Russellians can have a no proposition view of empty names

Abstract

Russellians can have a no proposition view of empty names. I will defend this theory against the problem of meaningfulness, and show that the theory is in general well motivated. My solution to the problem of meaningfulness is that speakers’ judgements about meaningfulness are tracking grammaticality, and not propositional content.

Keywords:

• Direct reference
• empty names
• propositions
• Russellianism

Acknowledgements

I thank Dominic Alford-Duguid, Paloma Atencia-Linares, Michael Bench-Capon, Robyn Carston, Daniel Deasy, Tadeusz Cieciersk, Ricardo Mena Gallardo, Eduardo García-Ramírez, Kathrin Glüer-Pagin, Paweł Grabarczyk, Katarzyna Kijania-Placek, Ed Nettel, Peter Pagin, David Pereplyotchik, Stefano Predelli, Andrés Soria Ruiz, Markus Schlosser, Elmar Geir Unnsteinsson, and Dan Zeman for discussion, anonymous referees, and audiences at the Instituto de Investigaciones Filosóficas, the Third Conference of the PLM (Philosophy of Language and Mind network), the Semantics and Philosophy in Europe Eighth Colloquium, the Proper Names in Fiction workshop at the University of Warsaw, and University College Cork. I gratefully acknowledge the support of the Instituto de Investigaciones Filosóficas, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México through a fellowship from the Programa de becas posdoctorales de la DGAPA-UNAM. This research was supported by an Irish Research Council Government of Ireland Postdoctoral Fellowship.

Notes

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

1 Contemporary Russellianism has been inspired by ideas from Russell (1938); the principle I label Russell is closest to these ideas, the one I label Mill reflects a view of names inspired by Mill (1889).

2 These formulations are very similar to those in Braun (1993, 450).

3 Problems about the metaphysics of propositions will need to be resolved eventually; for a theory that is Russellian see King (2007), and for related views and discussion see Soames (2010), Hanks (2011, 2015), King, Soames, and Speaks (2014), Soames (2015).

4 Braun uses ‘Millianism’ to refer to Russellianism (Mill and Russell).

5 I use the term ‘judgement’ rather than ‘intuition’ in my own presentation.

6 Things other than sentences might be grammatical e.g. noun phrases, although this is a delicate issue (Ludlow 2005; Stainton 2005). All my view is committed to is that grammaticality is a property of the sorts of things that are meaningful in the sense at issue in Braun’s argument.

7 Braun uses ‘unfilled’ in the earlier paper and ‘gappy’ in the second; the notation I use for gaps follows Braun’s second paper. The origins of the idea can be found in Kaplan (1989, 496, fn. 23). Almog (1991), Salmon (1998), Everett (2003) report that David Kaplan was responding to ideas of Saul Kripke’s which were presented in lectures eventually published in Kripke (2013). The idea has been criticised in Everett (2003), Mousavian (2011).

8 Braun (1993, 451–452) cites Russell (2010) and Quine (1980).

9 The strange properties of (3) might be taken as evidence that names like ‘Vulcan’ are not in fact empty, and really denote nonexistent objects. This is the noneist view defended in Priest (2005); the term is adopted from Routley (1980) and the view is related to but distinct from that of Meinong (1960). Apart from such a view it seems that (3) raises problems for everybody, it is not a special problem for Russellians (see e.g. Crane 2013, 71–75). This is because the odd interaction between negation and ‘exists’ will arise even on views in which (3) might have a proposition as its content.

10 The same point would apply to someone who thought that some sentences containing empty names are true.

11 The example is from Karlsson (2007), following an example from Miller and Chomsky (1963).

12 David Pereplyotchik first drew my attention to these cases; Pereplyotchik (2011) discusses recent debates about the representation of syntactic structures.

13 Braun (1995) discusses the complexity of Kaplan’s view; Braun argues that it differs between the informal and formal presentations of the view.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Irish Research Council [GOIPD/2015/66].