I’ve found two seminars to go to at the University of London. Barry Smith is convening one called ‘Philosophical Linguistics and Philosophy of Language’. At King’s College there’s a seminar called ‘Formal Semantics and Pragmatics’ convened by Eleni Gregoromichelaki, Ruth Kempson, and Wilfried Meyer-Viol which looks like a lot of fun as well. I’m finding it hard to get my hands on a copy of Bob Carpenter’s book Type-logical Semantics for the latter, but I’m not discouraged.
I’m in London for my visit to UCL Linguistics and the Institute of Philosophy. I’m planning to attend UCL’s Pragmatics reading group and Barry Smith’s philosophy of language seminar. Hopefully I’ll write some of my thesis while I’m at it.
I’ve been thinking a bit about a descriptivist account of proper names. One way this gets motivated is to appeal to data that as far as I know were first presented by Tyler Burge in his 1973 paper ‘Reference and Proper Names’. He points out that proper names take definite and indefinite articles, plurals, and quantifiers. His examples:
(1) There are relatively few Alfreds in Princeton.
(2) An Alfred Russell joined the club today.
(3) The Alfred who joined the club today was a baboon.
(4) Some Alfreds are crazy; some are sane.
Others have pointed out since that in some languages unmodified singular names take the definite article as in:
(5) ho Sōcratēs aphīketo.
This is one way to say ‘(The) Socrates arrived.’ in classical Greek, so I’m told. Burge thought this was evidence for names being predicates. On his view singular names in fact occur in construction with a demonstrative that is unpronounced in English. Modern versions of the view replace the demonstrative with a definite. I like this line of thought. I’m inclined to think that there could happily be a definite or a demonstrative in different circumstances. I think this might help with ‘Paderewski is Paderewski’ type sentences, because we could treat ‘Paderewski’ as predicate combined with a demonstrative and used for an act of deferred demonstration.
In any case I’ve heard some people say something that might count as more evidence. It seems quite common to say things like:
(6) I will miss my Frank.
In many cases ‘my’ will combine with predicate, like ‘car’, to give an object. In that respect in behaves like a definite. So this looks like a case on a par with (3). In that case it should be more evidence for the view.
It might be objected that ‘my’ is semantically vacuous. In that case (6) will be taken to be just like:
(7) I will miss Frank.
I don’t think this is true. Suppose we are at a retirement party for somebody called Frank. I don’t know Frank very well, but I am close to another man named Frank who is also retiring. The natural interpretation of an utterance of (6), given that we are at a Frank’s party, is different to the natural interpretation of an utterance of (7). The two utterances are in an intuitive sense about two different Franks. One way to account for this would be in Frank were a predicate taking an unpronounced ‘the’ in one case and a pronounced ‘my’ in the other. Or so I would argue.
I’ve decided to take down my MobileMe homepage. I decided it wasn’t very useful. I’ve also been updating links and so on. This is all in some sort of preparation for the new academic year and my visits to London and Oslo. I’m looking forward to it.
is here.
is here.
I’ll be spending some time in Oslo in the new year visiting CSMN on an International Student Fellowship. The provisional dates are the 11th of January to the 12th of March. It should be a lot of fun.
I’m spending a few days taking a break from my usual philosophical interests by attending St Andrews’ Kant & Reid Reading Party at the Burn. They say a change is as good as a rest.
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