Please join us this Friday as Aidan Gray (Philosophy, University of Illinois at Chicago) presents work on proper names.

Date and time: Friday, March 11, 10:30 a.m. – 12:20 p.m.

Location: Rosenwald 208 (Linguistics seminar room)

Title: Names in strange places

Abstract:

Predicativism about names is the view that proper names have predicate-type semantic values. Historically, the central argument for predicativism has been that it is the simplest explanation of the fact that names can appear in predicative positions (e.g, in Two Alfreds and a Helen walk into a bar and Every Jeremy I know plays squash). In this paper I evaluate the prospects for this argument. In the first part of the paper, I canvas different possible deflationary strategies towards the data (i.e. strategies for explaining predicative interpretations of names without holding that names are lexical predicates). In the second part of the paper, I introduce an under-appreciated challenge for both predicativists and non-predicativists alike – explaining the discourse possibilities of singular unmodified definite descriptions containing names. I argue that non-predicativists have no very clear path to explaining the possibilities, and that predicativists only have a path by altering their conception of the discourse role of proper names.