AN ALTERNATE APPROACH TO NAMING.

Undoubtedly, I got many of my ideas for the following from Kripke's Naming and Necessity. Familiarity with that work would help the reader with the following. In the following I want to touch extremely briefly on some of the problems with Bertrand Russell's theory of descriptions as mentioned by Kripke. In the rest of this article I am proposing an alternative theory that gains its origin from pointing.

I think the entire problem of Names and Naming got off on the wrong foot. It got tangled up, unnecessarily with existence and non-existence, and with the theory of descriptions.

At least two specific, related problems emerged. We, who never met Scott can, according to Frege/Russell translate Scott to the description : "the author of Waverly" , and this, supposedly unique, description "the author of Waverly" can now be used in place of Scott. The first, typically philosophical question is whether the two are identical. To start with, nothing is. This string of letters: "Scott" are not identical to this, second string of letters "Scott", because they have different temporal and special coordinates, are made up of not identical pieces of ink, whose molecules are not even identical to each other, nor its atoms, because they have different electrons, not one of which can be identical to another because of the Pauli exclusion principle, and could not even in theory be identical since, according to the Uncertainty Principle, their location and momentum could not be ascertained simultaneously; furthermore, it doesn't even make sense to ask the question of location and momentum even in principle. So strict identicity (or, identity) is an impossible requirement even in principle.

Even Aristotle's A is not not A can not be satisfied, since in nature there is no entity called "not not A". Everything is "not A", including this "A" on this page. Instead of following those well-trodden paths, what may be discussed profitably is whether "the author of Waverly " may be used in place of Scott. Well, yes, and of course no. Because, so the argument goes (at least Kripke's), Scott may not have been the "real author", or there could be another novel Waverly, or he really wrote Maverly, which was renamed accidentally as Waverly. The number of counterfactual scenarios philosophers can dream up is truly amazing. All of this is summed up flippantly in the saying that the author of Hamlet was not Shakespeare, but another person whose name was Shakespeare. And off we go into a Philosopher's Paradise of speculations, discussing the obvious, that in the counterfactual case Scott is not even synonymous with the "author of Waverly". Obviously, when the phrase "the author of Waverly" does not uniquely describe its author, it is not a unique descriptor. Of course, I am joking; "the author of Waverly" uniquely describes someone, except not necessarily Scott, but its real author, whoever he be. Of course, that person is not "necessarily" the author, since one can imagine a "world" (a favorite expression of the School of Counterfactualists, including Kripke) in which Waverly was not written by that author either. In fact I cannot imagine a world in which Waverly must needs be described by one and only person, though I cannot imagine a world in which Waverly need not have been written or created by someone or something. And off we could go again....

The second related problem has to do with existence. If Moses (the example Kripke uses ad nauseam) is only known by his aggregate descriptions like "the person who brought down the tablets from Mt. Sinai", "the person that led the Jews out of Egypt", "the person who made the Red Sea part", etc., how many of these must be true for him to have existed? And since, to avoid Kripke's sin of circularity, none of these descriptions are necessary unique to Moses, he might have existed even if he did not do any of these. What if these were done by someone else? Would he be called Moses? Did he necessarily exist? What if his name too was Moses? And another merry-go-round can start, replete with learned definitions. Kripke spends endless time on these, without resolving the issue.

I believe the above all miss the point. I would like to show an alternate approach, which avoids the above logical cul-de-sacs.

Names started for reasons of simplicity. So let us see how the process may have started. For instance, a hypothetical couple on a remote island begetting and giving birth to a baby need only to refer to it as 'he' or "she', or, if they know the meaning of the terms, "son" or "daughter". If anyone were to ask them who they mean by these terms, they could simply point to the baby, saying "this thing here". For this approach, pointing is essential. And accepting pointing as a means of designation equally so. If pointing and designation are not accepted as a unique reference, my approach will not work, but then there is no hope for an intelligent treatment of this subject, because it means that nothing subsequent to this can work.

Now it may come to pass that the couple has another baby. If the first is a boy, the second a girl, they may just continue referring to them by those terms. The terms are not names, nor are they descriptions. To me, they are tags, simplifying the language from having to say "this thing here" etc., or saying "the thing that now moved from there to here", or "who is sleeping", etc. If both children are boys, the couple may well resort to the Chinese custom of calling them, not naming them, #1 son and #2 son. Now there is no problem with a stranger coming and referring to the #1 son as "the person you two call #1 son". Contrary to Frege and (pace) Russell, there is no description assigned to the term. I use the neutral word "term" since I cannot think of a better one: I hesitate to use the word "designation", because it comes with almost as much philosophical baggage as "name" or "referent". Let us stick with "term".

So a third person can ask the second about #1 son, and is told that he is referred to as "the person the original two call #1 son". So the third person can refer to the child as "the person to whom the second person refers as 'the person the original two call #1 son'". Please note the reference within the reference, marked by different quotation marks, or rather single and double quotation marks. I could go on ad infinitum. For instance, a person on another island can hear about #1 son. If asked who he means, he could recite the string: {the person I was told about by the fourth person, [who referred to it as (the person to whom the second person refers as <the person the original two call #1 son>)]}, (I am not sure of the quotation marks anymore, so I use parentheses, hope I get the point across). The point is that by this method it is always possible to establish a direct link to the person without naming him (or her). The above-described link contains an initial pointing and only reference to persons who were told by other persons about other persons.

Of course our ancestors were practical people, not given to playing infinity games, so they attached a name to #1 son, probably something like Tall, Red, Short, etc, not with the aim of describing #1 son but to have a simple tag. From here on the link still operates 'the person to whom his parents refer as Tall' can be iterated endlessly, like I showed above with #1 son. If Tall did something, we can still go on with the chain: Short said that Red saw Tall do something. The point is that each statement can be verified, and the process proceeds one step at a time. Hence only direct observations and pointing are involved.

Before I go on, let me shorten the above procedure by abbreviating the long string of 'person I said that person 2 said ... etc" as the string of P_n (i.e. P₁ + P₂ + P₃..... P_n) This does not mean summation, just order of communication). With this notation we can refer to #1 son as "P_n said #1 son". Of course, eye-witnessing and direct speaking are not the only modes of reference which can be accepted. "P, heard that P2 saw that P3 wrote" are accepted, and so is "P3 read that P2 heard that P, saw". They are all subsumed under the notation P,,.

I would like to make one more simplification. The "names' Tall, Red, Short, etc., of course, couldn't hold for long. So, in came Jones, then Robert Jones, then Robert C. Jones, then Robert C. Jones Jr. Ill. Still, not enough, and not specific enough. If there is anything specific to a human being, it is his fingerprint (we are talking Philosophy, not Science Fiction). So in my proposed approach the obvious step is to take Tall's fingerprint and display it every time a reference is made to him. That's what the FBI does. But since in this discussion it is difficult to display one, let us agree that the picture could be converted to coordinates, they in turn to a string of numbers standing for the picture. For instance, fed to a computer, the fingerprint could be reconstructed from the numbers.

Finally, let us return to Tall, and name him Fingerprint 1,2,3,5,9... Thus the normal sentence that "Tall wrote a letter" would become more rigorously "P,, that Fingerprint 1,2,3,5,9... wrote a letter".

Note how this simplifies things. Scott does not become defined ever by the description: "the author of Waverly". Instead, the construction would require to state 'the person who said that the other person saw that his brother read ... that Scott was the author of Waverly' or "P,, Scott wrote Waverly". And if Scott has the Fingerprint no. 2,3,5,9,0, "P,, Fingerprint 2,3,5,9,0 wrote the book Waverly". There is no descriptive entity called "the author of Waverly", which would be an Ontological problem concerning the status of "the author of Waverly". Instead, the question becomes merely an epistemological one about whether the information of all P's and ours is correct. If it turns out that PI saw Scott (alias Fingerprint 2,3,5,9,0) write a manuscript titled Waverly, and P2 heard him open the publisher's door, and P3 saw the publisher pay him, and P4 printed the book, and Ps wrote about it in a newspaper which was read by P6, etc.,etc .... then we have reason to say Scott wrote the novel Waverly. If the statement is incorrect, it must be only because one of the elements in the P-chain contains a mistake. This is a question of Epistemology, and following Ayer, for instance, we could state what proof would be required to demonstrate the correctness of the statement.

There is no counterfactual case regarding Scott. There are an infinite number of things Scott did not do, which doesn't mean he didn't exist, and there are an infinite number of potential beings who might have written Waverly. But not the book described by the chain P,. I don't know about the status of an entity "the author of Waverly'. He may not be real or not exist. But the way I see it the person Scott (i.e. Fingerprint 2,3,5,9,0, as reported by P,, ) is real, as much as anything empirical can be real. to repeat, the personage referred to by the description may not be. In my opinion, the description 'the author of Waverly' is nothing but a string of ink pattern, not an alternative to a name.

Moses? What about Kripke's Moses? Did he exist? If he was fingerprinted as F 1,2,3,4,5 and a different chain, p. reported to see, hear, or read about him, he existed as the subject of verifiable claims. Without anyone reporting about him, his existence is analogous to that of the sound of a falling tree in an unobserved forest.