Michael McKinsey

This book defends the Direct Reference (DR) thesis in philosophy of language regarding proper names and indexical pronouns. It uniquely draws out the significant consequences of DR when it is conjoined with the fact that these singular terms sometimes fail to refer. Even though DR is widely endorsed by philosophers of language, many philosophically important and radically controversial consequences of the thesis have gone largely unexplored. This book makes an important contribution to the DR literature by explicitly addressing the consequences that follow from DR regarding failure of reference. Michael McKinsey argues that only a form of neutral free logic can capture a revised concept of logical truth that is consistent with the fact that any sentence of any form that contains a directly referring genuine term can fail to be either true or false on interpretations where that term fails to refer. He also explains how it is possible for there to be true (or false) sentences that contain non-referring names, even though this possibility seems inconsistent with DR. Consequences of Reference Failure will be of interest to philosophers of language and logic and linguists working on Direct Reference.

Hilary Putnam (1981) proposed an interesting and much discussed attempt to refute a skeptical argument that is based on one form of the brain-in-a-vat scenario. In turn, Putnam’s attempted refutation is based on content externalism (also known as semantic externalism). On this view, the referents and meanings of various types of singular and general terms, as well as the propositions expressed by sentences containing such terms, are determined by aspects of the speaker’s external environment. In this entry, we will consider the basic features of and problems with Putnam’s original argument, and we will also present and discuss several of the most important attempts to reconstruct or improve upon that argument.

Abstract. On the Direct Reference thesis, proper names are what I call ‘genuine terms’, terms whose sole semantic contributions to the propositions expressed by their use are the terms’ semantic referents. But unless qualified, this thesis implies the false consequence that sentences containing names that fail to refer can never express true or false propositions. (Consider ‘The ancient Greeks worshipped Zeus’, for instance.) I suggest that while names are typically and fundamentally used as genuine terms, there is a small class of names, which I call ‘descriptive names’, whose reference is fixed by commonly associated definite descriptions, and I also suggest that there is an idiom of natural language on which such names can be used as abbreviated definite descriptions in a limited set of sentential contexts, including (1) positive and negative existentials, (2) cognitive ascriptions, and (3) uses of names to talk about myth. Uses of empty descriptive names in such contexts can then be either true or false. Relying on Gregory Currie’s theory of truth in fiction, I also propose an idiom on which fictional names can be used as short for a certain type of description in talk about fiction. Along the way, I provide arguments that names are used as short for descriptions in substantive existential statements as well as in both metamythic and metafictive contexts. I also discuss and criticize alternative views of these matters, including the views of David Braun, Saul Kripke, Peter van Inwagen, and others.

Gareth evans has proposed a type of case which shows that kripke's sketch of a causal theory of proper names is in need of modification. Kripke has himself suggested a way in which the modification might proceed, But I argue that this suggestion leads in the wrong direction. I consider a development of kripke's view by michael devitt which may overcome evans' case, But which is shown false by a different sort of case. The latter kind of case also shows that a view of names recently proposed by donnellan is in need of revision.

There is a fairly general consensus that names are Millian (or Russellian) genuine terms, that is, are singular terms whose sole semantic function is to introduce a referent into the propositions expressed by sentences containing the term. This answers the question as to what sort of proposition is expressed by use of sentences containing names. But there is a second serious semantic problem about proper names, that of how the referents of proper names are determined. This is the question that I will discuss in this paper. Various views consistent with Millianism have been proposed as to how the semantic referents of proper names are determined. These views can be classified into (1) description theories and (2) causal theories, but they can also be classified into (3) social practice theories, on which a name’s referent is determined by a social practice involving the referent, and (4) individualistic theories, on which the referent of the use of a name is determined by the speaker’s state of mind. Here I argue against social practice theories of the sorts proposed by Kripke and Evans and in favor of an individualistic approach to name reference. I argue that social practice is irrelevant to determining name reference and that, as a consequence, names have no meanings in natural languages. In the second part of the paper I motivate and propose a new form of individualistic theory which incorporates features of both description theories and Evans’s social practice theory.