Dolf Rami

Proper names play an important role in our understanding of linguistic ‘aboutness’ or reference. For instance, the name-bearer relation is a good candidate for the paradigm of the reference relation: it provides us with our initial grip on this relation and controls our thinking about it. For this and other reasons proper names have been at the center of philosophical attention. However, proper names are as controversial as they are conceptually fundamental. Since Kripke’s seminal lectures Naming and Necessity the controversy about proper names has taken the form of a debate between two main camps, descriptivists and non-descriptivists like Kripke himself.The lectures were given in Princeton in 1970 and published in book form as Naming and Necessity .Descriptivists hold that there is a close connection between proper names and definite descriptions: the meaning or sense of a proper name can be given by a definite description. Th ..

In this paper, I aim to present the main components of my non-standard interpretation of Frege’s views on existence to the English-speaking public. First, I will outline the standard interpretation and show how to a great but not full extent the standard interpretation can be justified on the basis of Frege’s writings. Second, I show that the main error of the standard interpretation consists in the assimilation of the contents of the ordinary language expressions “exist” and “there is” according to Frege. Third, I evaluate possible sources for this unfounded assimilation. After that, I outline my alternative interpretation that distinguishes in opposition to other non-standard interpretations between a substantive and a deflationary part of Frege’s complete conception of existence in analogy to Frege’s analysis of truth and negation. Fifthly, I justify my interpretation by the reconstruction of a so far overlooked master argument of Frege against the above-mentioned assimilation. In the last section, I introduce and discuss five objections against my interpretation that came to my attention.

Dolf Rami contributes to contemporary debates about the meaning and reference of proper names by providing an overview of the main challenges and developing a new contextualist account of names. Questions about the use and semantic features of proper names are at the centre of philosophy of language. How does a single proper name refer to the same thing in different contexts of use? What makes a thing a bearer of a proper name? What is their meaning? Guided by these questions, Rami discusses Saul Kripke's main contributions to the debate and introduces two new ways to capture the rigidity of names, proposing a pluralist version of the causal chain picture. Covering popular contextualist accounts of names, both indexical and variabilist, he presents a use-sensitive alternative based on a semantic comparison between names, pronouns and demonstratives. Extending and applying his approach to a wide variety of uses, including names in fiction, this is a comprehensive explanation of why we should interpret proper names as use-sensitive expressions.

Dieser Sammelband ist den Themen Wahrheit, Bedeutung und Existenz gewidmet sowie dem Bezug dieser Themen zur Realismus-Antirealismus-Problematik. Die Aufsätze zum Thema Wahrheit behandeln unter anderem, welche Rolle ein realistischer Wahrheitsbegriff für unsere Erkenntnispraxis spielt und wie man einen realistischen Wahrheitsbegriff genau charakterisieren sollte. In den Beiträgen zu dem Thema Bedeutung wird diskutiert, ob sich eine irrtumstheoretische Version des Antirealismus bezüglich der Existenz semantischer Tatsachen aufrechterhalten lässt und welche Variante des Antirealismus Saul Kripke in Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language vertreten hat. Die Beiträge aus der letzten Themengruppe gehen dem Status möglicher Welten, der Existenz vergangener Objekte und der Frage nach, wieso wir Sachverhalte als existent postulieren sollten, für deren Existenz eigentlich keine vernünftigen Gründe sprechen.

In diesem Aufsatz möchte ich mich mit dem Verhältnis von Existenz und Quantifikationen beschäftigen. Oft wird die Bestimmung dieses Verhältnis auf die Frage heruntergebrochen, ob der partikuläre Quantor als ein Existenzquantor interpretiert werden soll oder nicht, der im Anschluss an Frege, Russell und Quine für eine Eigenschaft der Existenz von Begriffen von Dingen steht. De facto ist diese Betrachtungsweise aber viel zu kurz gegriffen. Ich werde vier Positionen gegenüberstellen, die das Verhältnis von Existenz und Quantifikation in unterschiedlicher Weise bestimmen. Daran anschließend werde ich mich mit den Vor- und Nachteilen dieser Auffassungen auseinandersetzen und für eine Auffassung stark machen, die von sogenannten adaptiven Quantoren Gebrauch macht.

In this paper, I will defend a new compositional semantics for single-domain free logic. This semantics makes use of a distinction between the semantic value of a singular term and its semantic referent. The semantic value of a singular term is conceived of as a set that either contains the semantic referent or no element at all. The semantic referent is the object that the term designates. Before I will introduce this new semantics for single-domain predicate and an S5-type modal logic in detail, I will present five related problems of compositionality of the standard semantics for these logical systems. After that I will show in detail how my new proposed alternative semantics can be used to solve nearly all of the outlined five problems.

In this paper, I will show that typical formal semantic reconstructions of the rigidity of proper names neglect the important aspect that the rigidity of names is determined by our ordinary use of a name relative to the actual world. This fact was clearly pointed out by Kripke, but overlooked by the subsequent discussion concerning this topic. Based on this diagnosis, I will distinguish three different actualized notions of rigidity. Firstly, I will introduce two different new varieties of known versions of rigidity; namely, actualized persistent and actualized obstinate rigidity. Secondly, I will make use of the tools provided by free logic and introduce a new and overlooked version of rigidity, which I will call actually restricted rigidity. Against this background, I will argue that we have different options to formally model the rigidity of proper names in natural languages. Which option we choose, mainly depends on our philosophical background assumptions. For someone who believes in non-existent objects and the possibility of naming such objects, it is the best choice to hold that proper names are actually obstinately rigid designators. For someone who rejects non-existent objects and the possibility of naming such objects, actually restricted rigidity is a better choice than actualized persistent rigidity.

The predicate view on proper names opts for a uniform semantic representation of proper nouns like ‘Alfred’ as predicates on the level of logical form. Early defences of this view can be found in Sloat (Language, vol. 45, pp. 26–30, 1969) and Burge (J. Philos. 70: 425–439, 1973), but there is an increasing more recent interest in this view on proper names. My paper aims to provide a reconstruction and critique of Burge’s main argument for the predicate view on proper names, which is still used by several current philosophers in defence of this view. I have called this argument the unification argument. I will present a stepwise interpretation and reconstruction of this argument, consider several possible responses to it and defend a specific response to it in detail

In this essay I will defend the thesis that proper nouns are primarily used as proper names—as atomic singular referring expressions—and different possible predicative uses of proper nouns are derived from this primary use or an already derived secondary predicative use of proper nouns. There is a general linguistic phenomenon of the derivation of new meanings from already existing meanings of an expression. This phenomenon has different manifestations and different linguistic mechanisms can be used to establish derived meanings of different kinds of expressions. One prominent variation of these mechanisms was dubbed in Nunberg. In the essay I will distinguish two different sub-varieties of this mechanism: occurrent and lexical meaning transfer. Nunberg conceives of meaning transfer as a mechanism that allows us to derive a new truth-conditional meaning of an expression from an already existing truth-conditional meaning of this expression. I will argue that most predicative uses of proper nouns can be captured by the mentioned two varieties of truth-conditional meaning transfer. But there are also important exceptions like the predicative use of the proper noun ‘Alfred’ in as sentence like ‘Every Alfred that I met was a nice guy’. I will try to show that we cannot make use of truth-conditional meaning transfer to account for such uses and I will argue for a the existence of second variant of meaning transfer that I will call use-conditional meaning transfer and that allows us also to capture these derived meanings of proper nouns. Furthermore, I will try to show that the proposed explanation of multiple uses of proper nouns is superior to the view supported by defenders of a predicative view on proper names.

In this essay I will defend a novel version of the indexical view on proper names. According to this version, proper names have a relatively sparse truth-conditional meaning that is represented by their rigid content and indexical character, but a relatively rich use-conditional meaning, which I call the (contextual) constraint of a proper name. Firstly, I will provide a brief outline of my favoured indexical view on names in contrast to other indexical views proposed in the relevant literature. Secondly, two general motivations for an indexical view on names will be introduced and defended. Thirdly, I will criticize the two most popular versions of the indexical view on names: formal variable accounts and salience-based formal constant accounts. In the fourth and final section, I will develop my own use-conditional indexical view on names in three different steps by confronting an initial version of this view with three different challenges

In this paper I aim to defend a version of the view that ‘exist’ expresses primarily a property of individual objects, a property that each of them has. In the first section, I will distinguish the three main types of rival conceptions concerning the semantic status of ‘exist’ that will define the subsequent discussion. In the second section it will be shown that the best explanation of our overall use of ‘exist’ in natural language requires the treatment of ‘exist’ as a predicate that can be applied to individual objects. The third section will be concerned with the problem of the semantic analysis of negative singular existential sentences that contain proper names. I will briefly defend a specific solution to this problem that makes use of a single-domain free logic. In the following sections, I will try to defend this view of existence in more detail. That is, I will deal with three different specific challenges that prima facie seem to speak against the proposed view and for some rival alternatives; and I will show how these challenges can be met