Empty Names and Pragmatic Implicatures
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I Introduction
What are the meanings of empty names such as 'Vulcan,' 'Pegasus,' and 'Santa Claus' in such sentences as 'Vulcan is the tenth planet,' 'Pegasus flies,' and especially 'Santa Claus does not exist'?
Our view, developed in Adams et al. (1992, 1994, 1997, 2004), consists of a direct-reference account of the meaning of empty names in combination with a pragmatic-implicature account of why we have certain intuitions that seem to conflict with a direct-reference account.
According to the direct-reference theory, the meaning of the name 'Kerry' in the sentence 'Kerry was defeated' is the man John Kerry and the proposition expressed by the whole sentence is that identified by the ordered pair <Kerry, being defeated>, which contains Kerry himself. There are many descriptions commonly associated with 'Kerry,' such as 'candidate for U.S. president in 2004,' 'Vietnam-war veteran [End Page 449] and protester,' and so on, but on the direct-reference theory these are not part of the content of the sentence above. Only the referent of a name figures in the content of the expressed proposition.
What should direct-reference theorists say about sentences with empty names such as 'Vulcan is the tenth planet'? One answer, and this is ours, is that the empty names in such sentences have no meaning and the propositions expressed are incomplete, or gappy. The sentence 'Vulcan is the tenth planet' expresses the gappy proposition <___, being the tenth planet>. This proposition is neither true nor false.
We favor a direct-reference account of both filled and empty names for a number of reasons, which we have developed elsewhere (Adams et al., op. cit.). Besides the intuitions, stressed by Kripke (1972), such as that Aristotle was necessarily Aristotle but not necessarily Alexander's teacher,1 our account is supported on grounds of simplicity: it is more unified than alternative accounts.2
On our view, then, when we utter the sentence
the name 'Santa Claus' lacks a meaning and the proposition that is expressed by the sentence is the incomplete, or gappy, proposition <_____, being F>, which is neither true nor false. In uttering (1a), however, we also pragmatically imply (or implicate) complete propositions such as that there is a jolly fat man who lives at the North Pole and delivers presents to children on Christmas day and who is F. The mechanisms [End Page 450] by which such implicatures are conveyed are those of associated descriptions3 and Gricean pragmatic conveyance (Grice 1989).
What is especially important is that this pragmatic component of our view enables us to handle what looks like a strong objection to our claim that sentences with empty names are neither true nor false. This is the strong intuition that the sentence
is clearly true. Our overall view explains this intuition by distinguish between what is literally expressed and what is pragmatically implicated. The sentence (1b) literally express the incomplete proposition <______, non existence>, which has no truth value, but it also pragmatically imparts the complete proposition that would be expressed by substituting the associated definite descriptions for 'Santa Claus' in (1b). When we substitute in, e.g., 'the jolly fat man who lives at the North Pole, etc.' for 'Santa Claus' we get
The complete proposition that the above sentence expresses, when glossed in the familiar Russellian way (in which existence is not a first-order property of objects but something like a second-order property of properties) is the proposition that there is no unique x such that x is a jolly fat man who lives at the North Pole.4 This pragmatically implicated proposition is complete and (pace the author of the letter 'Yes, Virginia, there...
