| Phi 346-02 Spring 2014 |
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The key material in the this last part of Kaplan’s article comes in §§IX–X, where he presents an analogue to the idea of standard names and then comments on it. His discussion of this idea, “vivid names,” bears some similarity to what Kripke says about proper names (see the handout of quotations from him, which is on the course Canvas site), but there are two differences between Kaplan and Kripke that keep the ideas from matching up exactly:
(i) Kaplan uses ‘name’ not as a short for ‘proper name’ but as something that applies also to definite descriptions like ‘the shortest spy’ so what he says about vivid names applies more broadly than what Kripke says about proper names; and
(ii) Kaplan treats every name as having a descriptive content as well as a “genetic character” while Kripke finds the former in definite descriptions only and speaks of the latter only in connection with proper names.
There is one other point of comparison to consider as you think about Kaplan: in his account of the role of singular terms in belief, Kaplan is addressing some of the phenomena that Kripke has in mind when he speaks of the “qualitative” features of one’s situation.
• The main function of §IX is to introduce the ideas of what a signular term denotes, what it is a “name of,” and whether it is vivid, ideas which figure in the analysis of belief-of that ends the section. Although Kaplan’s discussion of pictures functions here mainly as a device to explain these ideas, he will return to the topic in §XII.
On the middle of p. 200, Kaplan points to an issue that came to be quite important and that we will return to. The “limitation” he sees on the distinction between what we believe and how we believe it shows up in Kripke’s view that the reference of proper names, which (according to him) is quite independent of our beliefs about the things named or, indeed, of anything we are aware of. Out of this developed a view, known as “externalism,” according to which the content of our beliefs (and not merely their truth and falsity) was determined by things outside us.
• Section X details the special contributions that each of the three ideas from §IX makes to the analysis at its end, so it serves to further explain the significance of these ideas.
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In §XI, Kaplan points to a new puzzle (really a new aspect of one he’d already pointed to) for belief-of. (In stating it, he uses the notation ‘~’ for ‘it is not the case that’.) He uses this puzzle to argue for the superiority of his own Fregean analysis of belief-of. It’s worth noting that it would be open to Quine to extend his approach to handle this puzzle by introducing a new relation Bel of “unbelief-of” or “doubt-of” that Kaplan would analyze along the lines of (46). Kaplan’s argument would then be that it is better to understand all these ideas in terms of the single concept of belief expressed by B.
• Kaplan hasn’t done much with the idea of “meaning marks” M…M since he introduced it in §IV. In §XII, he comments on this and says why it or some other alternative might be more appropriate than Quine corners.
• The final section XIV is Kaplan’s conclusion, and he further clarifies the intention behind the choice of topics in this article.