The naked ‘duchess’: names are titles

Abstract

In her recent defense of predicativism for proper names, Delia Graff Fara proposes the following non-metalinguistic being-called condition (BCC) for the applicability of names as predicates: A name ‘N’ is true of a thing if and only if it is called N. The BCC is supposed to hold for names only. In this essay I criticize Fara’s BCC by arguing that the word ‘called’ is ambiguous, and that the BCC holds only for the particular sense of ‘calling’ as naming. I revise accordingly Fara’s BCC and propose in its place a non-metalinguistic being-named condition (BNC). I also argue, against Fara, that being-named conditions are not unique to proper names: they hold for (at least some) mass nouns, common count nouns, as well as for family names, which I distinguish from surnames. Finally, I discuss honorific titles and propose a being-entitled condition according to which a title ‘T’ (when a predicate) is true of a thing just in case it is dubbed T. I conclude the paper with pragmatic, syntactic, as well as semantic considerations in favor of the thesis that names are a subspecies of non-hereditary, honorific titles.