A Rejoinder to Fara’s “‘Literal’ Uses of Proper Names”[*]
Robin Jeshion
University of Southern California
May 23, 2012
I greatly enjoyed Delia Fara’s spirited and clever response to “Names Not Predicates” (NNP). It is extremely clear, philosophically rich, and genuinely advances the debate about whether proper names are predicates. I will unfortunately only be able to address certain key issues here. My main goals will be to clarify the dialectic between us, and by way of doing so clarify the dialectic in NNP, and assess Fara’s analysis of the three main classes of examples she considers.
§1 Clarifications
Fara takes me to be advancing what she calls the Anti-Uniformity Argument against Predicativism. She thinks that I am arguing for the conclusion that predicativism is wrong -- that there are literal uses of predicative proper names that do not satisfy her Being Called Condition (BCC), and that, consequently, there is no unified meaning analysis of literal uses of predicative proper names. She also takes me to be arguing that predicativists lack justification for unifying the semantics of predicative uses of proper names with referential uses on the grounds that predicativists have justification for unifying their account of predicative uses of proper names with referential uses only if they can give a unified meaning analysis of all literally used predicative proper names.
In this, she misunderstands the overarching dialectic and the specifics of the argument in my paper. In NNP, I do not aim to refute predicativism. And I do not advance the Anti-Uniformity Argument against Predicativism that Fara attributes to me. It is an interesting argument, one deserving of discussion, but it is not mine.
The argument that I do present is that the predicativist’s own Uniformity Argument on behalf of predicativism, as a superior theory to referentialism, does not hold up. I also argue against three rationales that predicativists themselves have advanced to show why we should accept predicativism in the first place, in particular why we should accept certain examples of predicative uses of proper names as the canonical or normal predicative uses of proper names. I called these the Syntactic, the Semantic Dependence, and the Literal Rationales.
In NNP, I was explicit about my aims and dialectic: In §1, I announce that my main aim is “to dismantle the Uniformity Argument and so undermine the roots of the primary case for predicativism over referentialism.” §4 is devoted to laying out the Uniformity Argument that I am opposing. At the end of §7, where I summarize my main challenge to predicativism, I conclude that by virtue of the Uniformity argument, the predicativist does not have an advantage over the referentialist. In the last paragraph of the paper, I conclude by reminding the reader that my aims have been modest and almost exclusively critical: to undermine the Uniformity Argument advanced by predicativists and to establish that the three main rationales that predicativists have put forward on behalf of predicativism are misbegotten. So I was not advancing any kind of anti-Uniformity argument against predicativism. Nevertheless, there are various things that I do say (mostly infelicities) that surely encouraged Fara’s interpretation: I referred to one of the examples in §5 as a “counterexample” to BCC, by which I meant only that BCC did not offer the correct application conditions. I also noted that there would be a cost in terms of uniformity to the predicativist’s offering a distinct semantics to deal with some of my examples. That too could encourage interpreting my argument as aimed at refuting predicativism.
For the sake of clarity, I shall briefly reiterate the overarching structure of my main argument, correcting certain misimpressions along the way. I devoted §§1 and 2 to giving an overview of the state of the debate on predicativism, an initial presentation of the Uniformity Argument, and the Syntactic, Semantic, and Literal Rationales that predicativists have advanced for regarding a certain set of examples of uses of proper names as illustrating the normal, literal usage of proper names. In discussing these rationales, I was merely describing the (then) extant state of the debate, and its going assumptions. I was not endorsing them all, especially not the view that so-called metaphoric uses of proper names are rightly cordoned off as special because metaphorical.
In §4, I explicitly laid out the predicativist’s Uniformity Argument. The crucial premise of that argument is Uniformity Principle 1. That principle basically says that the superior semantic theory of proper names is the one that offers a uniform semantics for (what I called there) the apparently referential uses [1]-[4] and a certain specific class of (what I called there) apparently predicative uses, illustrated by [5]-[10]. I repeat them here for convenience.
Apparently Referential Uses of Proper Names
[1] Alfred studies in Princeton.
[2] Osama bin Laden is dead.
[3] Picasso painted Guernica.
[4] Stella is inside the museum.
Apparently Predicative Uses of Proper Names
[5] There are relatively few Alfreds in Princeton.
[6] An Alfred Russell joined the club today.
[7] Some Alfreds are crazy; some are sane.
[8] The youngest Teddy Kennedy bit my son.
[9] No doubt, many Osamas hate their name.
[10] Two Stellas are inside the museum.
It is this principle, Uniformity Principle 1, that I attribute to Burge and Fara and other predicativists, and not, as Fara claims, the Uber Uniformity Principle.[1] It is the predicativist’s assumption of Uniformity Principle 1 that is the source of problems for the Uniformity Argument.
I present my fundamental challenge in §5: that there is a series of examples that seem to be appropriately classified alongside [5]-[10] insofar as they too look to be apparently predicative uses of proper names yet the BCC does not give the correct truth (application) conditions to them. It is imperative to correctly understand how these examples fit in with my overall dialectic. Fara takes me to be presenting each in turn as an example of a non-metaphorical use of a proper name. Hence, given her attribution to me of (what she calls) Burge’s Claim that non-metaphorical usage entails literal usage, she takes me to be presenting each example as a literal use of a proper name for which the BCC gives the wrong application conditions, and that I conclude from this that predicativism is wrong and refuted.
This rests on misunderstanding. For one, I do not embrace Burge’s Claim. Indeed, like Fara, I deny it. (In NNP, I do not address the claim directly, but do comment in §6 that some examples can be construed as metaphors and others as “otherwise non-literal”.) Fortunately, none of Fara’s arguments about particular examples or my arguments essentially turns upon deeming a particular use metaphoric or non-metaphoric, so little turns on this here.
More fundamentally, though, I did not offer up the examples in §5 as a piece of an argument that predicativism is wrong. I offered them up as new examples of apparently predicative uses of proper names that any theory needs to address and that the predicativist is not in position to cordon off as obviously different in kind from the examples [5]-[10]. They needed to be considered side-by-side with examples [5]-[10]. What this means dialectically is that the predicativist is not entitled to simply assume without argument that examples [5]-[10] are the canonical examples of predicative uses of proper names that illustrate proper names’ normal application conditions.
This last point is crucial, so let us look more carefully at the background dialectic. In advancing their Uniformity Argument, Fara[2] and Burge argue as follows: Observe that “Alfreds” in “relatively few Alfreds” in sentence [5] and “Stellas” in “Two Stellas” in sentence [10] can, given their syntactic positions, “only be predicates”.[3] Furthermore, these predicates “Alfred” and “Stella” apply to all the things named “Alfred” and all the things named “Stella”, respectively, and to them only. Because “Alfreds” and “Stellas” can only be predicates in these sentences, and because in such sentences these terms are true of those and only those individuals that are named “Alfred” and “Stella”, respectively, and because we should seek uniform semantic explanations within our theories, we ought to regard BCC as supplying the “normal applicability condition” for proper names, including for [1]-[4].
Central to this argument is the assumption that the occurrence of “Alfreds” in sentence [5] and “Stellas” in sentence [10] are semantically paradigmatic. That is, according to Fara and Burge, these sentences themselves exemplify the “normal meaning” or “normal usage” of the two proper names; they are sentences representative of literal, normal uses of “Alfred” and “Stella”.
My series of examples in §5 was aimed at challenging this assumption qua assumption. Because of the large and varied set of examples to which the BCC does not deliver the right application conditions, the predicativist needs to argue or somehow justify, not assume, that sentences [5]-[10] exemplify the normal, literal usage of proper names.
I shall henceforth refer to examples [5]-[10] and their kin as BCC-friendly examples. My main argument in NNP can be seen as presenting a challenge to the predicativist: demonstrate that the BCC-friendly examples are syntactically or semantically different in kind from the examples in §5.[4]
§2: Fara’s response about deferred interpretation and resemblance examples
Fara classified the set of examples I discussed (and others she added to them) into three main types, what she called deferred interpretation examples, resemblance examples, and Romanov examples. She regards these as three mutually exclusive groups, by which I mean that, for her, if an example is a deferred interpretation example, it is neither a resemblance example nor a Romanov example; if it is a resemblance example, it is neither a deferred interpretation example nor a Romanov example; and if it is a Romanov example, it is neither a deferred interpretation example nor a resemblance example.[5] Her main strategy is to divide and conquer: to argue that none of these three types of examples threaten the predicativist’s position that all literal uses of proper names satisfy the BCC. In my initial discussion of how she deals with the three types of examples, I just grant that this is the appropriate way to classify the set of examples under discussion, that the three types are mutually exclusive, and that she has correctly classified particular examples as instances of deferred interpretation, resemblance, or Romanov examples. In the final section of this paper, I circle back and assess these assumptions.
As I explained above, I use the set of examples presented in §5 as a way to challenge the predicativist’s assumption that the BCC-friendly examples are semantically special insofar as they illustrate the normal or default use of proper names. I do not intend them as counterexamples to the predicativist’s position that all literal uses of proper names satisfy BCC. In order to bridge this dialectical disconnect, in discussing what Fara says about each type of example, I shall do two things. I shall evaluate her analysis as a defense of predicativism – that is, I assess what she says as a reply had my examples been constructed as a refutation of predicativism (which they were not). Then I shall evaluate her analysis as an answer to my challenge to the predicativist to justify the assumption that the BCC-friendly examples illustrate the normal usage of proper names.
Deferred interpretation examples include costume examples, artwork examples, and role-playing examples. A costume example occurs when [11] is used to mean that two individuals dressed as Osama bin Laden came to the Halloween party.
[11] Two Osama bin Ladens came to the Halloween party.
An artwork example occurs when [10] is used to mean that two paintings by [Frank] Stella are inside the museum.
[10] Two Stellas are inside the museum
A role-playing example occurs when [12] is used to mean that there are two persons who are playing the role of Hamlet at the party.
[12] There are two Hamlets at the party
According to Fara, for a use of a proper name to count as a deferred interpretation example, there must be “some one specific ‘salient functional relation’ between the deferred usage of the expression” and its “normal usage”.[6] In this, she follows Nunberg’s condition on deferred interpretation: the subject must bear some single “specific relation to things that fall under the predicatively used noun.”[7]
Resemblance examples, she says, form a distinct class. They include my Lena example as well as the set of examples that have previously been cordoned off in the literature for being metaphoric. Upon seeing Lena come into the room with her three daughters, two that physically resemble her, one that does not, I say
[13] Two little Lenas just arrived
to mean that two daughters that closely physically resemble Lena have arrived. Likewise, I may say
[14] George Wallace is a Napoleon
to mean that George Wallace behaves like Napoleon (in some particular contextually salient manner).
Fara offers the same type of defense for both deferred interpretation examples and resemblance examples. She regards both sets of examples as non-literal uses of proper names, hence the scare quotes in her paper’s title, but she does not rest her case on whether we say that the uses are literal or non-literal, metaphoric or non-metaphoric. Instead, she argues by analogy. The deferred interpretation and resemblance examples with proper names are not problematic because common count nouns exhibit parallel uses. Here is her argument: