Descriptivism Defended

• Published in: Noûs (Bloomington, Indiana) Vol. 36; no. 3; pp. 408 - 435
• Main Author: Nelson, Michael
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Boston, USA and Oxford, UK Blackwell Publishing, Inc 01.09.2002; Blackwell Publishers; Blackwell
• Subjects: Cognitive Processes; Definite descriptions; Descriptivism; Grammatical clauses; Intuition; Language Thought Relationship; Onomastics; Overman; Philosophical analysis; Philosophical logics. Philosophy of language; Philosophy; Philosophy of Language; Proper names; Propositional attitudes; Semantics; Sentences; Word Meaning; Contents; Semantics; Reference; Epistemology;Philosophy of Science; Cognitive; Rigidity; Causality; Descriptivism; Modality; Kripke (S. A.)
• ISSN: 0029-4624; 1468-0068
• DOI: 10.1111/1468-0068.00378

Rigidified causal descriptivism, defined as a thesis that the content of any name can be given by a definite description specifying the entity in the causal-historical chain leading to a given use of the name, is defended against Scott Soames's arguments against its component subtheses by modifying the description to specify "the subject of this dossier," following a proposal by Graeme Forbes (1990). The claim that the content of a proper name is given by a mental dossier description is termed rigidified Forbesian descriptivism, & two versions of it are shown to hold against Soames's objections: (1) the semantic content of the dossier description is identical to that of the name in context, & (2) the dossier description makes explicit the thought in the speaker's mind when using the name on a given occasion. 68 References. J. Hitchcock