by Pharaoh’s daughter” and so on, searches the world, finds its satisfier, and attaches the name to it. For the referent itself, the man who really did lead the Israelites from Egypt might well have done something else.39 Moses might have chosen to stay in Egypt working for Pharaoh, and might not have led the Israelites out of Egypt. His mother might have decided to keep him, and so on. Kripke:
He might never have gone into either politics or religion at all; and in that case maybe no one would have done any of the things that the Bible relates of Moses.40
This doesn’t mean that in such a possible world, he wouldn’t have existed, he just wouldn’t have done those things. Hence, the existence of Moses cannot be reduced to the existence of a man with such attributes.
For similar reasons, Mill argued that a proper name signifies no attributes as belonging to its bearer, that it is more like a mark placed directly on the bearer and so, strictly speaking, has no meaning at all.41 It merely “answers the purpose of showing what thing it is we are talking about, but not of telling anything about it” (System I. ii. 5). This idea did not originate with him—elsewhere Mill cites Reid’s claim that a proper name “signifies nothing but the individual whose name it is,” and that when we apply it to an individual “we neither affirm nor deny anything concerning him”—which Reid himself probably got from the Greek grammarian Apollonius Dyscolus.42 But as I noted in the previous chapter, Mill does not explain how a mark can be meaningless, yet be connected in our mind with the idea of an object, nor does he explain what the idea of an individual object is.
The standard theory is a development of Mill’s theory, and is attended by the same difficulties. It explains properness by a semantic connection between proper name and bearer whereby the name can only signify that thing, but this leads to all the well-known difficulties mentioned in the last chapter, for example (i) how a large planetary body like Jupiter could be a part of a meaning or a thought, (ii) how identity statements involving different names for the same thing, such as “Hesperus is Phosphorus” can sometimes be informative, and (iii) how negative existential statements, which apparently deny a meaning for the name, are possible at all.
By contrast, the anaphoric hypothesis offers a simpler explanation of properness. On the anaphoric thesis, the semantic function of a proper name is to associate the proposition, which contains it with an antecedent anaphoric chain, such that any two terms in the chain, including the proper name in question, signify that if they have a referent at all, they have a single referent. Other singular terms such as definite descriptions and pronouns have a similar function, but a proper name has no other function, being simply a tag for its chain of antecedent terms. We can clearly see this if we express the content of the following single proposition:
A hobbit called “Bilbo” lives in a hole
by means of two separate “that” clauses, namely, (i) a hobbit is called “Bilbo” and (ii) Bilbo (or “he” or “this hobbit”) lives in a hole. It would be ridiculous to suppose that the proper name, when used, signifies some individual essence of a hobbit, or that it directly signifies the hobbit himself. If the single proposition does not express Bilbo-ness, which it cannot because it is an indefinite proposition, and if the propositions signified by the two “that” clauses express the same thing as the single proposition, then the two propositions cannot express Bilbo-ness either, despite the use of the proper name in the second “that” clause. But there is no need to run into the sorts of philosophical difficulties generated by individuating differences or direct reference, so long as we see the proper name as a mere tag that allows us to join two propositions into one, as above.
Hence, a proper name cannot have a plural. Or suppose it had. Then we could use the name to signify both that the same thing is such-and-such, and that a different thing is such-and-such. But a proper name cannot signify identity and difference at the same time, so it cannot have a plural. A common name, by contrast, can be used to signify both “the same F” and “another F,” because its purpose is not to continue an anaphoric chain. The anaphoric account has no philosophical difficulties at all. We run into such difficulties only if we suppose that a name signifies some essential property of an individual, or the individual itself, rather than a property of the language alone.
Summary
I have argued that co-reference is rule governed, and that it in no way depends upon any semantic relation between a text and extratextual items. The difficulty faced by computers in comprehending human texts does not conflict with this principle. The ability to understand a text like the Hebrew Bible presupposes the ability to keep track of which individual is which by assigning the right token of a singular term to the right subject. This requires not just knowledge of the syntax and semantics of the language, but knowledge of the genre, or of human nature itself. Such knowledge determines the “natural” reading of the text, deviation from which can only be justified if it justifies the same reading systematically across every passage of the scripture, and which other writers could emulate without going astray. For this reason, the proper names “Noah,” “Abraham,” and “Moses” have the same reference, that is, co-reference, in all the parts of the Hebrew Bible, even when the parts are written by different authors. Co-reference is objective in the sense that there are systematic rules or heuristics that determine sameness of reference. Otherwise there could be no “natural” reading of the scriptures.
The existence of such rules is crucial to determining the truth conditions for reference statements, which I shall discuss in the next chapter. I shall argue that a reference statement is true if and only if the term that is mentioned in the statement co-refers with the term that is used, hence if co-reference is an objective property of the text, the truth of a reference statement depends on properties of the text, rather than some extralinguistic relation between language and reality.
NOTES
1. Readers interested in the more general question of scriptural interpretation should consult Gracia 1995 and 2001, although Gracia’s work is reliant on an outmoded theory of reference derived from Searle.
2. Chastain 1975, 205. Sommers (1982) also proposed the idea that proper names and indeed all definitely referring expressions are anaphors, but the idea precedes both writers. A similar idea was mooted by Prior, “Oratio Obliqua,” originally published 1963, and Geach discusses something similar in Mental Acts. Strawson introduced the closely connected idea of story-relative reference in 1959, which he may have borrowed from W. E. Johnson (Logic, 1921), who distinguishes between what he calls the “Alternative indefinite” article, as in “A man must have been in this room,” which should really be interpreted as “Some or other man must have been in this room” from what he calls the “Introductory indefinite,” which occurs at the beginning of a narrative, for example, “Once upon a time there was a boy who bought a beanstalk.” Johnson then supposes the narrative to continue: “This boy was very lazy,” where the phrase “this boy” means “the boy just mentioned,” that is, “the same boy as was introduced to us by means of the indefinite article.” The affinity with Strawson’s idea should be obvious. Johnson’s work includes an early use of the term “reference” that is close to its contemporary sense. For example, he says “Here the article ‘this,’ or the analogous article ‘the,’ is used in what may be called its referential sense” (my emphasis). Johnson, Logic, I. vi. §4 (p. 85).
3. Chastain (“Reference and context,” 216) rightly observes that “the ability to comprehend a novel, a biography, or even a single paragraph presupposes the ability to keep track of who’s who by assigning a given singular expression to the right anaphoric chain, where the latter will normally be a mixture of proper names and other singular expressions. This means, for example, knowing when an occurrence of ‘she’ in Lolita belongs with the occurrences of ‘Lolita’ and when it belongs with the occurrences of the names of the other female characters in
