Philosophy 2 Week 2 Essay Quiz

● Recall, from an earlier lecture, the introduction of the foundational idea of meaning: a concept is sometimes taken to be the meaning of a kind term or a predicate the idea of meaning is pretty complicated to get a sense of this, one might take the meaning of a predicate to be all the things that that predicate applies to, i.e., the extension of the predicate or one might take the meaning of a predicate to be the criterion (or rule) that determines what that predicate applies to, i.e., the intension of the predicate here, perhaps the intension can be thought of as a bunch of conditions ● The need for a distinction like that of extension v. intension is ancient. It was made vivid, though, in contemporary philosophy by Gottlob Frege (1848-1925), a German logician and philosopher, the father of modern philosophy of language and one of the founding thinkers in the analytic tradition Consider what is now known as Frege’s Puzzle (1) a = b (2) b = b How can (1) be informative if (2) is not? In more particular terms: (3) Hesperus is Phosphorus (4) Hesperus is Hesperus Hesperus is the first heavenly body visible in the evening (aka The Evening Star) and Phosphorus is the last heavenly body visible in the morning sky (aka The Morning Star) It was a significant discovery that Hesperus is Phosphorus. But, if all there were to the meaning of a proper name were its referent, everyone should have known this all along, because everyone knew that Hesperus is identical to Hesperus and Hesperus is Phosphorus just is that proposition ● In light of this puzzle, Frege posited a distinction between the sense of a linguistic expression, e.g. a proper name like Hesperus, and the reference of that linguistic expression the sense is supposed to be some descriptive way of presenting and understanding a thing the reference is supposed to be just some (non-representational, non-descriptive) thing in the world

it was assumed that the sense of an expression could be captured by a definite description, that is, a linguistic item, using ‘the’, that picks out a unique thing in the world and that sense determines, in some way, reference ● Ok. Seems fine. In light of Frege’s Puzzle, it seems one should just accept this distinction for all terms, including proper names But things are not so simple. There are compelling reasons to think that proper names do not have senses along these lines Consider the following: (i) you enter a conversation in which people are complaining about Joe; you have no idea who Joe is, but after listening a bit, you say “Joe is not nice”; it seems you can refer to Joe, that person, without having any uniquely characterizing description of them (ii) say you regard Shakespeare as the author of Romeo and Juliet, if things were different, and Shakespeare did not write this play, it seem one could nonetheless refer to that man by using the name ‘Shakespeare’ (iii) say you regard Shakespeare as the author of Romeo and Juliet, then the proposition expressed by ‘Shakespeare wrote Romeo and Juliet’ would be knowable a priori and true in virtue of its meaning, but it does not seem to be (iv) say you regard Shakespeare as the author of Romeo and Juliet; as it turns out, some other person, a woman, wrote this play; if the referent of ‘Shakespeare’ were determined by the relevant sense, then one would be referring to this woman whenever one used this name, but one has no idea about this woman; it seems the name nonetheless refers to that guy, Shakespeare These considerations are based on the work of Saul Kripke, presented in the famous set of lectures Naming and Necessity (1980)