The Functional Fallacy: On the Supposed Dangers of Name Repetition

Abstract

Whenever the theme of personal naming comes up, both in academic debate and in public opinion, we encounter a tendency to take for granted that there is some sort of collective interest in the clear and unambiguous individuation of persons through their names. “Society” or “culture”, it is presumed, would not function as well if that failed, so homonymy is automatically taken to be dysfunctional. This kind of explanation carries a deep sense of validity in common sense attitudes and it clearly imposes itself upon all who have discussed this issue over the past few decades, both in history and anthropology. In this essay, I argue that, on the one hand, there are fallacious implications to this explanatory proclivity, to which I call the functional fallacy, and, on the other hand, that it finds its power of evidence in the implicit expectations that characterize late modern thinking concerning what is a person and how persons are constituted. I identify three dispositions that need to be overcome: sociocentrism, individualism and the paradigm of the soul.

Keywords:

• Personal names
• Person
• Brazil
• Portugal
• Nicknames

Notes

See Pina-Cabral (1984, 1986, 1994, 2005, 2008a, 2008b, 2010a, 2010b, 2010c) and de Pina-Cabral and Matos Viegas (2007).

I use the word “nickname” to describe the broad category of informal, community-based personal names because it is the most commonly encountered in the historical and anthropological literature on Europe. The way these are formed varies considerably (cf. Pina-Cabral 1984), corresponding to the whole to the variation in systems of family reproduction (cf. Pina-Cabral 1991). In English they may also be called by-names, in French they are either called surnoms or sobriquets, with different implications, in Portuguese alcunhas (but in Brazilian Portuguese apelidos), in Italian sopranommi, in German spitznamen, etc.

Thanking Nuno Gonçalo Monteiro for having shown it to me.

Today these lists are no longer of saints but Civil Registry name lists kept by a professor of linguistics at the payment of the authorities (cf. Pina-Cabral 2008a).

Interestingly, I am told, mostly Hindus and Brazilians.

Interviews carried out in Valença (Baixo Sul, Bahia) in 2006 by Ulla Macedo, whom I thank for it. The Project Nomes e Cores was subsidized by the Foundation for Science and Technology, Portugal, and the Institute of Social Sciences of the University of Lisbon.

It is probably worthwhile to note for the interested reader that (a) “traditional names” (saints’ names) are considered very uncool (my own name João was often said to be the epitome of bad taste by my interviewees in Valença) and (b) the interviewee does not seem to query the fact that Zulena Madalena is a rhyming name, a feature that elsewhere would probably be picked out as in very “bad taste”.

One of the referees to this paper kindly suggested that this discussion might be extended so as to develop a new angle on the old anthropological distinction between “classificatory” and “descriptive” kin terms. A further debate of this interesting suggestion, however, will have to await for another occasion.

I will leave aside here the issue of how, and under what conditions, the choice is seen as collectively made by both parents. To our surprise, in a large majority of cases the mother alone is attributed with the choice. This matter will have to be discussed further elsewhere.

I leave aside here the discussion of the integral kind of homonymy between child and father, uncle or grandfather that I discussed in Pina-Cabral and Matos Viegas (2007).

In the 1930s, Montaigne was accused of being a Jew due to that name! As a matter of fact, the name's etymology is likely derived from the proper name Joachim, so the accusation, aside from being racist, was also spurious (Ciroc 1938: 468).

I imagine the word is being used here in its literal sense of “quality of that which is empty”.

For convincing counter-arguments see either Clark's (1997) Being There: Putting Brain, Body, and World Together or Chemero's (2009) Radical Embodied Cognitive Science.