Alice Damirjian: "Names that Misbehave"

Alice Damirjian, Stockholm University: "Names that Misbehave: Is Inherent Polysemy a Threat to Kripke’s Picture?”

Abstract
Since the publication of Naming and Necessity, philosophical debates concerning the semantics of proper names have largely been centered around two of Kripke’s main theses: The thesis that proper names rigidly designate their bearers, and the thesis that proper names do not semantically encode any information about their bearers. However, these debates suffer from an almost exclusive focus on personal names. As a result, the currently most influential semantic theories of proper names are all primarily, if not exclusively, informed by the linguistic behavior of personal names but assumed to apply equally well to all classes of proper names. That this has led us to ignore a feature that is distinctive of at least some proper names: Inherent polysemy.

Many proper names, particularly names for countries, exhibit inherent polysemy. That is, such names systematically refer to several related but ontologically distinct entities. For example, ‘France’ systematically refers to a geographical location, a collection of people, and a political entity. Furthermore, and as is widely recognized in the literature on co-predication, these three readings of ‘France’ do not mark the name as lexically ambiguous. The different readings can be selectively triggered by different predicates in one and the same construction without the construction being rendered unacceptable or zeugmatic. Consider:

(1) France is a large French-speaking republic.

The inherent polysemy of ‘France’ and other names like it is in tension with Kripke’s two theses. The mere observation that the reference of some proper names is easily shifted conflicts with Kripke’s rigidity thesis. Furthermore, the apparent semantic variability of ‘France’ can be taken as intuitive evidence that the name must semantically encode at least some information about its bearers. In this paper, explore these issues and the prospects for preserving Kripke’s theses. To this end, I discuss four different approaches the phenomenon of inherent polysemy, some of which are more compatible with Kripke’s picture than others. I show that all approaches are flawed, where this is because they either fail to support both of Kripke’s theses, fail to account for some of the relevant data, or have various unattractive consequences. I conclude that inherently polysemous proper names remain a threat to Kripke’s overall picture and discuss some of the potential conclusions that one could draw from this observation.