An alternate approach to "Naming"

Dear friend RC,

The more I think about the problem of naming and Bertrand Russell’s solution via the theory of types (i.e. Scott is the author of Waverly ) the more I think it may be a philosophical overkill.

There is a human who lives next door. How do I know he is a human? It has the attributes of a human: he looks human, he walks on two feet, he drives a car, he talks to me, and so on. Could I call him a human if he had no attributes whatsoever? We know “things” by their attributes (extensions?). Look at your waste can and see if you can think of it without recognizing it attributes.

How do we know a bird is a bird? Plato worried about this. He would probably have said that if this particular bird resembles the "heavenly form" of a bird, it is a bird. I would merely simplify by saying that if it has wings, if it flies, it is likely to be a bird. Could he be an airplane? Without describing a thing with an infinite number of attributes there is always a possibility of something else having the same attributes. In my opinion, this even applies to Plato's treatment, but that's another story. So read on.

Let’s get back to my neighbor. Could he be non-human? Of course! He could be a machine with exactly the same attributes as my neighbor. In a possible universe (beloved by philosophers), it is quite possible that my neighbor is not human. But let’s forget this for the moment. How do I know he is my neighbor? He has lived next door for 10 years, he mows the lawn, he has cook-outs during holidays, his children mess up my flower garden, and so on. Could he fake being my neighbor? Of course. But what is the difference between my neighbor and a person who fakes being my neighbor? Ask Bertrand Russell. Suppose I ask my neighbor his name. His says, “my name is John Neighbor”. So I call him Neighbor. Whatever I said about him when he was simply my neighbor is still true when I refer to him with a capital “N”. Suppose I call him John. He is still the same person with all those attributes. Of course there are zillions of Johns who are not my neighbors just as there are zillions of humans who are not my neighbors. But that is true of every “thing”.

I tell you about John my neighbor. Do you need Russell to know who I mean? Of course not. When I tell you that John kept his loud party up all night do you know who I mean without Russell? Do you even need to have seen John to know who I mean? Of course not. Suppose my other neighbor is called Scott. When I tell you that in my absence Scott mowed my lawn you don’t have to be a philosopher to know who Scott is. Of course Scott is not Scott without attributes, and many of these can be the attributes of non-Scotts. But that is the predicament of Life. When I tell you my car broke down you have to think of some attributes or you cannot think of my car. So what is the difference between Scott who is my neighbor and who mowed my lawn and Sir Walter Scott who lived in the eighteen hundreds and wrote Ivanhoe? In my opinion very little. You know my neighbor from my description and we know Sir Walter from the testimony of others. If it turns out that I lied or Sir Walter’s contemporaries had the fact wrong, well that’s life.

But read on for a slightly more detailed treatment.


AN ALTERNATE APPROACH TO NAMING

For several decades of my life I thought that Sir Walter Scott was just Sir Walter Scott, without thinking anything else. Then I read Bertrand Russell, came across his theory of descriptions, and life was never the same. After that I was willing to substitute “the person who wrote the novel Ivanhoe “(I always preferred it to Waverly that Russell used in his examples—but this has nothing to with the topic. Sorry!) and figured that was the end of the story. That is until I read Kripke’s book, Name and Naming, and realized that things were even more complicated than that. Since then I have been trying to think of a simpler way to figure out who we mean when we use the name of somebody. The following is my attempt at an approach. It is based on two concepts, pointing and designation. You will have to read this short but by no means easy paper (so my friends tell me) to understand what these mean and follow my suggested approach. It would require a more monumental ego than mine to think that I can improve on these giants of philosophy, but I think I may be on to something.

In reading the approach please be indulgent about my nomenclature; I admit it is not elegant, and it may even be slightly confusing. Instead of hurling unheard invectives at my head, try to see the spirit behind the letters.

Undoubtedly, I got most of my ideas for the following from Kripke's Naming and Necessity. Familiarity with that work would help the reader with the following.

I think the entire problem of Names and Naming got off on the wrong foot. It got tangled up, unnecessarily with existence and non-existence, and with descriptions.

At least two specific, related problems emerged. We, who never met Scott can, according to Frege/Russell translate Scott to the description: "the author of Waverly", and this, supposedly unique, description "the author of Waverly" can now be used in place of Scott. The first, typically philosophical question is whether the two are identical. To start with, nothing is. This string of letters: "Scott" are not identical to this, second string of letters "Scott", because they have different temporal and special coordinates, are made up of not identical pieces of ink, whose molecules are not even identical to each other, nor its atoms, because they have different electrons, not one of which can be identical to another because of the Pauli exclusion principle, and could not even in theory be identical since, according to the Uncertainty Principle, their location and momentum could not be ascertained simultaneously; furthermore, it doesn't even make sense to ask the question of location and momentum even in principle. So strict identicity (or, identity) is an impossible requirement even in principle.

Even Aristotle's A is not not A can not be satisfied, since in nature there is no "not not A". Everything is "not A", including this "A" on this page. Instead, what may be discussed profitably is whether "the author of Waverly" may be used in place of Scott. Well, yes, and of course no. Because, so the argument goes, Scott may not have been the "real author", or there could be another novel Waverly, or he really wrote Maverly, which was renamed accidentally as Waverly. The number of counterfactual scenarios philosophers can dream up is truly amazing. All of this is summed up flippantly in the saying that the author of Hamlet was not Shakespeare but another person whose name was Shakespeare. And off we go into a Philosopher's La La Land of speculations, discussing the obvious, that in the counterfactual case Scott is not even synonymous with the "author of Waverly". Obviously, when the phrase "the author of Waverly" does not uniquely describe its author, it is not a unique descriptor. Of course, I am joking, "the author of Waverly" uniquely describes someone, except not necessarily Scott, but its real author, whoever he may be. Of course, that person is not "necessarily" the author, since one can imagine a "world" (a favorite expression of the School of Counterfactualists, including Kripke) in which Waverly was not written by that author either. In fact I can imagine a world in which Waverly must needs be described by one and only person, though I cannot imagine a world in which Waverly need not have been written or created by someone or something. And off we could go again....

The second related problem has to do with existence. Moses’s existence is one of Kripke’s favorite example. If Moses is known by his aggregate descriptions like "the person who brought down the tablets from Mt. Sinai", "the person that led the Jews out of Egypt", "the person who made the Red Sea part", etc., how many of these must be true for him to have existed? And since, to avoid Kripke's sin of circularity, none of these descriptions are necessarily unique to Moses, he might have existed even if he did not do any of these. What if these were done by someone else? Would he be called Moses? Did he necessarily exist? What if his name too was Moses? And another merry-go-round can start, replete with learned definitions. Kripke spends endless time on these, without resolving the issue.

Suffice it to say that I believe the above all miss the point. I would like to show an alternate approach, which avoids the above logical cul-de-sacs.

Of course, like so many amateur philosophers, I probably oversimplified the above situation, except to say that the situation is confusing. But a detailed discussion is unnecessary for the following.

Names started for reasons of simplicity. So let us see how the process may have started. For instance, a hypothetical couple on a remote island begetting and giving birth to a baby need only to refer to it as 'he' or "she', or, if they know the meaning of the terms, "son" or "daughter". If anyone were to ask them who they mean by these terms, they could simply point to the baby, saying "this thing here". For this approach, pointing is essential. And accepting pointing as a means of designation equally so. If pointing and designation are not accepted as a unique reference, my approach will not work, but then there is no hope for an intelligent treatment of this subject, because it means that nothing subsequent to this can work.

Now it may come to pass that the couple has another baby. If the first is a boy, the second a girl, they may just continue referring to them by those terms. The terms are not names, nor are they descriptions. To me, they are tags, simplifying the language from having to say "this thing here" etc., or saying "the thing that now moved from there to here", or "who is sleeping", etc. If both children are boys, the couple may well resort to the Chinese custom of calling them, NOT NAMING THEM #1 son and #2 son, etc. Now there is no problem with a stranger coming and referring to the #1 son as "the person you two call #1 son". Contrary to Frege and (pace) Russell, there is no description assigned to the term. I use the neutral word "term" since I cannot think of a better one: I hesitate to use the word "designation", because it comes with almost as much philosophical baggage as "name" or "referent". Let us stick with "term".

So a third person can ask the second about #1 son, and is told that he is referred to as "the person the original two call #1 son". So the third person can refer to the child as "the person to whom the second person refers as 'the person the original two call #1 son'". Please note the reference within the reference, marked by different quotation marks, or rather single and double quotation marks. I could go on ad infinitum. For instance, a person on another island can hear about #1 son. If asked who he means, he could recite the string: {the person I was told about by the fourth person, [who referred to it as (the person to whom the second person refers as {the person the original two call #1 son})]}, (I am not sure of the quotation marks anymore, so I use parentheses, hope I get the point across). The point is that by this method it is ALWAYS POSSIBLE TO ESTABLISH A DIRECT LINK TO THE PERSON WITHOUT NAMING HIM, This link contains an initial pointing and only reference to persons who were told by other persons about other persons.

Of course our ancestors were practical people, not given to playing infinity games, so they attached a name to #1 son, probably something like Tall, Red, Short, etc, not with the aim of describing #1 son but to have a simple tag. From here on the link still operates 'the person to whom his parents refer as Tall' can be iterated endlessly, like I showed above with #1 son. If Tall did something, we can still go on with the chain: Short said that Red saw Tall do something. The point is that each statement can be verified, and the process proceeds one step at a time. Hence only direct observations and pointing are involved.

Before I go on, let me shorten the above procedure by abbreviating the long string of “person “n” said that person (n-1) said that person (n-2) said that person (n-3) said that…the first person said
as the “string” of Ps(n)=(P(n)<>Waverly “. Instead, the construction would require to say [Ps(n) Scott], meaning “the person who heard that the other person heard that his brother saw that the last person in the chain saw Scott. In other words, [Ps(n) Scott] means Scott definitely and rigidly. Or if Scott has the Fingerprint no. 2,3,5,9,0…., than Fingerprint 2,3,5,9,0….is Scott. There is no descriptive entity called "the author of Waverly “ We could, of course, construct a chain (see below) that starts with a person who saw Scott writing Waverly in which case Scott would rigidly be the author of Waverly .

Instead of the ontological problem concerning the status of “the author of Waverly” there would merely be a simple question of whether the information of all P's and ours is correct. If it turns out that P1 saw Scott (alias Fingerprint 2,3,5,9,0…) write a manuscript titled Waverly, and P2 heard him open the publisher's door, and P3 saw the publisher pay him, and P4 printed the book, and P5 wrote about it in a newspaper which was read by P6, etc, etc, .... then we have reason to say Scott wrote the novel Waverly. If the statements are incorrect, it must be only because one of the elements in the P-chain contains a mistake.

There is no counterfactual case regarding Scott. There are an infinite number of things Scott did not do, which doesn't mean he didn't exist, and there are an infinite number of potential beings who might have written Waverly. But not the book described by the chain of Ps. I don't know about the status of an entity "the author of Waverly”. He may not be real or not exist. But the way I see it the person Scott (i.e. Fingerprint 2,3,5,9,0…. ) is real, as much as anything empirical can be real. In my opinion, the description "the author of Waverly" is nothing but a string of ink pattern, not an alternative to a name.

Moses? What about Kripke’s favorite Moses? If he was fingerprinted as F 1,2,3,4,9,8… and/or a different chain of Ps reported to see or hear him, he existed as the subject of verifiable claims. Without anyone reporting about him, his existence is analogous to that of the sound of a falling tree in an unobserved forest.