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February 09, 2006
Name Systems
In section IV of "On Referring" Strawson remarks that although names for people are usually arbitrary it "would be perfectly possible to have a thorough-going system of names, based e.g. on dates of birth, or on a minute classification of physiological and anatomical differences."
It seems to me that there's a reasonable case to be made that we already have such systems. There's the system we use for constructing names for the natural and rational numbers, and for some of the reals, there's a system for naming dates (e.g. "January 9th 1942"). I wonder if there's a system for naming stars? (The International Star Registry, which lets you pay to name a star after your hamster, doesn't count.) And I wonder if the expressions determined by such systems really count as names, and at what point we slip into the realm of descriptions.
Posted by logican at February 9, 2006 12:28 AM
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Comments
Jeff King has a great paper on this topic, focusing on the case of "naming" dates. ("Naming" is in scare-quotes since on King's view expressions like "January 9th 1942" are non-rigid designating terms.) The paper is "Remarks on the syntax and semantics of day designators", Phil Perspectives 2001.
Posted by: Michael Fara at February 9, 2006 01:04 PM
Thanks, Mike. Our philosophy of language reading group at Wash U has been reading Jeff King's "Structured Propositions and Complex Predicates". I think we might get through it in one week instead of two (it was assigned two weeks on the schedule) so perhaps I can fill in the gap with the names paper...
Posted by: Gillian Russell ![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://www.logicandlanguage.net/nav-commenters.gif)
at February 9, 2006 03:03 PM
One might argue that our family names do just this. In Iceland, instead of representing your fictitious farthest-back male-line ancestor, it just represents your father and says whether you're his daughter or son (like Björk Gudmundsdóttir, or Leif Eiriksson). In Russia, I believe they have both a patronymic middle name and a male-line last name. In China I believe there's one syllable for the ancestral family, one for the set of siblings, and one for the individual.
This still leaves plenty of arbitrariness in the personal names, and the original designation of family names and the like, but at least part of it is systematic.
Posted by: Kenny Easwaran at February 9, 2006 07:28 PM
Nomenclature rules for organic chemistry might be an example for this. You know, names like 1-chloro-2-(3,4-methylenedioxyphenyl)ethane, which actually give you the molecular structure of the compound.
Posted by: Richard Zach at February 11, 2006 08:05 PM
Yes, a 'logically perfect language'!
Posted by: Giovani at March 29, 2006 06:22 PM