Research Group
in Analytic Philosophy

Abstract

In previous work, I have defended anovel view of the semantic of proper names, i.e., the PolyreferentialView. According to this view, proper names can have more than onesemantic referent, indeed as many as bearers of the name there are.However, the view still sees proper names as referential terms thatcontribute their referents to the propositional content. This has theimplication that a sentence containing a polyreferential name wouldthereby express many propositions or contents, as many as referentsfor the name there are. This paper proposes a logic for this newsemantic relation of polyreference and gives an account of compositionality.

Given a standard way of understandingsentence truth as depending on the truth of the proposition itexpresses, we have that for any sentence S, S is true when it expresses a true proposition and S is false when it expresses a false proposition. So, most sentencescontaining polyreferential terms will be true, and they will befalse. As a result, we won’t be able to reason from the truth orfalsity of sentences in the standard way – e.g. `David is happy andDavid is not happy' expresses many different propositions, only someof which are contradictions, for many others are true propositions,e.g., when Hume is happy and Lewis is not (among many otherpossibilities). Although in this framework, some standard reasoningswould not be valid, the paper argues that this is not necessarily abad result. I suggest that when taking the fact that names havemultiple bearers seriously, our intuitions about the truth andfalsity of sentences, and of the validity of inferences may change.The logic proposed, however, can cope with most of our ordinary reasonings with proper names.