Names and Natural Kind Terms

2009 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Braun
Keyword(s):  
Natural Kind ◽  
Mark Twain ◽  
Syntactic Structure ◽  
Proper Names ◽  
Major Focus ◽  
Natural Kind Terms ◽  
Kind Terms ◽  
Theoretical Assumptions ◽  
Proper Name ◽  
Do So

Names and natural kind terms have long been a major focus of debates about meaning and reference. This article discusses some of the theories and arguments that have appeared in those debates. It is remarkably difficult to say what names are (more exactly, proper names) without making controversial theoretical assumptions. This article does not attempt to do so here. It instead relies on paradigm examples that nearly all theorists would agree are proper names, for instance, ‘Aristotle’, ‘Mark Twain’, ‘London’, ‘Venus’, and ‘Pegasus’. All of the proper names that are discussed in the article are singular nouns that have no syntactic structure. Most of them refer to objects (for instance, people, cities, and planets), but some, such as ‘Pegasus’, apparently do not. The article begins with proper names and the question ‘What is the meaning of a proper name?’ It turns to natural kind terms later.

scholarly journals Experimental Philosophy and the Philosophy of Language: A Defence of the Ambiguity Thesis

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Katharine Hamilton
Keyword(s):  
Natural Language ◽  
Undergraduate Students ◽  
Natural Kind ◽  
Philosophy Of Language ◽  
Proper Names ◽  
Ordinary Language ◽  
Definite Descriptions ◽  
Natural Kind Terms ◽  
Kind Terms ◽  
Cross Cultural Differences

<p>In this thesis I employ the experimental method to inform three important debates within the philosophy of language. These three debates can loosely be characterised as the following: Strawsonianism vs. Russellianism about the meaning of definite descriptions (Chapter 2), Millianism vs. Descriptivism about the meaning of proper names (Chapter 3), and Internalism vs. Externalism about natural kind terms (Chapter 4). To investigate these debates I use surveys to test the intuitions of ordinary language users, that is, non-philosophers, about the meaning of various terms and phrases in natural language. This included New Zealand undergraduate students, students in China, and participants in the US in order to investigate any cross-cultural differences. The results of these three studies indicate substantial variation in the intuitions held among ordinary language users. I use this variation to defend an ambiguity thesis. According to this thesis, some terms and phrases as they occur in natural language (specifically, proper names, natural kind terms, and definite descriptions) have multiple meanings associated them. No one disambiguation is correct outside of a context of utterance. If the ambiguity thesis is accepted, various philosophical puzzles disappear. I will also address a number of objections that face the general program of this thesis.</p>

scholarly journals Experimental Philosophy and the Philosophy of Language: A Defence of the Ambiguity Thesis

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Katharine Hamilton
Keyword(s):  
Natural Language ◽  
Undergraduate Students ◽  
Natural Kind ◽  
Philosophy Of Language ◽  
Proper Names ◽  
Ordinary Language ◽  
Definite Descriptions ◽  
Natural Kind Terms ◽  
Kind Terms ◽  
Cross Cultural Differences

<p>In this thesis I employ the experimental method to inform three important debates within the philosophy of language. These three debates can loosely be characterised as the following: Strawsonianism vs. Russellianism about the meaning of definite descriptions (Chapter 2), Millianism vs. Descriptivism about the meaning of proper names (Chapter 3), and Internalism vs. Externalism about natural kind terms (Chapter 4). To investigate these debates I use surveys to test the intuitions of ordinary language users, that is, non-philosophers, about the meaning of various terms and phrases in natural language. This included New Zealand undergraduate students, students in China, and participants in the US in order to investigate any cross-cultural differences. The results of these three studies indicate substantial variation in the intuitions held among ordinary language users. I use this variation to defend an ambiguity thesis. According to this thesis, some terms and phrases as they occur in natural language (specifically, proper names, natural kind terms, and definite descriptions) have multiple meanings associated them. No one disambiguation is correct outside of a context of utterance. If the ambiguity thesis is accepted, various philosophical puzzles disappear. I will also address a number of objections that face the general program of this thesis.</p>

Semantics for Natural Kind Terms1

1993 ◽  
Vol 23 (3) ◽  
pp. 389-411 ◽  
Author(s):  
Harry Deutsch
Keyword(s):  
Natural Kind ◽  
Singular Term ◽  
Proper Names ◽  
Possible World ◽  
Prime Integer ◽  
Natural Kind Terms ◽  
Kind Terms ◽  
Noam Chomsky ◽  
Natural Substances ◽  
Naming And Necessity

According to the well-known Kripke-Putnam view developed inNaming and Necessityand ‘The Meaning of Meaning’, proper names and ‘natural kind terms’ - words for natural substances, species, and phenomena (‘water’, ‘rose’, ‘light’) - are non-descriptional and rigid. A singular term isrigidif it has the same referent in every possible world (and with respect to other extension-determining parameters, such as the passage of time), and isnon-descriptionalif, roughly speaking, its referent (at a possible world or other parameter) is not secured by purely descriptive conditions analytically tied to the term. Thus, ‘the inventor of bifocals’ is nonrigid and descriptional, while ‘the unique even and prime integer’ is rigid and descriptional, and ‘Noam Chomsky’ is rigid and non-descriptional.

Roads to Reference

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mario Gómez-Torrente
Keyword(s):  
Natural Kind ◽  
Proper Names ◽  
Sufficient Conditions ◽  
Natural Kind Terms ◽  
Kind Terms ◽  
Sensible Qualities

How is it that words (such as “Aristotle”) come to stand for the things they stand for (such as Aristotle)? Is the thing that a word stands for, its reference, fully identified or described by conventions known to the users of the word? Or is there a more roundabout relation between the reference of a word and the conventions that determine or fix it? Do words like “water,” “three,” and “red” refer to appropriate things, just as the word “Aristotle” refers to Aristotle? If so, which things are these, and how do they come to be referred to by those words? In Roads to Reference, Mario Gómez-Torrente provides novel answers to these and other questions that have been of traditional interest in the theory of reference. The book introduces a number of cases of apparent indeterminacy of reference for proper names, demonstratives, and natural kind terms, which suggest that reference-fixing conventions for them adopt the form of lists of merely sufficient conditions for reference and reference failure. Arguments are then provided for a new anti-descriptivist picture of those kinds of words, according to which the reference-fixing conventions for them do not describe their reference. The book also defends realist and objectivist accounts of the reference of ordinary natural kind nouns, numerals, and adjectives for sensible qualities. According to these accounts, these words refer, respectively, to “ordinary kinds,” cardinality properties, and properties of membership in intervals of sensible dimensions, and these things are fixed in subtle ways by associated reference-fixing conventions.

The Logic of Natural Kind Terms

2014 ◽  
Vol 45 (3) ◽  
pp. 199-216
Author(s):  
Lifeng Zhang
Keyword(s):  
Natural Kind ◽  
Natural Kind Terms ◽  
Kind Terms

scholarly journals The Psychology of Natural Kind Terms

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emily Foster-Hanson ◽  
Marjorie Rhodes
Keyword(s):  
Natural Kind ◽  
Natural Kinds ◽  
Natural Kind Terms ◽  
Kind Terms

Draft of chapter to appear in: The Psychology of Natural Kinds Terms. In S.T. Biggs, &amp; H. Geirsson (Eds.) The Routledge Handbook on Linguistic Reference. London: Routledge.

What Are Natural Kinds?

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Scott Soames
Keyword(s):  
Natural Kind ◽  
Actual World ◽  
Natural Kinds ◽  
General Term ◽  
Conventional Wisdom ◽  
Natural Kind Terms ◽  
World State ◽  
Kind Terms ◽  
Ontological Question

This chapter approaches the ontological question, “What are natural kinds?” through another, partially linguistic, question. “What must natural kinds be like if the conventional wisdom about natural kind terms is correct?” Although answering this question will not tell us everything we want to know, it will, be useful in narrowing the range of feasible ontological alternatives. The chapter summarizes the contemporary linguistic wisdom and then tests different proposals about kinds against it. It takes simple natural kind terms—like “green,” “gold,” “water,” “tiger,” and “light”—to be Millian terms that rigidly designate properties typically determined by a reference-fixing stipulation to the effect that the general term is to designate whatever property provides the explanation of why, at actual world-state, all, or nearly all, the samples of items associated with the term by speakers who introduce it have the observational properties they do.

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