'Latinos', 'Hispanics', and 'Iberoamericans': Naming or describing?

Philosophical Forum

Volumn 32, Issue 2, 2001, Pages 175-188

  Nuccetelli, Susana ^a  

^a ST CLOUD STATE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 60949175502     PISSN: 0031806X     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/0031-806X.00059     Document Type: Article

References (15)

1. G. Frege, "On Sense and Reference," in Translations from, the Philosophical Writings of Gottlob Frege, ed. P. Geach and M, Black (Oxford: Blackwell, 1952), p. 57 (emphasis added)
2. See B. Russell, "On Denoting," Mind 14 (1905): 479-93
3. and "Lectures on the Philosophy of Logical Atomism," Monist 28 (1918-19)
4. Frege's views on the sense of proper names may be considered quite different from Russell's eliminativism, for the latter famously took ordinary proper names (but not logical proper names) to be truncated definite descriptions. On Russell's account, the proposition expressed by (1) Aristotle was fond of dogs. may be analyzed as (2) The last great philosopher of antiquity was fond of dogs. And (2) in turn could be recast as (3) Exactly one person was last among the great philosophers of antiquity, and any such person was fond of dogs. Would Frege endorse this analysis? (The examples are from Kripke's Preface to Naming and Necessity.) In one of his well-known footnotes in "On Sense and Reference," there is a discussion of the sense of the proper name, 'Aristotle', which suggests that he would - or, at least, that his position is compatible with Russell's analysis. "In the case of an actual proper name such as 'Aristotle'," writes Frege, "opinions as to the sense may differ. It might, for instance, be taken to be the following: the pupil of Plato and teacher of Alexander the Great. Anybody who does this will attach another sense to the sentence 'Aristotle was born in Stagira' than will a man who takes as the sense of the name: the teacher of Alexander the Great who was born in Stagira. So long as the reference remains the same, such variations of sense may be tolerated, although they are to be avoided in the theoretical structure of a demonstrative science and ought not to occur in a perfect language." (Frege, "On Sense and Reference," p. 58.) The view that, as generally construed, the Frege-Russell account amounts to a 'description theory' of the meaning of ordinary proper names is found, for instance, in S. Kripke, "Naming and Necessity," in Semantics of Natural Languages, ed. D. Davidson and G. Harman (Dordrecht, Holland: Reidel, 1972), pp. 253-355
5. and S. Schiffer, "Naming and Knowing," Midwest Studies in Philosophy 2 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1977), pp. 28-41
6. See, for example, N. Salmon, Frege's Puzzle (Atascadero, California: Ridgeview, 1991)
7. J. Gracia, Hispanic/Latino Identity: A Philosophical Perspective (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000). Gracia proposes the adoption of 'Hispanics' as an ethnic-group term to name Latin Americans and their descendants in different parts of the world. But since he seems to hold a descriptive theory of the semantic content of such names, he might face the problem raised here
8. J. S. Mill, A System of Logic (London: Longman, 1952)
9. S. Kripke, "Identity and Necessity," in Identity and Individuation, ed. M. Munitz (New York: New York University Press, 1971), pp. 135-64
10. and Kripke, "Naming and Necessity."
11. See Gracia, Hispanic/Latino Identity
12. J. S. Mill, "Of Names," p. 22
13. K. Donnellan, "Reference and Definite Description," The Philosophical Review 75: 281-304
14. and D. Kaplan, "Demonstratives," in Themes from Kaplan, ed. J. Almog et al. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), pp. 481-563
15. See Mill, "Of Names," and Kripke, "Naming and Necessity."