Defining Marks: A Defense of the Predicate View of Proper Names

At the start of the last century philosophical consensus was that names were more or less like descriptions, and, at its end, that names were utterly unlike descriptions. The former view, Classical Descriptivism, had it that each individual’s name was its name in virtue of the individual uniquely fitting some implicit characterization. Names were thus believed to have structure at the level of content: they expressed properties an object can have or fail to have. This view was in turn challenged beginning in the 1970s, most notably by Saul Kripke. Kripke’s claim was that an individual’s name has no structure at the level of content: it simply stands for a given individual. A name cannot characterize anything, and has no “meaning” save what it names. Kripke’s view, Referentialism, in turn became the new orthodoxy. In my dissertation, I challenge the arguments that have lead us to believe names and descriptions are expressions of two different kinds. But I do not vindicate the old orthodoxy. I chart a middle path between Classical Descriptivism and Referentialism that can recapture many virtues of the former view, while respecting the linguistic data that lead to its abandonment. I do this in defending a competing theory, one that has recently grown in prominence: the Predicate View of names. The Predicate View offers a radically different conception of what a name is, one tied neither to an individual referent (as with Referentialism), nor to some set of properties an individual might uniquely bear (as with Classical Descriptivism). Instead, on the Predicate View a name such as “Bambi” expresses a property, bearing-“Bambi”, satisfied by all and only Bambis. To fully substantiate this approach requires an investigation of how definiteness — a linguistic marker of something being unique relative to some context, as when “the cat” refers to some specific cat thanks to “the” — is realized cross-linguistically, and how this bears on the way a name like “Bambi” successfully picks out some particular Bambi. I take the proper formulation and defense of the Predicate View to be a preliminary contribution to such an investigation. What it promises is a more refined understanding both of how language expresses thoughts about individuals, and how this language is related to the language of properties, i.e. ways individuals can be. Names are not proprietary to individuals on the Predicate View. They express shareable properties, they have structure at the level of content, and they have a meaning, which can be characterized schematically: for any name “N”, its meaning is given by bearing-“N”. The Predicate View does not assume the tight connection between name meaning and name denotation than both Referentialism and Classical Descriptivism do (albeit in different ways). The name “Bambi” corresponds to some set of individuals that satisfy bearing-“Bambi”, but does not “refer” to that set or indeed any member of it. Which individuals gets referred to with the name “Bambi” by speakers is a distinct matter, and the denotation of a name is to be understood in terms of acts of referring. In this respect, the Predicate View differs fundamentally from both Referentialism and Classical Descriptivism. Indeed, it differs more from both of these accounts than they do from one another. The Predicate View assumes a very different structure for name bearing, i.e. how names themselves are individuated and how names are related to what they name. I show in Chapters 1 and 2 that the semantic behavior of names — especially with respect to time and modality — provides evidence that the Predicate View gets the structure of name bearing right. I argue further that data which were taken to support Referentialism are equally well explained by the Predicate View. This runs counter to a common assumption — that the Predicate View faces a serious problem with modality, since it cannot deliver the result that names are rigid. I show that, on the contrary, the Predicate View offers a more nuanced and explanatory account of name rigidity than Referentialism. The Predicate View also explains a neglected fact that Referentialism cannot: that there are non-rigid occurrences of names. The picture that emerges is one on which names are predominantly rigid, but where they occur non-rigidly as a result of certain presuppositions being satisfied. I conclude that we should abandon Referentialism and embrace the Predicate View. In Chapter 3, I defend the View against a challenge due to John Hawthorne and David Manley in The Reference Book. There they argue that the most dramatic data favoring the Predicate View may have nothing to do with names at all, being adequately explained by an all-purpose mechanism of metalinguistic ascent. Why not say that in constructions like “I know three Caitlins” we are quantifying over what are strictly speaking ambiguous names (in the Referentialist’s sense), rather than revise our semantics in the way the Predicate View proposes? I argue that in fact on a very natural elaboration of the basic idea behind the Predicate View, the cases of “metalinguistic ascent” that Hawthorne and Manley have in mind are naturally explained on the Predicate View itself, blunting their dialectical force

Speech Acts: The Contemporary Theoretical Landscape

What makes it the case that an utterance constitutes an illocutionary act of a given kind? This is the central question of speech-act theory. Answers to it—i.e., theories of speech acts—have proliferated. Our main goal in this chapter is to clarify the logical space into which these different theories fit. We begin, in Section 1, by dividing theories of speech acts into five families, each distinguished from the others by its account of the key ingredients in illocutionary acts. Are speech acts fundamentally a matter of convention or intention? Or should we instead think of them in terms of the psychological states they express, in terms of the effects that it is their function to produce, or in terms of the norms that govern them? In Section 2, we take up the highly influential idea that speech acts can be understood in terms of their effects on a conversation’s context or “score”. Part of why this idea has been so useful is that it allows speech-act theorists from the five families to engage at a level of abstraction that elides their foundational disagreements. In Section 3, we investigate some of the motivations for the traditional distinction between propositional content and illocutionary force, and some of the ways in which this distinction has been undermined by recent work. In Section 4, we survey some of the ways in which speech-act theory has been applied to issues outside semantics and pragmatics, narrowly construed

WetNet operations

WetNet is an interdisciplinary Earth science data analysis and research project with an emphasis on the study of the global hydrological cycle. The project goals are to facilitate scientific discussion, collaboration, and interaction among a selected group of investigators by providing data access and data analysis software on a personal computer. The WetNet system fulfills some of the functionality of a prototype Product Generation System (PGS), Data Archive and Distribution System (DADS), and Information Management System for the Distributed Active Archive Center. The PGS functionality is satisfied in WetNet by processing the Special Sensor Microwave/Imager (SSM/I) data into a standard format (McIDAS) data sets and generating geophysical parameter Level II browse data sets. The DADS functionality is fulfilled when the data sets are archived on magneto optical cartridges and distributed to the WetNet investigators. The WetNet data sets on the magneto optical cartridges contain the complete WetNet processing, catalogue, and menu software in addition to SSM/I orbit data for the respective two week time period

Prospectus, December 7, 2016

EIGHT PARKLAND FACULTY FACE NON-RENEWAL OF CONTRACTS; Humans of Parkland: Destiny Norris; Giertz Gallery exhabition highlights the art in drawing; Cobra basketball teams fighting hard in 2016-17 season; Trump taps former campaign rival Carson as housing secretary; Teens, young artists among California warehouse fire victims; After Trump rift at Liberty University, students find unity; McDonald\u27s CEO: Chain still plans to expand in the US again; During first look at wildfire rubble, residents in a daze; Family pushes for cyberbullying laws after teen\u27s suicide; Moments from Parkland\u27s Charlie Brown Christmashttps://spark.parkland.edu/prospectus_2016/1030/thumbnail.jp

Senior Projects in a Rural School

This article discusses senior projects in a rural school. Technology and a school-university partnership enabled high school faculty members to implement the Senior Project. The authors describe the process of change, the project requirements, and the learning that resulted for students and faculty

Prospectus, June 7, 2018

Article Highlight: April 11, 2018 Parkland Students, Staff Volunteer in Flint, Letter to the Editor, Article Highlight: Feb. 28, 2018 Parkland Tuition Remains Unaltered for First Time Since \u2792, Commencement 2018https://spark.parkland.edu/prospectus_2018/1014/thumbnail.jp

Prospectus, September 28, 2016

PARKLAND SURGICAL TECHNOLOGY ON CUTTING EDGE; Humans of Parkland: Michelle Wright; Police: 5 shot, 1 dead, after fight at Illinois campus party; Food pantry helps Parkland students; People around the world react to first Trump-Clinton debate; The Pledge, the national anthem, patriotism; Pygmalion highlights from 2016; Call for Entries for the 2016 CUDO PRO SHOWhttps://spark.parkland.edu/prospectus_2016/1023/thumbnail.jp

Prospectus, October 19, 2016

OLYMPIANS, PARALYMPIANS HONORED BY DODDS PARK MONUMENT; Humans of Parkland: Katie Kuska; Cuba next destination for study abroad; Student groups talk about race; Zika Virus topic of next World of Science Talk at planetarium; Same-day voter registration still an option; C-U Symphony Orchestra presents \u27Spooktacular\u27 concert Oct. 29 at Virginia Theatre; In \u27Tower,\u27 a mass shooting before anyone knew what that was; Heroin crime immunity yields mixed results, AP review finds; High school grad rates increase; A few highlights from Giertz Gallery alum showhttps://spark.parkland.edu/prospectus_2016/1025/thumbnail.jp

Prospectus, November 9, 2016

RADIO DRAMA BY COMM. STUDENTS TO AIR ON WPCD; Humans of Parkland: Thom Schnarre; Club Latino a \u27family-like community\u27; Official: 40 to 50 buildings damaged in Oklahoma quake; Parkland Cobra soccer teams 2016; Reasons to go to China; Obama reveals private living areas of White House; Register for Parkland College Spring 2017 Classes; Google speaker is secretary, radio...and work in progress; Students from Okinawa, Japan visit Parklandhttps://spark.parkland.edu/prospectus_2016/1027/thumbnail.jp

“What is a referendum?” How we might open up pre-vote TV debates to genuine public scrutiny

The 2015 TV election debates proved their civic value – as they had in 2010, write Stephen Coleman (left), Nick Anstead, Jay G Blumler, Giles Moss and Matt Homer. But in these edited extracts from a University of Leeds report, Democracy on Demand?, Dr Anstead questions whether Twitter is – as some media organisations seemed to imply – representative of public opinion. The authors also urge the media to experiment with the format of any TV debates during the EU referendum campaign to make them more responsive to the public’s questions and reactions