1 research outputs found
âThe functional fallacy: on the supposed dangers of name repetitionâ
Whenever the theme of personal naming comes up, both in academic debate and in public
opinion, we encounter a tendency to take for granted that there is some sort of collective
interest in the clear and unambiguous individuation of persons through their names.
âSocietyâ or âcultureâ, it is presumed, would not function as well if that failed, so homonymy
is automatically taken to be dysfunctional. This kind of explanation carries a deep
sense of validity in common sense attitudes and it clearly imposes itself upon all who have
discussed this issue over the past few decades, both in history and anthropology. In this
essay, I argue that, on the one hand, there are fallacious implications to this explanatory
proclivity, to which I call the functional fallacy, and, on the other hand, that it finds its
power of evidence in the implicit expectations that characterize late modern thinking concerning
what is a person and how persons are constituted. I identify three dispositions that
need to be overcome: sociocentrism, individualism and the paradigm of the soul