CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2013
| Author | Popescu, Serban Alexandru |
|---|---|
| Title | The Description Theory of Names |
| Summary | My goal in this dissertation is to present and defend a version of Descriptivism that can coherently retain pre-theoretical intuitions about the relationship between proper names and definite descriptions, and successfully answer arguments adduced against it. There are three important claims I believe must be made in order to achieve this. The first is to hold a Cartesian view regarding singular thoughts, that is, to hold that a thought is singular because of its structural features, and not because the subject who entertains it is acquainted with a certain existent. The second is to assert that singular thoughts expressed by the use of a proper name are composed of dynamic senses. There are two consequences of this second claim. The first is that the identity conditions for a singular thought do not entail concept-by-concept identity. The second consequence is that a proper version of Descriptivism must focus on tokens of proper names. The view that answers best to both demands is, I believe, a version of Cluster Descriptivism that is supplemented by the idea that the weights of the descriptions present in a cluster are adjusted according to contextually-available information. The last claim that I shall make is that definite descriptions included in the cluster that gives the meaning of a proper name are two-dimensional singular terms. The claim can be rephrased by saying that the historical connection between “the” and “that” is not mere contingency. As an added bonus, uses of an incomplete definite description are treated similar to those of a proper name: any completion of the description by qualitative material that singles out the intended object is viewed as communicating the same singular thought. |
| Supervisor | Robinson, Howard |
| Department | Philosophy PhD |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2013/fphpos01.pdf |
Visit the CEU Library.
© 2007-2021, Central European University