Presuppositions and Pronouns - Nijmegen Centre for Semantics

Names 217
alternative theories of meaning cannot capture this notion. This suggestion
and its implication are wrong, because there is no single pre-theoretical
notion of what is said. Intuitions about what is said vary with one's interests.
Two interlocutors uttering (23a, b) may have said the same thing in one sense,
but in another sense they haven't. A theory of lexical semantics may be
expected to explain this shifty behaviour of the verb say, but there is no
reason to require that central concepts in semantic theory (such as 'character'
or 'content') must capture any of our ways of understanding 'what is said'.
Lewis's objection applies to Kripke's rigidity thesis, too. It is true that there
is a sense in which (22) correctly describes a possible state of affairs in which
Mary happily lives under a different name. But there is also a sense in which
(22) is not correct in such a state of affairs; for if someone's name isn't Mary,
it is wrong to call her so. Indeed, it has never been denied, as far as I am
aware, that someone who utters (22) conveys the information that Mary is
called Mary. What Kripke denies is merely that this information is part of the
meaning of Mary, and he suggests that this equally holds for the pretheoretical
and theoretical notions of meaning. Given the chameleontic
quality of the pre-theoretical notion of meaning, it is pointless to disagree
with the first half of this claim; but the second half is false, in my view.
Still, why is it that names usually, though not invariably, appear to be
rigid9 9 This is a legitimate question, even if we mustn't presuppose that the
intuition of rigidity is a direct reflection of the semantics of proper names.
My answer to this question is not a new one. It has been given, independently
pre-
it seems, by several reliable sources, including Sommers (1982), Bach (1987),
and Fodor (1987).1 100
Of these, Fodor's version comes closest to the
formulation that I prefer:
The course of wisdom would be to reiterate the moral -— viz., that
names are a hard problem for everybody -— and then to shut up
and leave it alone. Still, how about this: 'Cicero' and 'Tully' are
synonymous but differ in presupposition. [...] Then 'Cicero was
wet' says, in effect, that he was wet and presupposes that he was
called 'Cicero'. 'Tully was wet' says that he was wet too, but it
presupposes that he was called 'Tully'. 'Cicero is Tully' is
informative because, although it doesn't say that the guy who was
called 'Cicero' was called 'Tully', it "carries the information" that
he was. (Fodor 1987: 85)
9
9 It should always be kept in mind that names aren't always rigid, as several of the data
discussed in the foregoing have shown. This observation already suggests that the intuition of
rigidity calls for a pragmatic explanation, not a semantic one.
10 10 More accurately: it seems to me that the intuition underlying the answers given by these
authors is the same in each case, although strictly speaking their proposals are incompatible
with one another.