The Origin of Cross-Cultural Differences in Referential Intuitions: Perspective Taking in the Gödel Case

Abstract

How do proper names refer? This question about reference is critical for philosophers studying language, linguists investigating meaning and reference, and psycholinguists interested in how children acquire names. Over the past century, philosophers have put forward two classical theories to explain the link between a name and the entity it refers to, i.e., the descriptivist theory proposed by Frege (1892/1948), Russell (1905) and Searle (1958) among others, and the causal-historical view most notably advocated by Kripke (1980). On the former account, a name gets its referent through associated definite descriptions. Thus, when a speaker uses a name, they typically refer to whoever best fits the descriptive content attached to that name. For instance, the name “Kamala Harris” refers to the lady Kamala Harris because she is the sole individual who could uniquely satisfy the descriptive content “the first female vice president of the United States” that is commonly associated with the name nowadays. In contrast, according to the Kripkean causal-historical view, a name refers to a person via a link that is originated in the initial naming ceremony and then gets passed down through a community of speakers. Kripke contends that proper names are rigid designators and they continue to refer to the individuals who were initially given the name, even when they turn out to have none of the properties that speakers associate with this name (1980). That means, on the causal-historical picture, the name “Kamala Harris” would still refer to the person Kamala Harris even if she had not been elected the vice president of the United States. In the philosophical literature, the received wisdom is that Kripke supported his causalhistorical view of reference with the famous “Gödel” thought experiment. Suppose the only thing most people have heard about the mathematician Kurt Gödel is that he is the person who proved the incompleteness of arithmetic, which thus is the only possible definite description these people could associate with Gödel. And now imagine that the person who bears this name (Kurt Gödel) didn’t actually prove the theorem, but instead stole it from a fellow named Schmidt who did all the work. In this case, the descriptivist theory predicts that the name “Gödel” would refer to Schmidt, because Schmidt is the person best fitting