Research Group
in Analytic Philosophy

Abstract

In the recent philosophical and linugistic literature on proper names, several people have argued for the thesis that proper names can have anaphoric or bound uses. In this talk, I will, firstly, give a brief overview of different kinds of examples that have been proposed as evidence for this thesis. Secondly, I will distinguish three different proposals to account for the semantics of apparent bound uses of proper names. The first and the second account propose a uniform semantic treatment of proper names relative to bound and unbound uses that assigns to names a semantics that is similar to the semantics of third person personal pronouns or complex demonstratives. The third account gives a pluralist and non-uniform treatment of different apparent uses of proper names. According to this view, names are atomic (context-sensitive) referring expressions relative to their standard referential use and those uses that appear to be anaphoric uses of names are either in fact nonanaphoric uses of names or anaphoric uses of expressions the resemble names only syntactically, but not semantically. Thirdly, I will argue for the pluralist view.