What’s in a Name?

Juliet had a big problem. Her boyfriend had the wrong name. Infamously, she tried to explain it away.

“‘Tis but thy name that is my enemy,” she said to Romeo. “It is nor hand, nor foot, / Nor arm, nor face, nor any other part / Belonging to a man,” continued the Bard’s young lover.

The French philosopher, Jacques Derrida, glosses this line from Juliet as saying that Romeo’s name is “inhuman” or “ahuman.” “Not only does this name say nothing about you as a totality but it doesn’t say anything,” writes Derrida, “it doesn’t even name a part of you, neither your hand, nor your foot, neither your arm, nor your face, nothing that is human!” Juliet desires that arm, hand, and face, and aims to dissociate her Romeo from his name.

There remains a strong connection—existential, essential, indexical, or whatever—between a person’s name and the person. Philosophers such as Plato, John Stuart Mill, and the early Ludwig Wittgenstein describe this connection as a solely denotative one. Others, such as Gottlob Frege, say that proper names both denote and connote, or in his parlance, have a “reference” and a “sense.” For him, when names denote they have both a sense and a reference, but when they do not denote, they may have “sense” (connotation) but no “reference” (denotation).

My personal favorite philosophy of proper names comes though from the Princeton philosopher Saul Kripke, who said that proper names are “rigid designators,” meaning that they designate the same object in all possible worlds. Kripke even goes so far as to say that a name is attached to its bearer through a baptism of sorts, after which, it remains connected to its bearer regardless of any properties that may be attributed to that person. Hence, Nixon is Nixon even in possible worlds where he was not the president of the United States.

Unlike Shakespeare’s heroine, who contends that the name of her beloved is something quite different than the young man with whom she is in love, most tend to believe that proper names denote and/or connote something. To dissociate a proper name from its object is to deny names their special nature. Names are strongly linked to identity, and are a crucial factor in developing a sense of self and interacting with the world.

“By a name,” says Romeo to Juliet, “I know how to tell thee who I am.”

The civil rights and women’s equality movements taught us to recognize the harmful and hateful legacies spawned by essentializing race and gender. These movements and others were synthesized into the precepts of political correctness that reminded us that regardless of race, class, gender, ethnicity, and sexuality, we need to treat all people equally and not prejudge them based on bias or stereotypes associated with their names.

One of the ways that political correctness regarding “names” was encoded into the humanities was the practice of “blind reviewing.” This means that when one submits an article, story, or poem to a journal, it is read by the reviewer without knowing in advance the name and identity of its author. The hope here is that the article, story, or poem is judged on its merit alone, not on the basis of the name and identity of the author.

Or, in Juliet’s terms, not on the grounds of an inhuman proper name, but on the human work generated by the bearer of the proper name. Names often lead us to prejudge works; works without names, texts, if you will, help us to avoid evaluation bias.

While some, including literary critic Stanley Fish, disagree with this position, arguing that there is “no merit without bias,” most progressive journals today follow the practice of blind-reviewing in order to avoid even the perception of bias or favoritism.

Fish argued in favor of bias in peer review because he wanted to reap the benefits that his name brought to his submissions. He worked long and hard at building up his scholarly reputation and having his name on his submissions ensured that all who read them would know that...