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Mind Association

Proper NamesAuthor(s): Richard CampbellSource: Mind, New Series, Vol. 77, No. 307 (Jul., 1968), pp. 326-350Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of the Mind Association

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II.-PROPER NAMESRICHARD CAMPBELL

IONE of the most straight-forward ways of referring is by usingpropernames. That is reason enough for asking what is a propername. But more than that. An account of proper names isneeded for a number of other purposes: for some interpretationsof quantification, for most ways of setting up the predicatecalculus, for most accounts of syntactical categories, for under-standing the way some philosophers have tried to explain thenotion of substance, and so on.The prevailing philosophicalopinionis stated neatly by BertrandRussell :1

There is a traditional distinction between " proper" namesand " class" names,which is explainedas consisting n the factthat a proper name applies, essentially, to only one object,whereasa class name applies to all objects of a certain kind,however numerous they may be. Thus " Napoleon" is apropername,while " man " is a classname. It willbe observedthat a propername is meaninglessunless there is an object ofwhich it is the name, but a class name is not subject to anysuch limitation.Behind this line of thought lies the assumption that naming isa relationwhich holds between a noise or mark, i.e. the name andthe object to which it is applied, the bearer. This assumptionlooks innocent enough at first sight. Naming is obviously

relational, and how could there be a relation unless both termsexisted ? A name is a name of its bearer, and the " of " herewould seem to signify a relation of belonging-to. At times thisassumption is made explicit. Thus Church 2A propername always is, or at least is put forward as, aname of something. We shall say that a propername denotesor names that of which it is a name. The relationbetween apropernameandwhat it denoteswill be called the namerelationand the thing denotedwill be calledthe denotation.

This assumption in turn would seem to stem from a particularview of naming. As a start, consider the following:(1) Let us name him Herbert George, after his grandfather.1Human Knowledge,p. 87.2 A. Church,Introduction o MathematicalLogic, i. 4-5. My italics.

326

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PROPER NAMES 327(2) I'm sure I've seen that bonnie face, but yet I canna nameye. (Burns)(3) Name whom you think to be the three greatest generalsEngland ever had.(4) If the Honourable Member does not resume his, seat, Ishall name him.

The word " name " in all these means something different. Inthe first, it means to give or bestow a name. A sound or mark isassigned, more or less arbitrarily, to something which is present,in this case a baby. The baby did not have that name before,and now it has. In (2), naming means uttering the right name,that is, the name generally given to that person as a distinctivemeans of identification. It is here that the idea that a name issome object, i.e. a sound or mark, which properly belongs toanother object, has its most plausible application. For it iseasy to interpret the bestowal of a name as the relating of thatsound or mark to that object. Thus naming sets up a con-ventionalrelationof sound or mark to object, a relation calleduponwhen one gives the name of that object.In (3), to name means to refer to; one mentions by namecertain persons, leaving out others. This use should be dis-tinguished from that in (4). In the latter to name is not to referto, since someone has already been referred to earlier in thesentence. Here naming seems to be uttering the noise whichfunctions as the name. Now, considering these four cases, wecan see why the relational view of naming has won wide accep-tance, since the third and fourth examples can be accommodatedwithin the pattern discerned in the first two.But trouble arises when we consider:

(5) The name of the winged horse you are thinking of is" Pegasus ".For there is a clear parallel between (3) and (5), and yetPegasus does not exist. If we regard naming, in the sense ofbestowing a name, like sticking a label on a bottle so that hence-forth there is a relation between label and bottle, then names like"Pegasus " raise a real problem. You cannot stick labels onbottles which do not exist, so how can we have a name of some-thing which does not exist ? Of course, one answer is to say thatPegasus does exist, or subsist, in some Meinongianjungle. Butas it stands this is no answer, but a retreat into paradox. Theother answer, which the quoted passage from Russell implies,is to say that one cannot name anything which does not exist.If no bearer exists, then no name.

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328 R. CAMPBELL:But such a dictum is surely too strong. It leads Russell tohold that the proper names of persons, which are the paradigmof proper names, are not really proper names at all. Not beingacquainted with most persons, our knowledge of their existenceis indirect, so how could our use of a propername relate directlyto them ? But leaving aside the epistemological blunders whichled Russell to this position, it would still be a strange doctrinewhich contended that " Socrates " ceased to be a proper namethe moment Socrates died.To meet this, P. T. Geach contends in Referenceand Generality

that " no reference to time is involved in the question whethera proper name in a given use . . . has a bearer, and whethersuch-and-such an object is that bearer " (p. 29). He points outthat " Augustus " as used in history books about ancient Romehas Octavian as its bearer even though he did not receive thatname until later, and that " Dion is dead " holds true of Dioneven though he is no more. Then he concludes:It suffices,for a name to have a bearer, that it could havebeen used to name that bearer in a simple act of naming; itdoes not matter if such use is not at present possible,becausethe bearer is to remote from the speaker,or has ceased to be.(p. 30).

Presumably, by " a simple act of naming " Geachmeans here thebestowal of a name, since that alone would be relevant to hisargument. Yet if we read the passage this way, puzzles breakout since in the bestowalof a name it is not the word which names,but people. This point, which might seem captious here, willprove to be of some importance.All the same, apparently Geach does not consider this a veryserious consideration, for he returns later to the issue to claim,with Frege, that there is no place for empty proper names inscientific discourse,or in any discourseaimed simply at conveyingthe truth. Should it ever turn out that an ostensible propernamehas no identifiable bearer, then that name should be dropped.Presumably, this would require that since astronomers havefailed to identify an intra-Mercurian planet under the style"Vulcan ", " Vulcan " never was a proper name, even thoughmany earlier astronomers thought it was and used it as a propername.Having thus lined up the body of opinion behind the Frege-Russellian position, it is time to call halt. For look at one of thesentences quoted already: " no reference to time is involved inthe questions whether a proper name in a given use . . . has a

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PROPER NAMES 329bearer." This is a perfectly sensible statement. Indeed I thinkit is true. But on the view we are considering-that a propername must have an object which is its bearer-there never couldbe any question whether a proper name has a bearer. To putthe point the other way around, if there can arise genuinequestions as to whether a given propername has a bearer,then itcannot be that every proper name must have one. In whichcase " Pegasus " would seem to be a proper name.But if " Pegasus " is a propername, how are we to understandwhat a propername is ? For no longer can we think of a nameas like a label on a bottle, since in some cases there is no bottle.Here, in exploring this line of thought, the linguist joins forceswith us :1

It must be realised that a propernameis not one whit less of athoroughbredpropername if its subject is insubstantial. If Ithink of an imaginary mountain and choose to call it by theutterly meaninglessname 'Karimankow' this name is everybit as good a propername as ' Popocatepetl'.Thereis a nice question here, however, to which we must return.

If I gave the name 'Karimankow' to an imaginary mountain,have I not a bearer for that name, viz. the imaginary mountain ?But on the other hand, how could that be, since the mountain isnot a real mountain at all ? Having raised this tantalisingissue, let us leave to one side the whole question of bearers andsee whether it is possible to devise a satisfactory account of propernames from which to appraise the problem.The modern interest in proper names has as its starting pointthe famous account of J. S. Mill.2 Following a long-establishedtradition in British philosophy, Mill includes under the headingof names not only what would now be called proper names, butalso common nouns and even adjectives including, it seems,demonstratives. His task is then to locate propernames withinthis large class. His first move is to distinguish general namesfrom individual, or singular names; the former being a namecapable of being truly affirmed,in the same sense, of each of anindefinite numberof things, the latter capable of being so affirmedof one thing only. His second move is to distinguish concretefrom abstract names, the former standing for a thing, the latterfor an attribute of a thing. His third move, that with mostbearing on the question of proper names, is to distinguishconnotative from non-connotative names. "A connotative

'A. H. Gardiner,TheTheoryof ProperNames, O.U.P. 1954, pp. 55-56.2 A System of Logic, i, ch. 2, esp. sect. 5.

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330 R. CAMPBELL:term is one which denotes a subject, and implies an attribute."Just what this amounts to is not clear. Mill tells us that theword " white " denotes all white things, as snow, paper, the foamof the sea, etc., and implies or connotes the attribute whiteness.This he glosses with the etymological comment that " connotare"means: to markalongwitnh;to mark onething with or in additionto another. What seemsto be meant by this is that " whiteness "is the name of an attribute, but that when we say " snow iswhite " we have not used the name of that attribute. What wehave done is to name one of the things-or more properly, sortsof things-which have that attribute. Since the attribute hasnot been mentioned, but needs to be mentioned in any analysisalong Mill's lines of the statement, it has been 'implied'.But, and this is what is confusing, Mill at times seems to extendthe meaning of " connote " beyond this. Thus, he says that theword " man " denotes Peter, Jane, John and an indefinite numberof others. But the attribute which he tells us is connoted by theuse of this general name is not manhood, which is what we wouldexpect, but a number of other attributes, which provide thecriterion for the correct application of the name " man ": cor-poreity, animal life, rationality, and a certain external form.Perhaps it could be said that these attributes would be men-tioned in an analysis of the statement " John is a man ". Buteven if that be allowed-and it only should be allowed if it isalso allowed that " a man is a rational animal " is an analyticstatement-all the same, it is obvious that this sort of analysisis a different sort of analysis from that involved in Mill's accountof " snow is white ". In the latter example there is a casefor saying that the proposition expressed by a standard use ofthe words " snow is white " logically implies the attribute white-ness to belong to snow. It could be argued that this is whatpredication, as a logical phenomenon,means. But in the exampleof " John is a man ", Mill acknowledges that the criteria forpredicating manhood are indefinite and to some extent doubtful.The ' implication ' of the attributes not only assumes that astandard use of " man " implies manhood, but must also calluponfurther conventions and usages borne in mind by particularspeakers of the language. That Mill's usage of " connotation "is not uniform is important in view of the muddles into whichlater writers have got.ilowbeit, Mill uses his distinction between those names whichare connotative and those which are not to divide the class ofindividual concrete names. Of these proper names are non-connotative; they are simply "marks used to enable those

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PROPER NAMES 331individuals to be made the subjects of discourse ". But withMill's stress on proper names being " unmeaning marks " theobvious objection is that some proper names are far from devoidof meaning. Consider New College, Land's End, Mont Blanc,Dartmouth. To this Mill replies that while the reason for naminga particular town " Dartmouth " may have been its situation atthe mouth of the river Dart, " is not part of the signification ofthe word ". The name of the town would not need changingshould sand choke up the mouth of the river, or an earthquakechange its course. " Otherwise, when the fact confessedlyceased to be true, no one would any longer think of applying thename." This answer comes somewhat near to the right answer,but as it stands, read in the light of the passages which speak of" unmeaningmarks ", it does raise the question whether the riveractually has to change its course before it can be settled whether"Dartmouth " is a proper name.Strange as it sounds, some people have proposed that a wordonly becomes a proper name when any facts which may haveprovided the reason for giving such a name have ceased to obtain.This would mean that " Oxford" was no thoroughbred propername so long as oxen used to ford the river Isis at this place, andthat it only acquired the status of proper name when bridgeswere built. But, as Gardiner has pointed out (p. 3), this isabsurd; it would mean that Mr. Ironmonger should lose hispropername if he returned to the trade of his fathers.The real trouble, which leads to such absurdities being sug-gested, lies in the looseness of the crucial word " connotation ".For just as a word is sometimes said to " connote " whatever itsuse (normally ?) brings to mind, so it can be said that propernames connote a great deal. If an attempt is made to excludethese 'connotations' of proper names, absurdity results. Prob-ably because of considerations like this, some have in fact pro-posed to distinguish proper means as those which are mostconnotative. A good example of this line of thought is thedistinguished linguist 0. Jesperson. In his The Philosophy ofGrammar, Jesperson draws attention to the existence of wordswhich are common nouns, but which are equivocal. A propername is like one of these except that in such a case the number ofcharacteristic traits is far greater.In support of this, Jesperson cites the following arguments:(a) When you first hear of a person, he is a " mere name " toyou, but the moreyou know about that personthe morethe namemeans; (b) If a propername as actually understood did not con-note any attributes, it would be impossible to explain how a

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332 R. CAMPBELL:sequence of sounds with no meaning at all could suddenlybecome connotative, as when we speak of a Judas, a Caesar, aSocrates; (c) Some names are transferable, both surnames andto a lesser extent Christian names; (d) Proper names can beused in the plural, as in " three Johns and four Marys ", " thedays of the Stuarts ", " two Rembrandts ", etc.; (e) Adjectivescan be attached to proper names, as in this sentence: " Therewere days when Sophia was the old Sophia-the forbidding,difficult Sophia " (Bennett); (f) Frequently both proper namesand surnames are coined from some descriptive name. He con-cludes: " linguistically it is impossible to draw a sharp line ofdemarcation between proper names and common names ", thedifference

being one of degreerather than of kind .. . the morespecial orspecificthe thing denoted is, the more probableis it that thename s chosenarbitrarily, nd somuch he moredoes t approachto, or become, a propername. If a speakerwants to call upthe idea of somepersonor thing,he has at hiscommandn somecases a namespeciallyappliedto the individualconcerned, hatis, a name which in his particularsituation will be understoodas referring o it, or else he has to piece together by means ofother words a complex denomination which is sufficientlyprecisefor his purpose(pp. 69-71).

Now the facts cited by Jesperson are indisputable, but theirrelevance to the question at issue is doubtful. Here again wemust say that great confusion has been caused by Mill's un-fortunate word " connote ", used in a sense he does not satis-factorily exclude, namely, what the use of a word brings to mind.That Jesperson is operating with this meaning of " connote "is clearly established by his saying " the main point of my argu-ment ... is that whenever the name ' Maud ' is naturally used, itmakes the hearerthink of a whole complex of distinctive qualitiesor characteristics " (p. 68). Nor is this treatment of propernames without championamongst philosophers. Russell regardspropernames as really disguised descriptions, on the groundthatthe thought in the mind of a personusing a propername correctlycan generally only be expressed explicitly if we replacethe propername by a description.1But such a view leads straight into insuperable difficulties, forwhat the name " Maud" makes a speaker think of is mostprobably different from what it makes a hearerthink of. But inthat case it is hard to see how both speaker and hearer can bethinking of the same thing when they talk about Maud. Nor

1 TheProblemsof Philosophy,p. 54.

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PROPER NAMES 333can it be replied that it is enough for the different descriptions tofit, to be true of, one person. This is roughly Russell's answer.For I may quite well ascribe certain characteristics to Maudwhich are not true of her. The upshot of this is that whatcharacteristics the use of some particular name makes me thinkof is a fact about my psycholQgy,a fact which can lead to some ofthe phenomena cited by Jesperson, but which plays no significantpart in the function of a proper name in communication.The looseness in the word " connotation " which leads to thesemuddles stems from a lack of precision in the use of the word"imply ". On the one hand, implication might be a purelylogical relation, and perhaps this is how Mill intended it to betaken. But on the other hand, the word " imply " is often usedto indicate what a speaker may be taken to believe but has notsaid. Such a reading is encouraged by the tendency, currentuntil recently, to treat the laws of logic as giving the " laws ofthought ", where by laws of thought was meant somethinganalogous to the laws of nature. The associationist psychologyentrenched in the tradition of classical British empiricism waswhat effected these conceptual links between logic, implicationand what 'comes to mind '. There may or may not be somemerit in this psychology, although it seems clear that it cannotdo all the work it was classically taken to do. But as a founda-tion for a theory of implication there is very little in it, if anythingat all. If Mill's definition is to lead to any workable account ofproper names, his notion of connotation needs to be freed fromany suggestion of meaning the associations to which a normaluseof the name might give rise, associations which may vary fromperson to person. For these same reasons, the current Searle-Strawson account of the descriptions 'presupposed' by the useof proper names should give no encouragementto those who arestill tempted to say that proper names do have connotation,thinking that thereby they are at variance with a Millian treat-ment.So let us start out again on a Millian tack. In this directionwe come across the definition offered by Keynes, who is reason-ably clearabout connotation: " A proper nameis a name assignedas a mark to distinguish an individual personorthing from others,without implying in its signification the possession by the indivi-dual in question of any specific attributes."'1 Here, in the lightof the previous discussion and Keynes' own sorting out of thetangles in " connotation ", we must take "implying in its

1 Formal Logic,4th edn., pp. 13-14.

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334 R. CAMPBELL:signification . . any specific attributes " to mean that it is alogically necessary and sufficient condition of that name's beingcorrectly applied that whatever is so named should possess thosespecific attributes. But even interpreted thus, this definitionis not very satisfactory. For one thing, Keynes immediatelygoes on to point out that many proper names (his examples are" John " and " Victoria ") are as a matter of fact assigned tomore than one individual. This counter-example he proceeds toexplain away, but only by introducing a new element into theaccount; "John" and "Victoria" are not, he says, generalnames " since on each occasion of their use (with an exception)there is an understood reference to some one determinate indivi-dual only ". The exception is when we have a class composed ofthose who bear the same name as, for example, in " All Victoriasare honoured in their name ". This move can also be discernedin grammar books. Thus, for example, Nesfield defines propernames thus: " a name for one particular thing as distinct fromevery other . . . it cannot be given to more than one thing at atime."'1 Presumably this should be taken to mean that a propername refers to only one thing in any single speech act. Evenwhen so interpreted, awkward questions of procedure are raised.For not only does it seem as if proper names are being definedin terms of the reference made in some speech act, whereas agenerally acceptable account of reference is wanting, but it isleft quite obscurewhat is meant by " one determinate individual "(Keynes) or " one thing " (Nesfield). How is this one individualthing determined ?But there are other problems facing this type of definition.On the next page Keynes admits that certain proper names maybe regarded as collectives,his examples being "the Pyrenees"and " the Seychelles ". Now, not only is this a rather novel useof " collective ", it is not clear at all that the Pyrenees are onething in the same sense that my dog Fido is one thing. Perhapsit couldbe said that this rangeof mountains is " being lookeduponas units, as individuals " (so Jesperson, p. 64). But what thismeans is that the Pyrenees are to be counted as one, if what weare counting are ranges of mountains. But this is not enough toestablish that the Pyrenees are " one determinate individual ".The point of this objection is to open up the whole questionwhether a propername is the name of one determinate individual.The view that this is so has common acceptance. Indeed it is

1J. C. Nesfield, Manual of English Grammarand Composition,1911,p. 16.

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PROPER NAMES 335enshrined in the OxfordEnglish Dictionary: " Proper (gram.)-Applied to a name or noun which is used to designate a particularindividual object." The view has a long and highly respectablehistory, going back to Dionysius Thrax, who says that propernames (KVIpLov) are "those which are used individually(lStcs')and which signify individualbeing (-rrv 831avov,glav)". Nowit is time to collect difficultieswith this view. In so doing, I willbe drawing, in part, upon examples adduced by Gardiner.Firstly, there are those proper names which do not nameindividuals in any normal sense of the term. Already mentionhas been made of " the Pyrenees " and "the Seychelles ", butthere are many more, e.g. " the Mafia", "Parliament ", "Con-gress ". A French philologist has even claimed " France" is acollective! Perhapswe could allow that all these latter examplesare collectives, in which names that are grammatically singularare applied globally to a collection of singular individuals. Butthen, leaving collectives, we come to words, grammatically pluralin number of which no singular is recorded, e.g. the latin names" Quirites ", " Luceres " Ranmes " and names like " theAndes ", " the Azores ", " the Pleiades ".The thesis that propernames which are used to referto plurali-ties refer to them globally and for that reason may be consideredindividual names becomes untenable when proper names are ofplural form and have nevertheless singulars of their own. Inquite early times tribal names like " Veneti " and " Helvetii "appear to have no correspondingsingulars, but that they werenot, or not always, thought of globally is shown by the possibilityof sentences like "Venetorum alii fugerunt, alii occisi sunt ". Evenmore interesting are Mriot and 1ftpacc, which are first of allplurals but which later evolved the singulars M^qos, nd HEporqs,.The opposite phenomenonto this is that which we find in moderndiplomacy, in that some nations recognise twoChinas. It mightbe arguedthat o M^qos,s descriptive, and not a propername, andthat it means something like " one belonging to the Medes".The difficulty with this is that the plural of o Mr7&soannot beread in this way.Here it is also instructive to reflect on the phenomenon ofsurnames. A surname was once the name of an individual butnow is the name commonto members of a family. It is commonin that the family shares the one name, and shares it in a waydifferent from that in which a number of different people sharethe name " John ". Thus it is not arbitrary who has the sur-name " Doakes ". Yet neither is " Doakes " a common name inthe way in which " dog " or " river " is a common name. There

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336 R. CAMPBELL:are no general characteristics which belong to all the Doakesfamily, or if there are e.g. black eyes and a hooked nose, it iscoincidental to their having that name. Especially when weconsider the derivation of a surnamefrom being the proper nameof an individual is there a good case for saying that the surnameis a proper name which applies to more than one individual anddoes so in a quite different way from that in which " John"applies to more than one individual.Then there is another class of names which would seem to beproper names, but which are shared in a way different from thatin which " John " is shared. This class includes the names ofthe days of the week, and the months of the year,andperhaps alsoof ritual festivals, like " Christmas" and " Easter " or "Whit-sunday ". (The classification of these last depends on thepossibility of an atheist celebrating Christmas!) Here, while"Friday " is the name of one day in any gtven week, it is thename of many days. And while there is a clear criterion forcalling a given day " Friday ", rather than say " Thursday ", itcan hardly be said that "sixth day of the week" is what" Friday " means. Nor does " sixth day of the week " pick outany individual day. It truly applies to one-seventh of all thedays there ever shall be. So now we have quite a number ofdifferent sorts of examples in which a proper name names aplurality, and does so in a way difficult to cover by invokingthe device of 'global' individuality.To press home the inadequacy of defining proper names interms of their application to one particular object as distinctfrom every other be it noted that not all singularnames are propernames. Mill knew this well; his examples were " the sun " and" God ". His ground for excluding these is that they are notstrictly speaking singular names at all, but general. This isalong the right lines, but as it stands is not satisfactory, since wehave seen that some proper names can be applied to more thanone thing. Perhaps Mill could argue from modern astronomyfor the multiplicity of suns, but in this case " the sun " is beingused in a rather extended sense, and anyway, we could easily fallback upon the latin " sol ", the Greek " A'tos" or the Hebrew" WtW". Neither are these proper names, as Russell seems toassume.1 But there is no need to go into this argument anyfurther; there are many singular names-names which in factapply to only one 'thing '-which are not proper: moon, para-dise, hell, ecliptic, zenith, nadir, zodiac, zero, chaos, pole-star,

' Human Knowledge, . 48.

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PROPER NAMES 337although perhaps some of these in some contexts might be con-sidered proper names.

We had set out on a Milliantack, but seem to have run aground.That impression is misleading. For all the proposals we haverejected have been found wanting when measured against ourintuitions of what counts as a proper name. Nor have theseintuitions been blind. Guiding them are two principles: (a) therole played in language by proper names does not depend uponany descriptive import those words might possess, nor on anyassociation of ideas which have become connected to them;(b) positively, their role is to serve as identifiers. These prin-ciples can be seen in the definition proposed bTyGardiner, uponwhom much of the immediately preceding argumentis dependent.His definition goes thus:" A propername is a word or groupof wordswhich is recognisedas having identification as its specific purpose, and whichachieves, or-tends to achieve, that purpose by means of itsdistinctive sound alone, without regard to any meaningpossessedby that soundfrom the start,oracquiredby it throughassociationwith the object or objects thereby dentified" (p. 73).

As an attempt to distil out what is right in the Millianapproachthis seems the best so far, as can be seen by testing it against allthe sorts of examples we have mentioned. Two explanatorycomments should be added. Firstly, while the definition isframed in terms of distinctive sound, how to adapt it to writtenlanguage is simple and obvious. Secondly, it must be said that aproper name tends to achieve its purpose of identification sinceoften whether it does so depends upon the context of its use,where " context " is taken in a very broad way, to include thethoughts of the speakers and hearers of the language.However, even this definition is not entirely happy either.For one thing, we have already seen how Gardinerinsists thatquestions of existence are irrelevant to whether a given linguisticexpression is a proper name. He considers that his definition isequally applicable to names of things which exist and of thosewhich do not. But his reference to "the object or objectsthereby identified " would work against this intention if themeaning of " object " is understood as: something which existsindependently of being perceived.For another thing, it could well be thought that the talk of aword'sfulfillingits role " without regardto any meaning possessed. . . or acquired " is sadly vague. What we need is a test fordeciding when this condition obtains. Yet the provision of sucha test may be thought a hopeless undertaking; indeed this is

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338 R. CAMPBELL:what led Jesperson to claim that it is utterly impossible to drawa sharp line of demarcation between proper names and commonnouns. But just because it is difficult in any particular case tomark a boundary does not mean that a general specification formarking boundaries cannot be given. What we need, in fact, isa test which will clearly divide those cases which ought to beclearly divided, and which will be indecisive in just those caseswhere clear answers cannot be given.To meet this I suggest the following, which gets around thesetwo difficulties, and supplies a test supplementary to Gardiner'sdefinition. Firstly, we should note that some propernames havesome descriptive import, that is, such words can form predicableexpressions when preceded by forms of the verb " to be ". Sucha word or phrase functions in its nominative occurrence as aproper name where we can state without self-contradiction thate.g., New College is not a new college. Rendering this pointformally yields this sufficient condition:

I: For any n, if [is an n] or [are n] is a predicable expression,then [n] is a proper name if an only if [n is not an n] or [nare not n] is not self-contradictory.

This condition makes use of the notion of a predicable expression,but I do not think this use introduces any circularity, since pre-dicable expressions can be attached not only to proper namesbut also to phrases like " somebody " "anything " "a man)"" this " "he ", etc. Further, the possibility of a feature-placinglanguage would seem to require predicable expressions but notproper names. A young child's language often appears tofunction in such a way.Secondly, we should note that some proper names, like"Cynthia " or " Richard Campbell" have minimal or no generaldescriptive import. They do not form predicable expressions.This feature, however, is not exclusive to proper names; de-monstrative and pronouns on the one hand, and quantifyingphrases like " somebody " or " anything " on the other, likewisedo not form predicable expressions. I will assume that quanti-fying expressions are individually definable in terms of rulesparallel to those governing the use of quantifiers in predicatelogic, using the stock of proper names provided by Condition Iabove. Next, we should note that demonstratives and pronounshave a characteristic generality about them; it is a logicalfeature of this class of expressions that they are usable to makemore than one statement. Only one person may be named" Adolphus Gephoups", but " he " cannot have so special a use.

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PROPER NAMES 339The notion of a statement used here may well involve the notionof reference complained about earlier, but laying it down that it isimpossible for a demonstrative always to be used to make thesame statement does not raise in the same way problems aboutexistence and uniqueness. This enables us to propose a secondsufficient condition:

II: For any n, if [is an n] or[are n] is not a predicableexpressionbut it makes sense to attach a predicable expression to[n], and if [n] is not a quantifying expression, and if it isnot impossible that a sentence of the form [n is (1]should always be used to make the same statement,then [n] is a proper name.

These conditions, I and II, are each sufficient and jointlynecessary.II

The situation now is that we have a definition of proper namessupplemented by a formal test which corrects certain inade-quacies in that definition, such that no question is raised aboutthe existence of what is so named. Let us call this way ofproceeding the linguists' way. It is in conflict with the otherway of proceedingsketched at the beginning of this paper, whicharguing from the relational character of naming concluded thatonly things which exist or have existed can be the bearers ofproper names. These positions are incompatible, so clearlysomething has gone wrong.

What seems to be at the root of the trouble is the logician'snatural assumption that naming is a relation. Let us look atthis more closely. The bestowal of a name, we said, is theassigning of a sound or mark to something. Now playing alongwith that, in what sense is this assigning a relation, or the settingup of a relation ? Here we find ourselves in great difficulties,forthe philosophical analysis of relations is not very well developed.There are two obvious paradigms for relations. One is given byphrases like " father of " or " taller than " ; the other by verbslike " kill " or " hit ". How relevant are these ?Let us take first the proposalthat assigning a name is a relation.At first sight the parallel to assigning would be hitting or killing.But no sooneris that said than it is obvious that assigning a namecannot be construed on such a model, since we have to accom-modate not only the namer and the named, but also the name.So let us try out as model something like the verb " break ",

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340 R. CAMPBELL:which, like " name ", can be binary or ternary. In the ternarysense, I can break a window with a ball. But one cannot breaka window which does not exist, just as one cannot kill a man whois not alive. What then are we to do with those cases where aname is bestowed on something which does not exist, as in theexample of naming an imaginary mountain " Karimankow "?Here the logician is inclined to start drawingdistinctions-betweenproper names and mere names, or between names in the logicalsense and names in the grammatical sense. But if one asks howare such proper names 'proper', if one asks what is this speciallogical sense, it turns out that these names are names of somethingwhich exists. Now, not only is it doubtful whether being of-something-which-exists is able to function as a distinguishingcriterion, but even if allowed this move only shifts the problem.For we are left with the problem of analysing how names, albeitnot 'proper', are bestowed on something which does not exist.But to return to the suggested paradigm. If I break a windowwith a ball, there must be a ball before I send it through thewindow. Yet there is not a name before I (or someone else)bestow one, at least not in the relevant sense. This significantdifference threatens to destroy the usefulness of our modelternary relation. The obvious way out of this would be to say.that it is not so much a name which is bestowed but a sound ormark, and that sound or mark is henceforth called a nameprecisely because it is related to whatever it comes to name.This is an interesting reply, since what it does is to concedethat the term "name " is a relative term, to be understoodnevertheless by means of the alleged relation set up between asound or mark and a thing. However this is still pretty obscure.Does it mean that a name is a sound or mark which has a certainrelation to something else ? In exploring this, we are backlooking for a binary relation as paradigm. The relation of thename " Socrates " to the man does not look much like the relationbetween Brutus and Caesar in the latter's last moment ! Amore plausible candidate is " father of ", the other paradigmwhich has figured largely in the history of the logic of relations.A father is a man who bears a certain relation to someone else;" father " is in that sense a relative term. However there is noquestion but that a father is a man. But is a name a sound ormark ? Here we run into,all sorts of type/token worries, and so,if we are to make any progress on whether and in what sensenaming is a relation, we must turn aside to pursue these worries.First some general remarks on the distinction between typesand tokens. One sense of the word " word " is that in which we

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PROPER NAMES 341say that a child is learning new words every day, or that Englishhas more words than Latin. A different sense is that in whichwe say that there were twelve words written on a telegram, twooccurrences of " and " counting as two words, or that Jones saidonly ten words in the whole meeting. It was to mark this dis-tinction that Peirce originally drew his distinction betweeh word-types and -tokens. Thus the two expressionsdogand dogare different tokens, appearing at different places on this page.But they are tokens of the same type, whereascatis of a differenttype. Bound up with this view is the assumptionthat tokens are instances of types; types are universal, tokensare particular.Some people have questioned the usefulness of this distinctionsince it raises in a linguistic context all the general problemsconcerning the relation of universals and particulars. But thatis not my problem here. Suppose a speech is tape-recordedandthen the recording is played back; have we not now twice asmany tokens ? Certainly we have twice as many sounds. Thesame thing occurs in print. If a photostat copy be taken of aprinted article, are there now twice as many tokens ? It wouldseem so, yet we still have the same speech or the same article,each consisting of a fixed number of words. Obviously we needsome stipulations here, so let us say that there are in these casestwice as many tokens but not twice as many word-instances. Aword-instance is not a word-type since the number of word-tokensof the single type " dog " would be doubled if a photostat copywere made of the this page without it ceasing to be the case thatwe have two instances of the one type. What we would have infact would be four tokens and two instances of the one type" dog ". This important distinction comes out in another way.The word-token "temple " can occur in the contexts "thetemple of my head " and " the temple of the Aztecs ". But asused in these two contexts we have two word-types put intoplay, although the tokens look alike. We also have two word-instances. Now suppose a photostat copy be made of this page.We still have two word-types signified by " temple " and stilltwo instances in the thitty-sixth line. But now we have twice asmany tokens.A token, as used in such a scheme of counting at any rate, isclearly a spatio-temporal thing or occurrence. A word-instance

12

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342 R. CAMPBELL:on the other hand seems not to be. Or at least, if we are lookingat some pages of printing, some of which are copies of others, thesheer occurrence of a number of spatio-temporal configurationsof similar pattern is not what is taken note of in classifying whatis before us in terms of word-instances. That is, it is not asspatio-temporal occurrences that words are classified as word-instances but by the number of times the speaker or writer inasserting what he did put into play a word of a given type, i.e.by the number of times in the one speech-act (or one set ofspeech-acts) he issued a sound or mark with the intention thatthe same linguistic rules or conventions be used by his audiencein understanding it.Now let us apply all this to the case of names. -Clearly n

(6) These are some of the names approved for registration inHolland: Adam, Adriaan, Annie,.. .the word " name " has more to do with types than with eithertokens or instances. What can be counted in this list is thenumber of those words which linguistically function as propernames and which can be used in a consistent way on manyoccasions to identify whatever they are assigned to. While thesentence (6) is made up of marks, the names listed in it can becalled marks only inappropriately. It is not as marks, but asinstances of something like a type that the list gives names,though of course marks are used in doing this. Now consider(7) In a fit of anger, Jim hit both John and Robert and damagedthe new train Robert had been given for his birthday.

Here we have three name-types and four instances and tokens.Suppose a photostat copy be made of this page. Then we wouldhave three name types, four name-instances and eight name-tokens. Our general distinctions for words apply to names.Perhaps in the case of names we need a fourth division. Isuggested that the way the word-instances written " temple "in " temple of my head " and " temple of the Aztecs " were ofdifferent types. By parity of reasoning " John Smith " whenused of the little boy next door and when used of his schoolteacherwould be two different names, i.e. name-types. But in anothersense they have the same name, as by (6) all people named" Adam " have the same name. This sense of " name " seemsdifferent from name-type, instance, or token. Let us dub thisspecial sense a name-style. Under this proposed rendering, theDutch registration list would be not of name-types, but of name-styles.

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PROPER NAMES 343Now let us consider what is a key example for the naming-is-a-relation view:(8) My name is Richard Campbell

This is true. But is " Richard Campbell" here a namne-token,or -instance, or -type, or style ? Clearly not a style; it isirrelevant whether other people are also so named as in fact someothers are. But neither is it a token; taking a photostat of thispage does not mean that I have two names. Rather it seems thatin asserting (8) I am informing you of my name-type, of whichthe particularset of words " Richard Camnpbell wherethey occurin (8) is an instance. In this sense it is quite misleading to saythat a name is a mark or sound. Rather it has a mark or soundas its distinctive means of functioning. There are particularrules or conventions to be followed in the use of this name, andthe distinctive sound or configurationof the mark is vitally im-portant in such a use. Now we can clear up an earlier puzzle.In bestowing this name on me, my parents took a particularname-style and set up the convention that I was to be so identified.But, of course, a name-style is not a sound or mark either, al-though it has a distinctive sound or mark, i.e. uses one. Thuswe must conclude that a particularname is not itself a particularconfigurationof sounds or marks but is what is broughtabout bya correctapplication of the rules or conventions to the productionof noises or marks where the intention is to communicate. Tomake the point in terms of another early example. It was notthat Burns' forgetful fellow did not know the noise for the bonnieface he saw; he did not know the rule for linguistically identifyingits owner.This is an important conclusion, for it further weakens thelabel-on-a-bottle picture of naming. We have already suggestedthat the possible non-existence of the bottle creates a gravedifficulty for the view that naming is this sort of a relation.Now we find that a name is not properlyconstruableas a physicalobject, like the paper of a label, either. Thus, with both termsof the alleged simple relation proving so resistant to being treatedon analogy with what have been taken as the paradigms ofrelations, let us cast around for some other sort of analogue bywhich to understand naming.What we want is a clear class of verbs which are relational atleast in the sense that they have not only a subject but also anobject or objects, direct and indirect, which object(s) might notexist. Such a class is not hard to find. The following sentences

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344 R. CAMPBELL:all employ such verbs. (I italicize what is possibly non-existent.)

(9) John is thinking of Bill Jones.(10) The Greeksworshipped Zeus.(11) The Brown family are afraid of theghost of Lady Jane.(12) The Moabites offered sacrifices to Moloch.(13) The hunter fired his gun at a stag.Of these, (9)-(11) have binary verbs, (12) and (13) have ternaryverbs. All of them belong to that class which is generallycalled 'intentional ' in that their standard use is to express anagent's directing his thought or action upon something which,though perhaps not real, is present in his mind. We could saythat these verbs express an intentional relation.There well could be quibbles over whether in these cases wehave anything which can properly be called a relation at all.On the one hand, what is most significant about our clear casesof relations is that they are expressed by two- or many-placed predicates. Proceeding on this line, we might distinguishrelations syntactically, saying that a relation is what is expressedby a two- or many-placed predicate. But on the other hand, wemight think that such aproposalis far too wide. Since we alreadyhave the term "two- or many-placed predicate " we mightdecide to restrict the term " relation " to what is expressed bythose predicates which share with "- is father of -" and "hit -" the feature that all blanks are to be filled with names ofdescriptions of existing things.How this dispute is decided is pretty much a matter of choice.Nevertheless, in order to mark clearly the fact that these in-tentional relations, if properly called relations at all, are im-portantly different from what are traditionally called relations,-letus say that we have to do here with ' relative determinations '.This is a bit of jargon I borrowfrom Brentano, who was perhapsthe first clearly to distinguish intentional 'relations ' from thosetraditionally so called.'What I now want to contend is that naming involves not somuch a relation in the narrowsense, but a relative determination.Indeed, I could claim that I have already shown this by showingthat a coherent account can be given of proper names whichleaves open the question whether what is so named exists or not.This possibility of non-e"xistences one of the criteria frequently

1In a letter to F. Hildebrandt, reprintedin The True and the Evident,p. 103, Brentano says the distinctionis in Aristotle, but the most relevantpassageMetaphysics,V, 15 cannot be interpretedin this way.

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PROPER NAMES 345offered by philosophers for distinguishing intentional objects, andthus for distinguishing relative determinations from relations inthe narrow sense. Such a claim is, I think, quite justified. ButI want to support it by an independent line of argument designedto show that naming involves relative determinations, which areintentional.The first move is to recall that in the bestowal of a name, it isnot a word which names, strictly speaking, but people. Namingis something people do. So long as this is obscured by thecommonly heard loose talk about " Socrates " naming Socrates,the thesis that naming involves intentional relative determinationswill seem not just wrong but unintelligible. Once the point isclearly grasped this thesis becomes at least a starter in the field.The next point to notice is that naming is in an important wayinter-personal. What I mean is this. At one place G. E. Mooremuses on the fact that although it is not his name, his familyhabitually call him " Bill " (CommonplaceBooks, p. 248). Theyused " Bill " as a propername for him. This leads him to considerthat there must have been a first occasion when his wife used" Bill as a proper name for him in his absence. She did notmean "The person I am calling 'Bill ' ", since this would raisethe question of what is meant by her ' calling ' him "Bill ".He also rejects the possibility that the first occasion that "Bill"was used as a proper name for him in his absence could have beenin such a context as " Go and fetch Bill ". For she would nothave been understood unless the person to whom this commandwas addressed had become accustomed to hearing her call Moore" Bill ". He seems to conclude from this that the first occasionhe was called " Bill " in his absence must have been in narrative.In this first narrative use we have a good case of the bestowalof a name, not in some quasi-formal ceremony, but in the samebreath as it is used. It is to be contrasted with a first-occasion-use when only the namer and the named are present, as when aperson says to a strange boy: " Tommy, hand me that hammer."Mooreconsiders that here " Tommy " is perhaps being used as aproper name, although it is not habitual. However, this way ofsetting up the cases suggests that the crucial thing to a word'sbeing a proper name is that there is a habitual use of the wordas a proper name, or even such a use in the absence of what isnamed. This is misleading. Take first the case of asking theboy to pass the hammern Here " Tommy " is what I have calleda name-style, which is being used on this occasion as a stop-gap.Its rule is analogous to that of a free variable in a logical formula.It is not what I have called a name-type, nor a name-instance.

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346 R. CAMPBELL:Suppose I get to know this boy quite well, but continue callinghim " Tommy ". This is parallel to his wife's privately using

" Bill " in the vocative when addressingMoore. Does this amountto the bestowal-in-use of a proper name ? I am inclined to thinknot; a free variable can occur more than once in a logicalformula (though it is not a wise procedure!). Anyway,-nothingmuch turns on it, since the crucial case is the use of that word toa third person. Anld n this case, Moore'sfirst narrative occasion,what is vital is that the speaker should intendthat the hearer takethis word to be a propername, and be able to use it himself in thesame way. This intention might or might not come off, but if itdoes, then here we are able to talk about name-types and name-instances-in other words, we have a full-blown case of a propername being used. Incidentally, if the intention does not comeoff, we have a case of naming-failure. Because it is intentionalin this way, "'naming " is a success-word.Although I have tried to show that naming is in this wayintentional, I have not yet established that we have to do withthe sort of intentional ' relation' or relative determination I setout to establish. To do that I want next to take over a pointwhich has recently been emphasised especially by both Geachand Miss Anscombe. If I hear what seems to be a proper namebeing used, I cannot know how to use it myself unless I knowwhat kind of thing it is supposed to be a proper name of. Wecannot say " Jemima ... Jemima again ... Jemima again ... ."unless we can say " cat . . . the same cat . . . the same cat . . .".This view has met with some resistance, which seems to centre onthe possibility of assigning and continuing to use a proper namewhen what is so named has not been correctly classified. I canassign a name to some material object which I see each morningtrailing a red ribbon behind it, no matter whether I classify thatobject as a man, a cassowaryor an orang-utan. If I classify thisthing as a man when in fact it is a cassowarythat does not meanthat I have failed to assign a propername. Thus, it is urged, thesuccessful assignment and subsequent application of a name to amaterial object or other particular, such as a hurricane, iscompatible with its having been seriously misclassified.What this criticism amounts to is not clear, for the notion ofcorrectclassificationis not clear. Nevertheless, it is very hard tosee how one could name particularswhich are wholly unclassifiedor completely misclassified. The first part of this concession isimportant in itself; as for the second half, what would be a caseof 'complete misclassification'? Perhaps a classification in thewrong category, as, for example, classifying an eventas a material

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PROPER NAMES 347object. Yet even in the above counter-example some classifi-cation has taken place; how else could the example have beenpropounded ? We have: a material object trailing a red ribbonbehind it. Now, while the words "thing ", "object ", "exis-tent ", etc., will not serve as classifiers, the phrase " materialobject trailing a red ribbon behind it " can. " Red ribbon " is aclassifying phrase,and in the context of the example, the materialobject which trails this ribbon moves as one whole relativelyindependent of other things in the visual field. Further, mis-classifying is still classifying. If it turns out that the objectwhich I thought was a man is found not to be a man, then whathas happened is that a better scheme of classification has beenadopted. This new scheme is then read back into the earlierusages, and this would only be possible if what is now classifiedas a cassowary is the same X as what was earlier classified as aman, where X is to be filled in by some general classifying term.Similar treatment applies in those cases where a proper nameis apparently given to something identified by no more than"this ", e.g. " This is Dewlip ". From the context or environ-ment it can usually be worked out what sort of thing is beingpicked out by " this ". Mistakes of classification can occur, butin such cases the above treatment is relevant. What I have beendefending is the thesis that for the bestowal of a proper namethere must be supplied, or understood by both speaker andhearer to be, what is usually called "a criterion of identity ".This last phrase is not altogether happy, however. What ismeant by it is some criterionby which the same thing of a certainsort can be identified; consequently we would do better to speakof a criterion of identification.What I now must do is examine more closely what is meant byidentifying. When I assign a proper name my purpose is toidentify something of a certain sort, that is identifying somethingwithin the class defined by that sortal word. But what ? Tosome extent what is being named can be specified more and moreclosely by adding descriptive phrases to the sortal noun. Butit is controversialwhether that move is ever sufficientin all cases.Let us break these up into two groups.The firstgroupis that in which what is being namedis somethingwhich exists. Here is the well-known problem that, short ofinspecting the whole universe, it is always possible that thereare two or more things which answer any proffered identifyingdescription. The logicians who show impatience with this diffi-culty are, in so doing, expressing the tendency of logicians toregard their world sub specie aeternitas. But lesser mortals have

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348 R. CAMPBELL:to get by by indicating in some way that they intend somedescription to be an identifying one. Our usual device for doingthis is to prefix " the " to the description. Such a use of " the "is accordingly intentional in force. Indeed, it is intentional inthe two different senses of that word. Firstly, it is intentionalin the sense that thereby a speaker shows that he is intending tooffer an identifying description of something. In a slightlyextended sense of action, offeringan identifying descriptionin thisway is an intentional action. But secondly, in offering such adescription a speaker indicates that he has some particular thingin mind which he is seeking to describe. Of course, if the speakershould find that two or more things satisfy this description thenhe must be able to say which one it was he had in mind, or elsehis claim in using " the " is empty. His surest way of meetingthis is to invoke such 'mongrel' descriptions as " the one I wastalking to last week ", which are not 'purely' descriptive butare partly self-referential. Now, to have something in mind, tothink of something, it is not necessary that that thing exist.What one thinks of might or might not exist; it is an intentionalobject. This is the other sense of "intentional", and the one Iam seeking to tie in to naming. That the description definingsome intentional object applies to things which exist, as we sup-posed initially, does not controvert my claim.Next consider the second group of cases, those where we havewhat a linguist would count as a proper name, although not thename of anything which exists. Some would deny that identifi-cation is possible in such cases, but, on the contrary, I wouldcontend that these are just the cases to which Leibniz' Lawapplies. Identity of description implies an identity of what isthought of, or imagined. Here again we are dealing with anintentional object. So in both cases there must be, correspondingto the proper name, some description a speaker could give,though it need not be the description he does give, whichapplies uniquely to what he has in mind, his intentional object.By the way, it should hardly need saying that the word " object "in the phrase " intentional object " is not being used in anythinglike the same sense as that in which we spoke at one stage of amaterial object. Intentional objects are not a sort of object.It is as an intentional object that something is named. But the' relation ' between a thinker and what he is thinking of is not afull-bloodedrelation, but merely a relative determination. Fromthat, in the light of our discussion, it follows that the ' relation ' ofnaming is not a full-blooded relation either, but a relative deter-mination. And that was what I hoped to show.

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PROPER NAMES 349In conclusion, I want to distinguish my position from that ofAnthony Kenny, who in a slightly similar way works intention

into the account of proper names. Being also worried about thedoctrine that a proper name must have a bearer which exists, hepoints out that it is not enough to know what things there are inthe world to be named, but also we must know what a speakermeans to be taken as names, and that opens the possibility thathe intends to name something which does not exist to be named.So Kenny seeks to define " proper name " not by reference to thecontents of the universe, but by reference to the intentions ofspeakers :1I shall say that any simple symbol which is used with the inten-tion of referring exclusively to a particular individual of acertain kind is a propername. If A intends by the word " N "to refer exclusively to B, then A means B by " N ". Onlyif Bexists will A succeed n referring o B. To refer to something sto be successfulin meaning it, just as to win a race is to besuccessful n running t.

This account is intentional, not in the sense for which I haveargued, but only in the sense in which naming is an intentionalaction. An immediate difficulty with it, like one we discussedearlier, is that proper names are being defined in terms of thereference of those names, whereas a generally acceptable accountof referenceis wanting. Moreparticularly, Kenny here explainsmeaning-something-by-a-proper-name in terms of intending torefer, and referringin terms of success in meaning. Only by thelatter move can " refer " plausibly be said to be a success-word,yet we need an independent justification for so understandingthe expression " A means B by ' N ' ".Not only are there these general difficulties with this way ofproceeding, but adoption of the proposed definition of propernames would still diverge from what a linguist would count assuch. What would have to go are those names which a speakeruses identifyingly without intending to refer to something whichexists, especially names in fiction and fancy. And the names ofnumbers would remain names only for those who believe thatnumbers exist. Unless, of course,we fall back upon such fictionsas mathematical existence, fictional existence, legendary exis-tence, etc., which would render the thesis rather pointless.What I have sought to do in this paper is to undermine in threeways the orthodox doctrine that proper names are noises ormarks which bear a conventional relation to some existent or

1In' OratioQbliqua II ',P.A.S.S., 1963, pp. 137-138.

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350 R. CAMPBELL: PROPER NAMESonce-existent object, the bearer. By disputing the claim that aname is a noise or mark, by arguingthat what is named need notexist, and by contending that the 'relation' between name andwhat is named is a relation only in an extended sense, betterdistinguished as a relative determination, I have tried to bringout the intentionality of naming. If we insist that all nameshave bearers,the bearerof a nlame s to be parsedas an intentionalobject; being an intentional object is true of what is named.That is not the same as saying that a bearer is an intentionalobject, in the sense of identity. That would only follow ifrelative determinations were full-blooded relations after all.Intentional objects are not a peculiar kind of object. Thus thisview of naming need raise no fears of turning our stock of propernames into an index for Meinong'sjungle.

The Australian National UniversityCanberra