Descriptivist Theory of Names - Revival of Descriptivism and Two-dimensionalism

Revival of Descriptivism and Two-dimensionalism

In recent years, there has been something of a revival in descriptivist theories, including descriptivist theories of proper names. Metalinguistic description theories have been developed and adopted by such contemporary theorists as Kent Bach and Jerrold Katz. According to Katz, “metalinguistic description theories explicate the sense of proper nouns - but not common nouns - in terms of a relation between the noun and the objects that bear its name.” Differently from the traditional theory, such theories do not posit a need for sense to determine reference and the metalinguistic description mentions the name it is the sense of (hence it is "metalinguistic") while placing no conditions on being the bearer of a name. Katz's theory, to take this example, is based on the fundamental idea that sense should not have to be defined in terms of, nor determine, referential or extensional properties but that it should be defined in terms of, and determined by, all and only the intensional properties of names.

He illustrates the way a metalinguistic description theory can be successful against Kripkean counterexamples by citing, as one example, the case of ‘’Jonah’’. Kripke’s Jonah case is very powerful because in this case the only information that we have about the Biblical character Jonah is just what the Bible tells us. Unless we are fundamentalist literalists, it is not controversial that all of this is false. Since, under traditional descriptivism, these descriptions are what define the name Jonah; these descriptivists must say that Jonah did not exist. But this does not follow. But under Katz's version of descriptivism, the sense of Jonah contains no information derived from the Biblical accounts but contains only the term "Jonah" itself in the phrase "the thing that is a bearer of 'Jonah'." Hence, it is not vulnerable to these kinds of counterexamples.

The most common and challenging criticism to metalinguistic description theories was put forth by Kripke himself: they seem to be an ad hoc explanation of a single linguistic phenomenon. Why should there be a metalinguistic theory for proper nouns (like names) but not for common nouns, count nouns, verbs, predicates, indexicals and other parts of speech.

Another recent approach is two-dimensional semantics. The motivations for this approach are rather different from those that inspired other forms of descriptivism, however. Two–dimensional approaches are usually motivated by a sense of dissatisfaction with the causal theorist explanation of how it is that a single proposition can be both necessary and a posteriori or contingent and a priori.