[Wittrs] Re: Proper Names --Wittgenstein, Russell, Kripke

  • From: Sean Wilson <whoooo26505@xxxxxxxxx>
  • To: wittrsamr@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Fri, 5 Feb 2010 12:39:46 -0800 (PST)

(J)

... alrighty, I see more of where you are coming from now. Let me note a couple 
of very minor points.

1. Let me give some better explanation of "bearer-calls" and 
"bearer-assignments." Bearer-calls are where bearers and their names are always 
present (together) in the language game. Here we ALWAYS want to identify some 
person or thing that bears the N in question. It's a person (or thing) quest. 
The quest can be for something real or fictional. ("This is Mordor"). But what 
is key is that we are searching for a person, place or thing that is called by 
the right N. The game is: match the bearer to the N.  One wants to say this 
"feels" like a kind of archeology or an historicism. You look for the X that is 
bearing your N. 

With bearer-assignments, the psychology is different. In this language 
game, the bearer and the name become separated. And the name of the game (sorry 
for pun), is to ASSIGN a bearer by DEFINITION. We don't care who is actually 
bearing any particular N, we care only whether candidates for the bearing of 
our N FIT THE RULE. Here, the name has become a kind of definition that narrows 
to one. That's what separates this from ordinary titles, and from words like 
"bachelor" or "class valedictorian" or "president" -- which are not really 
"names," but titles (pure). The idea with bearer-assignments is that they are 
truly NAMES, but they function differently in their grammar. Compare: "He is 
president" with "He is The Terminator." (Or Unibomber, as you say). "He is 
Denice the Menace."  

What bearer-assignments say is something like this: (1) there is an X; and (2) 
it does attribute-criteria Y. Hence, "Moses" can function in language as a 
bearer-assignment. So if Bob is the one who saved the Israelites while Moses, 
his brother, did not, Bob can be "Moses" and his brother not.  Note that this 
can even be the case where the stories were falsely attributed to Bob's brother 
(Moses). In this language game, we need to ask: by "Moses," do you mean 
a bearer-call or a bearer-assignment?  Here is what I want to say: any language 
game that separates the bearer from the name creates SENSES of the name.

One wonders what this does to Kripke? It's not clear to me if Kripke is saying 
that bearers cannot become separated from their names -- which is surely false 
-- or that ONLY IN GAMES WHERE THEY DO NOT, that they are rigid designators. 
The more I think about Kripke, the more I think that his contributions are 
quite useless.        

2. "Tautology"

You are right that You and I are not connecting on this word. All my life, I 
have been taught that "bachelor" in a school-boy sense is a tautology because 
it is true by the defintion of the terms, not by looking at the world. Here, I 
think, the confusion between us is between something being verifiable in theory 
versus it being in action used to state something in a proposition. 

I tend to lump words that are only reflections of their definition into the 
word "tautology." You know what I mean? These "circular worlds?" Consider the 
medical jargon of "acidosis." Acidosis is defined as arterial PH below 7.35. 
Therefore, "acidosis" can be taken as a tautology in this way: it only ever 
means a measure of 7.35. That is, it means nothing other than "verify 
criterion." However, in a non-tautologous sense it can mean "requisite acidity" 
being  serviced by the measure of 7.35." Under this idea, we might say that 7 
or 6.5 might also count once our notion of requisite acidity becomes more 
clear. So if "acidosis" means something more than verifying a criteria -- if it 
requires any judgment or thinking -- it isn't tautologous. It becomes 
tautologous if it has no meaning other than verifying a criteria. 

If my use of "tautology" is odd here ... what do you call these circular words? 
(You know, where the "disease" is nothing but the symptoms? You see this in 
medicine all the time)

Regards and thanks.

Dr. Sean Wilson, Esq.
Assistant Professor
Wright State University
Personal Website: http://seanwilson.org
SSRN papers: http://ssrn.com/author=596860
Discussion Group: http://seanwilson.org/wittgenstein.discussion.html 



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