"Proper Names" by John Searle
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- čas přidán 29. 11. 2023
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This is a video lecture in a course on the philosophy of language. It explains John R Searle's seminal and groundbreaking 1958 paper "Proper Names". Searle discusses and ultimately rejects both Frege's and Mill's theories of proper names. But Searle does think that associated with every name there is something like Frege's sense, except Searle thinks that it is a purposefully vague cluster of descriptions. Therefore, Searle's theory is often called the Cluster Theory of Proper Names. This video explain's Searle's theory and it uses a lot of examples involving Beyonce, Jay-Z, and Aristotle.
BABE WAKE UP KAPLAN SEARLE VIDEO JUST DROPPED
ngl my heart skipped a beat from excitement
For real 😂
What??
"I bet he's thinking about another woman"
John Searle was my professor at Berkeley in 1971; I took Social Psychology from him. Naturally at the time I had no idea he would be seen as one of the most important "philosophers of mind" of the twentieth century.
Was he a good professor? Just wondering 😄
@@anmafu0068He was opinionated, in the sense that during lecture he made no bones about saying some idea (or even person) was wrong (or even dumb,) and that some other idea was correct. He understood that he had a responsibility to “tell you about” mind body dualism, for example, but breezed past it til he got to philosophies closer to his own. If you’re taking Searle for Searle, then it’s great.
@@anmafu0068I had three classes with him in the early 2000s. I liked him, I thought he was good. Most of my professors I can’t even remember anymore, but I definitely got a few great nuggets from Searle that I remember and still think about to this day.
Interesting. I was at Berkeley in '69 and took a calculus class taught by a Professor Kaczynski; ever hear of him?😮
@@barneyronnieYeah, he was a pen pal of mine. I always looked forward to getting the mail.
You have a genuine talent for teaching and explaining things concisely
I do not come from philosophy, but history, and in history we DO have names that are constantly going through what is described as “historical debate”. The person to which we refer to does not change, but the First, Second, Third (…) things that come to mind when mentally conveying the referred person to the name changes our perspective on how we see them. In fear, in abjection, in condolences, in pity. The biggest names in sociology are a good example.
This subjectiveness around the Proper Name makes so that there could be 8 billion individual ways of conveying the same Name, although we could all agree it is the same person. I would like to see a part two where this aspect is discussed. How can we all are familiar to the same concept, and at the same time have our own conception about it…
8:57 Now Zchwanga exists, and we will think about him and wonder.
He is the entity that doesn't have a description, fathomless, wandering
the corridors of Philosophy, in search of meaning.
There's no god but *Schwangar and Jeffrey is his prophet
Oh no, already the first split in the Schwangar community over how the Divine Name is actually transliterated in English
@@notanemoprog You are right. It cannot only be transcribed in one unique way.
And we cannot say how correct the alternative spellings are.
Love the lecture. Your enthusiasm and energy are well suited for this medium.
We need more videos like this.
the fact that i was nodding throughout the video, and even once caught myself speaking like i was in discussion, while watching this video, even though i am 13 years old and not a native english speaker amazingly demonstrates how good of a teacher mr. kaplan is.
i understood everything perfectly sir. thank you very much :)
I like his point about “what if Aristotle was a bunch of people” because this is precisely the case with Homer.
Thank you. I remember the Morning Star, Evening Star problem from school, but never heard Searle's theory. You did quite well. I remember reading some Searle when I studied Philosophy of Language. Loved that class.
You’re back ty always for providing awesome lectures ❤
If one of you ever need to explain how pointers and "void" pointers in C work. Just show them this video. Great job
I'm so glad you popped up in my CZcams recommendations! You've reminded me of my days as a philosophy major. I had no idea the Searle had contributed to the philosophy of language. Thank you for introducing me to this paper.
This is a very interesting discussion. To me it appears that names are part of the toolset of language and are like placeholders that do not in themselves have meaning by themselves. It is in their practical use that they bear some meaning and as such we understand what they are. In fact in conversation names do not need any preceding cognitive act in order to be understood. For example, when you ask about a certain name of one whom you are unfamiliar with, say Bob, that name itself is already specific albeit empty. It is just a placeholder. In fact it is the unfamiliarity, the lack of description, that makes it functional in a question, "Who is Bob?" The name precedes any description since the act of describing itself assumes that both conversant acknowledge its use as a name. Similarly, if two persons were talking about two different persons with the same name, each name despite being the same and confused are distinguishable and distinct. It is the variable function of a name that enables this kind of conversation to even make sense. The same however may be said of an unknown word or perhaps a foreign word. It is uttered but without descriptive meaning, but only word; but it has pragmatic value in the context of a conversation.
YOURE BACK!!!!!!
anytime i come across something amazing im afraid it will vanish into the void
please keep these coming
also, in the brief window where you'll see a comment before they get inundated, your marbury vs madison video was fantastic - something i always 'knew' about, but the way you told it, including the context and behind the scenes maneuvering made it come to life in a way i hadnt realized i was missing
plus, THANK YOU for creating a distinctive thumbnail that *isnt* some garbage clickbait covered with arrows and CrAzY googly eyes or some nonsense
I love your videos, as a bachelors student stumbling upon this channel .... the best thing that happened.... I am currently reading your suggestions of books to read and i loved the suggestion.... Please if you can make videos reagarding that too... That would be awsome...
Love you videos.
Professor these videos are always stimulating! Thank you so much for all your effort, and I couldn’t wait to throw my email in for a free copy haha.
Reason #7: it also solves the "Ship of Theseus" paradox by making it clear that the paradox arises from confusing the reference with the referent.
I love how you compress your content, and then deliver it, the fact you got me watching the whole video ( not just one ) is highly surprising to me, thank you very much for interesting and well put content, would love to get the chance to get that book, keep on educating and informing, nice work :)
thank you, you really make a lot of twisty concepts clear, even with my extremely scattershot prior education and trouble focusing 💖
you know its a good day when prof kaplan uploads
Excellent video. I recently started reading the Kripke book on names, so I look forward to the video on that.
Your work is top-notch quality. I am at a lack of words to express how much I like your content.
Searle is currently 91 years old, and he has withdrawn from public life in disgrace (not because of his age). Thank you for the mini-lecture.
So I've been thinking about this for a few days. It's just been something that has stuck in my head. One of the more interesting examples would be when certain elements of television shows change. When certain characters leave but the show itself limps on. It also prods deeply at the old Ship of Theseus thought experiment. Rephrased I suppose would be "does the sense of the ship change?" slightly half formed but I think I'm seeing the idea here. It's interesting to see the two "competing" I'd argue complementary ideas juxtapose against each other. Really enjoying these lectures!
I've watched a fair amount of you lectures and would like to state that your pedagogy is top notch!
These are quite *outstanding* lectures. Just out of interest, my tutor when I was an undergraduate at Sussex University, UK, locked horns with Searle in the early 80s about the so-called ‘physical symbol system hypothesis’ in AI. More simply, the issue between them concerned whether and how machines might think. Searle’s ‘Minds, Brains, and Programs’ (1980) triggered a series of published and broadcast exchange about whether Turing machines could think.
You are a really great teacher, or I guess more accurately, professor. I've seen other videos that you've done, and every one of them made me wish I had teachers/profesors like you. (Had I read the original Searle, I certainly would not have been able to gget this much from it.)
Keep this going…gold
Fantastic. Oh, and by the way, you and the philosophy community were and still are very much needed at The Open Group's discussions on the nature of identity. It's tech stuff, and they rattle on about a bunch of "core identity" nonsense. The Searle theory on proper names is a perfect response to that. However, I think it is much more useful than the theory suggests. In information theory in the digital world, something exists if it has a useful context (very loose term - useful - just like the reasoning in Searle's proper name theory). By the way, that's the whole problem with Descartes' bit about existence. To exist is only meaningful if there is a context - any context, and that cannot be solely an internal egotistical thing. It has to be "out there" someplace.
I missed this class, it's great being able to watch these.
It's interesting that the examples here of what a proper name means often include some relationship with other proper names. For example "Aristotle" was born in "Stagira," was a student of "Plato," was a teacher of "Alexander the Great," and he wrote a book named "De Anima."
I love your videos. I'm very interested in the topic of the universality of human rights, and out of all the CZcams creators I've seen, I believe you are the perfect one to explain that topic. Would you consider making a video about it?
I'd say the sense is the mental model that any particular person has of the object, and that mental model includes all of the descriptions and characteristics they associate with it, but it is more than a cluster, at least for any object or person the individual knows enough about. After all, if we know a person well enough, our model might rise to the level where we can simulate even how that person might think about something. And it doesn't matter that every individual may have a different mental model of that object, so long as everyone's mental model is accurate enough to allow us to be sure we are talking about the same thing. My father probably has quite a different mental model of my grandfather than I, but we are both referring to the same person when we use the name. The descriptions, while they inform the model, are only a component of the final sense, and in fact, we use that model to generate new descriptions as necessary, so the essential part of the sense is its nature as a kind of data structure associated with the object, not the particular descriptions that feed into, or can be produced by that structure.
I would tweak Searle’s Cluster Theory a bit. The issue is not which characteristics are necessary to provide the full sense of a proper name to link to the referent. It is not necessary, nor even possible, to ever list all of the unique characteristics that any particular referent possesses. All that is necessary is which set of characteristics are unique enough to discriminate that referent from all other possible referents. That’s why it is not possible to definitively state some minimum number of characteristics must be true-let alone even in one person’s mind-to properly link the name with the referent. In fact, there may be a different subset of characteristics that will accurately discriminate my name from any other “Robert” in history that strangers may use than what friends and family might use. Simply because there are characteristics that I possess that only friends and family know about. But that lack of knowledge of those specific characteristics does not prevent strangers from accurately referring to me when using my proper name. So, the key is simply we need just enough characteristics to differentiate one possible referent from all other possible referents. That’s it.
But that will never end. I suppose you are trying to find the intersection of an infinite amount of growing sets that describe a single object from different perspectives. People will never stop describing Aristotle or Beyonce, so such a unique set of characteristics, computing it that is, will never halt, it eventually becomes an np-hard problem.
@@peterkamau2014 I think you misunderstood my comment. I actually AGREED with you when I said “It is not necessary, nor even possible, to ever list all of the unique characteristics that any particular referent possesses.” And so I think you might want to re-read what I wrote. I am NOT saying you need an infinite amount of attributes. I AM saying you ONLY need enough to distinguish the referent from other potential (but incorrect) referents. And that depends on the situation. I have been in a group of friends (and coworkers) where there were three “Roberts” in the group. So the group would often say “the tall Robert’ or the “funny Robert” or “Rob 1” and “Rob 2,” having determined before that Rob 2 was the funny Robert. The name Robert referred to all three ambiguously first, because that was actually their name. And so to clarify WHICH Robert, we needed only to find ONE attribute that was different between the three Roberts. If I am looking at the population of all John Smiths in the country, I will need to use probably a few more characteristics to be able to single out one specific John Smith from all the rest (e.g., John Smith from Omaha, Nebraska, whose phone number is XXX-XXX-XXXX.” Or “John Smith who graduated from Harvard with a Ph.D. in Chemistry in 2022.” In NONE of these cases do we need to list all the attributes that this particular John Smith possesses to correctly link the name to the correct referent.
It has taken me far too long to work out how you manage to mirror-write on the glass so fluently - even after I noticed your _apparent_ left-handedness! 🙄
Love the content and the style, thank you. Please keep it coming!
Wow, ya i kept imagining series of angled mirrors.
@@tigadirt Some (mainly left-handed) people, including myself, can directly write in mirror, though I have never seen anyone do it so effortlessly or neatly as John appears to do it. It took a while for the penny to drop.
@@BeeSting862 oh wow, i actually thought after seeing your comment that he must be writing normally on glass with a camera on the other side and just flipping the image during editing. But you're saying he actually writes from right to left in backwards lettering?
@@tigadirt No., he just flips the image. Apparently this is not immediately obvious to everybody ;-)
Love these 👏 Your gift for teaching is so evident. Thank you for sharing.
Has it been argued that metaphysical "objects", as the gestalt of a cluster of description, could themselves also be the referent of the proper name? That while Zeus did not exist, there is still a sense to the name, a cluster of presupposed facts (the descriptions and ideas given in stories largely agreed as canonical) about a fictional character. Does a proper name even need a physical "real" referent per se? Or supposing it turns out that no person meets the loose sense cluster for Aristotle, would then the name "Aristotle"-in the same sense as before-now be referening to the metaphysical idea of the fictional character that embodies that cluster, as opposed to a particular person, or would it be referring to the cluster itself, or be referring to nothing at all? Because it seems it would still be referring to SOMETHING as a proper name, and thus the question: could the descriptive cluster itself be a referent of the proper name (either in addition to, or wholly separate from) the either real or not real object? Has a philosopher touched on this with regard to proper names?
When you speak, you make sentenses which contain phrases. What you put into a phrase have two purposes. One is to give the listener new information about an object. The other is to identify the object. For both purposes you can put a discription into the phrase. Such a discription can either have one of these purposes or both at the same time. To identify the object you can also use pointers like articles or words like this, that and so on, or names. And you can introduse a name. To put it shortly, what you compose the phrases with, can have these two purposes, identification, new information or both.
Great lecture!
My conclusion is that Proper Names, after being identified by ostention or description, have very fluid cluster of descriptions and are potentially eternal unless all people who knew about at least one of the descriptions are dead or lost their memory.
There is no need for a Proper Name to have even one fixed description throughout it’s ‘life’, everything can change or be disproven, but the change itself is a separate new description. So even if all facts and presumptions about Aristotle are proven to be wrong we always can refer to Aristotle as the guy who had such and such descriptions which were disproven. Only if all forget about any mentioning of Aristotle the Proper Name will “die” and the word “aristotle” won’t make any sense to anyone alive.
Or we can think of some place in a town that looked differently in the past and the older generation refer to it by using a Proper Name with descriptions that are no longer true. For example, an elderly person says “drop me off by the hotel” but the hotel was demolished 20 years ago. Only because he has the knowledge about the description transformation and he shared it with you, you both can understand each other. At the same time the younger generation of the town refer to this place as “the gym” for example, so after there are no people remembering about “the hotel” existence, the Proper Name will “die”.
📝 Summary of Key Points:
📌 John Searle presents a theory of proper names, discussing the advantages and disadvantages of previous theories by John Stuart Mill and Gottlob Frege.
🧐 Searle argues that the rules for a proper name must be logically tied to the characteristics of the object, but the description used to teach the name may not stay attached to the name throughout its existence.
🚀 Searle proposes that non-existence statements are about the names themselves, not the objects they refer to, and that Mill's theory cannot explain the unique usefulness of proper names in language.
🚀 Proper names do not presuppose any stage setting or special contextual conditions, unlike demonstratives, and they refer without specifying any characteristics of the objects they refer to.
🚀 Searle suggests that the sense of a proper name is a cluster of descriptions, rather than a single description, and that the criteria for a proper name are loose and indeterminate.
💡 Additional Insights and Observations:
💬 "The rules for a proper name must be logically tied to the characteristics of the object." - Searle emphasizes the importance of the logical connection between the rules for a proper name and the characteristics of the object it refers to.
📊 No specific data or statistics were mentioned in the video.
🌐 John Searle's 1958 paper on proper names and his theory provide a comprehensive explanation of how proper names function in language.
📣 Concluding Remarks:
John Searle's theory of proper names combines elements of previous theories and provides a more comprehensive understanding of how proper names work in language. He emphasizes the logical connection between the rules for a proper name and the characteristics of the object it refers to. Searle also highlights the unique usefulness of proper names and their ability to refer without specifying specific characteristics. Overall, his theory offers valuable insights into the nature and function of proper names.
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Cool Video. Reminded me of something: I was doing Shakespeare's Othello in college. My friend wanted to adapt 'Hamlet' and pin the setting in a WW2 Germany kind of milieu. I said show me the script. I read his script and told him, "Well thats not Hamet's adaptation". I said it because i didnt get a SENSE that he had written Hamlet's adaptation, although some descriptions were there. I just intuitively told him that your adaptation doesnt have that 'thing' that would make it seem like it was Hamlet's adaptation. Soemthing makes 'Hamlet' Hamlet. If that thing is there in any setting, then it may well be 'Hamlet's' adaptation. If not then you might as well be adapting king lear doesnt make a difference.
It was your friend's adaptation of Hamlet.
@@ronald3836 yes
You are so GREAT at explaining these things!!! Thank you so much. But why don't the original philosophers just explain this stuff the way that you do and save us all the headache of trying to figure out what the heck they are saying? You must be the best explainer out there (although I haven't checked to see if you have done an explanation of Bleen and Grue .... aaaaaaacck!! ugh) I probably wouldn't have changed my major early on if I had you as a teacher.
I'll admit that listening to philosophers grapple with information theory is somewhat interesting. As tends to happen with philosophers relying on intuition, Searle got some of it right but was not able to understand or define it in a complete and formal way.
Mysteries of science that you think philosophy can answer? 😄😆🤣😂😃Okay, now that I'm done laughing, I would be curious to know what you think those three things might be. BTW, I'm picturing the Taco Bell commercial where Gidget (the Taco Bell chihuahua) had a box propped up with a stick with a string tied to it to pull the stick away as a trap for Godzilla. However, as Godzilla approached and the ground began to shake from the footsteps, Gidget said, "I think I'm going to need a bigger box."
Ryle picked Fido as an example of a name so that it would be obedient, said Derrida.
This is Gladis Elizabeth, (down over here, see?), She was my Grandma's electric dishwasher. She lived in San Francisco and was olive green.
Loved 335 this semester- now, back to watching the YT videos!
So proper names are a ship of Thesius. Then there is one more thing in language that also fits the character of proper names, the word "I" behaves the same.
Ah... darn it, this video makes me want to write a paper extending and refining Searle's argument presented here in order to handle the development of names into archetypes (such as in the case of Julius Caesar, who wanted to make himself "a new Alexander") by way of the echoing of one's life in history, pedagogy, and/or the use of individuals (or the internal conception one has of an individual) as role models, as well as the transformative use of the names of historical or significant fictional figures in new works which reference them via characters named in the same manner (King John in the Robin Hood stories is not the exact same King John as the real world version, and by taking the idea and name of a person to develop a fictional identity, something different and special is being expressed by the same words). Similarly, there is some work that could be done with mythic figures who are commented upon by multiple authors at different points in time, who use them in different ways: King Arthur in the History of Britain is not the same individual as in Le Morte d'Arthur, despite the same mythic *core* being evoked, and similarly any version of Papess Johanna who is used in a more modern work is very much not the same character as the original cluster of identifying characteristics which were associated with the original stories referring to the one bearing that name.
I just wish I had the time and luxury to actually go about constructing such a work. Now that I am no longer at University, both my available resources and my capacity to work on projects of this sort are significantly reduced.
Wouldn’t mind a video on performative language from Austin.. trying to understand how photography can be used in a performative way .. thanks for your awesome videos
I have one in the works! I will go through Kripke and several other famous works in the philosophy of langauge, but then it is on to Austin on Performative speech acts!
Things can get really hairy when we use word describing "Quantum objects". For example, when we say that an elecron hit a screen, what does it mean? It seems to refer to a process rather than an object since quantum mechanics even rejects that electron are "ontological objects". After all, the Pauli exclusion principle is based on the fact that two elecrons are indistinguishable completely.... So referring to "single electrons" seems to be a contradiction.
I like these philosophical mad dashes toward the truth most of all. Performing a careful analysis and considering every avenue satisfies me to no end; however, seeing the philosopher win every now and then makes watching the slogging worth while.
@ 10:00 - I'd say that mythical names are a bit more complicated than that; the name "Zeus" has a *reference class* rather than a referent object; a series of statements/propositions associated with the name "Zeus." For example, "Zeus is the husband of Hera," and "Zeus resides on Mount Olympus."
Sir asalam alaikum sir I humbly request that if you start series of lectures on philosophy of different philosophers such as Aristotle ,Plato,Socrates,Hegel,john Lock etc all philosophers in sequence sir will be really thankful to you if you sir do it sir I am from Pakistan really enjoyed your lectures and your way of teaching and your talent of getting abstractions remarkable
Amazing video! I now have a question. When we talk about the “meaning” of a word, are we talking about it’s sense, or it’s sense and reference put together?
Hi, Dr. Kaplan, I love your videos! I would love a video on the basics of symbolic logic and set theory!
Hey, I'm interested in the book you're writing but I like listening to audio books more than reading.
Any chance you'll record a reading of it and make it available to purchasers of the book?
Apparently subsequently Hawking * models space-time as a Hausdorff cluster-paracompact topological space ** , ruling out even a number coordinate system dependent Lie algebra modelling space-time symmetrically by reflection and rotation for instance, because of the technical possibility of zero and infinity being substitutes from uniquely no effect upon either after being 'operated' upon by a non-negative finite number, so do you think this defeats Searle's linguistic argument?
* Hawking, S. W. & Ellis, G. F. R. "The large scale structure of space-time", Cambridge Monographs on Mathematical Physics.
** A topological space, is a set ^ with a topology of declared bona-fide open sets where any complement, union, or finite intersection of topology subsets is also in the topology, including the set and the empty set, an open set is any element of some set subset, a topologucal space is Hausdorff when any two open sets are disjoint with empty intersection, ruling out aspatio-temporal unique number concatenated with negative and positive -x+x = -x+ for "x" a variable that can assume numeric values, but not -x +x, paracompact when for any union of open set subsets called an open cover equal to the topological space, there is a subcover where only finitely many subcover open sets intersect with any cover open set and any 'cluster' subset is a subset of the covers open set subsets, ruling out -x while supporting instantiation - there is a real number between any pair - for differentiation and apparently, any metric space is also a topological space, implying that point and open set are different forms of the same thing.
^ Russell draws attention to a set theory contradiction : the set of all sets that are not elements of themselves, is a set that is not an element of itself and is not, a set that is not an elememt of itself and Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory does not resolve this, because the Axiom of the Unordered Pair (Wolfram Mathworld) permits set Y constituted by x and not-x where not means opposite, breaking the law of non-contradiction, however if the set of all sets characterizes either infinity, or an arbitrary least upper bound, for a set with an element between any pair and indefinite property, then his argument may collapse when there is also an empty set representing either a corresponding greatest lower bound, or zero, because uniquely they are the answer under multipliction with a non-negative finite number, so they are like substitutes, but complements under addition.
So interesting to hear words being argued about in such logical terms. Very few brains work in such strict logic, and yet everyone spews out words - usually with more of a blend of right-brained (emotional/intuitive/poetic) thinking. You can say Zeus doesn't exist, but at one time the name pointed to an 'entity' that was very important to a lot of people - none of whom would stop to check his existence against scientific-materialist standards.
that reused cut at @26:00 threw me off. this was my first encounter with searles cluster theory. its pretty interesting. i almost feel like it would benefit from an accompanying theory of structuralism though, to explain where we may get one of those potential cluster referents from.
At one point, the lecture started sounding like it's about category theory 😅 Excellent work.
How so?
Zeus does exist.. as an imaginary character. There is a story of Zeus, and characteristics. A proper name does not need to point to a material object.
The mathematical model of a triangle does not exist, but it has a name and most people agree on what it is. So Zeus exists, even if as an imaginary character, because we agree on a broad set of characteristics that define him. The set may change as long as enough characteristics remain that all people agree to denote that same character.
.in fact a proper name only references a loose set of characteristics, one of them is "exists". Science is full of concepts that were given a name before anyone could make proof that they exist or not: either, black holes, God particle, etc. To exist or not to exist is just one of these changing characteristics. There are only two entities here: the proper name and the loose set of characteristics.
The Fifth Element is a well known movie. People agree on what it's plot is, what is the cast, who is the director, etc. Where is that movie? Nobody cares. The movie has no defined location: there are many copies everywhere. Pointing to one copy does not make that copy THE movie (implying that the others would be fake). In that case everybody agrees that the object (the movie) does exist, but it still is not a single material thing that one can touch (especially in the digital world). By definition a movie is an illusion. But that illusion still exist.
The object being referenced does not matter the least: Zeus is a proper name regardless of Zeus existence.
All 3 philosophers are wrong.. 😅 Maybe Kant was into something..
I have some expertise in language and, ever since I studied Semiology in the 1980s, have appreciated its philosophocal implications. This is the first time I've watched one of your videos (promoted to me by the CZcams algorithm) and I found it fascinating. Just a quick question. I understand that Searle used the term "cluster" but wouldn't that simply be a set of characteristics? If so, would that be any different to a label like "cow" which is a bovine, with four-legs, chews the cud, produces milk and which may have horns? When I was a very small boy, on a train with my mother, I got mixed up when I saw cows with horns thinking they were bulls. Doesn't your thinking also apply to common nouns like "cow" or "tree"?
It seems like the description importance is how quickly it narrows down the list of potential options. Starting with every object in the universe, "teacher of Alexander" narrows this potential rapidly to a person that instructed Alexander the Great. Compare this to "born in Stagira" which does narrow the list of potential options down, it does not do so as much as the "teacher of Alexander" description. You need as many descriptors as it takes so that only 1 object remains to avoid ambiguity.
I’m reminded of a quote about the authorship of the Epistles, maybe it was Bart Ehrman. Paraphrasing, “If they weren’t written by Paul, then they were written by some other guy named Paul.”
I love listening to your lectures!
Other than offending the entire population of Bavarian town of Schwangau, great lecture.
A proper name is just a label we agree to use for a particular person, where the person may either be a living or historical person or a fictitious person. Problem solved.
Whether a discovery that Aristotle was born somewhere else changes the "meaning" of a the name Aristotle is NOT a question about proper names. The question is simply whether we agree that we are still talking about the same historical person.
I mostly have a negative view of Searle as someone who is into Jacques Derrida and who was at Cal when his whole scandal was unearthed but I really appreciate this
There's a meme out there wandering the interwebs; it's a video of a few toddlers trying to talk to each other. One boy says to two girls that it is raining outside, but the girls insist that it is *not* raining, it is *sprinkling* outside. This discourse reminds me of that meme.
Searle's work in this area was impressive in 1960, but today is only of historical relevance. Anyone with experience of programming, particularly in C. will have a very clear understanding of the ideas discussed here, and anyone who is used to object oriented programming will need to have a far better understanding of the issues involved in naming.
Dear Professor, could you 'do' Russells 'On Denoting' & Quine's 'Dogmas of Empiricism'?
What about the Raold Dahl character known as _The Big Friendly Giant_ ? He's never given a proper name but is always referred to "the BFG".
Dammit! Prof. Kaplan just posted another video, and I am busy, but I now I MUST spend 30 minutes watching his video. However, it will be worth it.
Edit: It was worth it, and I added my name to the book list.
Thing referred to, uttered and meant. Aristotle and Zeus are still proper names though (capital letter). They were created from real objects: an actual human/individual and the phenomena of that which oversees all or god.
Wonderfully explained. Have you heard of "Pesudo-Aristotle"? It is precisely a real-world example of what you explain hypothetically.
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Aaron or Error?
This was very interesting as an analysis of arguments, but I have to say my background in linguistics made me chuckle a little at what I perceived as naivety in both Frege and Stuart Mills' arguments: How could they not see what a child instinctively sees; that names are just like the stickers on the keyboard that you learn to type with: Just there so you know which one to hit. I think I should look at this as an invitation to investigate different ways of conceptualising language than the Saussureian one. After all, the whole idea is that language itself is nothing but mostly arbitrary signs with conventional definitions, so not to entertain different definitions with the same name as the term you like is tantamount to hypocrisy and insanity.
Though I suppose in Academia, Shakespeare would remark, "A term by any other name would smell as sweet, but a name by any other term would of terminally ill repute reek."
I suppose when two proper names have a similar cluster, it is left up to the individual to decide whether they refer to the same person or thing. But some descriptions would nail it as it were, like the fingerprints or dna or exact location.
A description in the cluster may have its own cluster. For example, the person who murdered Mrs Jones. That person may have left evidence which is itself a cluster : 6′4", drives a blue chevy truck etc. In this case the things in its cluster are less important than rhe fact he killed Mrs Jones.
I know this was a very basic introduction so I suppose there will be a lot of nuances to what a cluster is.
Couldn't it be said that Proper Names translate to a very specific proper characteristic? Beyonce could be translated as "The one who is regarded as Beyonce"
I have my own view on Names, in that they are pointers to transcendent spaces. A transcendent space is a shared state of mind that generates particular images and ideas, that may not be the same from person to person but that somehow yet correlate and allow us to extrapolate meaning.
Understanding a name means interiorizing the knowledge of that particuclar transcendnet space. Names and symbols are maps that let people "categorize" this transendent space. The "cluster" that Searle talks about could very well match this transcendent spaces. And when you decide to create a list of characteristics belonging to "Beyonce" you are actually instantiating that transcendent spae into a concrete form.
I hope this made sense.
Thank you. Watching from Alaska.
Don't know if I'm repeating anything, I didn't read many of the other comments, but there's another advantage of cluster theory. You can recognize a proper name you have no descriptions for used in some utterance, and that doesn't necessarily make the name nonsense. The context and utterance can provide enough information to build provisional descriptions for you.
If you say "I met Teddy in town today and we went to the library to both return some books", and I've never heard of Teddy before, then the context let's me know that Teddy is an acquaintance of yours, was present in town today, is one to return library books and so not a neighbor's dog etc, is the person you met earlier today, and so on. We can make inferences to build more descriptions so that further utterances you make about Teddy I will recognize. Some inferences I make will be wrong, like perhaps it will turn out that Teddy is not a adult but a youth, which is doesn't invalidate all the other descriptions so is fine.
If I become acquainted with Teddy at some point, then those original descriptions I had built by context and inference relating to the person you met that day may all fall by the wayside in place of all the visual and other first-hand characteristic descriptions that supersede them.
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I've been following Sean Carroll and his journey to work on the foundations of Physics in the realm of Philosophy, so am interested in the potential overlap of your book and potentially visiting the same ideas from another direction. So I'll be asking to keep up to date on its publication.
Where is the link to book?
My favourite philosophy CZcams
While it's almost certainly used as the example by virtue of being a philosophical paper; I think a much more pertinent example to explain the concept of a name that is true without being would be "Shakespeare"
The possibility that there was no singular person of "William Shakespeare" is a much more well known theory, plus Shakespeare has become more then just a name; but more an cultural icon of the theatre as a whole; layering on even more to the concept of ambiguity.
pls make video about leibniz (or possible world) - saul kripke. thanks.
love searls philosophy, thanks.
Can you provide Indonesian subtitles so that I understand, I'm not good at English,I want to study philosophy further,
JOHN SEARLE was on your dissertation committee, dude?! Holy shit!
Can we just appreciate how we can watch a CZcams video and think about philosophy and grand ideas? Even a few hundred years ago there were only a handful of people on earth that had the knowledge and time and money to casually think about greater ideas. So wild.
The referent of a proper noun does not need to exist, just the idea. For example, while, indeed, Zeus does not exit, nevertheless, this is a proper noun. As is the name Frodo - a fictional character. Proper nouns are also not the only mechanism for avoiding debate or agreement on of description of a thing. Pretty much all nouns work this way. To say I put my coffee down on the table, allows me to avoid having to spell out whether this is a coffee table made from oak, or a breakfast table made from granite etc. So what is the difference between proper nouns and nouns? I would say that the only presupposition is that a proper noun refers to a unique thing (or idea), whereas a noun allows us to classify objects (or ideas).
Searle ignored the subject theory in psychoanalysis. The repository of the sense (the set of signifiers that explain the signified) is in the "other". The subject is divided between its initial impulse to self-identify and its desire for the culturally "other" which solely holds the "sense". If the "other" bans the subject from accessing the chain of signification that points to "Beyonce", the subject's unconscious might dream of a substitute for "Beyonce" but in real life that signifier would point for him to a void (and such it would be repressed). If the law would say that whoever says "the King is a fool" would be beheaded, in your dreams you'd appear headless -).
As you instructed us in previous videos, i have a question. So, i get the idea of proper names not having it necessary to have an exact set of characteristics to be understood. But isn’t it the question of just identifying the one person/phenomena that we are talking about? I mean, Aristotle - a greek philosopher, student of Plato, teacher of Alexander the Great. We have only one man named Aristotle, who fits this criteria, we have identified him and we can go on discussing exactly this person. Or am i missing something here? Like, I mean, when you’re crossing the border or getting register to vote, the officials have to identify you. All they need: your id, which would serve as a description which can be put against the description - that is you’re having it with you and showing your face or even being identified through biometrics
I messed up the terminology, but hope it’s still clear, what i meant
I went from, "Huh, this is interesting" then to Frustration, "Well Zeus Dang It! Which one is it!?" and finally landed on "That was interesting." :D
The ship of Theseus could be seen as a case where most of the descriptions apply to two objects with a few of the descriptions only applying to one of them and a few of the descriptions only applying to the other of them. It would only be natural for each of the ships to be called the ship of Theseus, and to distinguish them they would naturally be given additional names such as "the old wood ship of Theseus" and "the new wood ship of Theseus".
Another very interesting name to talk about while on this topic is the name of Jesus.
" looseness of criteria" could also be a testament to changing identities people undergo be it through time or space
Happy belated!
How is this different from what Wittengenstein argued first in Philosophical Investigations, other than restricting itself to Proper Names?
Also the video didn't seem to justify the restriction with anything near the rigour as the rest of the arguments in the video
"Everest" is certainly qualitively different than "The tallest mountain in the world", but tall, mountain, & world seem like they'd all behave in the same sense as Proper Names do under cluster theory
You’re pretty good at this Philosophy stuff also. Thanks
finally a straightforward explanation
Dude your back🎉
He seems to attach description to pointing. I believe this to be an error. Pointing is merely an assertion of a condition of identity a name and the thing named. But, I suppose that would imply tthat this a pipe!