Epigrams [For Piano]

Impure Reference: A Way Around the Concept Horse Paradox

“…The most influential development of the contrary semantic proposal that proper names are predicates, rather than referring expressions, is owed to Burge. 6 A great deal of the intuitive support for thinking proper names are simple referring expressions arises from concentrating upon their singular unmodified uses ("Alfred studies in Princeton"). But proper names also take the plural ("There are relatively few Alfreds in Princeton"), indefinite and definite articles ("An Alfred Russell joined the club today", "The Alfred who joined the club last week is an idiot") and quantifiers ("some Alfreds are crazy").…”

“…then it would be unnatural to reply using (7). But this would only be because a sentence that mentioned Melanie first would unnecessarily switch our attention away from Jeanette, so we'd use (6) instead. Whereas if someone asked the question "What happened to Melanie?"…”

“…But even though "ξ kissed ζ " and "ξ was kissed by ζ " stand for the same relation, substituting the latter for the former in (6), a context that appears to be perfectly extensional, is not guaranteed to preserve truth-value. The sentence (8) Jeanette was kissed by Melanie may be false even if (6) is true.…”

“…Recognising that they're impure also provides us with insight into why the substitution that transports us between (e.g.) (6) and (7) is guaranteed to preserve truth-value, whilst the substitution between (6) and (8) isn't. Because the rule associated with "ξ was kissed by ζ " for interpreting the significance of right and left-flanking names is the reverse of the rule associated with "ξ kissed ζ ", the result of swapping right and left flanking names and substituting "ξ was kissed by ζ " for "ξ kissed ζ " is to represent the same things configured in the same way; whereas the result of making this substitution whilst neglecting to swap flanking names represents them configured differently.…”