Proper Names: Their Meaning and Reference

Core Idea

Proper names pose a distinctive problem for semantic theory: they seem to contribute nothing to the truth-conditions of sentences containing them beyond identifying an individual, yet they convey no descriptive content. Names appear to be purely referential, depending on facts about the world (causal history, current facts) rather than conceptual content. Different theories explain how names acquire their referents: descriptivist accounts, causal-historical accounts, and hybrid accounts.

Explainer

From your study of Kripke's causal theory of naming, you already have the central modern account in hand. The question is why proper names were puzzling in the first place — and why Kripke's answer was so revolutionary. The puzzle begins with a simple observation: when you use a name like "Aristotle," what determines which person you are talking about? One natural answer is that you associate some cluster of descriptions with the name — "the pupil of Plato," "the teacher of Alexander," "the author of the Nicomachean Ethics" — and whoever uniquely fits that description is the referent.

This descriptivist view, held by Frege and Russell in varying forms, has an appealing explanation of meaning: names are disguised descriptions, and grasping the name means knowing the associated description. But Kripke's modal arguments exposed its failures. Suppose Aristotle had died young and written nothing. On descriptivism, "Aristotle" would no longer refer to Aristotle — it would refer to whoever actually taught Alexander, which might have been someone else entirely. This seems wrong: we can coherently say "Aristotle might have died young and never written anything," which presupposes that "Aristotle" *refers to the same individual* in that counterfactual scenario. Names are rigid designators — they pick out the same individual in every possible world in which that individual exists, regardless of which descriptions happen to be true of them. Definite descriptions are not rigid: "the teacher of Alexander" refers to whoever occupied that role in each scenario, not necessarily Aristotle.

Kripke's causal-historical account replaces descriptions with a chain of transmission. A name enters circulation through an initial baptism — a naming event where the name is attached to an individual, either by ostension ("I name this child 'Sophia'") or description-fixing ("We'll call whoever discovered this planet 'Neptune'"). Subsequent uses of the name get their reference from this chain: you picked up "Aristotle" from books and teachers, who got it from others, stretching back through generations of use to an initial event of naming. You don't need to know any true descriptions of Aristotle to refer to him; you just need to be a participant in the right causal chain. This explains how proper names can be *empty of descriptive content* while still having determinate reference.

The theory is not without complications. What counts as being in "the right" causal chain? If a name is misapplied (early Greeks named a constellation, but the name later migrated to a different object), does the chain still transmit the original reference? What about purely fictional names, or names for abstract objects? Hybrid accounts try to preserve the insight that names are rigid and not merely descriptions while acknowledging that descriptive content sometimes plays a role in fixing reference — especially in the initial baptism, where a description is often used to identify the named object. The broader lesson is that reference is not a relation between a word and a concept in your head, but a relation between a word, a community of speakers, and an object in the world — a fundamentally social and historical phenomenon.