Overview

Dolf Rami contributes to contemporary debates about the meaning and reference of proper names by providing an overview of the main challenges and developing a new contextualist account of names. Questions about the use and semantic features of proper names are at the centre of philosophy of language. How does a single proper name refer to the same thing in different contexts of use? What makes a thing a bearer of a proper name? What is their meaning? Guided by these questions, Rami discusses Saul Kripke’s main contributions to the debate and introduces two new ways to capture the rigidity of names, proposing a pluralist version of the causal chain picture. Covering popular contextualist accounts of names, both indexical and variabilist, he presents a use-sensitive alternative based on a semantic comparison between names, pronouns and demonstratives. Extending and applying his approach to a wide variety of uses, including names in fiction, this is a comprehensive explanation of why we should interpret proper names as use-sensitive expressions.

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9781350197220

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Reviews

In a series of recent papers, Dolf Rami has articulated a use-sensitive view of proper names, providing compelling explanations for the most significant phenomena uncovered in contemporary research in philosophy and semantics: rigidity, predicative uses, fictive uses, cognitive significance, reference-fixing. This book helpfully articulates Rami's proposal into a unified whole that will have to be taken seriously into consideration by future research on this fascinating topic. --Manuel Garcia-Carpintero, Professor of Philosophy, University of Barcelona, Spain Taking into consideration a variety of original desiderata, Rami casts a novel light on the debate on proper names and enriches it with original and thought-provoking insights and arguments. The outcome is a theory that no future student of proper names may afford to ignore. --Stefano Predelli, Professor of Philosophy, University of Nottingham, UK

Author Information

Dolf Rami is Heisenberg-Professor for Metaphysics and Philosophy of Logic at the Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Germany.

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