<Articles>Descriptivism with World Pronouns

Abstract

This paper offers a descriptivist analysis of proper names under an empirical assumption that the syntax of proper names is complex. I argue that the logical form of the singular use of a proper name is [ the [ [ F w ] C ] ] where w is an object-language pronoun that denotes a possible world and C is a domain restriction variable. World-denoting pronouns and domain restriction variables account for the context-dependence of determiner phrases in general. Since proper names are determiner phrases, they can uniquely and rigidly designate objects via contextualization. The proposed descriptivist analysis avoids the standard objections to classical descriptivism because it treats proper names as contextually produced rigid designators.