Proper Names: Reference and Attribution
Item
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Title
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Proper Names: Reference and Attribution
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Identifier
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d_2009_2013:b4ab8c1ebfc7:11370
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identifier
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11671
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Creator
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Maumus, Michael Fletcher,
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Contributor
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Stephen Neale | Alex Orenstein
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Date
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2012
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Philosophy | Linguistics | Definite Descriptions | Direct Reference | Empty Names | Frege | Proper Names | Propositional Attitudes
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Abstract
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In the wake of Saul Kripke's landmark Naming and Necessity, the claim that proper names are directly referential expressions devoid of descriptive content has come to verge on philosophical commonplace. Nevertheless, the return to a purely referential semantics for proper names has coincided with the resurgence of the very puzzles which motivated so-called description theories of proper names in the first place---to wit, the failure of substitutivity for co-referential names in propositional attitude ascriptions, the informativeness of true identity statements involving co-referential names, and the meaningfulness of negative existential discourse. In the following I argue in favor of what I dub Metalinguistic Description Theory, which holds that the meaning of typical uses of the name type 'NN' to be given by the definite description 'the phi bearer of 'NN'' (where phi is a contextually determined sortal which speakers use to disambiguate the reference of names with multiple bearers). This analysis, I contend, provides an ultimately novel solution to the principal puzzles for the Direct Reference theory of proper names which, nevertheless, avoids the devastating arguments which felled the classical description theories of Frege and Russell.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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2009_2013.csv
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degree
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Ph.D.
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Program
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Philosophy
