QUAL A FUNÇÃO BÁSICA DOS NOMES PRÓPRIOS?

Abstract

Nowadays, the most popular philosophical view about proper names says that the only semantically relevant function of these names is the referential function. In this article, I challenge this view by presenting several arguments to show, first, that proper names are also used to encode information, and, secondly, that the informational function of proper names is actually more basic than their referential function, more basic in the sense that the referential use of a proper name 'n' depends on whether it is used primarily to encode information. However, before I present these arguments, I do a quick inspection of some points of the contemporary debate about proper names and I clarify my concept of 'information'. At the end, I still do some brief remarks on the implications of the arguments presented here for Millian view of proper names.

Keywords

• Coding function
• descriptivism
• referential function
• information
• Millianism