CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION.. 3

CHAPTER I. THE GENERAL CHARACTERISTIC OF SOME PECULIARITIES OF PERSONAL NAMES’ TRANSLATION.. 5

1.1 The definition of the term “translation”. 5

1.2 The use of various translational transformations. 9

1.3 Definition and Classification of Proper Names. 11

1.4 Translation of Proper Names. 14

CHAPTER II. PROPER NAMES IN TRANSLATION OF SPOKEN SPEECH (ON THE MATERIAL OF KRIPKE’S PUZZLE) 19

2.1 The Two-Component Theory of Proper Names and Kripke’s Puzzle. 19

CONCLUSION.. 36

BIBLIOGRAPHY.. 38

CHAPTER II. PROPER NAMES IN TRANSLATION OF SPOKEN SPEECH (ON THE MATERIAL OF KRIPKE’S PUZZLE) 

2.1 The Two-Component Theory of Proper Names and Kripke’s Puzzle

Kripke's puzzle is an old and familiar story.  It was put forward in Kripke's 'A puzzle about Belief.' But even today it still has such a charm that people are drawn to it time and time again.  In this paper I shall use his puzzle as the stepping stone for developing a new description theory of proper names.   

Kripke tries to defend his direct reference theory against the charge that it cannot explain the role of proper names in an epistemic context (such as belief, thought, etc.).  There are many famous puzzles involving substitution salva veritate for different names of the same referent, and the description theory can easily dissolve them by suggesting that different names have different senses.  These puzzles were considered to be defeating the direct reference theory of proper names.  Kripke thus tries to demonstrate a similar puzzle that does not involve different names, and thus does not involve different senses.  Using his principle of disquotation and principle of translation, Kripke presents a puzzle which involves a Frenchman Pierre who is attributed the following set of beliefs:

(1) Pierre believes that London is pretty.

(2) Pierre believes that London is not pretty.

According to Kripke, the two belief reports attribute a contradiction to Pierre, even though Pierre himself cannot be interpreted as being inconsistent.     

Kripke also discusses another puzzle which invokes only the principle of disquotation and no translation is involved.  This is the example of Peter’s two beliefs concerning the politician/musician Paderewski.  In this case, we get a similar set of contradictory belief reports:

(3) Peter believes that Paderewski has musical talent.

(4) Peter believes that Paderewski has no musical talent.

Kripke thinks that these puzzles generate the same difficulty for both the direct reference theory and the description theory.  The conclusion he draws from these puzzles is that they reveal a general feature of belief contexts that such contexts resist substitution, and the failure of substitution has no bearing on whether one adopts a direct reference theory or a description theory. 

There are numerous approaches in dealing with Kripke's puzzle:

1. Stopping the generation of the puzzle: One could reject one or both of Kripke's principle of disquotation and principle of translation, so as to terminate the generation of these puzzling cases.

2. Biting the bullet: One could simply accept the verdict that Pierre and Peter have inconsistent beliefs and argue that we all do, thereby showing that the puzzle is no puzzle at all.

3. Dissolving the puzzle: One could give proper names a different analysis so that the puzzle gets dissolved under this new analysis.

My approach is of the third kind.  Following Marcus and Katz, I argue that Kripke's puzzle applies only to a direct reference theory such as his own.  There are, of course, other versions of the direct reference theory that may avoid generating this kind of puzzle.  The new direct reference theorists (such as Nathan Salmon, Mark Richard and Gareth Evans) incorporate some elements of the description theory into their direct reference theories.  What I am developing in this paper, on the other hand, is a  new description theory of proper names which incorporates some elements of the direct reference theory into the description theory.  I shall also explain why we should have a description theory rather than a direct reference theory, even though the two sides are meeting in the middle ground.  Since the decline of the description theory of proper names follows from Kripke's attack, my paper will treat Kripke's numerous criticisms of the description theory as the main challenge for my new description theory.  In what follows I will first briefly explain why Kripke's theory of proper names does not give us the whole story.  I will then introduce my theory which I call the two-component description theory of proper names.  My proposal will be based on the rejection of the commonly assumed sharp separation between semantics and pragmatics.  Using some of the familiar cases Kripke sets up against the traditional description theories, I will explain how my theory gives a different story.  Finally, I will go back to Kripke’s puzzle and show how my theory can avoid attributing a contradictory set of beliefs either to Pierre or to Peter, and thereby dissolve the puzzle that Kripke poses for the description theory.  

What I propose here is a two-component description theory of proper names (or, TCD).  I think two questions should be separated: 'What does the name mean?' and 'How does the name refer?'.  According to TCD, descriptions are associated with the use of proper names in two ways: One is the description that gives the meaning of the name, such as 'an individual called such and such (by a certain linguistic community).'  The other is the set of descriptions that the speaker would use, if asked, to specify the intended referent.  These two descriptions compose the sense, or the semantic value, of a proper name.  We shall treat the two kinds of descriptions as an ordered pair:

 [P] <'an individual called "F" (by a certain linguistic community),' F = a set of descriptions>

The first description determines the denotation of the name.  The set of descriptions F, on the other hand, fixes the reference of the use of a name by that speaker.  I distinguish 'denoting' and 'referring' in roughly the following way: denoting is a semantic relation; it is something that a name does, referring is a pragmatic relation; it is something that the speaker does.  The denotation of a proper name is a set, which consists of members whose qualifying property is that they are all called by that name (by a certain community).  The denotation sets the range of possible referents, and the speaker's associated descriptions get us to the particular referent within this range.  Now I shall discuss these two components separately.