Many Ways to Bear, and Not Bear, Names

One can bear a name legally, because it appears on one’s birth certificate; one can bear a different name because one’s parents use it to refer to one; or because one’s school friends or maths teacher used it.24

Similarly, one can fail to bear a name in many ways. And whilst on some occasions one might be the bearer of a particular name, on others one might not be. One can bear a name because one chooses to, and, conversely, not bear a name because one has chosen not to. Such decisions can lead to moral and social limitations on the use of certain names, but it is not clear whether they can create semantic or linguistic limitations except after the fact, in virtue of altering general usage. In this section, I am interested in how names can be used to refer. I will try to show that this is a different issue to how they should be used with regard to considerations that go beyond simply referring.

We have already seen, in §4.1.3, examples in which it appears that a name can refer to object that does not count as bearing it. These are the cases discussed by Rami regarding past and future bearers:

24

Dolf Rami has objected to me that there are actually only two ways to bear a name presented here: bearing a name officially in some way, and bearing a name because there is a practice of referring to one with that name. This is, of course, one way to divide up ways. But, as Rami also pointed out to me, we can simply recast ‘ways of bearing’ in terms of what we would plausibly say that an object is correctly called in particular kinds of circumstance or situation. This type of locution captures what I will say below just as well.

4.3. Problems with Bearers

# Leningrad is on the Baltic.

# Byzantium is a major tourist destination.

# Cassius Clay suffers from Parkinson’s syndrome.25

X Karl Marx Stadt is now called ‘Chemnitz’.

X Whiskers, as I think I might call her, is in the kitchen.

As Rami recognized, the first three of these cases are problematic in some manner, apparently because the objects referred to no longer bear those names. But, on pain of contradiction, this cannot be because the names used fail refer to anything. The problem is not that nothing is referred to in these cases so that the inscriptions come out false, or neither true nor false. Whatever is at fault with these cases, and I acknowledge that something is, the names used refer, or have the potential to refer, to objects that used to bear those names. In the last two cases, there seems to be nothing at all wrong with the inscriptions. One might imagine that, in the case of ‘Karl Marx Stadt is now called “Chemnitz”’, a prior, perhaps infelicitous, use of ‘Karl Marx Stadt’ might have occurred, to which this inscription is a correction, but this only seems to highlight that the name can be used referentially, although the city no longer bears it.

One way to respond to this kind of data would be to claim that it is the existence of a name/bearer relation at reference time rather than speech time that is significant. Thus ‘Leningrad was the second largest city in the Soviet Union’ is felicitous because the city referred to was called ‘Leningrad’ for most of the time that the Soviet Union existed. However, this does not explain why current names can be used felicitously to refer to their bearers at reference times prior to their coining: ‘St Petersburg was besieged during the Second World War’. It might be that it is fine to use current names at any reference time, but past names can only be used at reference times at which they were current. However, not only is such an account rather convoluted, it still cannot account for entirely felicitous utterances such as ‘Karl Marx Stadt is now called “Chemnitz”’, in which a past name’s reference time coincides with its speech time. Moreover, it is hard to see how the proponent of such an account could explain how reference seems to work fine whatever the name or reference time, but felicity is significantly affected.

Another way to respond might be to claim that names do not easily lose bearers, and that in all of these cases of apparent former name use, the names

25

This section was written prior to Muhammad Ali’s death. I have not adjusted tenses where it would affect the point of my examples. Though, in fact, this particular example might now be even more infelicitous: # Cassius Clay suffered from Parkinson’s syndrome.

4.3. Problems with Bearers

are still in fact borne by their referents, at least in the contexts in which they are being used26

—as evidenced by the fact that their use is still possible in these contexts. However, this response seems unsatisfactory. It appears that the notion of name-bearing being appealed to by indexicalists is the same as, or very close to, the ordinary language kind of conception of bearing a name, or having a name, or being called by a name (as in ‘The city is called “St Petersburg”’). According to Recanati, the name-bearing conventions he appeals to are social conventions, and presumably are supposed to be the same social conventions that speakers are aware of as they track namings and the use of names. But, as far as I am aware, according to this ordinary conception of naming conventions, it is quite possible for the names of objects to change, such that one name stops being the name of an object, and another takes its place as the object’s name.27

Indeed, this seems like the natural explanation for what happened in the case of St Petersburg—a city whose name changed three times during the Twentieth Century. If this is not the kind of convention that Recanati or other indexicalists have in mind, then they must provide some account of the nature of the social conventions they are appealing to, such that objects can gain, but rarely lose, names, and which are largely insensitive to the authority both of recognized namers, and of general use.

The bearer-reliant indexicalist might claim that objects can lose names, but only when their use has completely ceased. Or, at least, that they only lose names in all contexts when their use has completely ceased. We might then reasonably ask in what kinds of contexts objects still bear names that are widely considered to be merely former names. The answer clearly cannot be: those in which the name still refers to the object, on pain of begging the question. The idea that a name/bearer relationship is simply dead once its use has ceased is also strange. Presumably, there must be a long period in which the name is not used to refer to the object in question before it can be considered forgotten as a name for that object. Consider an ancient settlement, the remnants of which are buried deep underground, and which has been forgotten for so long that no one has referred to it by its name for thousands of years. It appears that the settlement can still bear the name: if an archeologist were to discover the ruins of the settlement, and find written evidence of its name, she could speak that name and refer to the settlement, and it would be natural to say that she had discovered its name. It might no longer be regarded as bearing the name, however: if the settlement had been discovered well

26

Recanati has indicated, at least in conversation, that this would be his preferred route.

27

Though, of course, objects can have multiple names simultaneously. For example, Derry/ Londonderry.

4.3. Problems with Bearers

before the written evidence was discovered, it might have already been given a name by the archeologists, and if, when the original name was discovered, it was particularly hard to pronounce in modern English, the new name might stick and we would say ‘the settlement was called “such-and-such” by its inhabitants’, but not necessarily ‘the real name of the settlement has been discovered’. Of course, this may be very sensitive to context, and there would be perfectly good ways of talking by which the settlement did bear the name. It seems clear, however, that simply going out of use is not sufficient for a name to stop having a particular bearer. So this is not a route that the indexicalist can take to explain when a name loses a bearer, or vice versa.

A further problem that the indexicalist must face if they wish to claim that the referent of a name must bear it at the time of use, is that they must come up with an explanation for why utterances such as ‘Leningrad is on the Baltic’ so often sound infelicitous, without appealing to names changing. They could perhaps appeal to different ways of bearing names and state that although St Petersburg changed its official name, the City officials (or the Kremlin) had no power to effect its status with regard to the social name-using convention associating it with ‘Leningrad’. It must then be claimed that the existence of any variety of name-using practice is sufficient for allowing reference, but, for some reason, current official naming practices are relevant to whether or not a reference to a city sounds admissible or strange. However, if this line is adopted, the indexicalist needs to say something about what it is about officialnames that is significant to the felicity—but not the reference—of utterances in some contexts, but not others. Note that there will be contexts, such as those in which the interlocutors are old Party diehards, in which there is no infelicity in using ‘Leningrad’ in present tense utterances.

There also appears to be nothing special about names being ‘official’ if this means something recognized by law. Consider Muhammad Ali. He stopped bearing the name ‘Cassius Clay’ in popular discourse at some point after he adopted ‘Muhammad Ali’. Ali explicitly renounced his former name, and it appears that it is normal to talk about him changing his name, and—as just demonstrated—referring to ‘Cassius Clay’ as a former name. Certainly, utterances such as those of the form ‘Cassius Clay suffers from Parkinson’s syndrome’ will sound strange in many contexts, whilst those of the form ‘Muhammad Ali was born in Louisville’ won’t. If a racist sports reporter had continued referring to him as ‘Cassius Clay’ after Ali changed his name, and particularly after his new named had been widely adopted, the reporter would have been doing something incorrect: presumably committing a social and moral transgression. However, Ali never legally changed his name. So, in legal contexts, Ali never stopped being the bearer of ‘Cassius Clay’. If he had

4.3. Problems with Bearers

given his name to the US Court of Appeals as ‘Muhammad Ali’ when he was appealing his indictment for draft dodging, he would have said something incorrect in the eyes of the law. It is clear that in both these Ali cases—the sports reporter and the courtroom—there is no issue with reference: ‘Cassius Clay’ can be used by the reporter to refer to Ali, even though this is no longer regarded by the public as his name, and people in the courtroom would have been able to refer to Ali using ‘Muhammad Ali’, even though that was not his name in the eyes of the court. The indexicalist who would maintain that the infelicity of uses of particular names in certain contexts is not due to referents not bearing those names in those contexts, must provide an explanation of these cases that does not simply appeal to official names being felicitous. Even if ‘official name’ is taken to include something like ‘the most widely used name’, assuming that legal names of people are also official, a further distinction must be made. Claiming something along the lines of ‘in non-specialist contexts, the most widely used name is the most felicitous’

is also problematic. Firstly, it is unclear how non-specialist contexts could be identified adequately. Secondly, it seems implausible that such a claim is true: infelicity is, presumably at least in part, subjective, and hearing it does not generally require awareness of how most other people use a name, though it does seem to require awareness of whether or not a name has been changed in one of various different ways.