Bloomsbury Academic Names and Context: A Use-Sensitive Philosophical Account (Mind, Meaning and Metaphysics)

About the Author Dolf Rami is Heisenberg-Professor for Metaphysics and Philosophy of Logic at the Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Germany. Product Description Dolf Rami contributes to contemporary debates about the meaning and reference of proper names by providing an overview of the theory and developing a new contextualist account of names. Questions about the use and features of proper names are at the centre of philosophy of language. How does a single proper name refer to the same thing in different contexts of use? What makes a thing a bearer of a proper name? What is their meaning? Guided by these questions, Rami discusses Saul Kripkes main contributions to the debate and introduces a new way to capture the rigidity of names, proposing a pluralist version of the causal chain picture. Covering popular contextualist accounts of names, both indexical and variabilist, he presents a use\-sensitive alternative based on a semantic comparison between names, pronouns and demonstratives. Extending and applying his approach to a wide variety of uses, including names in fiction, this is a comprehensive explanation of why we should interpret proper names as context\-dependent expressions. Review "In a series of recent papers, Dolf Rami has articulated a use-sensitive view of proper names, providing compelling explanations for the most significant phenomena uncovered in contemporary research in philosophy and semantics: rigidity, predicative uses, fictive uses, cognitive significance, reference-fixing. This book helpfully articulates Rami's proposal into a unified whole that will have to be taken seriously into consideration by future research on this fascinating topic." --Manuel García-Carpintero, Professor of Philosophy, University of Barcelona, Spain"Taking into consideration a variety of original desiderata, Rami casts a novel light on the debate on proper names and enriches it with original and thought-provoking insights and arguments. The outcome is a theory that no future student of proper names may afford to ignore." --Stefano Predelli, Professor of Philosophy, University of Nottingham, UK