Erkenn (2015) 80:235262

DOI 10.1007/s10670-014-9706-x

ORIGINAL ARTICLE

Names as Devices of Explicit Co-reference

Kenneth A. Taylor

Received: 31 October 2014 / Accepted: 31 October 2014 / Published online: 20 November 2014
 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2014

Abstract This essay examines the syntax of names. It argues that names are a
syntactically and not just semantically distinctive class of expressions. Its central
claim is that names are a distinguished type of anaphoric devicedevices of
explicit co-reference. Finally it argues that appreciating the true syntactic distinc-
tiveness of names is the key to resolving certain long-standing philosophical puzzles
that have long been thought to be of a semantic nature.

The aim of this essay is to examine what I call the syntax of naming. My main aim
is to show that names are a syntactically and not just semantically distinctive class
of expressions. Though the syntax of naming has been little discussed in the
philosophy of language, I have argued in a number of places that careful attention to
the syntax of naming has payoffs elsewhere in the philosophy of language. In
particular, I have argued that attention to the syntax of names is the key to
dissolving certain long-standing canonical puzzles in the philosophy of language
one prominent example being Freges puzzle about the possibility of informative
identity statements. Freges puzzle is, of course, of piece with certain further
puzzlesincluding the failure of co-referring terms to be intersubstitutable, salva
veritate, in indirect discourse reports, and puzzles about the behavior of empty
names.1 Such puzzles have long been taken to be basic touchstones for
philosophical theories of both the semantics of referring devices and also of the
semantics of various embedding constructions. On my own view, however, much of
this puzzle-driven semantic theorizing about referring expressions has been based
on a misdiagnosisor if a not quite a misdiagnosis, then at least a mistaken focus.

1
For elaboration, see Taylor (2003, 2004, 2010, 2014) for greater elaboration.

K. A. Taylor (&)
Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA
e-mail: ktaylor@stanford.edu

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236 K. A. Taylor

The canonical puzzles dont, in fact, tell us much at all about the semantic character
of referring expressionsat least not directly. If so, I have argued, then we
shouldnt worry so much about either directly or indirectly tailoring our semantics
to yield solutions to those puzzles. Thats because much of the behavior of referring
devices in various puzzling contexts can be accounted for more or less directly by
appeal to their broadly syntactic or structural properties and relations, rather
than their broadly semantic properties or relations.
In this essay, I shall primarily be concerned to more fully and directly develop
and defend the view that names are expressions of a distinctive syntactic type,
partially characterized by what I call a distinctive co-reference profile than I have in
earlier work. But while the bulk of this essay is taken up with the direct defense and
development of the view, I shall close with a brief review of how my approach can
be applied to yield a novel and satisfying solution to Freges puzzle about the
possibility of informative identity statements. Armed with the distinctions on offer
in this essay, it turns out, we can solve that puzzle without positing problematic
entities like sense. That my approach yields novel and satisfying solutions to long-
standing puzzles of this sort is intended as a further, though more indirect argument
on behalf of the approach I pursue in this essay. In effect, the final section of this
essay amounts to an attempt to confirm the viability of my syntactic approach to
names by appealing to what might called the downstream consequences of the
approach.

1 Names as Syntactic Kinds

I begin by acknowledging that philosophers typically use the word syntax for a
much narrower range of properties than I have in mind. And this fact is the main
barrier to wider acknowledgement of the sort of view I defend in this essay.
Philosophers have generally been conditioned to think of syntax in terms of shape-
like intrinsic properties of a symbol or representation. The most prominent
exemplar of that tendency is perhaps Jerry Fodor, who says the following:
Syntactic properties [are] among the local properties of representations,
which is to say that they are constituted entirely by what parts a representation
has and how those parts are arranged. You dont, as it were, have to look,
outside a sentence to see what its syntactic structure is, any more that you
have to look outside a word to see how it is spelled.2 (Fodor 2002, pp. 20)
So understood, syntactic properties are supposed to be intrinsic or essential in the
sense that, the identity of a sentence never survives alteration of its syntax or its
logical form. I dont intend to argue against Fodors understanding of syntax. He is
free to stipulate what he means by that phrase. My own usage of the term syntactic
is decidedly broader and more inclusive than Fodors, however. Intrinsic, bare
2
In fairness to Fodor, though, he also says that syntax has an external face since the syntax of a
representation determines certain of its relations to other representations. But I take syntax properly
so-called to be constituted by the sort of representation-representation relations toward which Fodor
seems here to gesture.

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Names as Devices of Explicit Co-reference 237

shape-like properties of the sort that Fodor privileges make up at most a small part
of what I mean by syntax. They are decidedly not the focal point of the discussion
that follows. When I speak of the syntax of a class of symbols and representations,
my focus is on properties that accrue to representations largely in virtue of their
(non-semantic) relations one to another. A better term for what I have in mind might
be structural rather than syntactic. To explicitly signal that I am talking about a
notion of syntax that is not restricted to intrinsic shape-like properties, I will
sometimes use the disjunctive phrase syntactic or structural to characterize what
Im getting at. If it will help, whenever I use the word syntactic in what follows,
you, gentle reader, are hereby licensed either to interpret that as syntactic or
structural or to just substitute the word structural for the word syntactic. When I
need to make an explicit contrast between my own broader conception of syntax and
the more narrow Fodorian conception, I will refer to the latter as syntax in the
narrow or Fodorian sense.
It is only on a structural/relational understanding of syntax that the question of
what, from a syntactic point of view, the property of being a name consists in, first
becomes significant and interesting at all. By contrast, on the narrow Fodorian
conception of syntax, that question will be of little, if any, substantive significance.
There is almost nothing to say about the intrinsic shape-like properties or names as
such. Names dont come with characteristic shapes or spellings that might serve to
distinguish them from other sorts of expressions. To the extent that philosophers
tend to think of syntax in narrow Fodorian terms, it is little wonder, then, that
philosophical discussions of name have been largely silent on issues syntactic.
Since this essay stakes out a position about the syntax of the naming relation that
is contrary to the main trend in the philosophy of language, it is worth pausing over
the question of just why we should assume that names have a distinctive and
substantive syntactic character at all. One who is tempted to deny that names have
any substantive syntactic character might be tempted to suppose that each language
comes with a relatively fixed stock of expressions, commonly used as names. One
might imagine that the set of permissible names in a language is given as a mere
listthough, perhaps, an open-ended one, to accommodate the possibility that new
names may be introduced into the language. And one might suppose that to
recognize that e is a name in L is to recognize that e is just another entry on Ls
open-ended list of names. To view the property of being a name in such a stripped
down fashion really is to strip the property of being a name of any distinctive
syntactic significance.
But this strikes me as a rather unfruitful way to think about the property of being
a name. Consider what a speaker knows when she knows of e merely that it is a
name. Among the things she knows, it seems, is that e is the sort of expression that
can occupy the argument places of verbs, that can well-formedly flank the identity
sign, that can anchor anaphoric chains both within and across sentence boundaries,
and so on. These properties are not yet semantic. They are not yet a matter of how
reference is determined or what a name contributes to the propositional content of
any sentence in which it occurs. They concern, rather, how names interact with
other linguistic expressions both within and across sentence boundaries. They have
to do not with representation-world relations, but with (non-semantic)

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representationrepresentation relations.3 And that gives ample grounds for thinking

of such properties and relations as broadly syntactic in character.
According to this way of thinking about syntax, the property of being a name is
not something that an expression can enjoy all on its own, independently of its
relation to other expressions.4 Nor do the broadly role-oriented properties on which
I focus hold in virtue of intrinsic shape-like properties. Consequently, to the extent
that such properties partially characterize what it is to be a name, it follows that an
expression will count as a name only to the extent that it plays the right kind of
structural or syntactic role in a system of interlocking expressions. Such holism
about the syntax of naming will seem startling or controversial only if one is
antecedently determined to think of syntax in narrowly Fodorian terms.
One cure for that mistaken tendency is to focus briefly not just on names, but on
other sorts of expressions as well. From a syntactic or structural point of view,
verbs, quantifiers, names, determiners and the like are syntactically correlative
notions. As such, they are functionally interdefinable only as an entire system. We
have neither an independent hold on the syntactic category NAME nor an
independent hold on any other syntactic category such as SENTENCE or VERB
PHRASE or NOUN PHRASE. Viewed in this syntactic cum structural way, names
are nothing but recurrent sub-sentential expressions of a distinguished sort that
function as minimal noun phrases and thereby combine with verb phrases to yield
sentences. And what are sentences or verb phrases? Well, verb phrases are
expressions that combine with noun phrases to yield sentences. Sentences, in turn,
are nothing but linguistic complexes built, in accordance with the rules of a
grammar, out of various sub-sentential constituents. Once we are armed with this
broader, more holistic notion of syntax, it is a short step to the conclusion that
names have a distinctive syntactic character that cannot be captured by appeal to
mere properties of local shape or intrinsic form. And that is part of the reason that
we must distinguish a name from its spelling. To say this is not to deny that various
features of a verbfeatures like tense, number or aspectare externally marked by
differences in spelling. But it would clearly be a mistake to conclude that therefore
nothing but spelling constitutes a verb as a verb. The property of being a name is no
more a matter of spelling alone than the property of being a verb is. To be a verb is
to be an expression that plays a distinctive role in an overall system of expressions.
Just so, I claim, for names.
Now the central claim that I defend in this essay is that names are expression
types that function as devices of what I call explicit co-reference and that they do so
as a consequence of their intrinsic linguistic cum syntactic nature. To say that it is
part of the intrinsic syntactic or structural role of names to function as devices of
explicit co-reference is to say that numerically distinct tokens of the same name

3
There are of course semantic relations among representationsrelations of synonymy, for example.
But such relations presuppose that expressions already stand in various representation-world relations.
4
This is not to say that narrowly Fodorian syntax is entirely irrelevant to syntax in the broader sense. If a
competent speaker is to be able to recognize and competently deploy an expression in syntactically
appropriate ways, then there must be something about the expression that enables such recognition and
deployment. And intrinsic shape-like properties may serve as good cognitive handles, as it were, on
syntax in the broader sense.

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Names as Devices of Explicit Co-reference 239

again have an intrinsic purport of co-reference.5 From a structural or syntactic point

of view, names are, in effect, a peculiar and dedicated type of anaphoric device. In
standard anaphoric chains, the interpretation of the dependent expression is
controlled by the interpretation of an antecedent expression. In the case of names,
though, it isnt entirely correct to say that the interpretation of a dependent token of
a name is controlled by some antecedent token of that very name. The claim, rather,
is that name types are such that the tokens of that type are one and all what we might
call interpretationally co-dependent. That is, token occurrences of the same name
type again inherit referential purport from the name type of which they are one
and all occurrences. Consequently, tokens of a given name type stand or falling
together with respect to referential purport, referential success, and referential
failure.6 This, I claim, is a non-accidental fact, rooted in the fundamental syntactic
cum structural role played by expressions belonging to the linguistic category
NAME.
Explicit co-reference must be sharply distinguished from coincidental co-
reference. Two token names that are not co-typical may refer to the same object,
and thus be co-referential, without being explicitly co-referential. Tokens of
Hesperus and tokens of Phosphorus co-refer, but Hesperus and Phosphorous
are not explicitly co-referential. The fact that tokens of Hesperus one and all refer
to Venus is linguistically independent of the fact that tokens of Phosphorus one
and all refer to Venus. More generally, whenever m and n are distinct names, they
are referentially independent. When m and n are referentially independent, nothing
in their intrinsic linguistic characters guarantees that if m refers to o then n refers to

5
It is sometimes objected to my view that the twin properties of explicit co-referentiality of co-typical
name tokens and referential independence of type-distinct name tokens are not, on their own, sufficient to
distinguish names from certain other sorts of expressions. For example, all tokens of the type tiger refer
(rigidly) to the species tiger, it is sometimes observed. Similarly with the word yellow. And it is
objected that one might therefore worry that my account fails to pick out any distinctive property of
names. But I claim only that the twin properties of explicit co-referentiality and referential independence
partially characterize the syntactic category NAME. Names are also expressions that, for example, may
well-formedly flank the identity sign and well-formedly occupy the argument places of verbs. Some
totality of such properties jointly constitute a broader, but still syntactically characterized class of
expressionsthe class of SINGULAR TERMS. Think of the category NAME as a distinguished subclass
of the class of SINGULAR TERMS. Now included in the class of singular terms are also demonstratives
and indexicals. I discuss the co-reference profiles of demonstratives in this essay and argue that
demonstratives and names constitute something like a minimal pair within the category of singular terms.
So my approach does require an antecedent analysis of singular termhood and I, admittedly, havent
offered such an analysis here. But the point is that the twin properties of referential independence of type
distinct tokens and explicit co-referentiality of co-typical tokens is meant to distinguish names from other
elements of the class of singular terms. It is of no consequence for my view if other expressions in, say,
the category PREDICATE or the category COMMON NOUN turn out to have correlative syntactic
properties. In particular, that would not suffice to make predicates be names or names be predicates or to
obliterate the important syntactic distinction between names and predicates.
6
Some have been tempted to assimilate names to variables (either bound or free) under assignment. But
I do not think that this is quite right because I think that reference of every token of a given name is
determined, as it were, in one fell swoop by facts about the name type of which the token is a token. What
we might call the type-reflexivity of names is also reflected in what I take to be the fundamental semantic
rule governing all namesif e [ NAME, and t is a token of e, then t rigidly designates the object o such
that o BEARS e, where e is an expression type, rigid designation is a semantic/modal relation, and
BEARS is a this worldly causal relation distinct from the semantic relation of rigid designation.

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o as well. To say that any distinct names are, as a matter of their linguistic character,
referentially independent, is not to say that they must ipso facto fail to co-refer. It is
just that when two distinct and thus referentially independent names do co-refer,
their co-reference will be what I call a mere coincidence of usage. We can directly
display the fact that two names are co-referential via true (and informative) identity
statements. When referentially independent names m and n are linked by an identity
sign, then the identity statement dm = ne puts on display the fact that m and n are
coincidentally or, as we might also say, extrinsically co-referential.7
Taken together, the correlative relations of referential independence and explicit
co-reference partially characterize the broadly syntactic or structural role occupied
by members of the linguistic category NAME. To be a name is, in part, to be an
expression type such that tokens of that type are explicitly co-referential with one
another and referentially independent of the tokens of any distinct name type. Hence
if one knows of e only that it belongs to the category NAME, then one knows that,
whatever e refers to, if it refers to anything at all, then tokens of e are guaranteed to
be co-referential one with another and referentially independent of any distinct
name e0 , whatever e0 refers to. A name (type) is, in effect, a set of (actual and
possible) name tokens such that all tokens in the set are guaranteed, in virtue of the
rules of the language, to co-refer one with another. Call such a set a chain of explicit
co-reference. I take it to be a linguistically universal fact about the linguistic
category NAME that numerically distinct tokens of the same name share
membership in a chain of explicit co-reference and numerically distinct tokens of
two type distinct names will be members of disjoint chains of explicit co-
referenceeven if the two tokens are coincidentally co-referential.

2 Names and Their Spellings

I shall eventually argue that the twin properties of referential independence and
explicit co-referentiality jointly suffice to yield a syntactic solution to Freges
puzzles about the very possibility of so-called informative identity statements.
Before taking up that argument, however, I own up to a consequence of my view
that many will no doubt find initially jarring. My approach requires that we
distinguish names from their spellings. Every name has a spelling, but no name is
strictly identical with its spelling. Spellings are associated with names in a one-
many fashion. That is, two or more numerically distinct names can be associated
with the same spelling. The way to enforce a distinction between a name and its
spelling is to see names as more abstract entities than their spellings are. That is
the jarring conclusion that I will defend in the current section. What makes an
expression to be a name at all, on my view, is the fact that it plays a certain broadly
syntactic cum structural role in a total system of role-playing expressions. What
makes a name to be the particular name that it is, is not the spelling of the name, but
its constitutive association with a particular chain of explicit co-reference.

7
But I stress that to display that two names are co-incidentally co-referential is not to say that they are
co-referential. The subject matter of a true identity statements is not metalinguistic but objective.

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Names as Devices of Explicit Co-reference 241

A distinction due to Fiengo and May (2006) may be of some help here. They
distinguish between names and expressions. On their view, names are individuated
by spelling and pronunciation, but expressions are not. Expressions may contain
names, but expressions cant be identified with names. Names are what they call
lexical items rather than what they call syntactic expressions. On their view, it is
expressions rather than names that play various structural roles in sentences and
discourses. Similarly, on their view, expressions, and not names, bear reference.
Though there are important disagreements between my view and theirs, on this
score, at least, I take my view and their view to be more or less notational variants.
What they call a name, I call a spelling of a name. And what the call an expression, I
call a name. On this way of thinking about names, though John Etchemendy and
John Perry have first names that are spelt the same, they dont have the same (first)
name.
Distinguishing in this way between a name and its spelling undoubtedly does a
degree of violence both to common sense pre-theoretical intuitions and to received
philosophical wisdom. Even when violence is justified, it is never an unalloyed
good. But I want to suggest that, in fact, this way of individuating and counting
names actually does less total violence to common sense than the alternatives. Both
common sense and philosophical orthodoxy tend to see the numerical identity of a
name as wholly constituted by spelling and if one counts names that way, one will
typically find one name where my view entails that there are many distinct names
with a shared spelling. The following remarks by Perry and Korta (2011) embody
just such a tendency:
names are nambiguous if you name your new child Larraitz, you seek
to establish a practice that makes it possible to refer to the child with that
name; you dont make it impossible to use the name to refer to other people
named Larraitz.
Now if names are to be individuated by spelling alone, it is hard to see why we
should think of them as referring expressions at all. Certainly, the recurrence of a
mere spelling does not, as such, carry with it either intrinsic purport to refer or
intrinsic purport to co-refer. But it is just as much a part of our common sense
conception of what it is to be a name that names are dedicated devices for referring
and co-referring. Denying that names as such intrinsically purport to refer and/or co-
refer does at least as much violence to common sense as denying that names are to
be individuated by spelling alone does. Something has to give.
One might well regard it as defect of natural that names are not wholly
individuated by spelling alone. But it should be said that languages are not entirely
insensitive to the trouble that this defect causes, since languages typically do allow
for the further spelling out of names, the spellings of which significantly overlap.
Consider, for example the phenomena of surnames, middle names and the entire
systems of modifiers like junior, senior the first the second, the elder the
younger. These are simply ways of spelling out names more exhaustively and thus
of making it more superficially explicit and epistemically manifest when we are
given the same name again and when, despite overlap in spelling, we are given two
different names. Perhaps in a logically perfect language, each name would have

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what we might call a complete spelling that served fully to distinguish it from every
other name.
As our languages stand, though, there is no such requirement. And in such
languages, two distinct elements of the common sense conception of namesas items
individuated by spelling and as things that carry intrinsic singular referential purport
cannot be jointly satisfied. Common sense may want to have it both ways, but it cannot
coherently do so. Consequently, we theorists must choose which bits of commonsense
are most worth preserving. We must do so not on the basis of common sense alone, but
on the basis of theoretical and explanatory utility. Hence the case to be made in this
essay for distinguishing names and their spelling is not exactly that it does the least
violence to commonsense of all the available alternatives. Rather, it is that it gives the
most explanatorily satisfying account of what exactly names are, even as it does a
small bit of violence to certain commonsense intuitions.

3 The Drainage Thesis

In this section, I start my defense of the claim that there is no systematic theoretical
utility for taking names to be wholly individuated by spelling alone. In fact, I shall
argue that taking names to be so individuated drains them of intrinsic singular
referential purport. With that thing, whatever it is, that is wholly identified by the
spelling J^o^h^n there are associated many distinct individuals. Taken on its
own, independently of any particular use or context, the thing wholly identified by
the spelling J^o^h^n would seem to apply either to all of those individuals or
to none of them at all. None of the individuals associated with the thing wholly
identified by the spelling J^o^h^n stands in a special or privileged relation to
it that would suffice to distinguish it as the unique referent of the thing wholly
identified with the spelling J^o^h^n. So if J^o^h^n refers to one of
those individuals, it must equally refer to each of them simultaneously. And if it
doesnt refer to each of them, it must refer to none of them. On either way of
resolving this dilemma, it follows that taken independently of any particular use or
context, the thing wholly constituted by the spelling J^o^h^n does not
function as a singular referring expression at all. To identify names with mere
spellings is thus to drain names of their singular referential purport.
Many philosophers endorse some version or other of the drainage thesis. Names
have variously been held to be ambiguous (Perry and Korta 2011), to be (or to be
useable as) peculiar sorts of demonstratives (Burge 1973) or indexicals (Recanati
1993), and also to be (or to be useable as) predicates (Burge 1973; Fara, unpublished
ms; Matushansky 2006). On none of these views, does singular referential purport
attach to what each identifies as a name directly and as such. Predicates apply to
many objects simultaneously, though without referring to any of them. Indexicals
and demonstratives do refer, though only in particular contexts or on particular
occasions of use and not in a context independent way. On the other hand, if names
as such are intrinsically ambiguous, then names must either be said to refer to many
objects simultaneously or to refer to no particular object at all unless and until they
are fully disambiguated.

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All versions of the drainage thesis go wrong from the very start by assuming that
names as such are wholly constituted by their spellings. But I shall argue, to the contrary,
that thing, whatever it is, that is wholly constituted by a spelling is not an entity of any
grammatical or linguistic significance. Though all forms of the drainage thesis suppose
otherwise, each expands on that initial, foundational mistake in different ways. Some of
these expansions are more plausible than others. So it will be worth our while to examine
the different versions of the drainage thesis in slightly closer detail. Doing so will enable
us to see better both the truth about names and various ways to be wrong about names.

3.1 Drainage as Ambiguity

I start with what I take to be the most intuitively plausible form of the drainage thesis.
This approach may, at first blush, appear to let us have our cake and eat it too. I have in
mind the view that names are intrinsically ambiguous (or nambiguous, as Perry puts it).
On this version of the drainage thesis, though names as such may be devoid of intrinsic
singular purport, once they are fully disambiguated they do enjoy singular referential
purport. Moreover, while it does not directly follow from the ambiguity thesis that fully
disambiguated names function as devices of explicit co-reference that are referentially
independent of every distinct, but also fully disambiguated (use of a) name, it is open to
the ambiguity theorist to accept that claim. She needs, however, a further argument on
behalf of that claim that is independent of the ambiguity thesis itself.
Understood in one way, the ambiguity thesis is little more than a notational variant
of my own approach. What it calls a name, I call a mere spelling of a name. What I take
to be a name properly so-called, it acknowledges as a disambiguation of what it
understands to be a name properly so-called. Moreover, both approaches would seem
to agree that no matter what it is called, that entity that is individuated by spelling alone
does not, as such, enjoy intrinsic singular referential purport and does not yet function
as a device of explicit co-reference, while a related, but more abstract entitythe
name disambiguatedthat is not individuated by spelling alone, may well do so. It is a
short step from these matters of agreement to the conclusion that what mere spelling
picks out is not yet a linguistically significant unit, with a distinctive linguistic
function. For we must now ask whether it is the disambiguated name or the non-
disambiguated name that, for example, occupies, at the level of logical form, the
argument place of a verb, or that may well-formedly flank the identity sign or that may
serve to anchor anaphoric chains. If she says that it is only the fully disambiguated
name that may play such roles, then her view collapses into mine. But if she insists that
it is the non-disambiguated name that plays all such roles, her view is either
implausible in the extremeat least if it is taken as a view about what plays what role
at the level of logical formor it suffers from a bewitchment with mere surface
appearances. To the extent that one believes both that surface grammar is not where the
real linguistic action is and that, at the level of logical form, names are significant
linguistic units with significant linguistic functions, we ought really to reserve the title
name not for that which is individuated by spelling alone, but for the more abstract
occupant of a certain tractable and significant linguistic role.
Still, it must be said that depending on how exactly the ambiguity thesis is understood,
there may be substantive, non-verbal issues that separate the ambiguity approach from

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my own. For example, I appeal to a broadly conceived notion of syntax to explain certain
aspects of the distinctive linguistic character of (fully disambiguated) names. That
names have intrinsic singular referential purport, that they function as devices of explicit
co-reference, that they may anchor anaphoric chains but never be anaphorically
dependent are consequences, on my view, of the broadly syntactic and structural role of
names. It is unclear what, if anything, on the ambiguity approach is supposed to play the
sort of explanatory role that I assign to syntax, broadly construed. Perry, for example,
appeals to what he calls permissive conventions to explain how a name ever manages
to refer to one particular object.8 Presumably, Perry thinks that various other aspects of
names are also to be explained by appeal to the conventions governing their use. I
dont deny there is a sense in which names are governed by various conventions of use. It
is a wholly conventional matter, for example, that I am called by the name Kenneth A.
Taylor. But the features and properties of names on which I focus in this essay do not
seem to me to be conventional in any deep sense. I conjecture, rather, that they are
features that are more or less directly specified by the Universal Grammar that plausibly
determines the space of all humanly possible languages.
In slightly more detail, my conjecture is that UG makes the category NAME
available for exploitation by human languages. But to say this is not to say that every
language necessarily contains expressions belonging to the linguistic category
NAME. NAME may be an optional rather than a mandatory linguistic category
though I suspect that by far the majority of languages do exploit the category NAME.
But that is an empirical issue on which I do not presume to pronounce. The point that
bears stressing here is that it is, in a sense, non-accidental that (many, most, or all)
languages contain genuine names. Moreover, it is non-accidental that names behave in
certain ways and not others in languages that do contain them. And that is why I say
that the linguistic behavior of names is in no deep sense merely conventional. It is in
no sense a matter of convention, for example, that the category NAME is partially
defined by the twin properties of explicit co-referentiality of co-typical name tokens
and the referential independence of type-distinct name tokens.
It is also important to stress that I take the role of names in shared public
languages to be a deep reflection of the role of mental names in the de facto private
language of thought. In particular, I claim that our ability to deploy in thought
names and other devices of explicit co-reference is a central source of our capacity
for what I call same-purporting thought. I can think of my son Kiyoshi today and
think of him again tomorrow with a kind of inner assurance that I at least purport to
think of the same person twice. I do so merely by deploying the private mental name
*Kiyoshi* across distinct thought episodes. If one deployed no such devices in
thought, it would always be an open question whether, in purporting to think now of
a particular o and now of a particular o0 , one has thought of two distinct objects or
has thought of the same object twice. It may sometimes, perhaps even often, be an
open question for a cognizer whether two of her thought episodes share a (putative)
subject matter, but it is surely not always so. I conjecture that this is so precisely
because there is a distinguished class of representations that function in thought as

8
See also Recanati (1993).

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Names as Devices of Explicit Co-reference 245

devices of explicit co-reference. For such devices, to think with or via them again is
ipso facto to purport to think of the same thing again.9
There are thus deep reasons why both shared public languages and the de facto
private language of thought should contain devices of explicit co-reference.
Elsewhere, I have argued, for example, that capacity to deploy devices of explicit
co-reference in thought and talk is central to the objectuality and referential fitness of
our thought and talk. If there were no explicitly co-referential representations, then no
two thoughts would ever inwardly purport to be about the same object. But if no two
thoughts ever inwardly purported to be about the same object again, then for any new
thought episode, even when the thinker was, in fact, thinking of the same object again,
it would always be inwardly as if she was thinking about an object never previously
cognized. The cognizing subject would have, at best, a fleeting cognitive hold on the
objects. She could not, for example, remember today what she believed yesterday.10
She could not anticipate in thought future encounters with a currently perceptually
salient object, as least not as encounters with that very object again. More strongly, a
mind in which no two thoughts same-purported would seem to altogether lack the
capacity for thought as of objects at all. For thoughts as of objects are thoughts as of
enduring particulars that may be encountered and cognized again from different
perspectives, while being the same again and while being at least on occasion cognized
as the same again. This is precisely what would be lost if our words and thoughts never
purported to be thought and/or talk as of the same object again.11
I have been arguing that it is non-accidental that both the de facto private
language of thought and shared public languages contain devices of explicit co-
reference. And I have argued that both public names and mental names in the de
facto private language of thought are just such devices. Moreover, I hold names in
public language are best regarded as shared externalizations of names in the de facto
private language of thought. As such, they are, in effect, designed to allow us to
coordinate our shared thoughts about objects, by making manifest the preservation
of subject matter, from speaker to speaker in either the same or different discourse
contexts. There is much more to say about the relationship between names within
public languages and names within the language of thought. But I lack the space to
9
For a further defense of this claim see Taylor (2010).
10
For a suggestive and helpful discussion of mental anaphora and its role in identity thinking and
content-preservation, see Lawlor (2002).
11
Kant was perhaps the first to see clearly that an inner capacity for thinking with same-purport was
essential to enable our thought to achieve what I have elsewhere called full objectivity (as opposed to
mere objectuality). Consider, for example, the following passage from the A-Deduction
Without consciousness that that which we think is the very same as what we thought a moment
before, all reproduction in the series of representations would be in vain. For it would be a new
representation in our current state, which would not belong at all to the act through which it had
been gradually generated, and its manifold would never constitute a whole, since it would lack the
unity that only consciousness can obtain for it. If, in counting, I forget that the units that now hover
before my senses were successively added to each other by me, then I would not cognize the
generation of the multitude through this successive addition of one to the other, and consequently,
I would not cognize the number
Kant takes the points made above about how numbers are cognized to be perfectly general and to apply to
the cognition of any object as such.

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246 K. A. Taylor

say more here. I will just say that in holding that public names are externalizations
of a kind of expression already part of the logical syntax of thought itself, I do not
mean to deny that convention has a secondary role to play in actually populating
public languages with names. In order to populate the linguistic category NAME
with a determinate stock of names and to make those names stand for particular
objects there is no doubt that a linguistic community has to actually do something.
Neither UG nor the logical syntax of the language of thought suffices to guarantee
that a language will contain names. What UG specifies is what youve gotten when
you have succeeded in introducing names into a language. It specifies the kind of
syntactic and semantic roles the introduced expression will play. It tells you, for
example, that names will function syntactically as devices of explicit co-reference
and that they will functionally semantically as devices of direct reference. And
though I argue below that a language that contained no devices of explicit co-
reference would be pragmatically impoverished, there is no a priori philosophical
reason to rule out the very possibility of such languages.
Return now to the distinction between names and their spellings. Though nothing
seems to prohibit a linguistic community from spelling what from the grammatical point
of view are really different names in the same way a closer look at certain grammatical
regularities supports the claim that spelling alone does not determine what, from the
grammatical point of view, counts as the same name again. Consider the following:

(1) Johni kicked Johnj.

On the default reading of (1), the two occurrences of John must be read as at
most coincidentally co-referential. Indeed, Principle C of the binding theory predicts
that with the two occurrences of John co-indexed, (1) is syntactically ill-formed
and therefore, presumably, not directly interpretable at all. (Chomsky 1981, 1995).
Now one might be tempted to read Principle C as somehow prohibiting
reoccurrences of the same name within a single argument structure. That would
explain why (1) is, supposedly, syntactically ill formed.
But first notice that Principle C as more or less standardly stated isnt quite correct.
The standard interpretation of Principle C confuses what linguists sometimes call
disjoint reference with what is, in fact, merely a requirement of referential
independence. These two notions are not really equivalent. There are contexts in which
an utterance of (1) could convey, though admittedly in a sort of accidental way, a
proposition about Johns relation to himself. Suppose, for example, the speaker has
encountered John twice, on two different occasions, but wrongly supposes that John and
John are two distinct people. A requirement of referential independence doesnt rule out
this sort of coincidental coreference, but a requirement of disjoint reference would. The
correct reading of Principle C, then, is not that it entails disjoint reference but that entail
that when two referentially independent expressions do co-refer, that co-reference has to
be merely coincidental and thus can never be marked as linguistically mandatory. The
correct generalization then is that although it is possible for a speaker who utters (1) to, in
fact, refer to the same person twicethough only coincidentally so(1) strongly
defaults to a reading on which the two occurrences fail to co-refer at all.

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Names as Devices of Explicit Co-reference 247

Notice, by contrast, that when we have what are obviously two distinct names, as
in (2) below, the parallel construction is perfectly permissibleeven in contexts in
which it is mutally manifest that Clark Kent and Superman coincidentally co-refer:

(2) Superman kicked Clark Kent.12

Why should there be this difference? The answer has in part to do with the fact that
the two occurrences of John in (1) cannot permissibly be construed as explicitly co-
referential, but must be construed as referentially independent, despite the fact that
they share a spelling. The correct generalization is that whenever two names can
permissibly occur in a construction like x kicked y the names must be construed as
referentially independent, rather than explicitly co-referential. But any given name is
explicitly co-referential with itself and referentially independent of every other name.
Hence to interpret the two occurrence of John in (1) as referentially independent just
is to count the two occurrences as occurrences of two different names (which happen to
be spelled the same) rather than the occurrence of the same name twice.
Now the fact that sentences like (1) strongly default to a reading on which two
occurrences of names with the same superficial spelling are, nonetheless, linguistically
marked as referentially independent is due to certain deeper grammatical constraints on
the way a name may claim simultaneous occupancy, as it were, of the multiple argument
places of a single verb. The strongly preferred way of saying that John is simultaneously
the agent and patient of a single kicking is to deploy the reflexive pronoun as in (3):

(3) Johni kicked himselfi.

Indeed, though a non-reflexive pronoun can often be explicitly co-referential with

an antecedent name, explicit co-reference is not possible here. If we substitute such
a pronoun for himself in (3) we get:

(4) Johni kicked himj.

As with (1), on the default reading of (4) John and him are referentially
independent.13 Again, though it is possible for John and him as they occur in (4) to
co-refer, they can do so only if the co-reference is coincidental rather than explicit.
12
Distinct names are ipso facto referentially independent. Moreover, unless it is made explicit either by
context or by the addition of an identity statement explicitly linking the two, the use of referentially
independent names generates a defeasible imputation of distinctness. Because of this fact, substitution of
names that are merely co-incidentally, as opposed to explicitly co-referential is not, in general, guaranteed
to preserve what I have elsewhere called dialectical significance. It is unfortunately, quite easy to confuse
failure to preserve dialectical significance with failure to preserve truth value. A clear failure to appreciate
the significance of the difference between failure to preserve truth value and failure to preserve dialectical
significance is exemplified in Saul (1997). Though Saul was one of the earliest philosophers to take
explicit notice of the failure of co-referring names to be freely substitutable even in simple sentences
containing no embedding constructions a lack of a full understanding of the distinctive co-reference
profiles of names led her to draw a number of erroneous conclusions. See also Saul (2007).
13
Indeed, Principle B of the binding theory predicts that (11) is syntactically ill-formed when John and
him are co-indexed and thus explicitly co-referential. (Chomsky 1981, 1995).

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248 K. A. Taylor

These data strongly suggest that, to a first approximation, a single name can
simultaneously control multiple argument places of a single argument structure
only through anaphoric dominance of a reflexive pronoun. We may think of the
reflexive pronoun as the names doppelganger. The name is, in effect, forbidden
from serving as its own referential doppelganger. It is as if a name refuses to be
anaphorically dominated even by itself. And this fact explains why when we have
what appears, because of mere spelling, to be the same name again, deeper
grammatical constraints force us to regard that appearance as a mere appearance.

3.2 Drainage as Indexicality

Turn next to a version of the drainage thesis that assimilates names to

demonstratives and/or indexicals. This approach may also appear, at first blush,
to let us have our cake and eat it too. For although it holds that names as such lack
singular referential purport, at least when taken independently of context, it still
treats name as significant syntactic and semantic units. Unfortunately, this approach
fails to recognize that the linguistic category NAME and the linguistic category
DEICTIC form something like a minimal pair within the class of singular terms. In
particular, the two categories have complementary co-reference profiles. It is a
defining fact about the category of DEICTIC singular termswhich includes both
explicit indexicals and true demonstrativesthat tokens of the same deictic type are
referentially independent. When tokens of the same deictic do co-refer, the co-
reference will always be a coincidence of usage. Moreover, because token deictic
expressions of the same type are referentially independent of each other, it is always
as if an episode of deictic reference involves reference de novo to the relevant
objectat least relative to any numerically distinct deictic. Now only expression
types which carry no intrinsic referential purport of their own, but whose tokens
have referential purport that is somehow contextually generated, could function as
dedicated devices of de novo reference. In de novo acts of referring, reference is not
inherited from any controlling antecedent. Rather, reference must be established
anew for each token. And this is so, even when the same device of de novo
reference is used again to refer again to the same object. Suppose, for example, that
I point to Troy and say, That man is a fine young philosopher and then point to
Troy again and say That man is a fine young poet. Though I have pointed and
referred to the same man twice, by using tokens of the same linguistic device again,
my two acts are independent acts of reference.14

14
My claim is not that co-referring and co-typical deictic tokens can never be interpreted as co-
referential. There are in fact sentences in which it seems all but mandatory that two co-typical deictic
tokens be interpreted as co-referential. Consider the following:
(a) Ted saw that man and Bill saw that man too
(a0 ) Ted saw (that man)i and Bill saw himi too
(b) John hates that man because that man is a cad
(b0 ) John hates (that man)i because hei is a cad

On the default reading, an utterance of (a) would seem to be roughly equivalent to an utterance of (a0 ).
Similarly, an utterance of (b) is roughly equivalent to an utterance of (b0 ). It may be tempting to conclude

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Names as Devices of Explicit Co-reference 249

Devices of de novo reference are handy things for languages to include. Among
other things, they make possible acts of reference that exploit the vagaries of local
context and situation. It seems unlikely, however, that there are languages all of
whose referential devices function as devices of de novo reference. Such a language
would be significantly expressively diminished, if not quite semantically then
certainly pragmatically. In such a language, though speakers could still refer twice
to the same object again, it would be significantly more cumbersome to make it
manifest and explicit that the same object was being referred to again. If a language
is to have the resources to make co-reference not only possible, but also explicit and
manifest, then it needs more than devices of de novo reference. It also needs devices
to make the preservation of reference explicit and manifest.15
There are, of course, other ways of making co-reference explicit. One can, for
example, use the identity sign to put on manifest display the co-reference of any two
coincidentally co-referential, but referentially independent expressions. One can use
anaphoric pronouns, which explicitly inherit their reference from some antecedent.
Proper names are another, syntactically distinctive device of explicit co-reference.
As such proper names stand in sharp contrast to devices of de novo reference like
demonstratives and indexicals and should not be assimilated to them. It is true
enough that when one tokens a given name again, there is a sense in which one
tokens something brand-new under the sun. That very token is a dateable, locatable
particular. It has never existed before and will never exist again. Nonetheless, in
contrast with an indexical or demonstrative to re-token a name is to manifestly
purport to repeat a reference. In re-tokening Cicero again I do not (purport to) refer
de novo to Cicero. Rather I (purport to) refer either to what others or I myself have
purported to refer to before. And I intend that it be manifest to either myself or to
others who also use that very name, either that they and I co-refer or that I co-refer

Footnote 14 continued
that there can indeed obtain a relation of anaphoric dependence between subsequent and antecedent
deictic tokens of the same type. But what we really have here is co-reference through what I call
demonstration sharing. Co-reference through demonstration sharing occurs when a speaker uses the
reference fixing demonstration associated with an antecedent deictic to also fix the reference for a
subsequent deictic. When two token deictics share a demonstration, they will indeed co-refer, but co-
reference through demonstration sharing is a purely pragmatic phenomenon. It is, moreover, a species of
coincidental co-reference rather than a form of linguistically controlled explicit co-reference.
15
Brandom (1994) makes a similar point. Where I distinguish between devices of explicit co-reference
and devices of de novo references, he distinguishes between repeatable and unrepeatable tokenings.
Names and anaphoric pronouns are repeatable, while demonstratives generally are not. Names, he says,
must be understood as anaphoric dependentselements in an anaphoric chain that is anchored in some
name-introducing tokening. Moreover, Brandom arguesquite correctly, in my viewthat anaphoric
reference of the sort that requires repeatability is more fundamental than what I have called de novo
reference. As he puts it:
Deictic uses presuppose anaphoric ones. One cannot coherently describe a language in which
expressions have demonstrative uses but no pronominal uses (although the converse is entirely
possible). For indexical uses generally, like deictic ones, are essentially unrepeatable according to
types. Different tokenings of this or here or now are not in general recurrences of each other,
or even co-identifiable. (464-65)
Though the precise letter of Brandoms views are rather different from my own, there is significant
overlap between the spirit of his view and the spirit of my own, at least on this score.

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250 K. A. Taylor

with myself again. That is one reason why, if I were to be asked, Was Cicero a great
Roman orator, I would not answer by responding, Yes, Tully was a great Roman
Orator. I would not do so, at any rate, unless the identity of Cicero and Tully was
already part of the shared common ground between my interlocutor and me. The mere
use of the same name again, already on its own, does the work of making the
preservation of subject matter explicit, without the need to deploy identity statements.
Now I have claimed that names enjoy, in virtue of their broadly structural cum
syntactic role in both language and thought what might be called intrinsic purport of
co-reference in the sense that any two tokens of the same name type again are
guaranteed to stand or fall together with respect to both referential success and
referential failure. And I have said that we can think of a name (type) as a set of (actual
and possible) name tokens such that all tokens in the set are guaranteed, in virtue of the
rules of the language, to co-refer one with another. I call such a set a chain of explicit
co-reference. I take it to be a linguistically universal fact about the linguistic category
NAME that numerically distinct tokens of the same name share membership in a chain
of explicit co-reference and numerically distinct tokens of two type distinct names will
be members of disjoint chains of explicit co-referenceeven if the two tokens are
coincidentally co-referential. Notice that even if one is temptedmistakenly so in my
viewto reserve the title name for that which is individuated by spelling alone, one
should still find the idea of a chain of explicit co-reference theoretically useful. For
those who tend to individuate names by spelling will still need to separate some uses of
a name so understood from other uses of a name so understood. That is, they will need
to segregate the totality of tokenings of a name understood as a thing wholly
individuated by spelling alone into something like disjoint subsets such that the
members of a given subset in some sense manifestly co-refer with one another and are
referentially independent of members of any other subset. And it is likely that they will
want to distinguish one such subset from other such subsets by appeal to something
like intentions to co-refer.
I do not wish to deny the importance of intentions to co-refer. But is important
that we understand their role correctly. In particular, it is important not to put the
cart before the horse. Intentions to co-refer no doubt play a role in the process by
which particular languages are populated with a determinate stock of names in the
first place. That is, they are ingredients in what might be called the name-making
machinery for given languageswhat I have elsewhere called mechanisms of co-
reference. Mechanisms of co-reference plausibly involve interactions among a set of
practices, institutions, and both intrapersonal and interpersonal processessome of
which may be conscious and some of which may be subdoxastic. Mechanisms of co-
reference make it the case that a given tokening of a sound/shape pattern counts as a
further episode in a connected history of such tokenings. Such mechanisms serve to
link collections of tokenings one with another in such a way that linked tokens share
referential purport. They are, in effect, the very mechanisms by which a sequence of
tokenings is constituted as tokenings of the same name again.
The fact that languages must deploy some name-making machinery in order to
constitute an expression as a name may, at first blush, seem inconsistent with my
claim that names as such are distinguished by mere syntax. But such a worry betrays
a number of confusions. First, it is certainly true, as I have been at pains to argue

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Names as Devices of Explicit Co-reference 251

throughout this essay, that the type-identity of a name is not determined by syntax in
the narrowly Fodorian sense. But it also bears stressing that we should not confuse
claims about the role of the name-making machinery with claims about the broadly
syntactic characters of names. Indeed, my clams about the role that the name
making machinery plays in constituting names is entirely consistent with the claim
that the category NAME is a linguistic universal, partially defined by the explicit
coreferentiality of co-typical name tokens and the referential independence of type-
distinct name tokens. It is also consistent with the view that UG makes the category
NAME available to every possible human languagesthough it does not follow
directly that every language will in fact contain such expressions. The point of
talking about the name-making machinery of a language is just to acknowledge that
in order to populate a language with expressions belonging to the category NAME a
linguistic community has to do something. UG doesnt tell you exactly how to do
that. It doesnt even tell you what names will look like or how they will be spelled
once you have stocked your language with them. What UG tells you, rather, is what
youve done once you have succeeded in introducing a name into a language. UG
entails that to use an expression as a name is to use that expressions with the
intention of either launching or continuing a chain of explicit co-reference. To use
an expression as a name is, in effect, to issue a kind of license to others that by the
mere reuse of that very expression they may manifestly purport to co-refer.

3.3 Drainage and the Predicate View

Turn now to the apparently perennially tempting urge to treat names are predicates
rather than as singular referring terms.16 Both lack of space and the complexity of
some of the issues at stake prevent me from launching a full-scale evaluation of this
this view here. The data I consider here are somewhat equivocal and seem to me to
support a somewhat ecumenical view. In particular, I hold that although our
language may contain certain name-like predicates, which are not singular terms, it
also contains genuine names. And these, I shall argue, are singular referring terms
and not predicates at all. Though some may find such ecumenicalism wishy-washy
and unprincipled, I shall argue that it is unsurprising that languages should contain
both genuine names and name-like predicates.17
I begin by noting that support for the view that name-like expressions at least
sometimes behave as predicates comes from the fact that certain name-like expressions
(to use a theoretically neutral phrase) frequently occur fronted by determiners as in:

(5) Every John that I know is a philosopher.

(6) There are so many Davids in this class.
(7) I met yet another Sally just yesterday.
16
An urge to which philosophers from many different philosophical milieus have been tempted to
succumb. See Quine (1960), Burge (1973), Fara (unpublished ms.), and Fara (2015), among others.
17
See Jeshion (forthcoming) for a far more developed argument against the names as predicates view. In
rejecting the view that we must give a unified treatment of genuine names and name-like predicates,
Jeshion argues that the predicativist fails even to give a unified treatment of predicative uses of name-like
expressions. For an earlier criticism along similar lines to Jeshions see Boer (1975).

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252 K. A. Taylor

(8) My son is not a typical Taylor.

Such predicative uses of name-like expressions raise many interesting,

challenging and delicate issues. A complete and exhaustive account of the linguistic
behavior of name-like expressions in all their uses would surely need to address the
many issues raised by sentences like (5)(8) above. But I will argue that the fact that
name-like expressions are sometimes used as predicates has little, if any bearing, on
apparently singular referential uses of such expressions. In both their linguistic role
as devices of explicit co-reference, and in their cognitive roles as dedicated devices
of same-purport, names behave like terms rather than predicates. In (9) and (10)
below, for example, the names apparently function as complete minimal noun
phrases and apparently directly occupy the argument places of the relevant verbs.
And we ought, I shall argue, take those appearances at face value, no matter what
we chose to say about the behavior of the name-like expressions in (5)(8) above.

(9) John is a philosopher.

(10) Jack married Jill.

Of course, someone determined to provide a unifying treatment of name-like

expressions in their singular referential use and in their use as predicates may try to
assimilate singular referential uses of names to predicative uses of names. She may
point to the following kind of exchange to bolster that impulse:
(11) Jones John is a philosopher, isnt he?
Smith No he isnt, hes a plumber
Jones Oh, you were thinking of that John. I thought you were talking
about the other John, the one we met yesterday
Though the defender of the names as predicate view will undoubtedly
acknowledge that name-like expressions at least appear to sometimes function as
complete noun phrases and to directly occur in argument position, she will have to
deny that this appearance is a reality. In reality, she will insist, when a name-like
expression appears to be a complete noun phrase and to occur in argument position,
it actually does no such thing. It is neither a complete noun phrase, nor does it
directly occupy the argument place of a verb. Rather it occurs in the predicate
position of some complete noun phrase, perhaps with a suppressed or unvoiced
determiner. She might hold, for example, that the bare name John in (11) above is
prefixed by an unvoiced determiner like that (Burge 1973) or the (Fara,
unpublished). This makes the apparent name equivalent to either a complex
demonstrative like that John or an incomplete definite description like the John.
I dont intend to spend a lot of time arguing against this view. Except for a
misplaced fetish for unity, there is little, if anything, to directly recommend it. There
is no independent positive reason to deny that name-like expressions occupying
argument places are just what they appear to becomplete, but minimal noun
phrases that function as singular referring terms. But there is also no real reason to
deny that name-like expressions that apparently play the role of predicates are just

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Names as Devices of Explicit Co-reference 253

what they appear to bepredicates, rather than terms. And I suspect that no matter
of either principle or detail stands in the way of this simple and direct ecumenical
approach. In fact, once we distinguish names from their spellings, and allow that
distinct names can, nonetheless, share a spelling, it is completely straightforward to
introduce predicates that apply to all and only those objects who names are spelled
in a certain way. Indeed, it seems to be something close to any analytic truth that
where S(N) is a spelling shared by many different names N1 Nn there will be a
predicate P(N), such that P(N) applies to x just in case x has a name N that is spelled
S(N). Hence if a language L already contains genuine names used as singular
referring expressions and if spelling alone underdetermines a names type identity in
L, then our theory straightforwardly allows that L may also contain name-like
predicates that apply to objects whose names share a spelling. But this predicate will
be a derived, rather than a basic predicate. Moreover, if the names in L have the
property of being exhaustively spelled outso that no two names share a spelling
then any such predicate will be redundant. Note that although languages do not, in
fact, spell out their names exhaustively, there is no principled barrier to languages
that do so. And if all names where, in fact, exhaustively spelled, we would feel no
pressure whatsoever to assimilate genuine names to name-like predicates.
Not only are there no positive reasons for treating genuine names and name-like
predicates in a uniform fashion, there are positive reasons for not treating them in
such a fashion. We have already argued that names in their singular, referential use
function in language as devices of explicit co-reference and in thought as devices of
sameness-purport. Neither complex demonstratives nor incomplete definite descrip-
tions have the kind of co-reference profile that is characteristic of names.
Demonstratives are the simpler case. We have already seen that straightforward
demonstratives are devices of de novo reference. And there is no reason to deny that
the same is true for hidden demonstratives. For notice that It is also true for
explicit complex demonstratives like that John. The same is true of complex
demonstratives. That is, each token of a complex demonstrative phrase is
intrinsically referentially independent of every other token of that phrase. Thus (12):

(12) That John came in and then that John sat down.
strongly defaults to a reading in which two different Johns are at issue. In contrast,
(13) strongly defaults to a reading in which only one John is at issue.

(13) John came in and then John sat down.

If, contrary to fact, there were antecedent reasons to take apparent names in
argument position to be constituents of complex noun phrases with some sort of
suppressed determiners, rather than free standing minimal noun phrases in their own
right, the foregoing considerations might be taken to suggest that the supposed
suppressed determiner would be more likely to be the definite article. That would mean
that in (13) above we really have something equivalent to the incomplete definite
description the John. Several brief observations are in order here. First, I distinguish
between what I call non-contrastive uses of an incomplete definite descriptions from

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what I call contrastive uses of such descriptions. In non-contrastive uses, incomplete

definite descriptions are used to single out a contextually salient particular of a certain
kind, without contrasting it with any other particular of the same general sort. In
contrastive uses, incomplete definite descriptions are used to single out a contextually
salient object of a certain kind at least partly by way of either an implied or explicit
contrast with another object of that very kind. Consider (14) below, for example:

(14) The cat is ferocious.

Even if no other cat is around with which to make a contrast, a sentence like (14) can
be used to talk about some contextually salient catand different cats on different
occasions of use.18 But now suppose that there are two cats about and suppose that one
wants to contrast them in some way. One might utter a sentence like (15):

(15) Though the black cat is quite ferocious, the brown cat is quite gentle.

When an incomplete definite description is used in a non-contrastive way, it can be

minimally specific, and may consist of only the definite article plus a common noun. It
need not contain any further modifiers. Indeed, whenever one adds additional
modifiers to an incomplete definite description, some further contrast seems always to
be implied, even in the absence of an explicit comparison. Compare (16)(18) below:

(16) The cat is on the mat.

(17) The black cat is on the mat.
(18) The black cat with the damaged tail is on the mat.

(16) neither states nor implies a that there is a contrasting cat somewhere about.
By contrast, (17) seems to at least weakly imply a contrast with a possible non-black
cat. And finally, (18) quite strongly implies a contrast with another cat, possibly
black, but certainly without a damaged tail.
But notice that while ordinary common nouns can occur as heads of both
contrastive and non-contrastive incomplete definite descriptions, name-like com-
mon nouns can occur as heads only in incomplete definite descriptions used
contrastively. Thus (19)(21) are all unacceptable, while (22)(24) are acceptable:

(19) ? The John just came into the room.

(20) ? The Mary loves the John.
(21) ? The John came in and then the John sat down.
(22) The John I met last night just came into the room.
(23) The Mary I introduced you to loves the John you met yesterday.
(24) The John I met last night came in, then the John you met left.
18
I have argued elsewhere that through the mechanism of what I call one and half stage pragmatics,
utterances of sentences containing incomplete definite descriptions typically convey singular proposi-
tions. See Taylor (2003) and Taylor (2004).

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Names as Devices of Explicit Co-reference 255

Since explicit name-like common nouns seem never to be permissible as heads of

non-contrastive incomplete definite descriptions we have, I think, strong reason to
doubt that bare names as they occur in argument position are equivalent to such
descriptions with unpronounced or suppressed definite articles. And this gives us
reason to conclude that names in argument position are just what they appear to
besingular referring terms.
I do not claim that the considerations presented in this section conclusively settle
against those who would give a unified treatment of apparently predicative occurrences
of name-like expressions and apparently referential uses of such expressions. But they
do seem to me to shift the burden of proof. While some name-like expressions really do
behave as genuine predicates, other name-like expressions clearly behave quite
differently. Indeed they appear to behave as singular, referring terms. Moreover, it is
straightforwardly predictable that in languages that do not require names within that
language to be exhaustively spelled, we can easilyand usefullyintroduce a name-
like predicate that applies to objects in virtue of their names. Unless some principled bar
to such ecumenicalism is adduced, there is no reason not to take both name-like
predicates and genuine names completely at face value.

4 Freges Puzzle Revisited

Let us turn now to examine one of the downstream philosophical consequences of

the approach laid out in the previous section. I claim that one benefit of my syntactic
approach is that it provides us with salvation from what might be called Freges
original Sinn. For we can apply the syntactic understanding of namehood to long-
standing putatively semantic puzzles to yield novel and satisfying solutions to
them. Though there are many such puzzlesincluding puzzles about the behavior
of empty names, puzzles about the behavior of names in propositional attitude
contextsfor lack of space my focus will be restricted to Freges puzzle about the
possibility of informative identity statements. My approach enables us to see this
puzzle in a promising new light. Contrary to much received wisdom, Freges puzzle
is not, if I am right, a puzzle about semantic content at all. Rather, the puzzle is
really a puzzle at the level of syntaxas syntax is understood throughout this essay.
Freges puzzle is rooted in the question of how possibly a statement of the form
d
a = ae could differ in cognitive value, as he called it, from a true statement of
the form da = be (Frege 1977). Statements of the former sort are always trivial,
while statements of the latter sort may contain new information. Yet, if a is identical
with b, then a statement asserting the identity of a with b merely purports to assert
the identity of an object with itself. But that, it seems, is precisely what the trivial
statement da = ae purports to assert. How can the one statement be trivial and the
other informative when the two statements seem to assert the very same thing about
the very same object?
Frege himself introduced the notion of sense partly in order to answer this last
question. Names, he thought, must have two distinguishable, though related, semantic
roles. Beside the semantic role of denoting its reference, a name also has the semantic
role of expressing a sense. A sense is supposed by Frege to be, or at least to contain, a

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256 K. A. Taylor

mode of presentation of a reference. And senses are supposed to serve as constituents

of the thoughts expressed by any sentence in which the relevant name occursat least
in direct discourse. And because names that share a referent may differ in sense, co-
referring names need not make identical contributions to the thoughts expressed by
sentences in which they occur. It is this last fact that is supposed to explain the very
possibility of informative statements of identity. Once it is allowed that names that
share a reference may differ in sense and allowed that thoughts or propositions are
composed out of senses and only senses, it is a short step to conclude that the thought
content expressed by a statement of the form da = ae is distinct from the thought
content expressed by a statement of the from da = be even when a just is b.
Now the approach to names on offer in this essay, suggests that we may not need to
appeal to sense or any sense-like notions at the level of semantic notions to explain at
least the bare possibility of identity statements with what I will call an informative feel.
For that there will be identity statements that have an informative feel follows directly
from our claim that type distinct names are referentially independent, while
numerically distinct tokens of the same name are explicitly co-referential. Because
the co-reference of type distinct names is not directly guaranteed by their structural
roles in ether language or thought, an identity statement explicitly linking two distinct,
and therefore referentially independent names will ipso facto have an informative
feel. By contrast, an identity statement linking numerically distinct tokens of the very
same name manifests only what logical syntax itself already guarantees. But if that is
right, then the difference in felt informativeness between trivial and non-trivial
identity statements is due entirely to the fact that when one repeats a name by issuing
another token of that very name, one not only preserves subject matter but also makes it
manifest or explicit that one does so.
To make clear what I mean by manifestly or explicitly preserving subject matter,
suppose that Jones says My Hesperus looks lovely this evening! Now suppose that
Smith wishes to express agreement with Jones, Smith can make her agreement manifest
by using again the name that Jones originally used. She can utter a sentence like Yes,
you are right. Hesperus does look lovely this evening! (Or she can use a pronoun that is
anaphorically dependent on Joness use of Hesperus.) Now suppose, by contrast, that
Smith continues the conversation by using a co-referring, but referentially independent
name like Phosphorus to refer to Venus. Perhaps she responds as follows, Yes you
are right, Phosphorus does look lovely this evening! Though Smith has, in fact,
expressed agreement with Jonesin the sense that she has predicated the very same
property of the very same objectshe has not done so in a manifest or explicit manner.
Indeed, as long as it is not mutually manifest that Hesperus just is Phosphorus, it is as if
Smith has either shifted the subject matter of the conversation or has somehow
implicated that Hesperus and Phosphorus co-refer. At a minimum, by shifting to a
referentially independent name, the co-reference of which with Hesperus is not
linguistically marked as explicit, Smith has left open the question whether she has, in
fact, preserved the subject matter. She can close that question by using the names
Hesperus and Phosphorus to state that Hesperus is Phosphorus.
Now it is important to distinguish the mere preservation of subject matter from
structurally or syntactically marked preservation of subject matter. The use and reuse
of expressions that are devices of explicit co-reference serves as linguistic markers of

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Names as Devices of Explicit Co-reference 257

the preservation of subject matter. By contrast the use of expressions that are merely
coincidentally coreferential preserves subject matter, but without linguistically
marking the preservation of subject matter. And I am suggesting that the distinction
between the mere preservation of subject matter and marked preservation of subject
matter may be a distinction of far reaching pragmatic significance, but a distinction of
no semantic significance. Its pragmatic significance lies in the fact that wherever
subject matter fails to be markedly preserved, an imputation of distinctness is
defeasibly pragmatically generated. Cooperative conversation seems to be governed,
that is, by a defeasible directive constraining discourse participants to not only to
preserve subject matter, but to preserve subject matter in an either linguistically or
contextually marked fashion. Such a constraint predicts that despite the coincidental
co-reference of Hesperus and Phosphorous, they cannot, in general, be substituted
one for the other in what we might call a dialectical significance preserving manner.
But I stress that to say that substitution of merely coincidental coreferents is not
guaranteed to preserve dialectical significance is not to say that such substitution fails
to preserve truth value. Preservation of truth value is one thing, preservation of
dialectical significance is something entirely different. The former does not require
manifestness. The latter does.19
It is important to stress that unlike Fregean and neo-Fregean approaches to
Freges puzzle, my approach does not attempt to locate the felt informativeness of
informative statements of identity at the level of content. Rather, I hold that the felt
informativeness or lack thereof of an identity statement is determined by facts about
relations between the vehicles of content rather than relations among contents
themselves. Informativeness, or lack thereof, turns out to be a matter of whether the
terms that flank the identity sign share or lack intrinsic purport to co-refer with each
other.

19
And in this I take myself to be in disagreement with Kit Fines (2007) relational semantics. Moreover,
my approach helps explains why we have different reactions to sentences like (a) and (b) below:
(a) Clark Kent went into the phone booth and Clark Kent came out.
(b) Clark Kent went into the phone booth and Superman came out.

Contra Saul (1997) and Saul (2007) (a) and (b) do not differ in truth value. (Here I bracket the fact that
since there is no Clark Kent and no Superman either, each of (a) and (b) are both, on my view, truth
valueless. See Taylor (2014) for a more realistic treatment of such fictional names.) Nonetheless (a) and
(b) can, in the right setting, differ in dialectical significance, since (a) does and (b) does not generate any
imputation of distinctness. The author of the Superman comic books cleverly exploits the referential
independence and co-incidental co-reference of Clark Kent and Superman to very good pragmatic
effect. In particular, it is part of the background story, within which these names are at home, that
although Clark Kent and Superman are one and the same person within the story, this fact is unknown to
most characters in the storythough it is known to the readers of the story. It would be an interesting
exercise to trace all the pragmatic effects of this setup in greater detail. I lack the space to do so here. I
will just say that it seems to me that whenever the two names are used together in the same sentence or
context, the reader is supposed to attribute a sort of in the story distinctness to Clark and Superman at
least for the other characters, while recognize that the characters are, in fact, confused and that in the story
Clark Kent just is Superman. Moreover, the use of either name in isolation from the other evokes in the
story continuity of reference and identity. But the deeper point is that this subtle exploitation of the facts
about the co-reference profiles of names depends entirely on the broadly syntactic character of names and
does not require us to any way bring to bear any sort of semantic analysis of names and naming.

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258 K. A. Taylor

My view should not be confused with a meta-linguistic view of the sort that
Frege himself earlier considered and then later rejected. The view is not, for
example, that in using the referentially independent names Hesperus and
Phosphorus to state that Hesperus is Phosphorus, Jones directly asserts that the
expression Hesperus and the expression Phosphorus are (coincidentally) co-
referential. No such metalinguistic proposition need be part of the (directly) asserted
propositional content of an utterance of Hesperus is Phosphorus. Frege was
certainly right to deny that what we strictly and literally say when we say that
Hesperus is Phosphorus is in anyway about the signs Hesperus and Phosphorus.
Though relations between signs are not part of the subject matter of an identity
statement, nonetheless, facts about such relations play an indispensible role in
explaining felt informativeness. That is because in asserting that Hesperus is
Phosphorus via an utterance of the sentence Hesperus is Phosphorus Jones make
manifest the coincidental coreference of Hesperus and Phosphorus. Now if that
information about the relationship between these signs was not already part of the
common ground of the conversation, it may thereby be added to the common
ground. Now an utterance of the sentence Hesperus is Phosphorus may make
manifest something different from what an utterance of Hesperus is Hesperus
does. But contrary to Fregeans and neo-Fregeans that fact does alone does not
directly or obviously entail that there need be any difference in narrowly or directly
asserted content between an utterance of the former and an utterance of the latter (as
opposed to total utterance content.)20 So even if one is inclined to claim, as
referentialists typically are and Fregeans typically are not, that the proposition that
Hesperus is Phosphorus is strictly identical to the proposition that Hesperus is
Hesperus, one can still manage to find a cognitive difference between the utterances
of our two sentences. It is just that that cognitive difference does not amount to a
difference in what is saidstrictly, literally and narrowlyby our two utterances.
One will be tempted by the view that a difference in cognitive significance must
amount to a difference in the propositional contents of what is strictly, literally and
narrowly said only if one commits what John Perry (2001) calls a subject matter
fallacy. One commits a subject matter fallacy, roughly, when one supposes that all
the information conveyed by an utterance is information about the subject matter of
the utterance. On my view, Frege himself committed just such a subject matter
fallacy in taking the puzzle to motivate the notion of sense.
Although felt informativeness is to be explained, on my view, by appeal to
broadly syntactic or structural relations rather than by appeal to semantic relations,
there is, nonetheless, a certain degree of affinity between my approach and Freges
approach. Thats because one of the many explanatory roles that Frege assigns to
sense is precisely that of explaining something like my distinction between
representations that enjoy intrinsic purport of co-reference and representations that,
though possibly co-referential, are, nonetheless referentially independent of each
other. That is why Frege holds that expressions that share a sense will necessarily
share referential purport. Indeed, they will do so, on Freges view, even if they

20
For more on the distinction between narrowly or directly asserted content and total utterance content
see Taylor (2007).

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Names as Devices of Explicit Co-reference 259

entirely lack a reference. Frege also holds that two expressions that differ in sense
will necessarily differ in referential purporteven when they happen to share a
reference. Sharing referential purport is not yet sharing a referencebecause of the
possibility of sense-having, non-referring names. Sharing reference is not yet
sharing referential purportbecause of the possibility of co-referring names that
differ in sense.
Explaining intrinsic relations of same-purport was just one of the many roles that
Frege assigned to sense. He also supposed that sense determines reference, that senses
constitute the contents of our thoughts, and that senses are the referents of that clauses.
Though I will not attempt to argue the point here, I doubt that any single thing actually
plays the multiplicity of explanatory roles that that Frege attributed to sense. And if
that is right, Freges notion of sense may justly be viewed as something of a mongrel
concept that collapses together things that are by their nature distinct. But if sense is a
mongrel, then it would be unsurprising if the work that Frege mistakenly attributed to
the mongrel concept of sense was actually done by a more refined and articulated
systems of concepts, rather than just by a single concept. Now I certainly do not claim
that syntax, as understood in this essay, does all the work that Frege (mistakenly)
ascribed to the single semantic notion of sense. But syntax does, I think, do some of that
work. Relations of intrinsic purport of co-reference are, I think, better explained by
appeal to facts about the syntactic structure and interrelations among the vehicles of
content, rather than by appeal to content itself. What Frege failed to appreciate is that
there are many structurally different ways of putting forth a given propositional
content and that differences in structure may make a difference to the felt
informativeness or triviality of that content (as expressed by a given syntactic
vehicle). By putting forth that content via one structured vehicle rather than another
and differently structured vehicle one may put on display different facts, even
though one expresses the very same content again. When one uses a sentence like
Hesperus is Phosphorus containing two referentially independent names to state the
identity of Hesperus with itself, one puts on display the coincidental co-reference of
two referentially independent expressions.
Frege mistook a merely syntactic phenomenonone that can be explained, at
least in part, by appeal to facts about structure and formfor a semantic
phenomenon that can be explained only by appeal to facts about meaning and
content. That mistake has reverberated throughout the philosophy of language ever
since and has been responsible for much misbegotten theorizing about names. But
the approach developed and defended in this essay allows us begin to unravel and
correct that mistake, while still acknowledging and applauding Freges tacit
recognition, however dim, of the very possibility of referentially independent but
coincidentally co-referential names. Where Frege sees two names, sharing a
reference, but differing in sense in such a way that it cannot be determined a priori
that they share a reference, there are really just two names that are referentially
independent, but coincidentally co-referential. Where Frege sees a reflection of the
semantic character of names, there is really the influence of the characteristic syntax
of names. What Frege and many who have followed in his footsteps have failed to
see is that from a syntactic perspective names are quite distinctive referring devices.
To repeat a name is ipso facto to repeat a reference. To refer again to the same

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260 K. A. Taylor

object, but using a different name is, in effect, to refer de novo to the relevant object,
that is, in a way not anaphorically linked with the previous act of reference.21

21
It is worth briefly contrasting my own view with a view that is similar in spirit but differ in detail from
my own. I have in mind the views of Fiengo and May (2006). Though they seem to agree with much of
the general spirit of much of what I say in this essay, they introduce a notion of de dicto content
apparently to preserve certain Fregean intuitions. But given the arguments of this essay it is hard to see
why any view roughly in the same spirit as mine should be moved by Fregean considerations. To make
clear the points of contention between their view and my own, I need to introduce three bits of their own
technical apparatus: (a) notion of a translation statement; (b) the notion of an assignment; and (c) the
distinction between a de dicto and a non-de dicto logical form.
A translation statement is a statement of the form:
d
(25) X translates Ye
where X and Y are expressions that may be either co-indexed or not co-indexed. This notion of
translation seems intended, at least in part, to capture speakers beliefs about coreference relations
both coreference relations of the linguistically marked variety and coreference relations of the
linguistically unmarked variety. Co-indexed expressions are guaranteed to be translations of one another.
Speakers have purely linguistic or grammatical grounds for their knowledge of such translation
statements. But even expressions which are not co-indexed can stand in the translation relations to each
other. There are, however, no purely linguistic grounds, according to Fiengo and May, for knowledge of
such translation statements. As they put it, Translation statements may also hold between noncoindexed
expressions, and these are learned case by case.
Consider next the notion of an assignment. An assignment, they say, is a semantic belief about the
reference of an expressions. Such beliefs may be characterized by sentences of the form:
d
(26) [NPi X] has the value NPie
where X is a schematic letter covering the syntactic contents of NPi. Hence:
(27) [NPi Cicero] has the value Ciceroi
and:
(28) [NPi Tully] has the value Tullyi
represent beliefs about the semantic values of Cicero and Tully respectively. Now Fiengo and May use
a system of indices to mark what they call expression identity. In their system, if NPs are occurrences of
the same expression then they are co-indexed. And if NPs are not occurrences of the same expression,
they are not co-indexed. Co-indexed expressions are coreferential. Expression that are not co-indexed
may also co-refer, but their coreference will not be linguistically marked by the system of co-indexing.
Finally, consider the distinction between what they call de dicto and what they call non-de dicto
logical forms. A dicto logical form, roughly, is a logical form that has an assignment as an explicit
constituent, while a non de dicto logical form is a logical form that does not have an assignment as a
constituent. According to Fiengo and May:
When speakers make assertions the Assignments believed by the speakers need not be part of the
logical form of the sentences that speakers utter. They may be, rather, elements of the context that
the speaker assumes. Assignments, however, are not always just background to assertions; they
may stand as part of the truth conditions of the assertion itself, in which case they give rise to
apparent exceptions to the Assignment principle.
In particular, Fiengo and May claim that both in the context of identity statements and in the context of
(de dicto) ascriptions of propositional attitude ascriptions, assignments make their way into asserted truth
conditional contents. To be sure, they acknowledge that although we may sometimes directly ascribe
belief in an assignment to an agent, typically such ascriptions are merely tacit. But they claim that
assignments need not be explicitly represented in order to make their ways into truth conditional contents.
Speakers sometimes:
commit themselves to a claim about the terms under which the agent holds a belief, and provide
information as to what the agent believes over and above that given by the overt primary
attribution.

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Names as Devices of Explicit Co-reference 261

Footnote 21 continued
I reject this sort of approach. To appreciate why, begin by considering the following two statements:
(29) John believes that Cicero was a Roman.
(30) John believes that Tully was a Roman.
Fiengo and May claim that (29) and (30) each have two logical formsa de dicto logical form and a non-
de dicto one. The two logical forms of (28) are represented by (31) and (32), while the two logical forms
of (30) are represented by (33) and (34) below:
(31) John believes that [Cicero1 was a Roman]
(32) John belives that [[Cicero1 was a Roman] and [Cicero1 has the value Cicero1]]]
(33) John believes that [Tully2 was a Roman]
(34) John believes that [[Tully2 was a Roman] and [Tully2 has the value Tully2]]
The idea is that a speaker has the option of ascribing an attitude in two different ways, using two different
logical forms. She will use a non-de dicto logical form when her ascription is not intended to reflect the
names that her ascribee herself would use to refer to the objects that the ascribed belief is about. She will
use a de dicto logical form when her ascription is intended to reflect the ascribees own use.
But I suspect that Fiengo and May have, like Frege, committed a subject matter fallacy. It may well be
correct to say that in certain contexts it is possible to convey information about assignments by an
utterance of an attitude ascription. But even if one can show that such information can be conveyed in a
given conversational setting, by a given utterance, it wouldnt follow from that fact alone that claims
about assignments enter into the strict literal truth conditions of the relevant utterance. In fact, it is not
obvious how and why such information could manage to become part of the strict literal truth conditions
of attitude ascriptions. To be sure, in claiming that de dicto logical forms are just that logical forms, F
&M may mean to suggest that at some level of representation a sentence like (29) above has a structure
like that of (32) above. But F&M adduce no evidence at all that (29) is structurally ambiguous.
Alternatively, they might think that (29) has some hidden or suppressed constituent that possibly calls for
a contextually supplied assignment as its value. But I know of no reason to think this. One could also
think that assignments get into truth conditions as either Perryesque unarticulated constituents or as the
consequence of something like Recanatis free enrichment. Now I have argued against all such
approaches elsewhere and wont repeat these arguments here. My point here is not that those approaches
have been thoroughly refuted. Its just that F&M dont tell us anything about how a sentence like (29)
which makes no explicit mention of any metalinguistic information about assignments, which does not
obviously contain some hidden slot or parameter that might take on an assignments as its value, which
seems in no way structurally ambiguous or semantically incomplete on its facewould manage to have a
logical form and truth conditions like that represented in (32). F&M owe us some story, but their book
contains no such story.
Another view that shares much of the spirit of the views presented here is due to Fines (2007). But
Fine wishes to complicate the semantics in ways that I find unnecessary. In particular, he thinks that we
have to build representations of what we might call referential coordination directly into the propositional
contents of our sentences. Thus on his view, Cicero = Cicero and Cicero = Tully will, in one
sense, express the same singular proposition, but the proposition expressed by the first will contain a
representation to the effect that Cicero contributes Cicero not once but twice, while the proposition
expressed by the second will contain two uncoordinated occurrences of Cicero. According to Fine,
moreover, we must distinguish representations which represent the same object from representations
which represent objects as being the same. He argues, for example, Cicero = Cicero represents Cicero
as the same, while Cicero = Tully represents the object as being the same w/o representing the
object as the same. Though I think Fine is on to an important distinction, what he sees as part of the
semantics, I see as part of syntax. But part of the difference between Fine and me, however, may be that
he sees syntax as a matter of mere typography. On my view, of course, syntax concerns considerably
more. It has to do with expression classes, their formation rules, transformations that can be made on
them, governance relations, anaphoric dependency relations, co-reference profiles and the like. Syntax so
understood not only helps to explain various distributional facts, but also to constrain without fully
determining semantic interpretation and relations. Perhaps if Fine were to adopt this broader notion of
syntax his view and mine would be considerably closer to converging.

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262 K. A. Taylor

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