A causal theory of proper names is any of a family of views about what kind of meaning a proper name (or "proper noun") has, what object it refers to, and how it acquires these features. In its strongest contemporary form, it involves the following claims: A proper name [is] a word that answers the purpose of showing what thing it is that we are talking about writes John Stuart Mill in A System of Logic (1. ...

• the meaning of a proper name is simply the individual to which, in the context of its use, the name refers, or a proper name has no meaning
• the name's referent is fixed by an original act of naming (also called a "dubbing" or, by Saul Kripke, an "initial baptism"), whereupon the name becomes a rigid designator of the referent
• later uses of the name succeed in referring to the referent by being linked by a causal chain to that original act.

Weaker versions of the position (perhaps not properly called causal theories), claim merely that in many cases events in the causal history of a speaker's use of the term, including how he acquired it, must be taken into account to correctly assign references to his words. The introduction to this article provides insufficient context for those unfamiliar with the subject matter. ... In general, a reference is something that refers or points to something else, or acts as a connection or a link between two things. ... A name is a label for a thing, person, place, product (as in a brand name), and even an idea or concept, normally used to distinguish one from another. ... Saul Kripke in 1983 Saul Aaron Kripke (b. ... Jump to: navigation, search Baptism is a water purification ritual practiced in certain religions such as Christianity, Mandaeanism, Sikhism, and has its origins with the Jewish ritual of tahara. ... This article is about causality as it is used in many different fields. ...

Causal theories of names became popular during and after the 1970s, under the influence of work by Saul Kripke and Keith Donnellan. Kripke and Hilary Putnam also defended an analogous causal account of natural kind terms, and work on causal theories eventually expanded into other parts of language. Hilary Whitehall Putnam (born July 31, 1926) is a key figure in the philosophy of mind during the 20th century. ... In philosophy a natural kind is a family of entities possessing properties bound by natural law; we know of natural kinds in the form of categories of minerals, plants, or animals, and we know that different human cultures classify natural realities that surround them in a completely analogous fashion (Molino...

The theory

Causal theories are usually advanced by philosophers who, following Kripke and Mill, deny both (1) that there is anything like a Fregean sense attached to a proper name, and (2) that ordinary proper names are (as Russell) held disguised definite descriptions. They argue that to grasp the meaning of a proper name, you do not have to give an identifying description of the individual that bears it, or to express any "sense" that would be equivalent to such a description. In order to meaningfully use a name, your use of the word only needs to be caused (in an appropriate way) by the naming of its bearer. Saul Kripke in 1983 Saul Aaron Kripke (b. ... John Stuart Mill (May 20, 1806 – May 8, 1873), an English philosopher and political economist, was an influential classical liberal thinker of the 19th century. ... The distinction between sense and reference was an innovation of the German philosopher and mathematician Gottlob Frege in his 1892 paper Über Sinn und Bedeutung. According to Frege, sense and reference are two aspects of the meaning of a linguistic expression. ... Jump to: navigation, search Bertrand Russell The Right Honourable Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell, OM, FRS (18 May 1872 – 2 February 1970), was an influential British logician, philosopher, and mathematician, working mostly in the 20th century. ... A definite description is a denoting phrase in the form of the X where X is a noun-phrase or a singular common noun that picks out a specific individual or object. ...

The argument for the view is something like this. In naming a newborn baby, traditionally we have taken the baby to a priest or pastor who baptizes and names the baby, say "Jane Doe." So the pastor says, "This child's name is 'Jane Doe'." And henceforth everyone calls the little girl "Jane." With that initial act, the act of christening as it is called, the pastor gives the girl her name. This seems all fairly straightforward. So we were asking: How do proper names come to refer to the individuals that they do refer to? In the case of our Jane, how does the name "Jane Doe" come to refer to Jane? The answer is obvious: Jane was christened "Jane."

However, not everyone who knows Jane was at Jane's christening. So how is it that when they use the name "Jane Doe," they are referring to Jane? Well, that's obvious too: there is a causal chain that passes from the original observers of Jane's christening to everyone who uses her name. For example, maybe Jane's friend Jill wasn't at the christening, but Jill learns Jane's name from Jane's mother, who was at the christening.

On the causal theory, then, proper names—whether of a person, a ship, a town, a planet, or anything else—are made to name the things they name by an original act of naming. The act of naming, and the causal chains that connect later speakers to that act, fixes the reference of names (such as "Jane Doe") to their objects (such as Jane herself). It's vital to distinguish this claim from the quite different claim that the meaning of a proper name is given by a phrase such as "the person who was named 'Jane Doe'" or "the person whose naming is causally connected in the appropriate way to my use of the name 'Jane Doe.'" The causal theory holds that the causal process itself which is said to fix the reference of the name, not that a description of that causal process gives the meaning of the name; most proponents of the causal theory, remember, deny that you can give the meaning of a proper name at all in the sense intended.

What's the difference? Well, the name "Jane Doe" and the description "the person who was named 'Jane Doe'" have different modal properties: advocates of the causal theory hold that "Jane Doe" is a rigid designator whereas "the person who was named 'Jane Doe'" is (or could be used as) a non-rigid designator. What that means, in brief, is that when we use the name Jane Doe, we can talk about what might or might not have been true of Jane in any given situation (in all possible worlds) in which she would exist. In particular, Jane Doe could have been named "Joan" instead of "Jane" (if her mother had changed her mind at the last minute, etc.). But the person who was named "Jane Doe" could not have been named "Joan"; if Jane's mother had changed her mind, then there would have been no person who was named "Jane Doe" (at the appropriate time, etc.). When we use the name "Jane Doe" (the argument goes) we pick out Jane (as it were) come what may, no matter what actual or counterfactual situations we are considering. But that seems to entail that our ability to identify a person in a hypothetical situation as "Jane Doe" cannot depend on any of the accidental properties that she would have in that situation (properties which she might or might not have had, while still remaining the same person), and having happened to be named "Jane" is surely among those. Modal logic, or (less commonly) intensional logic is the branch of logic that deals with sentences that are qualified by modalities such as can, could, might, may, must, possibly, and necessarily, and others. ... In modal logic and the philosophy of language, a term is said to be a rigid designator when it picks out the same thing in all possible worlds in which that thing exists (and picks out nothing in those possible worlds in which it does not exist). ... In philosophy and logic, the concept of possible worlds is used to express modal claims, claims that involve notions of possibility or necessity. ... In philosophy, an accident is a property that its bearer has contingently—that is, a property which its bearer could have failed to have (without having failed to exist), had things been different. ...

Criticisms of the theory

• Gareth Evans has argued that the causal theory, or at least certain common and over-simple variants of it, have the consequence that however remote or obscure the causal connection between someone's use of a proper name and the object it originally referred to, they still refer to that object when they use the name. (Imagine a name briefly overheard in a train or café). The theory effectively ignores context and makes reference into some magic trick. Evans describes it as a "photograph" theory of reference.

• The links between different users of the name is particularly obscure. Each user must somehow pass the name on to the next, and must somehow "mean" the right individual as they do so (suppose "Socrates" is the name of a pet aardvark). Kripke himself notes the difficulty, John Searle makes much of it.

• Mark Sainsbury has recently argued (Departing from Frege, Essay XII) for a causal theory similar to Kripke's, except the baptised object is eliminated. A "baptism" may be a baptism of nothing, he argues: a name can be intelligibly introduced even if it names nothing (p. 212). The causal chain we associate with the use of proper names may begin merely with a "journalistic" source (p. 165).

Gareth Evans (1946 - 1980) was a philosopher at Oxford University during the 1970s. ... John Searle is a philosopher at UC Berkeley. ... R. Mark Sainsbury (born 1943) is a London philosopher who has worked in the areas of philosophical logic, philosophy of language, reference, and the philosophy of Russell and Frege. ...

References

• Donnellan, Keith. (1972) "Proper Names and Identifying Descriptions."
• Evans, G. (1985) "The Causal Theory of Names". in Martinich, A. P. ed. The Philosophy of Language. Oxford University Press.
• Evans, G. The Varieties of Reference, Oxford 1982
• Kripke, Saul. 1980. Naming and Necessity. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
• Kripke, S. "A Puzzle about Belief", 1979, in Martinich (ed) 1996, pp 382-409.
• McDowell, John. (1977) "On the Sense and Reference of a Proper Name."
• Sainsbury, R.M. "Sense without Reference" from Building on Frege, Newen, A., Nortmann,U., Stuhlmann Laisz, R., (eds.), Stanford 2001