Kripke, Naming and Necessity, 58.
41. Mill, A System of Logic, I.ii.5.
42. See Mill, An Examination of Sir William Hamilton’s Philosophy, 1979, 323, citing Reid, The Works of Thomas Reid, 412. See also Reid, ibid., 219–20, where he says that a definition is the explication of the meaning of a word in terms of words whose meaning is already known, for which reason there can be no logical definition of individual things, such as London and Paris. Reid’s source was James Harris’s book Hermes, published in 1773, an outline of Dyscolus’ work on grammar. The idea can also be found in Aristotle, who points out in the Metaphysics (7.15, 1040 a27) that even when a term, such as “night hidden” denotes only one thing, namely the sun, it is still common because there could be two such objects. He contrasts this with a proper name like “Cleon,” which can denote only Cleon.
14:51 And a certain young man (νεανίσκος) followed him, with a linen cloth (σινδόνα) cast about his naked body; and they took hold of him.
14:52 And with the linen cloth cast off, he fled from them naked.1
Introduction
Mark mentions the young man just once. Perhaps he is the same man “clothed in a long white robe” that Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome saw later when they entered the empty tomb (16:5), but Mark does not say. He clearly knows who the man is—he says “a certain” young man (quidam, τις), but he chooses not to identify him. Some have speculated that he was Mark himself. Others, that he represents a flight from Jerusalem, and from martyrdom. Yet I can talk about him, as many puzzled scholars have done in the past. Correggio and others painted him. Given we know so little about him, how is it that we can refer to him at all?
The gospels are rich in characters like the naked fugitive. Many, like him, are nameless. In Mark, these include the Gerasene demoniac (5:1–20) who is introduced as “a man with an unclean spirit”; a woman with a flow of blood (5:25–34) who is cured by touching Jesus’ clothes, “an executioner” sent by Herod (6:27) to behead John the Baptist; a Syro-Phoenician woman (7:24-30) whose daughter Jesus cures of possession. Although there is extended reference to them by the pronouns “he” or “she,” or by descriptions such as “the woman,” none of them are named. Others are merely introduced without further mention, such as “one of Jesus’ disciples” (εἷς τῶν μαθητῶν – 13:1), who may or may not be the same as any of the disciples referred to elsewhere. Others are named, but mentioned only briefly: for example, “Andrew and Philip, and Bartholomew and Matthew, and Thomas and James of Alpheus, and Thaddeus [Jude] and Simon the Cananean” (3:18).
Other characters are named, and are the subject of extensive reference within the New Testament, but nowhere else, for example, Simon Peter (called “Simon” in 1:29, 30, 36; “Simon Peter” in 3:16; 14:37; “Peter” in 8:29, 32-33; 9:5; 10:28; 11:21; 14:29; 14:54, 66-72; 16:7; [16:9]). We do not find them in contemporary historical records outside the Bible. Jesus himself, the subject of all four gospels, is referenced frequently in the Acts of the Apostles, as well as occasionally appearing in person, but there is nothing about him in any independent contemporary document. He is mentioned frequently by Paul in his letters, but these are generally thought to have been written before the gospels, and the letters are in any case not independent witnesses. The first independent mention of Jesus is in Josephus’s Antiquities of the Jews, written probably 93–94 AD, books eighteen and twenty, although there are doubts about the authenticity of these passages.2 The second is by Tacitus, who mentions Jesus’ execution by Pilate in a page of his Annals (c. AD 116), book fifteen, c.44. All subsequent references to Jesus, to Simon Peter and the other apostles, depend wholly on the information about him provided in the New Testament.
This brings me to the puzzle of unbound anaphora, of how singular terms introduced by indefinite description, such as “a man named Moses,” “a woman named Martha,” and “a man in the crowd,” can co-refer in some sense with their indefinite antecedent, even though the antecedent itself does not refer. Mark says that the naked fugitive left the linen cloth, and that he fled. I can now say, using the pronoun “he,” (Gr. ὁ, Lat. ille,), that Mark is able to identify or refer to the young man. I have just made a reference statement! The word “he” in Mark’s text is the mentioned term, the expression “the young man” in my previous sentence is the referring term. I have used the reference statement to tell us who, that is, which individual, the mentioned term refers to. But how can the statement tell us this when we don’t know who the man is? His identity, like the identity of many characters in the Bible, is unknown. Mark’s text does not tell us who the young man is (nor who is the Gerasene demoniac, the Syro-Phoenician woman, the executioner sent by Herod). But I can make a reference statement, and a reference statement tells us which person a term refers to. So I can say who he is referring to, but Mark can’t, apparently. How do we explain this?
Story-Relative Reference
The puzzle of story-relative reference is central to Strawson’s book Individuals. He begins with what he calls story-relative identification.3
A speaker tells a story which he claims to be factual. It begins: “A man and a boy were standing by a fountain,” and it continues: “the man had a drink.” Shall we say that the hearer knows which or what particular is being referred to by the subject-expression in the second sentence? We might say so.
We know which individual is being referred to by the subject-expression “the man,” because it distinguishes the man “by means of a description which applies only to him,” but Strawson says this is relative identification only, for we know which particular individual is being referred to of the two particular creatures being talked about by the speaker, but we do not, without this qualification, know what particular creature is being referred to.4 He distinguishes this from identification within history, saying that the former is identification only in a weak sense.
His story consists of two sentences, but there is nothing to prevent us from adding new anaphor sentences, which refer back to the initial indefinite antecedent, or from creating new indefinite sentences introducing new characters, indeed this is how the Biblical stories can be told at all. For example, Mary is introduced (Luke 1:27) by the indefinite description “a virgin engaged to a man whose name was Joseph, of the house of David.” The narrative continues with the definite description “the virgin’s name was ‘Mary,’” after which Luke refers to her by a pronoun or her proper name. For example: “When Elizabeth heard Mary’s greeting, the child leaped in her womb” (Luke 1:41). Likewise, Elizabeth is introduced by the indefinite description “a descendant of Aaron [whose] name was ‘Elizabeth.’” Nearly all the characters in the gospels are identified in this story-relative way, being mentioned in no other contemporary historical source. These include all the twelve disciples, and other disciples, such as Bartimaeus, Jairus, his daughter and wife, Joseph of Arimathea, and Mary Magdalene. Other references, such as to Isaiah, Moses and Elijah, are to individuals in the Hebrew Bible, but they, like the majority of individuals mentioned there, are mentioned nowhere else.
Story relativity was a puzzle for Strawson. The focus of his work, and of the work of his student, Gareth Evans, was a criterion for a form of absolute reference, which he believed would be stringent enough to eliminate relative identification.5 He claimed to have found it in the spatio-temporal network in which we as speakers are located, which gives us—because of our place in that network—a point of reference that individuates the network itself, and so helps us to individuate
