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International Studies in Phenomenology and Philosophy

Journal | Volume | Article

151627

Lexical-rule predicativism about names

Aidan Gray

pp. 5549-5569

Abstract

Predicativists hold that proper names have predicate-type semantic values. They face an obvious challenge: in many languages (English among them) names normally occur as, what appear to be, grammatical arguments (call these bare occurrences). The standard version of predicativism answers this challenge by positing an unpronounced determiner in bare occurrences. I argue that this is a mistake. Predicativists should draw a distinction between two kinds of semantic type—underived semantic type and derived semantic type. The predicativist thesis concerns the underived semantic type of proper names and underdetermines a view about the semantic type of bare occurrences. I'll argue that predicativists should hold that bare names are derived individual-denoting expressions. I end by considering what this result means for the relationship between predicativism and other metalinguistic theories of names.

Publication details

Published in:

(2018) Synthese 195 (12).

Pages: 5549-5569

DOI: 10.1007/s11229-017-1462-4

Full citation:

Gray Aidan (2018) „Lexical-rule predicativism about names“. Synthese 195 (12), 5549–5569.