1. In January and February of 1970, I gave the three talks at Princeton University transcribed here. As the style of the transcript makes clear, I gave the talks without a written text, and, in fact, without notes. The present text is lightly edited from the verbatim transcript; an occasional passage has been added to expand the thought, an occasional sentence has been rewritten, but no attempt has been made to change the informal style of the original. Many of the footnotes have been added to the original, but a few were originally spoken asides in the talks themselves. I hope the reader will bear these facts in mind as he reads the text. Imagining it spoken, with proper pauses and emphases, may occasionally facilitate comprehension. I have agreed to publish the talks in this form with some reservations. The time allotted, and the informal style, necessitated a certain amount of compression of the argument, inability to treat certain objections, and the like. Especially in the concluding sections on scientific identities and the mind-body problem thoroughness had to be sacrificed. Some topics essential to a full presentation of the viewpoint argued here, especially that of existence statements and empty names, had to be omitted altogether. Further, the informality of the presentation may well have engendered a sacrifice of clarity at certain points. All these defects were accepted in the interest of early publication. I hope that perhaps I will have the chance to do a more thorough job later. To repeat, I hope the reader will bear in mind that he is largely reading informal lectures, not only when he encounters repetitions or infelicities, but also when he encounters irreverence or corn.
2. Given a chance to add a footnote, I shall mention that Rogers Albritton, Charles Chastain, Keith Donnellan, and Michael Slote (in addition to philosophers mentioned in the text, especially Hilary Putnam), have independently expressed views with points of contact with various aspects of what I say here. Albritton called the problems of necessity and a prioricity in natural kinds to my attention, by raising the question whether we could discover that lemons were not fruits. (I am not sure he would accept all my conclusions.) The apology in the text still stands; I am aware that the list in this footnote is far from comprehensive. I make no attempt to enumerate those friends and students whose stimulating conversations have helped me. Thomas Nagel and Gilbert Harman deserve special thanks for their help in editing the transcript.
3. Keith Donnellan, ‘Reference and Definite Descriptions’, Philosophical Review
75 (1966), pp. 281–304.
4. Philosophy and Ordinary Language;L Linsky,1963
5. Strictly speaking, of course, Russell says that the names don’t abbreviate descriptions and don’t have any sense; but then he also says that, just because the things that we call ‘names’ do abbreviate descriptions, they’re not really names. So, since ‘Walter Scott’; according to Russell, does abbreviate a description,’ Walter Scott’ is not a name, and the only names that really exist in ordinary language are, perhaps, demonstratives such as ‘this’ or ‘that’, used on a particular occasion to refer to an object with which the speaker is ‘acquainted’ in Russell’s sense. Though we won’t put things the way Russell does, we could describe Russell as saying that names, as they are ordinarily called, do have sense. They have sense in a strong way, namely, we should be able to give a definite description such that the referent of the name, by definition, is the object satisfying the description. Russell himself, since he eliminates descriptions from his primitive notation, seems to hold in ‘On Denoting’ that the notion of ‘sense’ is illusory. In reporting Russell’s views, we thus deviate from him in two respects. First, we stipulate that ‘names’ shall be names as ordinarily conceived, not Russell’s ‘logically proper names’; second, we regard descriptions, and their abbreviations, as having sense.