Concept
Proper name (philosophy)
Overview
in philosophy of language, name which is ordinarily taken to uniquely identify its referent in the world
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
Possible passages
Found by search and not yet checked by a person; they may only mention the idea in passing.
The only propositions of which Hobbes’s principle is a sufficient account, are that limited and unimportant class in which both the predicate and the subject are proper names. For, as has already been remarked, proper names have strictly no meaning; they are mere marks for individual objects: and when a proper name is predicated of another proper name, all the signification conveyed is, that both the names are marks…
John Stuart Mill, A System of Logic, Ratiocinative and Inductive
Names Proper name several times; states what Proper name is.
We put a mark, not indeed upon the object itself, but, so to speak, upon the idea of the object. A proper name is but an unmeaning mark which we connect in our minds with the idea of the object, in order that whenever the mark meets our eyes or occurs to our thoughts, we may think of that individual object. Not being attached to the thing itself, it does not, like the chalk, enable us to distinguish the object when…
John Stuart Mill, A System of Logic
States what Proper name is; the author is tied to Proper name in the knowledge graph.
in philosophy--we have to do it by means of some elaborate phrase, such as "the visual sensation which occupied the centre of my field of vision at noon on January 1, 1919." Such ultimate simples I call "particulars." Particulars MIGHT have proper names, and no doubt would have if language had been invented by scientifically trained observers for purposes of philosophy and logic. But as language was invented for…
Bertrand Russell, The Analysis of Mind
The author is tied to Proper name in the knowledge graph; names Proper name twice.
Related ideas
- Naming and Necessity
- John Searle
- David Kaplan (philosopher)
- John Stuart Mill
- Analytic philosophy
- Ludwig Wittgenstein
- Referent
- A System of Logic
- John McDowell
- Direct reference theory
- Sense and reference
- Denotation
- Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
- Continental philosophy
- Family resemblance
- Tyler Burge
- Meaning (philosophy)
- Bertrand Russell
- Keith Donnellan
- Logic
- Saul Kripke
- Gottlob Frege
- Jacques Derrida
- Connotation
Place in the tradition
Part of Analytic philosophy.