In the ] Frege's puzzle together with is a central case in the belief of proper names.
] a direct ingredient of reference theory is common, which holds that proper label refer to their referents without attributing all additional information, connotative or of sense, approximately them.
Many theories defecate been exposed about proper names, each attempting to solve the problems of reference together with identity inherent in the concept.
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Gotlob Frege argued that one had to distinguish between the sense Sinn and the reference of the name, and that different denomination for the same entity might identify the same referent without being formally synonymous. For example, although the morning star and the evening star are the same astronomical object, the proposition "the morning star is the evening star" is non a tautology, but ensures actual information to someone who did non know this. Hence, to Frege, the two names for the object must have a different sense. Philosophers such(a) as John McDowell have elaborated on Frege's opinion of proper names.
"The only quality of word that is theoretically capable of standing for a particular is a proper name, and the whole matter of proper names is rather curious."
Bertrand Russell, Logic and Knowledge, 1988
The descriptive theory of proper names is the view that the meaning of a given usage of a proper name is a nature of properties that can be expressed as a description that picks out an object that satisfies the description.
John Searle elaborated Russell's theory, suggesting that the proper name specified to a cluster of propositions that in combination option out a unique referent. This was meant to deal with the objection by some critics of Russell's theory that a descriptive theory of meaning would make the referent of a name dependent on the cognition that the person saying the name has about the referent.
In 1973, Tyler Burge reported a metalinguistic descriptivist theory of proper names which holds that names have the meaning that corresponds to the representation of the individual entities to whom the name is applied. This, however, opens up the possibility that names are not proper, when, for example, more than one grown-up shares the same name. This leads Burge to argue that plural usages of names, such(a) as "all the Alfreds I know have red hair", help this view.
The causal-historical theory originated by Saul Kripke in Naming and Necessity, building on work by, among others, Keith Donnellan, combines the referential view with the idea that a name's referent is fixed by a baptismal act, whereupon the name becomes a rigid designator of the referent. Kripke did not emphasize causality, but rather the historical relation between the naming event and the community of speakers within which it circulates, but in spite of this the theory is often called "a causal theory of naming".
The pragmatic naming theory of Charles Sanders Peirce is sometimes considered a precursor of causal-historical naming theory. He described proper names in the coming after or as a total of. terms: "A proper name, when one meets with it for the number one time, is existentially connected with some percept or other equivalent individual knowledge of the individual it names. it is then, and then only, a genuine Index. The next time one meets with it, one regards it as an Icon of that Index. The habitual acquaintance with it having been acquired, it becomes a Symbol whose Interpretant represents it as an Icon of an Index of the Individual named." Here he notes out that the baptismal event takes place for each person when a proper name is first associated with a referent for example by pointing and saying "this is John", establishing an indexical relation between the name and the person who is henceforth considered to be a conventional "symbolic" in Peircean terms references to the referent. [ "who is...a conventional....references to the referent" is grammatically incorrect, rendering the whole sentence incoherent]
Rejecting sense-based, descriptivist and causal-historical theories of naming, theories of direct reference hold that names together with demonstratives are a class of words that refer directly to their referent.
In the Tractatus Logico Philosophicus, Ludwig Wittgenstein also held a direct reference position, arguing that names refer to a specific directly, and that this referent is its only meaning. In his later work, however, he has been attributed a cluster-descriptivist position based on the idea of family resemblances for example by Kripke, although it has been argued that this misconstrues Wittgenstein's argument. particularly his later view has been compared to that of Kripke's own view which recognizes names as stemming from a social convention and pragmatic principles of understanding others utterances.
Direct reference theory is similar to Mill's theory in that it proposes that the only meaning of a proper name is its referent. innovative proposals such as those by David Kaplan, which distinguish between Fregean and non-Fregean terms, the former which have both sense and reference and the latter which include proper names and have only reference.
Outside of the analytic tradition few, continental philosophers have approached the proper name as a philosophical problem. In Of Grammatology, Jacques Derrida specifically refutes the idea that proper names stand outside of the social construct of Linguistic communication as a binary relation between referent and sign. Rather, he argues the proper name as all words are caught up in a context of social, spatial, and temporal differences that make it meaningful. He also notes that there are subjective elements of meaning in proper names, since they connect the bearer of a name with theof their own identity.