engleski

Name Reference and Background Conceptualizations

Although it is sometimes recognized by philosophers of language that there exists a connection between a name and a sortal concept which classifies its referent, the consequences of this connection for the semantics of names have largely been left unexplored. The paper proposes that, in the mind, names are connected to conceptual domains (which can be labeled by sortals) that encode the conceptualization of the kind of entity that the name names and that govern the referential behavior of the name. A domain is understood as a coherent region of human knowledge, or a coherent region of conceptual space. That this connection exists is also testified to by experimental work on names. Previous work has shown that there is a certain appropriateness to naming, in the sense that there is something wrong with naming your daughter 'John', or 'Fido', but the examples adduced in this paper, involving names of people, cities and literary works, point to a deeper phenomenon. The main points have to do with the way names can shift their reference from the whole entity to which they standardly refer to one of its aspects in accordance with the structure of the background domains, and with how the fact that some aspects seem to be more essential to the entity as we conceive of it than others manifests itself in the referential behavior of the name under certain circumstances.

proper name; reference; conceptual domain

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