Nicholas Wilson (King’s College London)

Millianism, Empty Names and Unfilled Propositions

Millians who maintain that a proper name’s semantic content (or meaning) is just its bearer face a problem with meaningful empty names. In this paper I argue that the Millian response to this problem which claims that sentences containing empty names express ‘unfilled’ or ‘gappy’ propositions (Braun 1993, Adams, Fuller and Stecker 1997) creates more problems than it solves. Amongst other things, it has the counterintuitive consequence that otherwise identical sentences containing distinct empty names express the same proposition. In the final section, I defend an entirely Kripke-proof obstinately rigidified descriptivism, according to which any proper name n has the same semantic content as the obstinately rigidified description ^┌the bearer of n in the actual world^┐ where the phrase ‘the actual world’ is to be understood non-indexically as referring to a single, unique possible world.

This paper is divided into four sections. In section 2, I present the most compelling formulation of this Millian response as found in Braun (1993) and elaborated upon in Adams and Stecker (1994) and Adams, Fuller and Stecker (1997). In particular, I detail both Braun’s and Adams, Fuller and Stecker’s characterisations of unfilled propositions and their solutions to two problems involving empty names. In section 3, I argue that it is a counterintuitive and ultimately unacceptable consequence of Braun’s and Adams, Fuller and Stecker’s solutions to these problems that otherwise identical sentences containing distinct empty names express the same proposition. Specifically, I claim that both Braun’s and Adams, Fuller and Stecker’s attempts to explain away this consequence are ultimately unsuccessful. In section 4, I argue that, contra Braun, unfilled propositions are unlikely to possess truth conditions and that, even if they did, they would certainly not possess the particular truth conditions ascribed to them by Braun.

Finally, in section 5, I articulate and defend a novel and entirely Kripke-proof form of descriptivism which I call The Obstinately Rigidified Description Theory of proper names (or ORDT for short), according to which any proper name n has the same semantic content (or meaning) as the obstinately rigid definite description ^┌the bearer of n in the actual world^┐, where the phrase ‘the actual world’ is to be understood non-indexically as referring to a single, unique possible world.

I highlight three attractive characteristics of ORDT: (i) ORDT, qua description theory, is independently and intuitively motivated (Frege’s Puzzle, empty names); (ii) ORDT, qua rigidified description theory, has been deliberately designed to resist Kripke’s (1980) objections to ordinary description theories (in particular, Kripke’s Circularity Objection); and (iii) ORDT, qua obstinately rigidified description theory, is capable of accounting for the obstinate rigidity of proper names.

It is intended that the combination of these characteristics and the articulation of them given here suffices to provide some support for the idea that ORDT constitutes an interesting and viable theoretical option for a theory of the semantic content of proper names, worth considering as an alternative to Millianism.