Anders Schoubye: "Naming and Variability"

Anders Schoubye, Stockholm University: "Naming and Variability"

Abstract
Variabilism is the view that proper names are variables (rather than constants or descriptions). This view has been defended by a number of philosophers of language throughout the past 40 years, but with very different assumptions about the nature of these variables and hence the behaviour of proper names. In this talk, I will start by providing an overview of a number of variabilist positions, but ultimately defend one particular variant. This particular version of variabilism comes with a distinct descriptive component, but I will outline why this version of variabilism is not threatened by any of Kripke's well known anti-descriptivist arguments. I will then turn to a discussion of a more recent potential problem for the variabilist view, namely a circularity worry raised by Aidan Gray and explain why this likely is not a threat to variabilism after all. Lastly, I will argue that once a variabilist analysis of proper names is adopted, one (of the many) positive upshots is that we get a clean and elegant metasemantics for names that is both more uniform and has broader empirical coverage than the standard Kripkean causal/historical chain story.