Presuppositions and Pronouns - Nijmegen Centre for Semantics

Names 211
have names; some of these I have chosen myself, others have been chosen by
various people around the globe, only some of whom I am acquainted with,
and yet others, such as cache183415.shtml cache!83415.shtml for example, were generated by
some program. The association between a file and its name is entirely
sustained by the computer's hardware and the programs running on it: if due
to some programming error the file name Bocherini gets changed into
Corelli, then the file's name IS is Corelli, not Bocherini. The baptist's original
intention is simply irrelevant.
The expression 'bearing a name' covers as many relations as there are
naming practices, and it seems to me that Kripke's causal theory of reference
is best viewed, not as a theory of reference, but as a partial theory of what it
means to bear a name. The theory is only a partial one because there are
naming practices that it doesn't account for, such as the one considered in the
previous paragraph.
Kripke's charge that the quotation theory is circular can now be countered
a second time, as follows. Even if a proponent of the quotation theory should
want to explain how names can be used to refer, his analysis of names need
not be circular, because the notion of reference need not enter into it: 'the
individual named N' is not the same as 'the individual that N refers to', and
the former does not presuppose the latter, either.
7.3 Names as presupposition inducers
On the presuppositional analysis of definiteness that I have taken more or
less for granted in the foregoing chapters, a definite NP of the form 'the N'
triggers the presupposition that N is given, and that is all there is to say about
the meaning of definite NPs. Such NPs are purely presuppositional
expressions, one might say, in that they presuppose their entire descriptive
content (ct. (cf. § 1.4). On the presuppositional version of the quotation theory
that I propose, names, too, are purely presuppositional expressions. The
descriptive content of a name N is 'individual named N', and the name
triggers the presupposition that an individual answering this description is
given.
Let us see how this version of the quotation theory measures up to the
observations presented in § 7.1. The first five of these observations hardly
need any comment. Given that names are treated on a par with overt definite
NPs, it doesn't come as a surprise that:
• names often carry definiteness markers;
• names are subject to definiteness restrictions;
• the referential/attributive distinction applies to names;