7 ideas
18935 | Semantic theory should specify when an act of naming is successful [Sawyer] |
Full Idea: A semantic theory of names should deliver a specification of the conditions under which a name names an individual, and hence a specification of the conditions under which a name is empty. | |
From: Sarah Sawyer (Empty Names [2012], 1) | |
A reaction: Naming can be private, like naming my car 'Bertrand', but never tell anyone. I like Plato's remark that names are 'tools'. Do we specify conditions for successful spanner-usage? The first step must be individuation, preparatory to naming. |
18945 | Millians say a name just means its object [Sawyer] |
Full Idea: The Millian view of direct reference says that the meaning of a name is the object named. | |
From: Sarah Sawyer (Empty Names [2012], 4) | |
A reaction: Any theory that says meaning somehow is features of the physical world strikes me as totally misguided. Napoleon is a man, so he can't be part of a sentence. He delegates that job to words (such as 'Napoleon'). |
18934 | Sentences with empty names can be understood, be co-referential, and even be true [Sawyer] |
Full Idea: Some empty names sentences can be understood, so appear to be meaningful ('Pegasus was sired by Poseidon'), ...some appear to be co-referential ('Santa Claus'/'Father Christmas'), and some appear to be straightforwardly true ('Pegasus doesn't exist'). | |
From: Sarah Sawyer (Empty Names [2012], 1) | |
A reaction: Hang on to this, when the logicians arrive and start telling you that your talk of empty names is vacuous, because there is no object in the 'domain' to which a predicate can be attached. Meaning, reference and truth are the issues around empty names. |
18938 | Frege's compositional account of truth-vaues makes 'Pegasus doesn't exist' neither true nor false [Sawyer] |
Full Idea: In Frege's account sentences such as 'Pegasus does not exist' will be neither true nor false, since the truth-value of a sentence is its referent, and the referent of a complex expression is determined by the referent of its parts. | |
From: Sarah Sawyer (Empty Names [2012], 2) | |
A reaction: We can keep the idea of 'sense', which is very useful for dealing with empty names, but tweak his account of truth-values to evade this problem. I'm thinking that meaning is compositional, but truth-value isn't. |
18947 | Definites descriptions don't solve the empty names problem, because the properties may not exist [Sawyer] |
Full Idea: If it were possible for a definite description to be empty - not in the sense of there being no object that satisfies it, but of there being no set of properties it refers to - the problem of empty names would not have been solved. | |
From: Sarah Sawyer (Empty Names [2012], 5) | |
A reaction: Swoyer is thinking of properties like 'is a unicorn', which are clearly just as vulnerable to being empty as 'the unicorn' was. It seems unlikely that 'horse', 'white' and 'horn' would be empty. |
13128 | 'Ultimate sortals' cannot explain ontological categories [Westerhoff on Wiggins] |
Full Idea: 'Ultimate sortals' are said to be non-subordinated, disjoint from one another, and uniquely paired with each object. Because of this, the ultimate sortal cannot be a satisfactory explication of the notion of an ontological category. | |
From: comment on David Wiggins (Identity and Spatio-Temporal Continuity [1971], p.75) by Jan Westerhoff - Ontological Categories §26 | |
A reaction: My strong intuitions are that Wiggins is plain wrong, and Westerhoff gives the most promising reasons for my intuition. The simplest point is that objects can obviously belong to more than one category. |
23689 | Moral words have an inherited power from expressing attitudes in emotional situations [Stevenson,CL] |
Full Idea: A term is moral because of the power that the word acquires, on account of its history in emotional situations, to evoke or directly express attitudes, as distinct from describing or designating them. | |
From: Charles Leslie Stevenson (Ethics and Language [1944], p.33), quoted by John Hacker-Wright - Philippa Foot's Moral Thought 1 'Ayer' | |
A reaction: Invites the question of what the words meant before they acquired this patina of historical usage. If 'good' orginally meant 'hurray!', its repeated usage doesn't seem to change that. If it was descriptive, why would that change with time? |