Talk:Descriptivist theory of names

Too short I think..

I'm surprised how short this one turned out to be. It seemed like it was longer when I was writing it. I'll have to expand a bit.--Lacatosias 17:48, 16 January 2006 (UTC)

Other Languages?

"Hesperus is Phosphorus."

Has anything been said about how these theories propose to deal with translation? Like, "Santa Clause is le pere noel"?

Yes, supposing you did not know that Santa Clause and "Babbo Natale" (I will leave aside "le pere noel" which is a definite description and brings in other considerations) refer to (i.e. designate) one and the same entity. Then the statement that "Santa Claus is Babbo Natale" is a perfectly reasonable, informative and meaningful statment on this theory. For Millian direct reference this represents a serious problem: the meaning of proper names ARE their referents. Saying "Santa Clause is Babbo Natale" and perhaps "Santa Clause is le pere noel" is the same exact thing as saying "Santa Clause is Santa Clause". In a nutshell, the distinction between sense and reference eliminates the problem where a=b is equivalent to a=a by (sort of) postulating two distinct levels of meaning. --Lacatosias 17:42, 7 July 2006 (UTC)

Whooooooaa!! Sorry about that!! My synaptic connections must be withering away in this heat or something. Santa Clause, of course, does not refer to anything and hence any statement/utterance involving Santa Clause is meangingless for Millian direct reference theorists. Hesperus is phosphorus (the morning star and the evening star) both refer to Venus. So, for a simple interlinguitsic example, let's take "the morning star is la stella della sera" . According to Millianism, this statement is just the useless tautology "Venus=Venus". (Of course, Millians respond by invoking pragmatic --ie.communicative intentions, context, etc--considerations to try to resolve these intuitive weaknesses). But for desciptivism,this is not a problem at all (there are OTHER problems) since "the morning star" and "la stella della sera" have sense (modes of presentation, in the Fregean jargin) as well as reference. Thereofre, although the descripstion "the morning star" and "le stellla..." refer to the same thing, they have different senses. One could know about the sense of one and not know abou the sense of the other (not know that they refer to the same thing). The statement is meanignful becaue it informs someone of the fact that the two terms refer to the samr thing.--Lacatosias 11:13, 9 July 2006 (UTC)

Paragraph makes sense?

The paragraph beginning "In general, descriptivist theories can be formalized ..." makes little sense to me. Looks like something was lost in the editting. --Philogo 14:30, 8 November 2007 (UTC)

Original Research?

This article had been tagged since 2008 as Original Research, but no rationale for this had been given on the talk page; In reading it I think it's actually not original research, but definitely suffers from a lack of inline citations showing where the examples, discussions etc. are supported by the references. If I'm wrong, please feel free to restore the other template and indicate any problematic statements so they can be sourced or removed. Thanks! BrideOfKripkenstein (talk) 15:49, 29 April 2010 (UTC)

I think it probably is OR as the very term "Descriptivist theory of names" is very dubious, no source is give for this term other than the article on Frege, which says in passing that his theory has come to be known as a "Descriptivist theory" (but does not say by who). Kripke talks about the "Description theory of names" which makes sense. I can understand someone who advocates a description theory of names being called a Descriptivist, but to then call the theory advocated by a Descriptivist a Descriptivist theory creates a circular definition, and surely if there is any point to Philosophy at all it is to stop us falling into such traps! I was going to do a search and replace on the Naming and Necessity article to change "descriptivist" throughout to "description" but the rot seems to have gone so much further that I've kind of balked at the task as it would also mean renaming this article. It may be worth digging a bit deeper to find where this muddled term really came from and whether there anyone can find any merit in it. I would note though that in the article on Saul Kripke someone pointed out that they could not find any definition of the word "descriptivist", which they noted is not a dictionary word. Samatarou (talk) 00:14, 14 September 2019 (UTC)