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What Is Mill's Definition Of A Proper Name?

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In Kripke’s Naming and Necessity, there are different relationships considered between proper names and definite descriptions (Mill’s, Frege-Russell’s, and Searle’s among others), but while considering these we will look at Kripke’s aswell. Generally speaking, a proper name, i.e., the name of a person or place, is a name which is usually taken to uniquely identify its referent in the world. A definite description is a denoting phrase (this will be further discussed, especially considering Mill) in the form ‘the X’. The definite description is then considered proper if X is a unique individual or object, and improper if X applies to one or more thing, or even nothing. When Kripke speaks of proper names, he means (as stated above) the name …show more content…

A proper name denotes an individual and connotes no attribute. It has no signification. Mill does not use the term definite descriptions. Rather, he talks of individual concrete names that connote an attribute as well as denoting an individual. Mill distinguishes connotation as the relationship between a name (singular or general) and one (or more) of its attributes, and the determinant of denotation considering that if a name is connotative it denotes what it denotes in virtue of the object (or objects) having the attributes the name connotes. It is possible that this same object can have several names all with different connotations. So it is possible for a name to have connotation but without denotation. For Mill, the connotation of a name can be take as its meaning. As we have seen, Mill notes that most individual concrete names are connotative, but that proper names are the exceptions. So for Mill, proper names do not have …show more content…

Kripke presents three arguments against descriptivism: the modal argument, the semantic argument, and the epistemic argument. I will consider the first two, and I feel the modal argument is the strongest, so I will elaborate on this, and briefly consider the semantic argument at the end. For his modal argument, Kripke introduces rigid designators (something that is the same in every possible world) and believes that ordinary proper names are rigid designators, whereas ordinary definite descriptions are not (although there are certain exceptions such as ‘the sum of 3 and 4’). Jeff Speaks presents Kripke’s modal argument as

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