of the Shakespearean plays” (i.e. Bacon, by hypothesis). That is more interesting because Kripke’s alternative to description theories emphasized the importance of causal links between the name-users and the named objects, and yet the question of which practice Bob was part of is one that requires more of an intentional than a causal answer.

Of course, consumers do not always know which sort of name-using practice they are part of; but still, our practices will presumably have evolved (or were designed, etc.) so that most of them do not use empty names. And although any ordinary proper name might be empty, for all that the name-users (especially the consumers) know, it is one of the strengths of description theories that they do not need to assume otherwise. Another is that they are untroubled by the other problem that Frege aimed to solve, of course (the problem of cognitive value, mentioned above).

 

Positing sense gives us the better picture of reference—the bigger picture, a broader view of what is going on. On Kripke’s account, descriptive content is necessary in order to secure reference (see Kripke 1972: 305; cf. Searle 1983: 245), but a description theory need not utilise causal connections; which is just as well because causal links do not give “either necessary or sufficient conditions for the use of a proper name to refer to its bearer” (Searle 1983, 239). E.g., I may refer to the man called ‘Bob’ who was closest to the North Pole when I first typed this phrase, and refer to him by his proper name even though it may well be that no causal link connects us; while the insufficiency of such links follows from the aforementioned possibility of secondary name-using practices.

And description theories, broadly construed (to include those that we have yet to develop), prejudge less about what we might find in the world—e.g. reconsider empty name-using practices (cf. Russell). Let us say that I name a particularly pretty cloud ‘Clarissa’ or can we say that? Was there such a thing as that pretty cloud, or really just rather a lot of water droplets and my imagination? If there is objectively no such thing as that pretty cloud, then ‘Clarissa’ is an empty name, and my belief that Clarissa is pretty is not true, if names refer directly.

And when I use Bob’s name I’m thinking of him as, primarily, his mind (whence the possibility of Bob reincarnating with a different body makes sense to me). But I may be wrong about Cartesian dualism. Perhaps Bob is a highly evolved biological structure, which at any given time is essentially just lots of fundamental particles interacting with the particles around them—or rather, that’s what Bob would be were ‘Bob’ referring to an objective individual. But perhaps ordinary objects are too fuzzy, too vague for such an object as Bob to exist objectively, despite everyday appearances. If so then many of my ordinary beliefs about Bob (not just my weird dualistic beliefs) could not be true, if names refer directly. (And were dualism true, with ‘Bob’ referring directly to Bob’s mind, what then of Bob being in suspended animation, etc.?) And of course, the same goes for lots of other things, besides Bob.

But as Frege (1953: 36) noted (in the confusing context of colour-names), a name’s private meaning (for its users, on each occasion of its use) is not its public meaning (the object of the name-using practice); or perhaps the private meaning is just the named object, but that is primarily an intentional object—or some weighted average of what the user imagines the referent to be and the most appropriate actual object (if any) and whatever the others in that name-using practice would be referring to and so forth—the point is that positing sense in addition to the referent seems necessary if we are to handle such complexities realistically.

Realistic reasoning is essentially analogical, and so, since our hypothetical posits resemble our fictional entities in various ways, I shall end with a glance at some of the complexities of the latter. I suspect that we cannot understand language if we do not understand fiction, which (from spells and myths, to pep talks and thought-experiments) helped to determine which language-users survived (while were we created there would be even deeper connections).

 

Objectionable Objects

 

I find myself thinking about fictional characters (e.g. Dr. Jekyll) as though they are objects created by, and hence individuated via, their authors’ conceptions of them. That may be naïve of me, but the more sophisticated approaches (such as Parsons’, Evans’ and Lewis’s, which I shall glance at below) seem to face problems insofar as they depart from that view. To begin with, we can say truthfully that Dr. Jekyll became Mr. Hyde. But to explain that we seem to need something called ‘Dr. Jekyll’ (be it nonexistent, make-believe or just non-actual, see below).

Dr. Jekyll is perhaps an intentional object. “Reference to nonexisting objects is possible because referring is an intentional activity and intentional activities require no more than an intentional object.” (Martinich 1979: 159) Intentional objects are puzzling (e.g. Crane 2001), but that is partly because even our normal experiences are puzzling (e.g. Valberg 1992). E.g. we can refer to blue chairs even though their blueness and their being chairs are not necessarily objective properties of matter, and we could even if we were all hooked-up brains-in-vats.

Less mysteriously, the fictional certainly excludes the factual and the hypothetical, since fictions cannot come true by accident (the author’s intention to write fiction being authoritative). Since readers might not be able to tell hypotheses from fictions, I think of Dr. Jekyll as an object created by Stevenson. And since “to all intents and purposes we can take an object to be any item falling under a sortal concept which supplies a well-defined criterion of identity for its instances” (Lowe 1997: 619), hence fictional characters are distinct objects insofar as the author of that fiction (if it has one) has a clear sense of them as individuals (that she has created within that fictional world).

Clearly, if an author cannot distinguish her own characters, then they are hardly objects. And if a fiction lacks an author (e.g. if monkeys typed it) then, since it must be the readers’ interpretations that give it meaning, I regard each reader as an author. So according to my naive view, when we refer to a fictional object we are referring to its author’s intentional object (and other sorts of characters can naturally be regarded as being constructed out of that basic sort). Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde are therefore the same character insofar as Stevenson thought of them that way, for example (and Moorcock put the same heroic character into different stories under different names, and in different fictional worlds, or so he said—we might regard his heroes as different characters, but he is surely the authority).

 

Parsons (1980) developed a general theory of nonexistent objects, which he applied to fictional objects. Imagine a list of all the objects that really exist, and alongside each of them imagine all of its properties, as a set of such predicates as ‘is a doctor’. Parsons calls such properties nuclear—predicates like ‘exists’ are excluded from those sets (because every object that is a unicorn lacks existence). Parsons adds, to that list of sets, all the remaining possible combinations of nuclear properties, and assigns, to each new set, a nonexistent object. Parsons (1980: 175-202) says that objects originating in stories are those with the nuclear properties attributed to them therein. E.g. Dr. Jekyll is a doctor because he has that nuclear property in Stevenson’s story.

However, not only are nonexistent objects counter-intuitive, Parsons’ theory faces a dilemma because a character’s nuclear properties usually go beyond (and sometimes clash with) those literally ascribed to it. If Dr. Jekyll’s properties depend upon readers’ interpretations, as Parsons (1980: 175) assumes, then it seems likely that his theory will identify Dr. Jekyll with many nonexistent objects. Yet we are intuitively talking about only one (i.e. Stevenson’s) Dr. Jekyll. But alternatively, if characters’ properties depend upon authors’ intentions, then Parsons’ theory seems to say that, as an author develops a character, a series of different objects are written about. Yet surely an author could even write new stories, and could have written different stories, about the same character.

So Parsons’ theory yields too many objects; but it also yields too few: If (Parsons 1980: 191) “a story says “a crowd gathered” but says nothing at all individually about the members of the crowd, then there is no way to get the theory to yield any particular member of the crowd as a fictional object.” There are no properties with which to individuate its members, and yet a crowd is essentially many objects. Intuitively the author will, in imagining such a crowd, have imagined (probably quite vaguely) many individual characters. Also, since authors usually describe their creations only after they have imagined them (as we might describe a daydream), why should different authors not describe different characters via the same nuclear predications?

Too many and too few—it seems that Parson’s theory is yielding the wrong sort of objects. E.g., if (Parsons 1980: 185) “a piece of fiction accidentally turned out to be a complete and completely accurate account of the entire (past, present and future) history of the universe, then all characters created therein would be identical with real objects.” But bizarre as that possibility is, it should not even be a possibility. Since Dr. Jekyll is not really a doctor, being only fictionally a doctor, perhaps we should start with Stevenson only pretending to know about Dr. Jekyll, thereby creating a mere pretence into which his readers are drawn.

 

Evans (1982: 353-68) developed a theory of make-believe so that his direct-reference theory of proper names could cope with empty names like ‘Dr. Jekyll.’ First, let *P* mean that “it is make-believedly the case that P.” Then our regarding it as true that “Dr. Jekyll is a doctor” is explained as *Dr. Jekyll is a doctor* being made true by our engaging with Stevenson’s story. Evans (1982: 366) treats “Bob admires Holmes” (where Bob is a real person) similarly: *Bob admires Holmes* is made true by Bob imagining an admirable Holmes as he reads Conan Doyle’s novels.

Kroon (1994) found the following problem. If proper names refer directly, then the names of real people and places refer (even when they crop up in fictions) to those people and places. So, suppose that a certain Garrison is watching a film about Garrison’s heroic exploits. “Clearly Garrison might admire his movie alter-ego even if he hates himself in real life and even if he is portrayed in the movie as totally above self-admiration. […] The problem is how to make logical space for the make-believe truth that Garrison admires Garrison, given the possibility that in the story portrayed it is false that Garrison admires himself. [… That] imputes a contradiction which simply isn’t there: there is nothing even remotely odd about Garrison’s admiring—as we might put it—the Garrison of the movie on the grounds that the latter doesn’t admire himself.” (Kroon 1994: 210)

The problem, then, is that *Garrison admires Garrison* is true (cf. *Bob admires Holmes*), and yet at the same time *Garrison admires Garrison* is false (since Garrison the viewer knows that Garrison does not admire himself in the movie). Kroon (1994: 210) suggests that: “a strong Lewis-type version of modal realism might reasonably be invoked as a solution to the problem.”

 

Lewis (1983) considers possible worlds in which someone (Dr. Watson) is telling Conan Doyle’s stories as known fact. The propositions in those stories pick out many such worlds, and other propositions have their truth-values determined by the close ones (according to a fairly complicated formula designed to yield the intuitively correct values). But Lewis’s (1983: 280) approach cannot handle cases where the author’s mouthpiece (e.g. Dr. Watson) purports to be telling the truth but is obviously lying. On my naive view, the assumption that Dr. Watson is lying is correct iff Conan Doyle imagined him to be lying.

And similarly for a problem that Lewis (1983: 262) raised for Parsons: “We can truly say that Holmes lived at 221B Baker Street. [But] the only building at 221B Baker Street, then or now, was a bank. It does not follow, and certainly is not true, that Holmes lived in a bank.” In accordance with my criterion, such inferences would be justified iff we were justified in assuming that they follow from the fictional background that the author imagined for such objects. Good authors make the important truths clear to their readers, by assuming backgrounds that (they assume that) their readers will also assume, which is how we (believe that we) know that 221B Baker Street was not a bank in Conan Doyle’s fictional London.

A similar problem, which Lewis (1983: 263) again raised for Parsons, is to explain how it could be true that “Holmes would not have needed tapes to get the goods on Nixon.” There are no close worlds (either to Conan Doyle’s fictional world, or to the actual one) in which Holmes and Nixon counterparts coexist, because they belong to such different times. Holmes might time-travel, were time-travel a future possibility; but since it might be impossible, part of the problem is that Lewis’s (1983: 274) theory cannot accommodate impossible fictions. But mainly the problem is that, since Lewis’s version of time-travel goes via appropriately related counterparts, rather than actual individuals actually moving through time, hence it seems implausible that a close world (to either) could contain such a time-travelling Holmes. Lewis can so complicate his formula that it yields all such intuitive truths of course, but only because Lewis’s approach is essentially unrealistic (which means that he is practically refuted when it comes to quantum-mechanics; cf. §7 of this).

 

In short, those three ways of analysing propositions about fictional objects failed, and perhaps because as they tried to improve upon the naive view of such things (that to refer to a fictional object is to refer to its author’s intentional object), they departed from it. So perhaps that naïve view is essentially correct, and the problem is just the obscurity of our concept of an intentional object. (There are other complications too, as always; e.g. there will be some intent, on an author's part, for his characters to be pegs onto which readers will attach their own imaginings.) But still, such obscurity is naturally on a par with the obscurity of the underlying nature of reality.

E.g., is there something that it is like, to be Dr. Watson, which his nuclear properties might not capture but which is crucial to our engagement with the novels of Conan Doyle—and presumably to his creation by Conan Doyle—because it is that which allows us to imagine ourselves in his place (whence reading fiction may help us to appreciate the world-views of others, and so improve our own)? In the obvious sense, clearly not; but is there then no such thing? There seems to be something not entirely subjective there.

More clearly, learning about fictional worlds does indeed seem to be (as Lewis’s approach emphasized) akin to learning about the world via testimony, as both involve us in trying to understand another’s world-view. A world-view is of course not a world but still, the world around us may well be (for us) indistinguishable from our own world-view. And after all, fictions are often presented as (objective) views from nowhere. And although the ordinary intentional objects around us seem less mysterious than fictional objects, it being if anything the underlying things-in-themselves that are mysterious, on the other hand by “that blue chair” (which I might call ‘Charlie’ of course) I mean the thing-in-itself that is the blue chair indicated—so even everyday intentional objects are quite mysterious, after all (cf. Valberg 1992).

After all, even if there is nothing more substantial than a fuzzy cloud of particles, in the objective world, where that blue chair is, was and will be, still it is surely simply true that I am on Charlie, when I am. And it is similarly clear that fictional chairs are (fictionally) blue in more-or-less the same way that we recall real chairs as being (really) blue. And of course, at the opposite extreme (to fictional objects) it is perfectly clear to me that ‘Martin’ is not an empty name—for all of us, there is one ordinary object that is most well known as a thing-in-itself—and yet that tells us surprisingly little about things-in-themselves because it is hard to imagine that most ordinary objects are, in themselves, subjects.

 

And so we return to our original puzzle, are they even objects? And of course we return to the obvious answer, via our robust realism (our natural absolutism)—when the cat is on the mat and I say, “The cat is on the mat,” I naturally mean that the real cat is really on the real mat. Of course I’m not saying anything about any close class of the cat-parts’ counterparts (and even more so when it’s a matter of my feet on the ground). About the only thing there that I’m even implicitly assuming about the nature of reality is that there is a reality, and I know that for sure because I’m a part of it (not apart from it).

Cf. Blackburn’s (2005: 156-8) picture of our non-fictional language-use, to describe the way things are (so to speak), as being like the use of a map of reality. If we encounter difficulties with using it, we may revise the map to make it more realistic, but decisions as to what gets represented on the map are for the most part made on the basis of our needs and desires. The symbols on the map represent bits of reality but those bits are—qua bits—individuated functionally, and may say relatively little about the underlying nature of reality (with which we are to some extent directly acquainted with). Usually they will be a good enough guide (otherwise our language-use would be dysfunctional)—enabling us to utter truths or else to clarify our words (to successfully revise our map) so that we can—but for example, why should the ways that cooks and vets talk about the parts of rabbits be commensurate; and why should rabbits not blur indefinitely into non-rabbits over time? English is not the language of Angels! So, since I began by noting that one use of the proper name ‘Bob’ could refer to many Bobs, I shall end by considering more of the same.

Suppose Bob was beamed across space (as in Star Trek) instantaneously, as a beam of information obtained via the destruction of his original body. Some philosophers would say that Bob died, and a copy created, others that Bob was beamed across space. In the latter case suppose that accidentally several copies were made. Each is the same individual as the original Bob, if slightly older (just as, more usually, there may be several possible Bobs), and so presumably my original use of ‘Bob’ referred to all of them. As for the former case, let us consider Bob dying anyway (of a gunshot, say). Bob’s wife arrives and says, “That’s not Bob,” referring to Bob’s body. In one sense she could be right, as Bob may be in Heaven. In another sense she is certainly wrong, as nobody else is lying there. Bob both is and is not lying there; and it isn’t the lying there that is indefinite, but the referent of ‘Bob’. According to our natural use of proper names, ‘Bob’ could, were Cartesian dualism true (as it may well be), mean Bob’s soul, or it could mean Bob’s body, depending upon the context. So how could ‘Bob’ be referring directly (even with dualism being just possible)?

Since reality may—in itself—be even more complicated than our non-fictional language-use, so Frege’s sense/reference distinction remains such a useful first step towards understanding the latter, the chopping-up of reality into intentional objects being how we make sense of it. The referent of a non-empty proper name is supposed to be the easy bit, but it may not exist in reality as such a distinct, well-defined object, for all that some fuzzy bit of reality must correspond well enough (functionally) to that primarily intentional object. Kripke (1972) gave us a simple picture of "water" meaning what it does (for us now) because someone once indicated the liquid form of H20 and said something like "that stuff," so that (via a causal chain) we mean by it what they meant by it. But that seems little better than his simple picture of descriptivism (if descriptivists thought that “tiger” meant a stripy thing like a cat, for example, then they would have thought that a man could, by putting on a tiger-costume, become a tiger, whereas of course no one thought that), because if what we mean by "water" depends upon something like that; then if some weird space-time worm-hole had briefly substituted that bit of water for XYZ just before s/he said "that stuff," then we'd have been misusing "water" ever since (and obviously we haven't; but it's not obvious that such a substitution could not have occurred).

More deeply problematic (since Kripke did mention "Madagascar") is the thought that, way back then, they may well not have had the same (folk) metaphysics as we do (alchemy instead of chemistry, or probably something even weirder), so why would "that stuff" have meant H2O then, and not something else? What, after all, stops us from referring to any form of H2O (e.g. plasma, liquid water being largely a mixture of H+ and OH- anyway) with our "water," or to any similar mixture of hydrogen and oxygen (similarly), or of nucleons and electrons, or to just the oxygen, or the nucleons, or to impurities in the water along with the H2O (and so on and so forth)? Presumably we presume a common, folky metaphysics, so that our "that"s are intimately (if innately, subconsciously and/or obscurely) associated with something like a description (less explicit than an actual description, and possibly indescribable).

But then maybe, once we've separated out such descriptivistic content, there won't be anything externalistic left over. Suppose, for example, that H2O naturally varied, from day to day (e.g. as the underlying particles pointed in different directions in some N-space), with no change in its chemical properties: Would we then refer, with our "water," to H2O only on some days? If, as seems intuitively plausible, not, then we would seem to be selecting which stuff we refer to on descriptivistic (i.e. chemical) grounds. We naturally assume that there is no such variation, but the success of our reference is surely independent of the literal truth of that presumption. Suppose that the variation made no difference to any observable physical property: Then it is just like there is no variation. Or suppose that it made some difference: Then our descriptivistic input would determine which stuff we were referring to (cf. normal and heavy water).

Suppose that when we say "That stuff," there's an awful lot of descriptivistic content; still, there must seem to be some externalistic remainder, with the "That." But I think that we would really have an internalistic remainder of "This." E.g., we can clearly refer to this Actuality (containing both that stuff and us), whereas there seems to be little else that we could refer to unproblematically, with no associated descriptivistic content. (Of course, all the above is not only confused but also speculative, so comments on it would be welcome.)

 

References

 

Blackburn, S. (2005) Truth: A Guide for the Perplexed, London: Allen Lane.

Crane, T. (2001) ‘Intentional Objects’, Ratio 14, 336-49.

Evans, G. (1982) The Varieties of Reference, Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Frege, G. (1953) The Foundations of Arithmetic (2^nd ed.), Oxford: Blackwell.

Kripke, S. (1972) ‘Naming and Necessity’ in D. Davidson and G. Harman (eds.) Semantics of Natural Language, Dordrecht: Reidel, 253-355.

Kroon, F. (1994) ‘Make-Believe and Fictional Reference’, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 52, 207-14.

Lewis, D. (1983) ‘Truth in Fiction’ with Postscripts, in his Philosophical Papers Vol. I, Oxford University Press, 261-80.

Lowe, E. J. (1997) ‘Objects and criteria of identity’, in B. Hale and C. Wright (eds.) Companion to the Philosophy of Language, Oxford: Blackwell, 613-33.

Martinich, A. P. (1979) ‘Referring’, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 40, 157-72.

Parsons, T. (1980) Nonexistent Objects, New Haven: Yale University Press.

Russell, B. (1912) The Problems of Philosophy, Oxford University Press.

Searle, J. R. (1969) Speech Acts: an essay in the philosophy of language, Cambridge University Press.

Searle, J. R. (1983) Intentionality: an essay in the philosophy of mind, Cambridge University Press.

Valberg, J. J. (1992) The Puzzle of Experience, Oxford: Clarendon Press.