On ACTUALITY, the Unique Category of Modality

Kant lists, in his table of categories, three categories (as with the other groups) of modality, and those are:
-actuality,

-possibility and

-necessity

We may feel pretty safe and liberal to add the fourth one, which would be the negation of possibility – impossibilty. Impossibility has the exactly opposite effect to necessity in that it implies non-actuality, while necessity implies actuality. Everything that is necessary is also possible, but not MERELY possible as I like to say, but possible and also has an impossible opposite or contradictory. Mere possibility though implies absolutely nothing about actuality one way or the other, but merely that the thing or event in question is POSSIBLY ACTUAL, but that is pretty much the very meaning of possibility, and isn’t an additional effect.
The category of ACTUALITY though, it seems to me, is a sui generis category of modality, if we consider it a modal category at all, since all the other categories are inter-definable by the negations of each other, while one cannot define actuality that way. YES, actuality IMPLIES possibility, but it is not coextensive with it since, even though all the actual things must be (at least) possible, not all possible things are actual. Likewise, even though necessity implies actuality, actuality does not imply necessity back, because what is actual may also be „merely“ possible, i.e. contingent. So, necessity and actuality are not equivalent either (of course, since they would then be one category) but also one cannot be defined as the negation of the other. And for the relation of actuality to impossibility (the third and last other modal category) also cannot provide a definition of actuality, since, even though what is actual is not impossible (by definition), non-impossible (possible!) things may still fail to be actual.
Thus, actuality stands in a pretty unique predicament among all the categories of modality, and proves to be one of a kind. As for its definition, that seems like a daunting task, but perhaps we could say that actuality is what obtains, is true, is real, or is the case. The best we can come to a determination of those, if we accept empiricist epistemology, is that what is actual APPEARS OR CAN APPEAR in VERIDICAL sense experience. The actual is a subset of the possible that has found its fulfilment or satisfaction, and it seems to present a brute bottom-line of our thinking about the world, so we may even take it as a primitive concept that we don’t or that cannot itself be defined, on pains of going deeper than the deepest layer of what exists or is apparent to us, the bare and naked presence of the world and worldly things and events.

Miodrag Vujaković

25. 06. 2025

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Against Rationalism: The Contingency of Human Logic

Contra Hegel: A something is not what it is not. Yes, what something is not determines that thing in its identity, but only negatively, only in abstract contradistinction! What something is not is not a part of its positive identity nor does it constitute it internally. All else is but sophistry and the exploitation of the ambiguity of language.

But wait! We have what something is on one side, and what something it is not on the other side, totally outside of what that something is. That sounds like a very neat, almost mathematical way to capture how the world is inherently split up. But the real difficulty lies not in that abstract conceptual determination or opposition, but in giving such a formal mold an actual, objective or empirical content.

Such conceptual language is all well and good, all pretty clear as far as it goes – the problem is the application. The problem is finding such clear outlines in any empirical given, in any concrete example of ‘a thing’. If logic is not to be mere formal talk and play within conceptual systems, it is to be tested out on the material of experience. And there, the real difficulties arise, what we cannot solve by mere a priori armchair speculation.

As logical categories get concretized, their boundaries dissolve into indeterminate blobs with nothing but provisional or conditional forms. And a complete mapping out of the ontological division of the world into things and kinds is an extreme of a rationalist phantasy of wanting a direct peek into the intelligible essences of the worldly parts or aspects, which suades only when human thought categories are not recognized for what they are.

Miodrag Vujaković 4/4/2025

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Identity and Aristotelian Logic

Quine wanted to argue and say that the collapse of the analytic/syntetic distinction undermines logical truths as (at least partly) conventional, and thus synthetic, and thus based on experience. Not even the basic axioms of classical Aristotelian logic should be able to survive those attacks. But I don’t think Quine’s objections are what is actually problematic with them, as I have argued elsewhere. Take for example “the law of identity”.

A=A. At least that much is indubitable, right? We can doubt the testimony of the senses, the existence of the external world, but at least we can know that everything is itself (and nothing else). Or so it seems. In any case, I want to argue that, even though the law of identity is in a sense indubitable, it is actually not an interesting claim…in fact – it is not even a proper “claim”.

Everything is surely what it is, or at least that is what Aristotelian metaphysics wants us to think (Aristotle’s logic wasn’t purely formal!). That principle stands irrevocably if we assume that things have their whatness or substance or essence (Greek: ‘ousia’). The actually interesting question, which is critical of Aristotle’s basic assumptions is, I want to say: how do we individuate a thing as something, as some-thing, as a particular entity? Also, in addition to the question of the principium individuationis of beings qua beings, we can then ask what makes the particular kinds of things the kinds of things they are?

That is where we peek under the floor of Aristotle’s building of human knowledge, and try to see what is in the basement. There, I would say, we find a human anthropological principle of trying to make sense of the world, perhaps with the best tools we have. But they are still our tools, and they have our fingerprints on them.

Miodrag Vujaković 31. 03 2025

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A Contemporary Philosophical Critique of Aristotle’s “Understanding”

Aristotle said that the only real knowledge is knowledge of  universals, so perception can’t be the scientific faculty, since it only presents us with particulars. Then the question is, if perception is not needed for real knowledge, what epistemic role does it actually play? Anyways, that role is provided by the intellect, the understanding (’nous’ in Greek) – that shows us universals, abstract essences, eidoi (plural of ’eidos’: idea, form).

That presupposes that there is only one unique way of conceptualizing the world, and there can be no competing, but equally empirically adequate ways. The assumption there is that our natural way of understanding things picks out objective intelligible forms of things, which would mean that our perceptual episodes are intrinsically propositionally contentful, and not at all colored by one’s socially conditioned ways of understanding.

This overlooks what some contemporary analytic philosophers have argued for: the dependence of our (propositional) knowledge on our conceptual schemes or theoretical frames of reference.

So in principle, as Putnam says, no knowledge of ours is a simple reflection of worldly states of affairs, but is already theory-laden, imbued with conceptual frameworks (which are our „creation“, our contribution, our input). Or, as Sellars says, no perception is conceptually unarticulated.

We could enter here a Wittgensteinian critique: our „grammars“ are viewpoint-relative and there are multiple incomensurable but equally legitimate ways of articulating our world pictures, understanding our experiences.

And finally, I will bring in Quine to say that no belief is beyond reproach or immune to revision, or ultimately foundational: that would require an indubitable foundation, which is nowhere to be found, and the only difference some beliefs have is that they are more basic in the sense that a greater number of other beliefs would need to be revised also if they were revised, because of the relations of implication and presupposition between them.

Aristotle may as well have taken some ways of understanding that are indigenous to him to be the final human ways of understanding, hell – he took them to be mirrors of the ideal world structure. The point is to see that what we see as universal might just be relative and conditioned; contingent on non-epistemic factors, and thus not ultimately authoritative.

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Author: Miodrag Vujaković

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Some Metaphysical Problematics Concerning Causality

The world is a panoply. To single out some particular part of it or event in it as a cause of some change in some other part of it requires some criteria of what is relevant, what is of interest to us. And this interest and relevance is first and foremost a relevance for action, a practical interest. It is that, at least in least genetically, at least as the primary (in terms of time, not of value) function of our cognition, which implies a sort of pragmatism, but it is not to say that action is the goal of everything else, or that theory can have no intrinsic value.

Some event being a cause of some other event, taken strictly, would imply that those events are causally isolated from everything else, that ONLY the first event that causes the latter one simpliciter, and that no other goings-on have an influence on the latter event taking place, since then those other goings-on would too be causal factors, and would play a causal role in bringing the relevant event about, so we would need to include them too in a complete account of the cause of that event (anything).

The radicalization of this logic would reach as far as to say that, for anything to happen in the world, the whole rest of the world has to be situated in some exact sort of way, for otherwise that event would not turn out as it turned out to be.

This is a holistic picture, that just may be the ultimate consequence of this way of thinking, but since we cannot have an overview or an omniscient insight into the workings of the whole world, and especially not all at the same time, we need to hone in our gaze, and hone in a lot at that, to be able to have useful guidelines for accomplishing whatever concerns us in that world.

So, here I propose an extreme logical analytic tool for thinking of causality as something that is a property of parts of the world, and not the whole world as such and in its totality:

What causes changes in some other part of the world, is a change in some proximate (spatio-temporally proximate) or in some close way connected (entering the prospect of non-local influence, either in some quantum mechanical sense, or some psychic or magical influence, or both) part of the world that changes ceteris paribus, or “all else being equal”.

Whether this is or is not the correct account of causality understood in this sense, I will here state what I clearly see as a necessary presupposition of the possibility of ceteris paribus change, and that is: the existence of at least some intrinsic natures or properties of things. Because, deductively, if something can change about one thing, while exactly nothing else changes about anything else, that thing has some change potential or causal power that is not dependent on anything else and intrinsic or totally internal to it, non-relational. Then, because this is clearly a necessary condition of such causal workings, rejecting intrinsic natures or properties rationally necessitates rejecting also this account of causality.

But, in defense of this, and against the metaphysics that accepts only extrinsic (relational) properties (maybe Deleuzean metaphysics?) I would usher a logical critique: if there were no intrinsic properties, we couldn’t account for the relational properties either, since relations are only relations between RELATA or things that stand in those relations. Also, how could anything differ from anything else if that were the case (and we want a metaphysics of difference, right?)? It would differ by what criteria exactly, which properties? So I would defend an ontology where identity is LOGICALLY superordinated to difference, as being, analytically, its presupposition. But this is a complex and highly abstract subject, and that is all I will say on it at this place.

As an appendix, I will here offer a logical analysis of the Buddhist doctrine of codependent or inderdependent origination, or pratitya samutpada, especially as found in the thought of Nagarjuna, the great Madhyamaka. Interdependent origination would mean that nothing possesses svabhava or own-nature, some set of properties that is completely independent of everything else in existence. That is what is meant my emptiness, at least in the Madhyamaka school of Buddhism. But, that, I think, does not mean that all of the entities properties are extrinsic. That other extreme would lead to nihilism, or the view that things have no natures whatsoever or that they don’t exist in any robust or substantial sense. So their position is intermediary: things stand in relation to everything else, and are only definable in reference to other things, but there must be something which is so definable of which stands in those relations.

A further radicalization and analysis may actually turn out to invalidate this way of “dialectical” thinking by reducing its products to absurdity, to unthinkable contradictions. But I will forego a further problematization until a more suitable situation arises. What I will say here at the end is that one cannot justify one’s apparently contradictory or absurd views simply by stamping the label “dialectical” on it, as if that exempts it from the burden of making sense or being rational. There is, perhaps, a place for defending non-classical or many-valued logics, but, Aristotle may have had a good point in saying that non-contradiction is the bare minimum requirement of saying anything sensible in the first place.

Author: Miodrag Vujaković

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Why there are no mere (causal) powers

There is no merely potential causal power, or, more broadly, no mere power [Greek: ‘dynamis’] at all without actualization or realization [Greek: ‘energeia’].

Consider the following deductive argument:

P1) If a thing ‘a’ had sufficient causal power on its own to being about the effect ‘b’ it would always manifest it, since sufficiency is, well, ‘sufficient’ for the bringing about the effect ‘b’

P2) The thing ‘a’ doesn’t constantly bring about the effect ‘b’ since it needs other factors beyond itself to do it

C) Ergo, the thing ‘a’ has no sufficient causal power on its own to bring about ‘b’

The takeaway of this is that things only have a partially sufficient causal powers whenever they don’t alone bring about the effect they bring about in conjunction with other factors. All sufficient causal power is always active, and never merely latent or potential. All sufficient causal power is always actualized, otherwise it is not causal power. Causal power doesn’t wait in stand-by mode for the right moment, it always expresses itself as soon as it gets the chance.

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Author: Miodrag Vujaković

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A Critique of Value Realism

Value realism, of which moral realism is a subspecies (since, of course, moral values are a kind of values) is an axiological theory which states that things have value in-themselves objectively and regardless of the evaluative attitudes we may take up towards them. That is the position whose critique I will take up in this article.
My main reference will be to the article by Frank Jackson and Philip Pettit entitled “Moral Functionalism and Moral Motivation” which appears in the book written by the collaborative effort of these two authors plus Michael Smith called by the name “Mind, Morality and Explanation”, specifically in the section under the title “Moral Theory”. I have taken the freedom to extend their talk of moral values to values in general (but with a special emphasis on moral matters), because I think similar and analogous patterns of analysis can be applied to all types of values, be they moral, political, aesthetic or epistemic.
I believe that the supervenience which they postulate of the evaluative facts on the descriptive facts (they claim they are even reducible to them in principle) relies on the view that an adequate and correct description of all the relevant matters of fact entail an adequate evaluative attitude that is proper to that state of affairs believed to be the case. That kind of view holds that all the differences in evaluative attitudes among subjects boil down to and are causally explicable by reference to a difference in relevant beliefs. Does this contradict what we actually find to be true among at least some cases of moral disagreement between subjects? Are there cases where all the relevant beliefs are shared but evaluative attitudes aren’t? I think there certainly are. Take for example a situation where we define to everyone’s satisfaction what being alive means, and we determine exactly at what point the fertilized egg cell is considered alive – still, some people may think that abortion is permissible while others still find it unacceptable. There, the difference in evaluative positions does not stem from a difference in belief, but, I will say, a difference in temperament and emotional states.
Claim: Morally proper desires and motivational states will certainly occur in all subjects that function under ideal conditions where weakness of will or some other detracting malaise isn’t present as soon as the right belief is formed; morally adequate motivation for action follows normally from an accurate ascertainment of moral truths in question which are relevant to the specific situation we find ourselves in. On this view, there seems to be no possibility for intentional evil or purposeful going against the moral prescriptions properly cognized to be normatively binding. This reminds me of the Socratic position that evil follows from ignorance (or is ignorance) with the addition that there is only one kind of will proper to the cognized normative fact. To be fair, the said authors will argue in this article against all-out intellectualism that can be said to haunt the Socratic standpoint.
These authors say that an accurate cognition of moral truths will, in sufficiently healthy and strong-willed subjects, be followed by an adequate desire to accomplish that course of action that is considered good or right. This commits what Mackie (see J. L. Mackie 1977) calls a mistake in the direction of the dependence relation between goodness and desire. “We desire what is good” is true under both construals, but in different senses – for Mackie that would be a tautology. These, as we can call them, “motivational internalists” argue that desire or other conative states arise out of the cognition of the good as such, which is independent of our desire and pre-exists it. Someone more in like with Mackie’s position will say: our idea of the good arises from, and is thus derivative from, our desires – our desires aren’t struggling to cohere with objective goodness out there in the world, but, in essence, create it – our belief about the good is formed on the basis of our desires, and not the other way around. In other words, these moral realists will argue that our desire is based on our recognition of the fact of what is intrinsically good, while Mackie will hold an opposite view in that regard – that our views about the good are based on the fact of what we desire, or, if you like, we don’t desire things because they are good but hold them to be good because we desire them, at least according to Mackie and probably subjectivists in general, whether they belong to an individualistic or collectivistic camp of subjectivism.
A corresponding desire follows its equivalent evaluative belief inferentially or, rather, quasi-inferentially with something that resembles the force of a logical consequent, according to these authors. If that is true, what about cases where the cogitation of a good act is not followed by the will to do that act, but rather an inclination towards its very opposite (which would be overtly immoral behavior) ? I don’t think it is accurate to characterize all persons who acts in that way as “weak-willed”; they may be very determined in their own right to do what they will regardless of the moral status of that act (which can be correctly called amoral behavior). These philosophers say” The conception of an act as fair is followed normally by the desire to do that act…But that is the case only in circumstances where fairness as such in all or at least some of its instantiations is desired or valued in the first place! The value or desire (which are equated by the subjectivist) to do that thing was already there, comfortably sleeping in its bed of subconsciousness, and it was only awoken by that belief, and not produced by it. Now someone could ask: was that value/desire just dozing off, or was it not there to begin with? I would distinguish here between desiderational (or generally emotional) dispositions. which are pretty much desires in stand-by mode – there, lurking under the surface of consciousness and ready to pop out their head at any moment in which the right provocative stimuli arise – and consciously felt desires. There are no emotions in general (and desires are no exception) without the pre-existing emotional dispositions; no emotion arises on contact with sensory or other input unless our emotional nature is not disposed or constituted in a way that allows that (maybe this can be traced back to our instinctual nature, but I don’t think it is reducible to it).
A non-intellectual evaluative belief, as these authors call them, that is more practical in nature can be held even when it is not fully conceptualized, articulated or consciously explicated, and it involves a desire in the same way that, for example, non-intellectual color belief involves a sensation, or a non-intellectual belief in modus ponens involves an inferential disposition. Our authors say that a belief that something has a positive (moral) value which is not accompanied by a corresponding desire makes for an incoherent state of affairs; just like it is incoherent when someone forms a belief that something is red without having the corresponding sensation or some red surface. The question here is: which element is causally primary: the belief or the desire? I think it is obvious in this analogy with color that the sensation is primary, and that it is only on top of it that the belief is formed, which would prove Mackie’s point that desire has precedence over the value judgement in the normative equation.
Our authors express a reserve when they say that not all beliefs are usually followed by the desires adequate to them, but only non-intellectual ones. By non-intellectual belief they seem to mean a more primitive sort of belief which doesn’t even require a developed conceptual apparatus in order to be formed. That kind of belief, if it showed that an action is good would imply that is is for that reason desirable (or desired!). But this seems to me to smuggle in a fragment of desire into the belief itself, even though it is claimed that desires, as consequences of beliefs, are separate from them. I don’t see how limiting a belief’s conceptual articulation would make it more intimately connected with a desire; it may only conceal possible reasons why the thing isn’t actually desirable. This may only show us a reason why people who put less effort into reflecting on and articulating their beliefs defend them more strongly and with more conviction; extensive reevaluation tends to throw doubt on our beliefs and shake our attitudes at their core. The dumbest people tend also to be the surest.
People tend to want to act, and subsequently act, in accordance with their judgement of what is “good” or “right” in normal (meaning the absence of perturbances) and ideal (denoting the presence of felicitations) circumstances; they only fail to do so if they’re in some way biased. Or at least that is what our authors say. I would object: all value dispositions represent biases towards one thing against another; in favor of one thing and at the expense of another. Without this kind of bias there would be no difference in evaluative attitudes towards different things. If we were to look at everything with an impartial eye, we would have no preferences or tastes; we would just be decisionless and thus inactive bystanders, passive witnesses of events moving about us, floating minds with no feelings.
Now I will present my formulation of value subjectivism as I understand and hold it: Value isn’t a natural (or for that matter a non-natural) property of objects, people or actions in the world – it is a result of taking an evaluative stance towards those objects, people or actions by the subject doing the evaluating. Values aren’t pieces of the furniture of mind-independent reality; they’re not the building blocks of the universe; they are subjective projections of states of feeling or emotion. Things don’t have value-in-themselves, they only can, and often do, have value-for-us. At best, objects can have certain properties that awaken in us certain evaluative attitudes that we’re so constituted and pre-disposed to hold towards such objects. In a sense, values can be understood as a relation that holds between the valuers and the valued, with an emphasis on their full dependence on the subject that is their source and final arbiter. All valuing begins and ends in, or with the subject; valuing is an activity of the subject, and value without the evaluator is an oxymoron.
Here is my reworking of the fact/value distinction: Cognition-in-principle is logically distinct from evaluation and free of it. Cognition-in-practice is no doubt often tainted with value judgements, so most of our theories are value-laden. But my point is that cognitions and values are separable in theory and, if we’re careful enough, in practice as well. Even science, which is supposed to be perfectly objective, impartial and unbiased has all sorts of values woven into its structure, which can be identified as such, and optionally eliminated, as one sees fit. That elimination of values from science must take place if it is to be an objective enterprise.
Conclusion: The position these authors have been presenting and defending is what they call “moral functionalism”, which is a form of moral (value) realism. This is also associated with what is called “weak internalism about motivation”, which means that a positive evaluation of certain actions acts like a reason that motivates our desire to do that action, and that a negative evaluation motivates the desire to refrain from the evaluated action, but not necessarily (which would be strong internalism) but only normally – under suitable circumstances. My contention is that this is reversing the order of explanation, and explaining desires in terms of beliefs, and not the other way around, which would be more accurate. I hope to have shown how some of their main points can be objected to, if not definitively refuted.

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Author: Miodrag Vujaković
Art by: Gabriel Perez

On Locke’s difficulty of defining ‘substance’

Locke writes in chapter XXIII of book 2 of his “Essay concerning human understanding the following remark:

“…if any one will examine himself concerning his notion of pure substance in general, he will find he has no other idea of it at all, but only a supposition of he knows not what support of such qualities which are capable of pro-ducing simple ideas in us.”

Perhaps here we can approach Locke and help him from this side: it doesn’t even make sense to talk about “what” a substance is, ie.  to look for its definition or essence through the closest genus and specific difference, because that would be to place substance as a concept at a place lower than the highest in the system of our concepts, and to deny it a categorical status.  The substance cannot be determined through some other broader concept.  What is a disadvantage in other definitions, ie.  to say that x (whatever it may be that we are trying to define) is “something that…”, with substance, is the only possible and correct way, because it captures thinghood as such, the simple being-something of something.  And, besides, I don’t think it would make sense to continue the definition with the addition of the type “substance is something that has properties” because a substance without properties is unthinkable and just an empty abstraction;  every “something” has properties, so it makes no sense to define substance by excluding things that don’t have properties.

This is the upper limit of our logical powers of understanding, and therefore even the ordinary logical laws of definition and determination that normally apply within any region of our thinking cannot be applied here.  Here we are at the limits of the conceivable, and from there we derive logical laws, rather than applying the same ones obtained from elsewhere.

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Author: Miodrag Vujaković

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A Case Against Representationalism

Here is an argument against representationalism and the idea of correspondence:

The theory of truth as correspondence implies that some of our representations of the way things objectively stand are veridical, i.e. they match some objective state of affairs, while others aren’t.

Now, this presuposes some sort of representationalism, or indirect realism, because if we adopt direct realism, we are left with only one entity – the objects in our consciousness, and not two entities – the representation and the object between which then a relation of correspondence or adequation can exist.

What is assumed there is that there is some fact about the mind-independent objective world that makes our representation of it true. Now, to be consistent with that (when we get rid of naive realism that says that things simply have the properties we perceive them to have), we must say that the objective properties of things are not “exactly” the properties that they have in our representations of them, but some “corresponding” properties. Here we mean certain primary qualities, which as such can’t be perceived, but are postulated as things that cause our representations to be as they are.

If that is true, then the best we can say, to characterize our representations as true is: “the things objectively have the kinds of (primary) qualities that are such as to cause in us the kinds of representations that we in fact have”. The problem with that is – that is always the case. If there are mind-independent things or states of affairs at all, and if they have the objective, primary properties that they have, they will cause in us the kind of representations that they must cause under certain conditions; the above is a truism. In other words, we cannot say: “our representations were caused by the way things aren’t”, since the non-existent has no causal potency. So whatever representations we have, veridical or not, were caused by the way things are, so error is put on the same level as truth, and truth is thus relativized and thus looses all sense.

An example of this is the following: let us say a perceive a shirt as being red, and from that I conclude that the objective “shirt”, or whatever may be out there corresponding to my idea of it, has certain properties that jointly make me experience it as “red”. But what would I say to someone who experiences that same shirt as green or brown? How could I argue that my representation is veridical, and hers isn’t? I would argue that something is wrong with her perceptual faculties. But “wrong” is a normative notion. Factually, the best I can say is that her perception is “different” in some sense, or that is not normal. But normalcy isn’t a guarantee of truth, but only of popularity. This leaves is with being able to say, at best, that the objective “shirt” has certain properties, we know not which, which in most people cause the visual experience of redness. But what would it mean to say that the perceptual apparatus of most people is well suited for capturing the way things actually are? Different configurations of perceptual capacities bring about different perceptual experiences, even though, presumably, the outside thing doesn’t change, and that is the best we can say.

A further worry is that we only have our representations at our disposal, and nothing mind-independent is, directly at least, accessable to the mind that we can compare our representations with. There is no way to get outside of our “heads” to see if the objective world fits our ideas of it. We are stuck within our consciousness, and then all we can do is compare one idea with another, and not with any state of affairs “out there”. Berkeley already saw this, when he said that ideas can only resemble other ideas, and nothing else. This argues against representationalism or indirect realism, and leads to a certain empirical idealism that I think most people are not willing to accept. But is it really that counter-intuitive?

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Author:

Miodrag Vujaković

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Some Peculiarities of Names

Here I will offer some attributes that differentiate (proper) names from other labels or linguistic expressions.

1.) There are no definitions (or general senses, or connotations) of names which precedes naming and determines what objects the name can stand for. Names are thus merely external labels of things which offer us no insights into their natures.

2.) A name is not a description; there is nothing about the name which tells us something substantial about the named object – by getting to know something’s name we do not find out about any of its characteristics. That is why names cannot properly stand in the predicate position, except as saying that “x is called by the name y” (since x “isn’t” y).

3.) A name, while naming or the “initial baptism” cannot be used wrongly – we can’t “name something by the wrong name”, but we can only call it by a wrong name once it is already named, while other (general) words and linguistic expressions have specific conditions of proper application (to an indefinite number of entities).

Note: A name, however, can be partly a description (as for example when we call a black dog “Blacky”) but they are always more than that – they are always also tools for MERE reference.

The above picture is largely Millian in spirit, in agreement with John Stuart Mill’s theory of names (although I do not claim here to represent his view). Frege, however, criticizes that kind of theory of names annd offers his alternative in his paper “Sense and Reference”. I note and adresa his objections below:Answers to Fregean objections:

Answers to Fregean objections:

One basis on which Frege criticized the theory that names have reference only for their meaning and argued that they have senses too is by saying that a name can have a non-existent referent and still have a meaning. In those cases I say, names refer to fictitious entities. Those entities must have means of identification beyond mere names, like some definite descriptions, so that we know which imaginary entity the name is referring to. That entity might be a mythological or an artistic creation. In other cases, the name refers to a past, or a future, or a possible entity (which, if not future, is imaginary), or otherwise the names have no meaning at all.

The second basis for Frege’s criticism of Mill’s theory is the following: there can be two names for one thing, and to put an identity sign between them may not be to make a tautology. I will give you an example: let’s say someone say “Hesperus is Phosphorus”. Even though both names have the same referent, to say that isn’t the same as simply saying: “Hesperus is Hesperus”, since it adds to our knowledge ;people haven’t always known that Hesperus and Phosphorus, or the evening and the morning star, are both the planet Venus). But to that we can say that uttering, say, that Hesperus is Phosphorus is to say that the object we refered to by the name ‘Hesperus’ and the object which we referred to by the name “Phosphorus” are the same object, which is not a tautology.

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Author: Miodrag Vujaković

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