Two Types of Empiricism

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Two Types of Empiricism

 

Type I empiricism says that all knowledge comes through the five senses. Type II empiricism says that all knowledge derives from experience. Neither entails the other. The senses could be the sole source of knowledge without being conduits of experience: the process might be entirely physical-causal, or proceed by way of blindsight and analogues thereof. And experience could be the source of all knowledge without the five human senses being involved: there might be no body at all, or different senses, or experiences of a type other than experience of sense. Type I empiricism focuses on specific human organs; type II empiricism focuses on the concept of experience as such.[1] It is type II empiricism that we are dealing with when we say things like, “All ideas derive from impressions” or “Beliefs must have an experiential foundation”. Type I is usually a steppingstone to type II: for it is quickly pointed out that we need to include an inner sense in order to make room for self-knowledge (“ideas of reflection”). A natural response to type I empiricism is to ask what motivates such a view—why should we believe it? It sounds like a stipulation we can happily ignore: what is it about knowledge that requires it? A rationalist will simply scoff at it. But type II empiricism has a clear rationale: knowledge requires reasons, and experience looks like the only possible source of reasons (ultimately speaking). Knowledge can’t just come from nowhere; it has to be based on something: but what else could that be except experience—impressions, presentations, sensations, events of seeming? Things strike us a certain way and we form beliefs based on this striking: that’s how knowledge works, isn’t it? Otherwise it is all groundless piffle, mere posturing. So all knowledge must be based on experience—or else not be knowledge at all. This reflection puts two familiar types of epistemology in peril: religious and rationalist (and course these were in the empiricist’s sights). We are instructed to believe religious teachings because they appear in the Bible or are intoned by clergymen in fancy robes, but none of this affords the kind of individual subjective impression of truth that knowledge requires; it is just so much taking on trust (“faith”, “revelation”, “tradition”). But the empiricist is having none of it: he wants an actual human experience that provides a real reason for the belief in question.  Similarly, the rationalist tells us that certain ideas are found woven into the innate fabric of the mind: but then, there are no experiential reasons for such items of alleged knowledge. We just have them, but we can’t say why. We don’t have them because things seem a certain way to us; we have them simply because we were born having them. Their rationality thus comes into question. The empiricist is thus unhappy with the “brute knowledge” assumption of the rationalist, i.e. knowledge without experiential reasons. But what can the empiricist say about such knowledge?           

Ideally, he could say that mathematical knowledge has its own proprietary mode of seeming that provides the necessary experiential grounding—“I have the distinct and vivid impression that Pythagoras’s theorem is true” etc.—but the trouble is that such experiences don’t seem to exist. The only alternative, then, is to declare that the knowledge in question doesn’t really exist (it’s all tautologies or human conventions). The problem here is actually quite severe, because the type II empiricist has hold of a solid point, but this type of knowledge poses a serious threat to it. For we can’t just concede empiricism defeated by counterexample and move on to another theory: empiricism has to be true (in the sense intended), and yet it appears not to be true for this type of knowledge (also logic and ethics). This may prompt us to search for some other notion of experience capable of meeting the case—some sense in which we do have experiences of mathematical facts. Here is where philosophy reaches that state in which we just want to scream (“It was all going so smoothly and then this!”). A priori knowledge has always been difficult, but this makes it irritatingly difficult. Empiricism looked so good, so manifestly sensible, and yet it can’t apparently be made to fit the case of one large category of knowledge—but not in such a way that we can simply move to a superior theory that dispenses with its central tenet. And surely we don’t want to say that a prioriknowledge is mysteriously experience-based! What we need, evidently, is the idea of a priori experience, but that idea looks hard to make sense of. If we had it, though, we could say that all knowledge rests on experience, thus vindicating type II empiricism.[2]

 

Colin McGinn             

[1] See my papers “Rationalist Empiricism” and “Seeming”. My first paper on this subject was “A Priori and A Posteriori Knowledge” (1976).  It has been troubling me a long time. Good trouble, though.

[2] Notice the form of the classic formulation: “A posteriori knowledge is knowledge based on experience; a prioriknowledge is knowledge not based on experience”. So what is it based on? We get the rather unhelpful, “Knowledge based on reason”. We can see how experience can provide a basis, but how does reason do anything comparable? What does it serve up that can play the reason-providing role of experience without being experience? The answer is obscure at best–hence the appeal of a generalized empiricism. Thus we have the problems besetting Western epistemology from Plato on. Epistemology shouldn’t have been this difficult!

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Footnote to “Social Cognition and the Unconscious”

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[1] This doesn’t mean there is nothing “erotic” about the unconscious: there is room for the erotic in all sorts of personal relations, and indeed in the joys of discovery (“Eureka!”). In psychoanalysis the erotic is understood as the “life force” (anima in Plato) and contrasted with Thanatos (the “death instinct”). We can preserve this aspect of Freudian theory without supposing that the male infant actually desires sex with his mother (or the female infant with her father—the so-called “Electra complex”). There is indeed a lot of “positive affect” in the unconscious, but it need not take the form of thoughts of actual incest! Freud’s specific theories do a disservice to his general conception.

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Social Cognition and the Unconscious

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Social Cognition and the Unconscious

 

It is generally recognized in psychology that a good deal of problem solving goes on unconsciously. We can solve problems as we sleep with no expression of this mental activity in consciousness. This can happen with scientific problems, mathematical problems, literary problems, and practical problems of various kinds. Life confronts us with a wide range of problems and the mind has the ability to work on them outside the sphere of consciousness, thus sparing the conscious mind from unnecessary distraction. This makes evolutionary sense and it fits with other conceptions of unconscious mental activity, such as Helmholtz’s “unconscious cerebration” in sense perception and Chomsky’s ideas about language processing. What is called simply “the unconscious” can be seen as a congeries of modular problem solving capacities, each dedicated to a specific subject matter—how to see an object, how to understand an utterance, figuring out the answer to an engineering problem, producing a chemical theory, coming up with a mathematical proof, and so on. We have an unconscious mind so that we can solve problems efficiently and easily. Among these problems are social problems—problems about other people. We are social animals, we live in families, we form groups, we cooperate and compete; and all this social activity presents problems, sometimes knotty problems, frequently emotional problems. So it makes sense to assume that there is an unconscious module devoted to social cognition in addition to our conscious thought about other people. We rack our brains about what do about person X, and we wake up in the morning with the solution in hand (if we are lucky). It can be assumed that the “theory of mind” plays a role in social cognition, because we will often have to think about other people’s motivations and beliefs, and no doubt much other knowledge will be relevant. Of course we also need to think about our own actions and wishes in relation to other people—what we want from them, what we can expect to receive, etc. So the social cognition module will contain a lot of information about psychological processes, social roles, family dynamics, and suchlike things. At different times of life certain types of social problem will be salient depending upon the prevailing social conditions; in childhood, say, social cognition will be focused on immediate family relations—parents and siblings mainly. Family problems will then occupy the attention of the unconscious social cognition module: problems concerning the distribution of parental resources, sibling rivalry, maternal deprivation, difficult fathers, suffocating mothers, love and hate, all the stuff of daily family life. Such problems are presumably not alien to our biological kin: we can suppose that at least the apes have to deal with a similar set of family issues—that is just the nature of the biological family. So it may be supposed that unconscious social cognition is quite commonplace among the more sophisticated social species (I don’t know about ants and bees). And all this will no doubt be affect-driven, sometimes a matter of life and death, and always of pressing concern. This particular module will have to bear a lot of human weight.

            I am saying all this in order to build up to the following point: the approach to the unconscious just sketched might provide a way to rehabilitate some aspects of the Freudian unconscious. At least Freud was right about the existence of a family-oriented unconscious mind, even if he was not right about its content. But for a moment let’s take seriously one of his distinctive and controversial claims, specifically the prevalence of the Oedipal complex. Suppose you are confronted by the following problem: you are in love with your mother and want to have sex with her, but your father stands in your way—what to do? Well, patricide might be an option worth considering; that way you can have your mother all to yourself. But then you reflect that castration might be inflicted on you, so you have to take that into account if you plan to do away with your father. Hmmm. I’m not saying any of this is true (in fact I don’t believe it for a second), but it is possible to cast the whole story as an exercise in problem solving: ifthese were your real desires, then your unconscious might come up with the solution suggested. More realistically, if you are greedy for your mother’s affection and think your father is getting too much of it, you might wonder how to improve matters, coming up with a plan to kiss your mother every night before bedtime (I am thinking of Proust’s maternally obsessive Marcel who meticulously plots his mother’s bedtime kiss every single day). Or, to borrow from Alfred Adler, you might be confronted with the problem of the elder sibling—you know, the one that gives you an inferiority complex because of his or her superior abilities. Ruminating on this problem, you might come up with a plan to learn from your sibling, or deviously cripple him, or just learn to play the piano while he cannot. That is, we can accept the idea of an affect-driven, emotionally fraught, family-centered unconscious, but not necessarily accept what Freud postulated to occur in it (based on his “clinical findings”). So we need not put repressed sexual desire at the heart of the unconscious (surely a reflection of the Victorian age in which Freud lived); instead we can suppose that the unconscious social cognition module occupies itself with whatever family matters it deems important—as it might be, parental attention, sibling rivalry, conflict resolution, permission to go out with your friends at night, etc. This material is not unconscious because it is intolerable to the ego and superego and must therefore be repressed, but simply because of capacity considerations—better to do this work unconsciously than have it absorb your every conscious moment. On this way of looking at things, Freud had a genuine insight, namely that there is an unconscious mental system inside us designed to deal with issues arising from family and other social relations, and which may be supposed to come online early in human life and leave its mark on later development. It is dynamic and fraught, and it may lead to psychological difficulties in later life if it fails to solve the problems confronted during childhood (problems arising from feelings of inferiority would be a good example). Freud was right about the form but wrong about the content: the social unconscious is a real entity but it is not much focused (if at all) on sexual matters, being much more concerned with questions of security, success, and approval.[1]

            This view of the “Freudian” unconscious could also be joined to other Freudian themes: not just the link to later-life neurosis but also liaisons with dreams, jokes, slips of the tongue, art, and adult motivation. Maybe the revised view of the contents of the social unconscious can lead to a new appraisal of the links to other mental phenomena: we dream about social insecurity, rivalries, betrayals, moral lapses, and the Anxiety of the Other; we make jokes about what troubles us socially (three men walk into a bar, etc.); we stumble over words that induce social vertigo in us; we produce art that dwells on family dynamics, thwarted romance, crime, and the tribulations of friendship; and we never quite leave behind the anxieties and ambitions of our early social years, which continue to motivate us in ways both helpful and harmful. So the Freudian psychic architecture can be transposed into another key by updating the conception of the contents of the unconscious that he took for granted.[2] We don’t have to throw out the cognitive baby with the sexual bathwater: there is an unconscious mind concerned with interpersonal matters, often emotionally laden, active during childhood, and linked to other aspects of the psyche; but it isn’t preoccupied with incestuous sex, patricide, and castration anxiety (still less “penis envy”). The old “quack” (as Nabokov always called Freud) might be reformed into a genuine scientist by adopting a more solidly grounded picture of the nature and function of the unconscious. And isn’t it true that when we read Freud we find ourselves quite taken by his overall picture of the structure of the psyche but turned off by the particular attributes he ascribes to the unconscious? All that doesn’t seem remotely plausible, but the idea of an unconscious mind dedicated to personal relations strikes us as eminently reasonable. In a nutshell: we replace Freud by Adler (whose books strike the reader as perfectly easy to believe). But Freud wasn’t completely wrong and he laid the groundwork: the Freudian unconscious lives and breathes, but now with different tenants occupying it. Psychoanalysis can thus survive the eviction of those troublesome tenants, with their tedious obsessions and questionable moral practices. Unconsciously we are hardworking interpersonal problem-solvers not enraged and ashamed sexual deviants subject to harsh repression. We are more like Archimedes than Oedipus.

[1] I don’t think Freud ever claimed that other species experience the Oedipal complex with accompanying psychological formations, but it would be very reasonable to suppose that other animals experience feelings of abandonment, rivalry, filial affection, and survival anxiety. It is surprising that Freud promoted a theory so contrary to biological principles: what value is there in a tendency to develop an Oedipal complex? Why would a desire to have sex with one’s mother at an age at which sex is impossible be favored by natural selection? Where is the genetic payoff? Freud was a Darwinian, but his theory of child psychology is quite contrary to Darwinian principles.  

[2] One important aspect of the Freudian unconscious is that its activities can lead to actions that the conscious subject cannot understand. The person’s reasons for action are opaque to her, because unconscious. This idea too can be preserved under the new dispensation: for example, unresolved sibling conflicts left over from childhood might lead to adult actions that the person fails to understand, because the motivating reasons remain unconscious. Freud’s specific theory of the unconscious is not the only one that is consistent with such effects.  

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Completely Empty Names

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Completely Empty Names

 

It is time we faced up to some uncomfortable truths about proper names. There have been two theories about them, neither very intuitive, commonly known as the description theory and the direct reference theory. The two theories are radically opposed to each other and each faces formidable difficulties. The simplest way to state the difficulties is that (a) functioning names can lack individuating descriptive content and (b) they can lack an existing bearer: thus they can be empty of sense and empty of reference. On occasion they can be empty of both: a name might be used by someone who associates no uniquely identifying description with it and which also lacks a bearer. For example, you might use the name of a Greek god(“Hera”) and not be able to distinguish this god from others, and neither does the god in question exist. This is what I am calling a completely empty name—empty of both sense and reference. Yet the name has a use. Theorists will sometimes resort to reference when sense is lacking, and resort to sense when reference is lacking, but this tactic won’t work when both are lacking. Notice that both theories face blindingly obvious problems: for names don’t look like descriptions (where is the “the”), and meanings don’t get buried in the ground when bearers of names do. But it is felt that such counterintuitive results are required by theory, these being the only theories available. Odd that the only possible theories look so unpromising on their face, but hey that’s philosophy for you! Thus philosophers pick their poison, and gag on it too (all good fodder for doctoral dissertations). No matter that speakers can hardly ever produce a suitable description, or that it might turn out that all our names lack bearers (we are name-users in a vat): a bit of vigorous bullet-biting can steel us to such embarrassments, and ingenuity is always able to come up with something. Still, some faint hearts might feel that this is not a happy situation and cast about for a less rebarbative theory. And it is not as if there is no logical space for an alternative theory: not all usable expressions of natural language fit the sense-reference paradigm. What about logical connectives or stress patterns or words like “boo” and “ha”? They have a use but it would be stretching a point to declare them susceptible to the sense-reference scheme: they have neither, but they have a job to do. Can’t proper names fall into this general category? Their meaning isn’t constituted by a description or by their bearer but by whatever it is that confers a use on them. Thus they may be empty of both sense and reference and yet possessed of a usable meaning—significance, “semantic value”, communicative function. We just have to find out what that is; then our troubles with names will be over.

            That sounds like a nice resolution, pleasantly irenic and thrillingly eliminative (vaguely Wittgensteinian), but it runs into an obstacle: names are nouns that occupy the subject position in sentences, like descriptions and demonstratives, so they are not like sentence connectives or stress patterns or exclamatory noises. We use them to denote things and they enjoy liaisons with other denoting expressions, so how can they not be components of sentences with that kind of function? Just look and listen and you will see and hear them occurring as parts of sentences playing a specific semantic role—how then can their meaning be constituted by anything other than sense or reference? Don’t they carry modes of presentation of some sort, and aren’t they intended to refer to things? To say they mean neither sense nor reference sounds like saying they possess the null semantics, so it has to be one or the other (or both as in “dual component” semantics). For them to be “completely empty” would be for them to have no linguistic function, to be nonsense, like rocks and table salt. And yet the name “Hera” would appear to be perfectly usable, entirely normal, nothing to worry about, despite its semantic impoverishment. We therefore have a puzzle about names: they can have a use and hence a meaning, but the only candidates for that meaning can be absent from the scene—no definite description or existing bearer in sight. They ought to mean nothing, but in fact they are as meaningful as any name, no matter descriptively well endowed or firmly linked to a real object. Is there any way out of this puzzle?

            I will develop what I call the “parasite theory of names”. Names are not self-sufficient sources of semantic nourishment; they derive their nourishment from a host that is rich in semantic nutrients. First, we must note that what appears to be part of a sentence is not necessarily really a part of it. The specific sensorimotor systems that are employed in speech and writing provide outputs that contain names, but the underlying abstract language faculty may be differently constituted—it might not contain any names at all.[1] Names are imported into natural language use from an outside source, chiefly for purposes of communication; they are not part of the original language faculty designed for aiding thought. We don’t think in names, though we do use them to talk to other people—they are useful for that purpose. In the language of thought we have descriptions and demonstratives, but we don’t have names. Names are introduced as tags or labels for things that people often can’t identify by means of descriptions (and may not even exist): they are parasitic on more basic (and arguably innate) categories of expression. These basic expressions have descriptive content—they are not mere labels—and they anchor names in discourse; but names themselves lack such semantic features. Names can function without themselves possessing sense and reference because they are linked to other expressions parasitically: they work a bit like winks used in communication—they don’t mean anything in themselves but they can be “translated” into genuine words. Indeed, a system of winks could in principle replace a stock of names. A semantic parasite like this will have not have sense and reference considered in isolation (like a description), but it will borrow from words that do, thus achieving a utility in communication. Thus neither a description theory nor a direct reference theory will capture their mode of semantic functioning (their “meaning” roughly). Maybe some words in the language of thought have a purely descriptive content, and some may well be subject to a directly referential semantics (e.g. words for sensible qualities); but the names employed in outer speech (auditory and visual) don’t participate in such a semantics. They are non-descriptive labels designed to overcome a knowledge problem (people often don’t know enough to pin their intended reference down). Thus they have a use but they don’t have the kind of meaning that other expressions have—they have a kind of zero semantics. They have a pragmatics but they don’t have their own proprietary semantics: they are linguistic parasites. In a sense they defer to the “experts” located in LOT. If they were basic they would need a semantics to ground them—such as a descriptive or referential semantics—but they are anything but basic. The mistake of the tradition was to assume that names are basic and then fret about their inherent semantics, thus oscillating between descriptions and objects as sources of name meaning; but once we recognize that names are parasitic we can accept that neither type of theory applies to them—which is exactly how things appear. In particular, they don’t have the kind of meaning postulated by description theories—hence the familiar counterexamples. But neither do they have a meaning constituted by objects themselves—hence the problem posed by empty names. Completely empty names are thus not at all anomalous or defective: they do their job perfectly well by being anchored to semantic machinery in the head. They simply don’t have any originalsemantics, any self-sufficient content; they are just convenient ways to get things across to people. We could speculate that they were appended to the language faculty late in the game, long after LOT evolved to service thought; and they have nothing in them analogous to descriptions. Nor do they possess any mechanism that could deliver a reference (unlike descriptions): we merely stipulate a reference for them and then use them to refer—they couldn’t do it without us. Semantically, they are blank tablets, mere counters in a game, so it is pointless to try to develop a “semantics of names”. Descriptions and demonstratives, yes (and other types of expression), but not names; they are, as we naturally say, meaningless labels. So theories of names have been chasing a mare’s nest: there simply is nothing that a mare’s nest could consist of, since horses don’t build nests. Likewise, there is no such thing as a name’s meaning, unless we mean by that “whatever it is that names do in communication” (mares have nests too if “nest” just means “a place they raise their young”). In the same sense “um” and “ah” have no meaning, though they play a role in discourse. Names look like they must have a meaning because they occur in the sensorimotor externalizations of internal sentences of LOT (the abstract language faculty), but it turns out that this appearance is deceptive because names are not parts of the innate lexicon (as accents are also not). The mistake is thinking that names are a semantic category analogous to descriptions or demonstratives, equally basic, equally non-parasitic. But names by themselves could never exist; they need support from elsewhere. The correct conclusion, then, is that names are the wrong kind of thing to subject to semantic analysis of the traditional kinds. We can sensibly have a description theory of descriptions (trivially) and a direct reference theory of basic sensory terms (as well as a two-level theory of demonstratives), but it is a category mistake to seek such a theory of names. This then is the solution to the puzzle of names outlined earlier: the language game of names is not the same as other language games used to refer to things, so it is wrong to seek a theory of names based on theories appropriate for other types of expression. And that is why the theories that have been proposed are so wide of the mark.[2]

 

Colin McGinn             

 

[1] For this kind of perspective, see Chomsky, Why Only Us: Language and Evolution (2016) and What Kind of Creatures Are We? (2016).

[2] We might compare the situation with a comparable mistake in the case of demonstratives: supposing that they must follow the paradigms of descriptions and names. Either demonstratives are really descriptions or they are really proper names, but they don’t appear to be either, so we have a puzzle. But the puzzle is resolved once we recognize that demonstratives function according to their own principles, in which context plays a crucial role. By analogy, names are rightly seen as neither descriptive nor directly referential but rather as parasitic and extrinsic to the internal language faculty proper. They are, just as they appear, meaningless labels arbitrarily assigned to objects about which we wish to communicate. They don’t mean associated descriptions and they don’t mean external objects: they don’t mean anything—though we may be said to mean something by using them. They are precisely not like descriptions or primitive terms for sensory qualities (e.g. “red”). Names are sui generis and should not be modeled on descriptions or demonstratives or primitive symbols for simple qualities.     

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Footnote to “Naming and Contingency”

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[1] But as soon as he created the predicate “bachelor” (along with its usual meaning) he was up to his neck in analytic necessities. God made names for the convenience of Adam and Eve (they were somewhat lacking in the omniscience department—don’t ask me why), but he had no intention of endowing them with semantic entailments. Put differently, names don’t come with the innate language faculty, unlike descriptions and demonstratives; they are an acquired appendage, pragmatically motivated.

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Naming and Contingency

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Naming and Contingency

 

Let’s accept that names have no meaning, as a distinguished tradition contends.[1] They may have a reference or denotation but they have no sense or connotation. Names lack “descriptive content” and are not synonymous with definite descriptions. Predicates are alien to their semantic functioning. They belong to a different semantic category from descriptive phrases (or demonstratives). Then an elementary consequence follows: names cannot give rise to analytic truths. For analytic truth is truth in virtue of meaning, but names have no meaning: they lack the semantic dimension that generates analytic truth. Descriptions have this dimension, so they readily produce analytic necessities (“The bachelor standing in the corner is unmarried”), but names are devoid of the kind of content that could underlie such necessities. This seems confirmed by simple inspection: sentences of the form “ais F” are never analytically true (the point is often cited as an argument against description theories).  You can never generate an analytic truth from “Aristotle” by combining it with a predicate true of him, though this is easily done by combining descriptions of Aristotle with such a predicate.[2] A generalization thus appears indicated: names cannot give rise to analytic necessities—simply because they lack the property responsible for such necessities, viz. meaning (sense, connotation). Sentences containing names are always synthetic; analytic necessity never follows from the semantics of names. So names belong naturally with contingency not necessity. Descriptions, on the other hand, readily lend themselves to necessities in virtue of their intrinsic semantics, because they possess a content that generates necessities (they have definitions and constituent semantic structure).[3] A monograph entitled “Describing and Necessity” would be aptly so named, while “Naming and Necessity” would raise eyebrows if intended to suggest that names and necessity have anything much to do with each other. One might even prefer “Naming and Not Necessity”, because names are not capable of producing necessities in virtue of meaning, having none.

            However, plausible as all this may sound, there appears to be an obvious counterexample to the generalization stated, namely sentences of the form “a is a”. Aren’t such sentences analytic tautologies, as with “Hesperus is Hesperus”? Such a sentence is necessarily true, known a priori, and inferable from mere mastery of the name “Hesperus”. It has all the marks of analytic truth. But on reflection this verdict should strike us as paradoxical, since we have just seen that names lack the property necessary for conferring analytic necessity, viz. meaning. How can our sentence be true in virtue of the meaning of “Hesperus” if that word lacks meaning (the reference of the name can’t produce such necessary truths)? It therefore looks as if the alleged counterexample cannot be genuine, so something must be said to explain it away. That is not so hard to do. First, notice that “a is a” sentences are highly unusual and not part of ordinary language—no one ever says things like this (except in a philosophy class). Second, are they even about things like the planet Venus—if so, what are they saying about it? Third, it seems obvious that their purport is something like the following: “The thing called “Hesperus” is identical to the thing called “Hesperus”—which is a metalinguistic tautology containing two occurrences of a single definite description. That is not generally true of sentences containing “Hesperus” (unless we decide to make it our general theory of names), but in this case it is what the peculiar sentence is really saying. But then the analytic status of “Hesperus is Hesperus” traces to a hidden description, which of course has descriptive content: the sentence has the same logical form as, “The inventor of bifocals is the inventor of bifocals”. The name “Hesperus” is not here occurring as a used proper name but occurs quoted inside a definite description, so we don’t have a counterexample to our plausible generalization. This is simply a case of a logically misleading sentence that can be generated from a natural language (though it is not generally used as part of natural language). When names occur in propria persona they never give rise to analytic necessities (how could they given their lack of meaning?); but they can occur in a nonstandard way in certain types of sentence (as quoted expressions in a metalinguistic definite description). The case is not unlike the sentence “I’m John Smith” said by way of personal introduction: it clearly means something like “I’m called ‘John Smith’”, in which the name is mentioned not used. Strictly speaking, “Hesperus is Hesperus” is a non-sentence, a linguistic monster, but we easily hear it as a quick way to express the descriptive metalinguistic equivalent (compare “There are a lot of John Smiths in the world”).

            This point can be reinforced by asking whether names ever have synonyms. Analytic truths arise from synonyms, but where are the synonyms for ordinary proper names? They don’t even occur in dictionaries, let alone thesauruses: there is no list of synonyms for “John Smith”. Don’t say “John” is synonymous with “Johnny”: this is a matter of alternative versions of the same name not real synonymy of different names. Names are just tags or labels (as we are assuming) so they don’t have synonyms—words with the same meaning. Different words can express the same concept, but names don’t express any concept—so we don’t have the phenomenon of synonymy, i.e. different words for the same concept. Different versions of the same name are really pseudo synonyms, rather like abbreviations of common words in casual speech (e.g. pronouncing “living” without the “g” at the end). Nor would it be plausible to suggest that names are synonymous with themselves alone, so that “Hesperus is Hesperus” contains a synonymy: no word is ever synonymous with only itself, since synonymy requires identity of meaning and hence a meaning that can be otherwise expressed. Names don’t function like regular words (and arguably are not words at all), so they can’t do what genuinely meaningful words do, i.e. produce analytic truths. They look like words, but so do such non-words as “Ha” or “Boo” or “Um”. Names can be used by speakers to perform acts of reference, but that doesn’t qualify them as real semantic units—almost anything can be used to perform acts of reference (e.g. blinking).[4] In any case it would be wrong to try to assimilate names to other types of expression that participate in genuine synonymies.

            It might be said that names admittedly never generate analytic necessities, but don’t they occur in sentences expressing synthetic necessities so that it would be wrong to dissociate them altogether from the concept of necessity? What about “Aristotle is a man” and “Paris is a city” and “Hesperus is Phosphorous”? I would not wish to deny that such sentences express necessities (non-analytic ones), but it doesn’t follow from their existence that the names in them have anything to do with the necessities stated. On the contrary, the necessities in question (“de renecessities”) can be reported using sentences of different semantic types, including descriptive sentences. The necessity doesn’t arise from the name but from the fact: facts of natural kind and facts of identity. The necessity reported has nothing intrinsically to do with the names used to report it but simply arises from the nature of the fact reported. So a monograph on de re necessity might be misunderstood if entitled “Naming and Necessity”, suggesting perhaps that the two topics are connected. Names have nothing to do intrinsically with either analytic de dicto necessity or synthetic de re necessity. Descriptions, on the other hand, have to do with both, since they are the ground of analytic necessity and they express de re essential properties of objects. For someone wishing to point up a connection between types of reference and types of modality, the titles “Naming and Contingency” and “Describing and Necessity” would be the best choices. Of course, the word “and” by itself entails no claim of connection (though it may conversationally imply it), being usable simply to make a list; but if it is desired to suggest a deep connection between language and modality, then the titles just mentioned would be appropriate. In particular, names are indissolubly connected to contingency in that they are incapable of generating necessary truth, whether analytic or synthetic.[5] Necessity either comes from concepts or from the world, but names express no concepts and are not part of extra-linguistic reality. They are merely convenient labels devoid of descriptive content and not integral to de re necessities: they cannot function as necessity generators (unlike concepts and properties). It is as if names have never even heard of necessity and want nothing to do with it. When God created names he still had more work to do to bring necessity into the world.

[1] I defend this position in “Naming and Knowledge”.

[2] There are such things as descriptive names (oxymoronic as it sounds), since we can simply stipulate that a name is to abbreviate a description, and these will give rise to analytic truths. But they are far from being the general case (Mill could have accepted their logical possibility).

[3] Demonstratives also feature in analytic truths in virtue of an appended predicate, as in “That bachelor is unmarried”. 

[4] It can even be argued that names lack reference as a matter of their intrinsic character: it is speakers who refer by using name not names themselves. But in the case of descriptions the words themselves contribute to determining reference; it isn’t just the speaker’s act that confers reference. This is why the content of a description can conflict with the speaker’s intention, which is not the case with names. The reference of a name is a matter of speaker stipulation alone, but a description carries its own reference-fixing content. Name reference is essentially pragmatic while description reference works via semantic content, i.e. meaning. (These are thorny issues, but I take it the basic contrast is plain enough.)  

[5] Someone may object that rigid designation can lie behind necessary truth, so names are logically connected to necessity, as in the necessary truth of “Hesperus is Phosphorus”. Both names designate the same object in every possible world; therefore the identity statement is a necessary truth. The same is not true for definite descriptions, which are non-rigid designators. But this is confused: descriptions can be rigid designators and thus generate necessary identity statements; and not all statements containing names yield necessary truths, e.g. “Plato taught Aristotle”. It is the necessity of the identity relation that lies behind the necessity of “Hesperus is Phosphorus” not the occurrence of names in this statement.  And we would get the same result by substituting rigid descriptions into the sentence (“the planet composed of such a such a chunk of matter”). Names are not distinctive of necessarily true identity statements; still less do they produce such necessities (identity itself does). 

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