I gave a short overview in excerpts of the question “How does language hook up to the world” with the stations:

• sharing a form: Aristotle and Wittgenstein
• Dialectical inspired conceptions of the relationship “signifier – signified”: Derrida, Hegel and Adorno
• Reductionistic conceptions: Physicalism (Fodor), Language reduction (Rorty)
• Direct/Natural Realism (late Putnam)

After that I presented various approaches to the problem of proper names in a chronological manner:

• Conceptual clearification and psychological theory in Mill
• Descriptional Theories in first generation analytic philosophy:
• Frege and the problem of informal identity
• Russell and the problem of Null-Extension
• Language and it’s usage
• Donellan’s conceptions of different ways of referring (attributive vs. referential usage)
• Kripke’s revolution in “Name and Necessity”
• the causal theory of reference
• “Hesperus = Phosphorus” and necessary statements a posteriori
• “The meter-bar in Paris is one meter long” and contingent statements a priori
• Evans mind experiments (Napoleon, Ibn Khan) and critique on Kripke
• A confusing mind experiment with twins at the end, which shows the inadequacy of all modells above (at least seen as general theoretical claims about meaning of proper names)

My folies can be found here. We had also interesting discussions:

• Hegel’s conception of demonstratives like “this” as being radically singular as well as radically general was confronted with Russell’s conception of logical proper names
• On a request I illustrated some consequences of generalizing Kripke’s causal theory on scientific and natural kind terms (Putnam) and sketched with Putnam’s twin earth argument why meaning are not in the head
• We discussed what happens with the conceptions of proper names if we take into account the plurality of languages (and in how far Evans’ and Donnellan’s view have here also advantages compared to Kripke’s original conception)
• I talked a bit about my personal view on so called analytic and anglo-saxon philosophy and that the time to build bridges between continental or french and anglo-saxon philosophy is better then ever (especially considering the “”deconstructive”" development of thinkers like Putnam or Goodman and the tendency of a expiration of the classical dichotomies like fact/value, perception/cognition, analytic/synthetic, metaphysical realism/antirealism (at least with Putnam), mind/body, etc.)

The athmosphere was very warm and the Gerusija people are super-sympathic. So it was very pleasent and also an honor to have a speech for this great student organization.

(published in Hilary Putnam / edited by Yemima Ben-Menahem, Cambridge University Press 2005)

Floyd’s paper begins with an overview of main characteristics of Putnam’s externalism which he offers in his “Meaning of ‘Meaning’”. She subsumes them under three major points:

1. Meaning “is object- or reality-involving”, in the sense that it is “significantly determined by reference rather then vice versa”.
2. “Concept possession, and much grasp of meaning is essentially social in character”.
3. She points out, that our “individuation of meanings, concepts, beliefs” are dependent on the language games in which they take place (she doesn’t use Wittgenstein’s term).

All the famous keywords like the inversion of Frege’s “intention implies extension”, indexicality, linguistic division of labour, the principle of charity and the causal theory of reference, “meanings are not in the head” can be subordinated under these points. The principles are realized by the way we apply Putnam’s meaning vector. I made an overview of her argumentation in a concept map.

Floyd’s new accentuation of Putnam’s critique of Frege is, that the primary issue was, beside attacking the descriptional/intensional theory of meaning and Frege’s Gedanken-platonism, also to demonstrate the inadequacy of Frege’s “universal conceptual scheme” (which he tried to realize as ‘Begriffsschrift’). She points out that this leads to ‘Proto-Kuhnian incommensurability problems’ between the ideal language and everyday language. As Frege considers a concept to be a function, ‘it must yield one and only one output for the inputs on which it is defined: the sharpness of a concept’s application [...] is intrinsic to it’s concepthood.’ This stands in contrast to everyday language where we do not have the sharpness demanded, even experts do not have a ‘full grasp of the sense of their concept words.’ Putnam contrasts this with a language-game dependent ‘polymorphousness of concept-individuation and contribution’.

Tyler Burge’s “Reference and Proper Names” presents a enjoyable variety of non-standard examples of usages of proper names. Pointing out possible pluralities of extension helps him to develop his thesis of proper names being predicates.

I very much like the paper “Über die seltsame Notwendigkeit von Freges “Sinn”-Begriff für Kripkes Theorie der Eigennamen” by Armin Burkhardt. Especially cause I found there a few things which I was searching for already:

• considering Kripkes division of ’speaker’s’ and ’semantical reference’ while discussing his theory of direct reference
• comparing this very division to Saussure’s parole and langue
• a trial to develop a hybrid conception of proper names, especially with the help of Wittgenstein’s philosophy

Then I was swimming a bit

In the evening I worked on slides for a speach about proper names, beginning with a chronological overview of the history of this problem in philosophy (it will be uploaded soon here). Then I added some slides about Mill’s conception of proper names – that is Mill playing on Wittgenstein’s “Vorstellungsklavier”.