was aristotle named 'aristotle'?

Canadian Journal of Philosophy

Was Aristotle Named 'Aristotle'?Author(s): Anne C. MinasSource: Canadian Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 6, No. 4 (Dec., 1976), pp. 643-653Published by: Canadian Journal of PhilosophyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40230653 .

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CANADIAN JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY Volume VI, Number 4, December 7976

Was Aristotle Named 'Aristotle'?

ANNE C. MINAS, University of Waterloo

Yes, Aristotle was named 'Aristotle'. I want to show that since 'Aristotle' is a proper name, this is true by definition. My theory of proper names is a version of Russell's, a theory that a name is equivalent in meaning to definite description(s) which single out the individual, if there is one, to which the name refers. ("When I say, e.g. 'Homer existed', I am meaning by 'Homer' some description, say 'the author of the Homeric poems'.")1 Braithwaite at one time said that the proper name 'Aristotle' meant the description 'the individual named "Aristotle" '.2 This theory, which makes it contradictory to

suppose that Aristotle was not (the individual) named 'Aristotle' I will argue is the correct one. This will involve some explanation of what naming is, which I will carry out in the first two sections. My contention is that naming is an activity that can be done either

explicitly or non-explicitly. And names can be conferred either (a) on the basis of acquaintance or (b) by associating the name with

descriptions.

I

When a name is conferred on the basis of 'acquaintance', the individual named appears in the experience of the person doing the naming. The most familiar form of such naming is the naming of babies shortly after birth. Societies have conventions and procedures for

1 "Lectures on Logical Atomism" in Logic and Knowledge, Robert C. Marsh, ed.

(London: George Allen and Unwin Ltd., 1956) p. 252.

2 Symposium: "Imaginary Objects" with G. Ryle and G.E. Moore, Aristotelian

Society Proceedings, Supplementary Volume 12, 1933, pp. 44-54.

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doing this. Roughly, it is the parents who decide on and confer the name, commonly making use of ceremonies like baptism. In the ceremony, the person officiating stipulates that the small individual presently before him is to bear a particular name. Assuming that everything is in order (the name given is the one the parents intended, it is their baby in the clergyman's arms, not some-one else's, or a doll), there is no possibility of a wrong name being conferred. The name, of course, could be inappropriate; a male child could be given a girl's name, or one not current in his culture, or a dog's name. John Searle, noting this fact says, "it may be conventional to name only girls 'Martha' but if I name my son 'Martha' I may mislead, but I do not lie".3 The tragedy of the situation described is that the poor fellow's name really is 'Martha', his father having given him this name with a recognized right to do so. He might (and should) have given him a different name - in this sense, there is no necessity in people's having the names they do. But given that a name has been bestowed on a person, this is what his name is, and there is no possibility of its being something else.

The above describes naming by acquaintance done explicitly; carried through by a certain person or persons at a particular time. But other kinds of naming by acquaintance are also possible, some of them non-explicit. The acquisition of nick-names are examples of non- explicit naming; the person gradually coming to be known by a particular name, because everyone starts calling him that, or because he begins to mention himself to other people by that name. I can even make up names for other people, objects or whatever, which I keep to myself, using them only in my own thinking (pace Wittgenstein). Or I can, along with some one else, start to refer to a third person by a nick- name. The possibilities are endless.

In none of the above varieties of naming is it possible to make a mistake in conferring the name, at least if it is kept clear what kind of name is being conferred (e.g., 'just my private name') and on whom. Possibility of error arises immediately, however, when names are used after being conferred. I am introduced to some one, presented with a person and a name, and because of the accompanying noise and confusion, I get his name wrong. I start using his name (or what I think is his name) in introducing him to some one else and I make a mistake.

This possibility of mistake shows that use of names, even in the presence of the individual whose name it is, cannot have the error- free character of name-conferral. The name used must be the right one in order to be correct. A person's right name is normally the one

3 "Proper Names and Descriptions" in The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Paul J. Edwards, ed. Vol. VI, p. 490.

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he acquired in the official way, shortly after birth, but it could be a nick-name that really 'stuck' or a name acquired through an accepted method of changing ones name (like marriage, in the case of a woman). So when I use a proper name to refer to some one, I mean that this name has become his in the proper way, that he is the individual who has been named by this name. And that is how proper names refer; they refer to the individual who has been named by them.

Nick-naming, or names which I reserve for my own use and keep to myself, or names which a few people decide among themselves to use also can be used mistakenly, by not being used for the individual on which they were conferred. If I have a pet name for my favorite coffee cup, I am in error in calling some other cup by that name. If Horace is not on the table, but some other cup closely resembling Horace is, then my thought that Horace is on the table is wrong; it's wrong because the cup I originally decided to call 'Horace' is not there.

So, generally, 'This man is Mr. X' means 'This man is the individual who has been given the name Mr. X' (or more brief ly, 'is the individual named Mr. X').

'Mr. X won the Olympic Lottery' means 'The individual named Mr. X won the Olympic Lottery'. And, 'Mr. X does not exist,' means 'The individual named Mr. X does not exist'. On the view I am urging, proper names are definite descriptions and so can be handled by the familiar Russellian devices for these expressions. The first example of this paragraph would have the Russellian reading 'One and only one individual is named Mr. X and that individual won the Olympic Lottery'. The second example becomes 'There is no one individual named Mr. X'. These analyses, however, need more refinement on matters I will discuss in Section IV.

This defining of 'Mr. X' as 'the individual named Mr. X' loses its appearance of circularity, I believe, when it is realized that 'named' refers to the fact that the individual acquired his name in some acceptable way. Of course, the typical user of the name doesn't have a very definite idea of how this acquisition took place (Was it baptism? Was it parental conferral without baptism? Was it by marriage?) and so doesn't have the specifics of what he is talking about. He does, nonetheless, have the essentials, namely that the name was acquired in some way that is accepted as making it his official name.

The fact that nick-names and private names can be made up and used to refer to individuals is no objection to the view I am urging. Defining 'Mr. X' as 'the individual named Mr. X' makes 'Mr. X' this person's "real name" or "right name" or simply his "name" unless some qualification is added. But unofficial conferrals can be referred back to as well in uses of names. Calling a person 'Bean-stalk' because

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he has been so nick-named is to call him 'the individual whom we gradually came to name, in fun, 'Bean-stalk'. Or using the name 'Horace' for my coffee cup refers back to my decision to single out my favorite by this name. 'Horace' = 'the coffee cup of mine that I privately named "Horace" '.

So if 'Aristotle' is used as a name conferred on an individual on the basis of acquaintance with this individual, then it is a contradiction to deny that Aristotle was the individual named 'Aristotle'. This is not because Aristotle, or anyone else, has to have the name he in fact does have, but because in referring to him as 'Aristotle' we have said that 'Aristotle' is what he was named. This would be true, supposing that historical figures like Aristotle can be treated in the same way as people we refer to by name, on the street, so to speak. In the following section, however, I want to show that historical figures acquire their names in a different way.

II

Historical figures are typically named (a) non-explicitly and (b) by description. Explicit naming by description is familiar enough, a familiar example being the naming of the planet Pluto. Before this planet was observed through a telescope, its existence was inferred from aberrations in the path of the planet nearest it, Neptune. Pluto was thus named by equating it with a description; 'Pluto' = 'the planet causing aberrations in Neptune's orbit'. The naming was explicit, in that some group of astronomers at some time decided that 'Pluto' should be the name of the planet fitting this description.

Something of this sort happens with naming of historical figures, except that the process is much less explicit. Gradually, the name 'Aristotle' has become equated with a set of descriptions, by those persons having the authority to do this, the Aristotle scholars. This set includes some descriptions which Aristotle's contemporaries believed to be true of him, like 'teacher of Alexander'. It includes other descriptions as well, however, descriptions having to do with Aristotle's place in the philosophical tradition, which could not have been known at the time he lived. 'Father of the distinctions between form and matter, essence and accident' would be one such example. This tradition of scholars, in effect, baptizes Aristotle by associating the name 'Aristotle', not with an individual with whom they are acquainted, but with a set of descriptions. They do this by using the name 'Aristotle' to make assertions, where the descriptions function as predicates, e.g., 'Aristotle was the teacher of Alexander'. At the beginning of this process of forming a set of scholarly descriptions, the name 'Aristotle' could not mean this set. But it could be associated

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with one particular description, as in the 'Pluto' case above, or it could be a name whose meaning was bestowed in one of the ways discussed in the previous section. 'Aristotle' could mean the person so named by his parents in Stagira, or the man so referred to by his colleagues in the Lyceum. But once the name 'Aristotle' begins to figure in a number of beliefs held by the scholars, the original description used to define the name will lose its position of primacy in the meaning of 'Aristotle'. The descriptions in all the beliefs will become associated with the name, in a looser sort of way that is something like Searle makes it out to be. "Suppose we ask the users of the name 'Aristotle' to state what they regard as certain essential and established facts about him. Their answers would be a set of uniquely referring descriptive statements. Now what I am arguing is that the descriptive force of 'This is Aristotle' is to assert a sufficient, but so far unspecified number of these statements are true of this object."4

Thus, on Searle's view, anyone who uses the name Aristotle meaningfully, scholar and layman alike, would have to produce a 'sufficient' number of descriptions which scholars believe true of Aristotle. But how often can a layman produce such a set, uniquely true of one individual? He may know only in a vague kind of way, that Aristotle was a Greek philosopher (though certainly not the only one), one of Plato's students, a teacher of Alexander (though there may have been others). And even if he could produce a logically unique set of descriptions, how confident would he be that they identified Aristotle, rather than some one else, when an Aristotle scholar disputes this? Suppose the layman maintains that Aristotle can be uniquely identified as Alexander's one and only teacher between 425 and 415 B.C. When a scholar points out that Alexander was not even alive at that time, hence the description is true of no one, the layman need not admit that 'Aristotle', as he used the name, named no one. He has the option of saying instead that he was referring to the same Aristotle the scholar is researching.

In taking this option, he aligns himself with the theory of proper names of historical figures I now want to explain. In using a proper name which has been conferred in connection with acquaintance with the object (the kind of name I discussed in Section I above) the user typically has no idea what the conferrer of the name's acquaintance with the object was like. Typically the named individual

4 "Proper Names" in Mind, 67, 1958, p. 171. N.L Wilson holds a view similar to Searle's and thus, I believe, suffering from the same defects, in 'Substances without Substrata' in The Review of Metaphysics, 1958, pp. 521-539. "We might say the design atum [of 'Caesar'] is that individual which satisfies more of the asserted matrices containing the word 'Caesar' than does any other individual." (p. 532)

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was given the name as a baby and few, if any, users of his name know what he looked like then. All they know is that the name was conferred in connection with some kind of acquaintance with the individual to whom it refers. And, in a similar manner, a layman would not have detailed knowledge of the descriptions scholars use to identify the historical figure (and thereby 'baptize' him with the name 'Aristotle'). So by 'Aristotle' the layman just means whoever the tradition has identified as Aristotle, the individual of whom a sufficient number of descriptions (where the sufficiency of the number is determined by the experts) is true. He believes that Aristotle is (by definition) the figure named 'Aristotle' by the tradition of scholars.

Lest it still be thought that we do in fact treat 'Aristotle' as equivalent, or loosely equivalent, to the set of scholarly descriptions, or some 'sufficient number' of them as Searle urges, I think it is appropriate to ask, who are "we"? Aren't "we" just members of the very tradition of Aristotle scholars, or at least among those who aspire to be? It is no coincidence, I think, that the name 'Aristotle' comes up so often in examples in papers on proper names, especially with those authors who want to equate names with descriptions. Naming, as done within a tradition, is not a one-shot matter that is decided on once and for all. In calling it non-explicit naming, my suggestion was that the equation of name with descriptions was an ongoing enterprise, continually being decided upon within the tradition. But conferring a name is still different from using it, even for those who are within the tradition. So even though Aristotle scholars know what the relevant descriptions are, they do not consider the name equivalent to them. Rather the name is equivalent to the acceptance of these descriptions by the right people.

Consider a scholar who has some unusual opinions about Aristotle. He believes that Aristotle was really Alexander's uncle, a person of royal blood, born at Pella, who, as a baby, for political reasons, had been left on a doorstep in Stagira. This scholar would not in this case include 'uncle of Alexander' in the descriptions used to define Aristotle, simply because such a description has not been accepted by his colleagues. So, for instance, he would not be as tempted to abandon his belief that Aristotle existed if it turned out that Alexander had no uncles as he would if Alexander had no teacher and that the Aristotelian corpus had been written in the Middle Ages by a collection of monks, using the pen name 'Aristotle' in order to have an authority to support some of their own views.

With figures in non-philosophical traditions, most of the time at least, we philosophers can't equate names with descriptions, for in all honesty we usually have to admit we don't know what the identifying descriptions are. One might know of Francis Bacon, Robespierre and Homer that they are, respectively, an English writer, a figure in the

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French Revolution, and the author of the Iliad and the Odyssey. But none of these descriptions are sufficiently narrow to pick out just one individual. (Lest anyone think the last description above is logically unique, I challenge him to distinguish the real Iliad from a writing some one might compose which would be closely similar to it.) Yet we think we know who we are talking about when we mention these individuals by name. Despite the fact that we can't supply unique descriptions, we don't believe that the question is open as to exactly which English writer Francis Bacon is, for instance. This is because we believe that such unique descriptions exist and are known to the right people, even though we don't happen to know them. We refer to them in using proper names without knowing what they are.

I am not arguing that someone can use a name meaningfully without associating any descriptions with it, or by associating descriptions that are completely wrong. Suppose some one doesn't believe that Francis Bacon is an English writer, believing instead that he is a Greek historian, or perhaps having no beliefs about him; this person has just heard Francis Bacon's name mentioned. He would then either associate his name with the wrong scholarly tradition (Greek historians) or with no tradition, thus using the name with the wrong meaning, or with no meaning. (Nevertheless, it is probably true that some one has 'Francis Bacon' right, and is talking about the same person everyone else is who uses the name, if such a person believes minimally that Francis Bacon is a famous person who figures prominently in some tradition or other, the only famous person of that name. These descriptions, general though they be, are, to my knowledge, true of one individual, the one scholars refer to by that name.)

Ill

In my foregoing account of names of 'historical figures', I don't in any way wish to suggest that these are names of fictional or unreal entities. Historical figures are real people, and I described them in this way mainly to indicate how their names are conferred.

Aristotle's childhood friends could quite meaningfully have wondered whether their precocious playmate would someday be a historical figure future scholars would refer to as 'Aristotle'. For them, it doesn't seem paradoxical to deny or wonder about the equivalence of 'Aristotle' and 'the individual named "Aristotle" by the tradition of Aristotle scholars'. They can certainly imagine some mix-up in the future, where all their friend Aristotle's writings and his name get attributed to some one else.

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The 'Aristotle' they mean, however, is their contemporary so- named by his parents. For them, the impossibility would be for this Aristotle not to have been so named, (or nick-named, or taken the name to call himself by). If a junior member of the Lyceum begins to call 'Aristotle' some one who was not so named, when he discovers his mistake, he does not say that he discovered Aristotle was not named 'Aristotle'. Rather, he would say that he had mistaken some one else for Aristotle. This someone else is not named 'Aristotle', but neither is he Aristotle.

Scholars do not take the point of view that parental naming is critical in this way. (Searle, I think, is wrong in maintaining that bearing the name 'Aristotle' is critical to being Aristotle.) They would allow for the possibility of his having been originally given some name other than 'Aristotle', but not for the possibility of his not fitting the scholarly descriptions. They could also allow for the possibility of his being Plato, or Thycydides, or anyone that might turn out to fit the Aristotelian descriptions. As long as this individual fits them, he will be Aristotle and his being Thucydides as well would be just another very interesting fact about him.

The point of the foregoing is that 'Aristotle' can be viewed as ambiguous as between the historical figure and the person known to his contemporaries. But today most of us must mean the historical figure, as we do when we use most names referring to notorious people who lived in the past. For instance, 'John Adams was the fourth president of the United States' is false, even though the fourth president of the United States did have the family name 'Adams' and the given name 'John'. The reason for the statement's falsity is that it is customary to refer to the fourth president as 'John Quincy Adams' in order to distinguish him from his father, the second president, who we call 'John Adams'. Similarly, 'Bach did not write the Brandenberg Concertos' is false even though a person, indeed many people, with the family name 'Bach' wrote no music at all. 'Bach' is a name we use to refer to one particular famous person, the composer of the Brandenberg Concertos and everything else the scholars say he wrote.

IV

I have been arguing for a theory of proper names where names are treated as definite descriptions and which can be handled by Russell's analysis of this construction. The name is treated as a general term (or, if you like, disappears in favor of the general term). Thus "Aristotle wrote the Nicomachean Ethics" becomes "one and only one person was named (by the scholarly tradition) 'Aristotle' and that person wrote the Nicomachean Ethics." The truth of the statement depends

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on (1) Whether an individual does get successfully named by the tradition, this depending on whether there is an individual fitting what scholars consider to be a sufficient number of the Aristotelian descriptions and (2) Whether this person wrote the Nicomachean Ethics.

But suppose instead some one said 'Aristotle married Jaqueline Kennedy' or 'Aristotle stars in Kojak' referring to Onassis in the first statement and Savalas in the second. According to what I have been arguing, 'Aristotle' in each statement means, (roughly) 'the individual named Aristotle', and appears to have the same meaning in both sentences, even though different individuals are referred to. The problem is a general one, occurring in any theory of proper names which treats these names as definite descriptions and, ultimately, as general terms. It would seem mere coincidence that such a name referred to one individual, the coincidence being that only one thing fit the general term. But ordinarily, many individuals have been given the same name. Thus, 'named Aristotle' or 'named John Smith' cannot be used to single out just one individual, which is what proper names are supposed to do. Thus my treatment in Section I of 'Mr. X' as 'named Mr. X' seemed incomplete, because in the analysis nothing was said about which Mr. X the assertions were about.

I believe that theories that liken proper names to ostensive terms, and then go on to argue that the existence of the referent is essential to the intelligibility of the name (e.g., Russell's early theory of proper names according to which true proper names were not disguised descriptions, but named objects of acquaintance which were their meanings)5 are wrong, for the familiar reason that the non-existence of a referent does not appear to make proper names unintelligible. However, these theories are correct in maintaining that often proper names have some ostensive function. This is also true of (other) definite descriptions and is what, in particular contexts, enables such terms to single out just one individual.

In discussions of 'King Richard', 'the English professor', 'the captain of the ferry boat', 'the lady next door', 'Henry Ford', 'John Smith' and 'Aristotle', normally a particular individual is being talked about. This individual is identified partly by the general terms in the descriptions; he, she or it must be something of which the general terms are true. However, these general terms are not true of just this one individual. There is surely more than one English professor in the world! So the 'context' of the discussion, in a very broad sense of the term, must supply the rest of what's needed to single out just the one individual

5 Chapter V, "On Denoting" of The Principles of Mathematics (London: George Allen and Unwin, Ltd. 1964).

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being discussed. This John Smith (i.e. this individual named 'John Smith') might be understood to be the one standing right in front of the speakers; this I suppose, is the most familiar use of ostensive terminology, to 'point to' something in the near vicinity in plain view of all. But 'John Smith' may also 'point to' something mentioned earlier in the conversation so that 'John Smith' is understood to be the man of that name that the anecdote just told was about. Or he may be the person of that name next on the list to be telephoned, or any number of things. There are conventional devices in language for bringing the 'context' to bear on singling out appropriate individuals which are used in the examples above but they are so complicated that I will not attempt to describe them. (They are so subtle and complicated that it sometimes amazes me that we can get them to work as well as they do!) I think it's all right to call such devices 'ostensive', as long as we don't over-simplify and believe that there is only one such device, uniformly used to point to an individual standing in plain view of the conversants. It's such over- simplifications, I think, that generate temptations toward the view that there must exist a referent for every (real) proper name. (For how can something be pointed to just over there, if it does not exist?)

V

In concluding, I think I should mention the 'historical explanation' theory of proper names which has just recently come into vogue and whose foremost exponents appear to be Saul Kripke and Keith Donnellan. According to Donnellan,6 the history of the speech act in which the name is used, rather than any descriptions associated with it is what determines the referent of a name. To find out what, if anything, 'Aristotle' or 'Santa Claus' refers to, one must examine the histories of the use of these names leading up to the speech act, to see what individual, if any, relates to these histories in the relevant way.

Quite evidently I am also urging that the history of the use of a name determines its referent, more particularly the part of the history which consists in the name being conferred on the individual. This is just a single event when persons are given their names at birth, but with my non-explicit naming by description of historical figures, this process may be almost identical with Donnellan's history of the use of the name. I also have just mentioned that the context concurrent with use of the name is important in identification of the referent.

6 "Proper Names and Identifying Descriptions" in Synthese, 21, 1970, and "Speaking of Nothing" in The Philosophical Review, LXXXII (1974), pp. 3-31.

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Nevertheless, Donnellan's theory makes me uneasy, partly because there is no general account of what the historical path must be which successfully links name to referent, and also because it makes reference so non-rational. At one place he speaks of a child

referring to some one he met at a party as 'Tom' even though the child can't remember enough about the man to recognize him or describe him uniquely. I agree with Donnellan that recognition isn't necessary for reference. (Think of all the students a professor refers to in

submitting grades alongside their names without being able to

recognize their faces.) What worries me about this child is that he has no way of indicating to some one else which Tom he means, has no devices for telling some one else which Tom he is talking about.

Another disturbing possibility in Donnellan's view is that there seems to be no 'official' history of the use of a name. Thus some one who first heard the name 'Aristotle' at the feet of an erratic scholar who confused him with Plato could not be faulted for describing him as we describe Plato. My view is that he could be faulted, because he doesn't use the name the way the final authorities on the name, the Aristotle scholars, use it.

Donnellan says that Santa Claus doesn't exist, because the name doesn't trace back to a real individual. But a real person, namely Saint

Nicolaus, was supposed to be the origin of the name 'Santa Claus'.

And, for all we know, many mythological characters may have been named in connection with real individuals, as (or so we are told) sea cows were first described as mermaids. The reason we say all these

things don't exist, is that nothing fits the descriptions we currently associate with their names. St. Nicolaus is not Santa Claus because he is not presently alive at the North Pole, wearing a red suit and long white beard and bringing the children presents at Christmas. The contexts in which the name 'Santa Claus' comes up ('Be good, or Santa Claus will

bring you no presents') associate all these descriptions with the name, in my view, and that is why we say there is no such individual.

May 1975

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