Blogosophy

Proper Names as DescriptionsThere's something

Proper Names as Descriptions

There's something that strikes me as a little odd about Bertrand Russell's theory (in The Problems of Philosophy) that proper names are really descriptions of the object in question. For example (at least for people who didn't know Julius Caesar personally), according to Russell if you have a thought involving Julius Caesar, the name Julius Caesar really stands for a description along the lines of 'the founder of the Roman Empire', 'the man who was assassinated on the Ides of March' or 'the man whose name was Julius Caesar ', although the exact content of the description will vary from person to person. The only constant is that the object described will be the same object for everyone using the name correctly.
What strikes me as odd is this: almost without exception, any and all of the individual pieces of that description could be wrong as a matter of empirical fact--and yet we would still intend in using the name that it stand for that particular person, and moreover would be understood by others as doing so. For instance, one could easily imagine the following conversation:
Trurl: "I was wondering whether I should read one of Bertrand Russell's books the other day, and I was thinking about starting with the Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding ; what do you think?"
Klapaucias: "Who?"
Trurl: "You know, Bertrand Russell, the French philosopher who wrote Prologomena to Any Future Metaphysic  and Ecce Homo "
Klapaucias: "Bertrand Rusell was English, and he didn't write either of those. He did  write The Problems of Philosophy  and the Principia Mathematica ."
Trurl: "Right, him. So do you think I should read his books or not?"
Klapaucias: "Definitely."
I think the above exchange makes perfect sense (although it would also make sense if Klapaucias asked whether Bertrand Russell was really the philosopher whom Trurl meant, and not Kant, Nietzche, Hume, or someone else entirely) and the reason that it makes sense is because of the single exception--the one that we can't be wrong about. Of all the descriptions that might come to mind when we think of Russell, the one that we really mean in most cases is 'the man whose name was Bertrand Russell.' Everything else that we might believe about him can easily be amended in the light of new information, but that Bertrand Russell's name was not really Bertrand Russell is impossible to understand except in a context something like Bertrand Russell's name used to be something different before he changed it, or the man known as Bertrand Russell to some people was known as George Smith to others (and in either case one could maintain that whatever else his name was, it was also Bertrand Russell). Posted by joshua at June 18, 2003 08:47 AM