preparation for outline 1.0 (from the ashes of outline 0.2)

Just as I suspected, not much of outline 0.2 survived the meeting of 10 March 2006. Briefly, gone are:

(1) Any concerns over whether the fact that properties (even considered extensionally) are uncountable in regards to whether there are names for them. There are, after all, uncountably many names for the real numbers.

(2) The concerns over the fact that first order formulations of arithmetic admit of more than one interpretation. I had thought that there was a troubling analogy between the formal language case and the natural language case: a first order formulation of arithmetic admits of more than one model, if natural languages are also indeterminate with respect to their interpretation, then it seems like the deflation of (apparent) de re necessities to simply statements that are analytically true might be, after all, "many-to-one". That is, for any analytically true sentence of the right form, this sentence might be the reduction of very many (apparent) de re necessities. However, this might be something to pursue later.

(3) Finally, (and this one smarts a bit) the notion that natural kind terms (or any sort of kind terms) might be names, with some associated conceptual content, that are directly referring, and so might be description names after all. Before I get to the reason for the challenge, let me say why I was keen on trying to present natural kind terms as names. An example of a motivating sentence for the notion of metaphysical necessity is 'water is H₂O'. The sentence is supposed to be necessarily true, yet not analytic and a posteriori. I had thought that if we could come up with description names for kind terms then we'd be able to start a story about sentences like this that would let us see that for some kind names (which were description names) a deflation of de re necessities in terms of analyticity was available. And so some of the motivation for the positing of metaphysical necessities would be removed.

But, on the other hand, there's a golden wedding band...

Ludwig (pace Koslicki) suggested that the semantics for sentences like 'water is H₂O' are given by universally quantified sentences like '(∀x)(x is water → x is H₂O)', and so names for kind terms need not even come up in these sort of claims. And it seems that for most if not all of similar sentences, this sort of predicate explanation will be available. So, on this view, it doesn't look like there's a need to investigate how description names (or more generally c-names) might be used to deflate de re necessities.

I do hold out hope for the usefulness of c-names (or even description names) for naming kinds, by way of naming properties. I haven't worked it out yet, but if we wish to make second order modal claims -- claims like 'it's necessary that property X has (second order) property P', then we will have to nominalize properties to deflate these claims with the use of analyticity. Hopefully, more to come on this issue...