In a celebrated lecture by that title, later reprinted as a
booklet, the philosopher Saul Kripke argues for an account of proper names as
being in origin ostensive/baptismal, handed down then to the generations
by a sort of isnâd (to use the
term of Islamic traditionaries).
This, by contrast with the more traditional understanding of names
achieving their reference via matching some understood description -- you manage to pick out Aristotle from amidst the
hordes of shades, by his embodying certain characteristics
-- teacher of Alexander, author of
the Organon, known to his homeys as “the
Stagirite”.
The essay sparked an extensive debagte, to which I would not
presume to attempt to contribute;
save that one signal example, supportive of Kripke’s a-posteriori
necessitarian position, has never, to my knowledge, been cited in the
literature. Namely: How (on the descriptive account) do you pick out an
individual who has no
characteristics?
I refer, of course, to the Mann ohne Eigenschaften, to whom the novelist Robert Musil has dedicated an extensive tome (widely
praised, though seldom read).
To be sure: Lacking all characteristics is itself
a kind of (meta-)characteristic, distinguishing its (non)bearer much like the “Invisible
Man” of Monty Python.
A critic might object, How do you know you have managed to
pick out precisely that individual by
that (meta-)description, “the Man without Qualities” -- rather than a whole grey
horde of characterless/uncharacterizable wannabes and also-rans?
This conundrum brings to mind some mysterious passages in
Quine’s essay “Ontological Relativity”, which basically posit a kind of
non-identity of indiscernibles:
things you might quantify over, on the substitutional sense of
quantification, but at the same time slur
over, since they lack individual names, and may be indistinguishable from any
of the named entities.
Well -- nunc dimittis,
I have said enough; time for a
nightcap, and so to bed.
Perhaps these puzzles may be unraveled by our grandchildren.
