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From: rmc@cca.UUCP (Mark Chilenskas)
Newsgroups: net.ai
Subject: Re: Essence
Message-ID: <528@cca.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 17-May-84 15:50:35 EDT
Article-I.D.: cca.528
Posted: Thu May 17 15:50:35 1984
Date-Received: Sat, 19-May-84 01:18:31 EDT
References: <1084@ihuxr.UUCP>, <179@ccieng2.UUCP>
Organization: Computer Corp America, Cambridge
Lines: 72


    What we are discussing is one of the central problems of the
philosophy of language, namely, the problem of reference. How do humans
know what a given name or description refers to?

    Pre WWI logic was particularly interested in this question, as they
were building formal systems and tried to determine what constants and
variables really meant.  The two major conflicting theories came from
Bertrand Russel and Gottlieb Frege.

    Russell believed in a dichotomy between the logical and gramatical
forms of a sentence.  Thus a proper name was not really a name, but just
a description that enabled a person to pick out the particular object to
which it refered.  You could reduce any proper name to a list of
properties. 

    Frege, on the other hand, considered that there were such things as
proper names as grammatical and logical entities.  These names had a
"sense" (similar to the "essense" in some of the earlier msgs on this
topic) and a "reference" (the actual physical thing picked out by the
name).  Although the sense is sometimes conveyed by giving a
description, it is not identical to the description you would give in
trying to explain the name to someone.

    Now there have been many developments of both theories.  Behaviorists
tend to build "complexes of qualities" theories of meaning which read a
lot like Russell's work, but there are lots of differences in
implementation and mechanism.  Linguists and modal logicians tend to
build theories closer to Frege's.

    I think the most important recent book on the subject is "Naming and
Necessity", by Saul Kripke (along with Willard VO Quine and Hillary
Putnam, probably the top philosophers in North Americal today).  The
book is a transcript, not much edited except for explanatory footnotes,
of a series of lectures trying to explain how proper names might work.
The arguments against the "quality cluster" theories seem pretty
conclusive.  They include the way we use counterfactuals, that is
talking about an object or a person if they were different than they
actually were (like, what would Babbage have been like if he had lived
in an age of VLSI chips?  or what would Mayor Curly of Boston been
like if he hadn't been a crook?)  These discussions can get pretty far
away from reality, and this indicates that the names we use allow us to
keep track of who or what we mean without getting confused by the
changes in qualities and properties.  The properties and qualities are
not what provide the "sense" or "essense" of the name.

    Kripke goes on to suggest that we understand names through a
"naming" and a "chain of acquaintances".  For example, Napoleon was
named at his christening, and various people met him, and they talked to
people about him, and this chain of acquaintances kept going even after
he was dead.  Thus there is a (probably multi-path) chain of
conversations and pointings and descriptions that leads back from your
understanding of the name "Napoleon" to the christening where he
received his name.  I am not sure that this is a correct appraisal of
the  mechanism for understanding names, but it certainly is the best i
have heard.

    Leonard (?) Linsky has recently written a book attacking this and
similar views, and indicating that a synthesis of the Russell and Frege
theories still has problems but avoids most of the pitfalls of
acquaintances.  Unfortunately i have not yet read that book.

    For other works in the area, certainly read Quine's Word and Object
and the volume of collected Putnam papers on language.  Also works by
Searle and Austin on speech acts are useful for thinking about the
clues, both verbal and non-verbal, that allow us to make sense of
conversations where not everything is stated explicitly.

    Enjoy!
                                R Mark Chilenskas
                                chilenskas@cca-vms
                                decvax!cca!rmc