My goal in this book is not to suggest new philosophical hunches about how proper names could work referentially, or even to take a strong stand on the multifarious present discussion. My goal is rather to develop what seems to me, in its foundations, to be an unexpectedly complex, comprehensive, and definitive kind of two-tiered cluster theory of reference for proper names, with wide-ranging consequences for other terms.

My methodological assumptions are also diverse; they constitute a much more pragmatically than formally oriented “philosophizing by examples” (Stroll). This philosophizing by examples was to a large extent inspired by Wittgenstein’s later comprehensive, anti-scientistic, natural-language “therapeutic” philosophy grounded on the idea of a “surveyable representation” (übersichtliche Darstellung) of the way language works—a critical procedure that much of the present metaphysics of language does its best to forget. Along with it comes the multi-faceted technique of using any available resource to approach philosophical problems (Searle). Another influence was the criticism against the fragmentation of present academic philosophy arising from scientism and premature specialization (Haack). Instead, according to her, we should proceed by means of successive approximations, trying to reintegrate philosophical views on the basis of a principle of consilience, i. e., the idea that reality, being unified, fosters inter-theoretical agreement. I believe that to a reasonable extent, this can also be the best strategy for the philosophical investigation of reference, which leads me to incorporate in my project ideas foreign to the sub-field. For instance, Donald Williams’ radically empiricist trope theory is here taken as a grounding ontological assumption. For such reasons, all that this book really demands from the reader is not as much proficiency as readiness for a new start.

To make the undertaking prima facie justifiable, some orienting historical remarks are in order. Concerning the investigation of the mechanisms of reference for proper names, there have been two distinct periods in the philosophy of linguistic analysis. The first is that of the old orthodoxy. It was already inaugurated by Frege in the 19th century with the suggestion of a descriptivist view of proper names. In the 20th century, the main actors were Wittgenstein, Russell, A. J. Ayer, J. L. Austin, and P. F. Strawson, along with logical positivist philosophers like Rudolph Carnap, Carl Hempel and, following similar lines, W. V. O. Quine. The old orthodoxy was continued by philosophers like Michael Dummett and Gareth Evans, still in England, and Paul Grice and John Searle in the USA (which also had some later influence in Germany through works by Ernst Tugendhat and Jürgen Habermas). They mainly assumed that the mechanisms of reference were internal, implicitly cognitive, and in one way or another, accessible through descriptions. Moreover, these thinkers tended to be anti-metaphysical.

The second period can be called the new orthodoxy. This period was initiated by Saul Kripke and Keith Donnellan in the early seventies with their causal-historical views of proper names. A group of very original philosophers joined them: Hilary Putnam, David Kaplan, David Lewis, John Perry, Tyler Burge, and Nathan Salmon… followed by Scott Soames and many others. Regarding mechanisms of reference, they were typically externalists, causalists, and to a greater or lesser extent, anti-cognitivists and anti-descriptivists. Moreover, much of their work had some metaphysical commitment, for instance, to essences and de re necessities. Gradually, they increased their influence on the philosophy of language to its limiting extreme. Nonetheless, the much greater influence of the new orthodoxy does not mean it has no serious drawbacks. Both approaches are to a considerable measure as stimulating as controversial, which has generated a deeply rooted stalemate.

From a methodological viewpoint, the analytic philosophy of language also had two main approaches, to some extent respectively parallel to the old and new orthodoxies. The first was motivated by developments in symbolic logic (J. O. Urmson called it “ideal language philosophy”), such as predicate logic and later modal logic. The philosophical use of Fregean logic was championed by Frege, Bertrand Russell, and the Wittgenstein of the Tractatus. Ideal language philosophy was also central for logical positivism, particularly that of Rudolf Carnap, later greatly influencing American philosophy (W. V. O. Quine, Donald Davidson, Saul Kripke, David Kaplan, and many others). With greater emphasis on original semantic applications of modal logic, Saul Kripke and the new orthodoxy promoted a renewed “ideal language” philosophical approach that today is favored among most specialists. Hence, a peculiarity of the new orthodoxy is that it is often formally inspired.

The second methodological approach was centrally motivated by a careful examination of communication praxis in normal language (Urmson called it “ordinary language philosophy”, although this label can be limiting). It was influenced by Moore’s common-sense approach and by reflection on the pragmatics of our natural language. It gained an exponential place in Wittgenstein’s later “therapeutic” philosophy, flourishing in the works of J. L. Austin, Gilbert Ryle, and P. F. Strawson, the so-called Oxford school, which had its final but minor influence in the USA through the works of Paul Grice and John Searle, both having learned philosophy at Oxford, though with a methodologically wider approach. It is not too difficult to understand that this last approach is today eclipsed by the dominant new orthodoxy, which being formalistically conceived, leaves scant room for a wider, pragmatically inspired natural language philosophy. (In semiotics, the pragmatic typically involves a semantic, which involves a syntactic, but not the opposite, which makes feasible the greatest scope of the pragmatics. We can see this, for instance, in the breadth of Habermas’ universal pragmatics.)

The present book is to a large extent a return to the old orthodoxy combined with a pragmatic approach in the wider sense. It must be so, since its methodology is a pragmatically driven investigation of natural language, and since the theory developed here is essentially internalist, cognitivist, and neodescriptivist, challenging most of the externalist views of reference. However, it is also heavily supplemented by the answers it needs to give to the important challenges posed by causal-historical referentialism, and by new, imported methodological devices such as the appeal to possible worlds, to say the least. In other words: it is true that the motivation and the necessary theoretical underpinnings for the much more elaborate cluster-descriptivist theory of proper names developed here draws on the old orthodoxy. But the new orthodoxy has provided not only new methodological devices, but also indispensable dialectical challenges without which no progress could be made. In fact, the here presented theory was developed in the form of a critical dialogue with the writings of some main philosophers of the new orthodoxy, so that without their inquisitive and imaginative work it would never have had enough fuel to lift off the ground.

Aware of this, my great expectation concerning the theory developed here is that it will allow us to overcome the fifty years of stalemate between the old internalist cluster-descriptivism and the new causal-referential externalist views of proper names. In my judgment, this can be achieved by a new approach that could be called metadescriptive: a two-tiered form of cluster-descriptivism, which contains metadescriptive rules able to evaluatively order the basic cluster of descriptions belonging to any given proper name regarding its application in any possible world.

There are many persons to whom I am deeply indebted, not merely for discussing the topics with me, but also for motivation and support. These include first John Searle, for his legendary lectures at UCLA-Berkeley, which I had the good fortune to attend in 1999; his work was a major influence on this book. I am also grateful to Manuel Garcia-Carpintero, who in 2007 encouraged me to undertake the hard work of developing my own views on the reference of proper names; to Richard Swinburne, for his insights regarding the merits of the old orthodoxy; to Marco Antonio Ruffino, for his sympathetic skepticism; to Wolfgang Spohn, for exchanging views with me at the University of Konstanz in 2010; to João Branquinho, who invited me to explain my ideas at the University of Lisbon in 2011; and to Guido Imaguire for our conversations at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro in 2013. I am also very grateful for the discussions and the chance to share my thoughts on the topic with Anna-Sofia Maurin and her talented, attentive students at the University of Gothenburg in 2016/1, along with François Recanati for welcoming me to the IJN in 2016/2, where I attended his excellent course on pragmatic aspects of language and meaning. I would like to give very special thanks to Peter Stemmer, who accepted me for postdoctoral work as a researcher at the University of Konstanz in 2021, and Francesco Orilia for discussions at the University of Macerata at the beginning of 2022. Very special thanks are also due to my friend Dr. James Stuart Brice for numerous suggestions on how to best formulate my ideas in idiomatic English.

Praia Bonita, 2023