Note too that if proper names did not have a content (but only a designatum), there could not be such a thing as this second type of antonomasia, which is not the figure in which a general term par excellence is applied to an individual (“the Emperor” for Napoleon, “the Voice” for Frank Sinatra) but the figure in which the name of an individual is used, par excellence, as the sum of properties (he is a Rambo, Hercules, or Judas; she is a Messalina or Venus).
At first the story of the sarkiapone seems to be that of an unwary purchase made on trust, but in reality, by saying that the sarkiapone must not be disturbed because it is irritable, Campanini is already attaching a label to our white box (or basket): the sarkiapone is a living creature. Chiari takes it from there, and instantly uses the term as a “peg upon which to hang descriptions.” His attempts in phase 3 are aimed at ascertaining the properties of the animal and therefore at obtaining instructions for the identification and recognition of the referent.
Note that this sketch also exemplifies the difference between speaking-of and referring-to. Campanini refers to an individual sarkiapone (in the basket). Chiari accepts the reference, and it is to that sarkiapone that he refers. But, in order to establish what it is like, he appeals to the universal, or to general objects: he asserts that he has come across other sarkiapones and, in trying to define their properties, he talks of sarkiapones in general, in other words he is trying to acquire information with which to construct at least tentatively the NC of sarkiapone and to form its CT, i.e., to have a chance to recognize the sarkiapone type. To do this, he always refers to the animal in the basket as if to a token that ought to exhibit all the properties of the type. You do not negotiate the reference without bringing content into play.
The dialogue in phase 3 can be understood as a process of “successive emptying” of all possible properties, so that the peg for hanging descriptions on remains exposed. When Campanini denies all possible properties for the sarkiapone, Chiari is left with little alternative, apparently, but to accept the name in a rigid manner. And he seems to do this, when in phase 4 he insults the mysterious beast, accusing it of not corresponding to any possible description. But he does not stop referring to that cursed being as a “beast.”
When Campanini, in phase 5, reveals that the sarkiapone does not exist, Chiari realizes that he has been talking of a nonexistent creature, in other words, of a figment of Campanini’s imagination, a fictitious individual that existed only in the possible world of someone else’s tall story. But in phase 6, even after the trick has been revealed, Chiari still refers to the sarkiapone. Except now he refers to it not as an element of the real world but as an element of a world invented by Campanini.
We might argue that in phases 1–5 Chiari is talking of a sarkiapone1, which he thought existed, while in phase 6 he is referring to a sarkiapone2, which he now knows exists only in a fictitious world. Yet he is still referring to the sarkiapone that Campanini was talking about, except for the fact that, before, he attributed it with the property of existing in the real world and, after, he attributed it with the property of not existing.10 The two have reached perfect agreement and know exactly what they are talking about.
The moral of the story is that (i) referring is an action that speakers perform on the basis of a negotiation; (ii) in principle the act of reference effected by using a term might have nothing to do with the knowledge of the meaning of the term or even with the existence of the referent—with which it has no causal relationship; (iii) nevertheless, there is no designation definable as rigid that does not rest on an initial description (“label”), albeit a highly generic one; (iv) therefore, even apparent cases of absolutely rigid designation constitute the start of the referential contract, or the auroral moment of the relation, but never the final moment.
One might object that we are dealing with a comic sketch. Would the same thing happen if the dialogue were between two scientists, one of whom began to talk of a substance X, which she had discovered, and it was made clear at the end that that substance did not exist or had none of the properties that the discoverer attributed to it? In a similar situation a scientist would behave differently from the scientific and moral point of view, publicly discrediting whoever had lied to her, but from a semiosic point of view things would go no differently. In the course of a subsequent scientific conference the scientist would continue to cite substance X as an example of an imaginary substance, the subject of a scientific fraud (or of a major blunder), but she would continue to refer to it as the one she had spoken of when, before making the necessary checks, she had assumed, on trust, that it existed.11
I am well aware that there is another interpretation, if not of the story of the sarkiapone, at least of substance X. Some would say that, as the substance does not exist, the expression substance X has no referent, nor did it have one when the scientist thought, on trust, that it did. But to say that an expression cannot be applied to any referent does not mean to say that it cannot be used for an act of reference, and this is the point I wish to insist on. In this oscillation between the possible referent of the term and the use of the term in an act of reference there lurks an ambiguity that has been the cause of much debate on the ontology of reference.
The Divine Mind as e-mail
By an ontology of reference I mean above all the philosophical position according to which individuals (Saint Paul, Napoleon, Prague, or the Thames) can be defined rigidly, in the sense that, whatever description we assign to a name, it refers in any case to something or someone that has been thus baptized in a given mo ment of space-time, and—no matter how many properties may be denied it—it will always remain that someone or something (a principium individuationis based on a materia signata quantitate). However, the ontological theory of reference has also been extended to the quidditates (the essences, or general objects), which, even if we did not know them, would be natural constants with an objectivity of their own above and beyond both our mental acts and the way in which culture recognizes and organizes them.
The extension of the hypothesis is not unjustified: if it is assumed that a name of a person can be connected directly to a haecceitas (even a past and therefore an immaterial one), why can a generic name not be linked directly to a quidditas? Which is more immaterial, horsehood or the haecceitas of Ashurbanipal, of whom I believe we no longer possess so much as a handful of dust? As we shall see, in both cases one cannot avoid assuming that the connection is provided by what Putnam (1981, III) calls noetic rays (which are merely a theoretical fiction).
From this point of view, for an ontological theory of reference, the term water would refer to H2O in any possible world, just as the name Napoleon would always refer rigidly to that unicum of the history of the universe that occurred, genetically, physiologically, and biographically, once and once only (and would remain that way even if in some future world governed by radical feminists Napoleon were remembered only as the individual whose sole property was that of having been the husband of Josephine).
This would be a “strong” ontology, in which the reference to water would seem to be independent of all knowledge or intention or belief on the speaker’s part. However, on the one hand this point of view does not exclude the question of what the reference is, while on the other hand it does not eliminate the notion of “cognition”: it simply moves both from psychology to theology. What does it mean if we say that the word water always refers to H2O regardless of all of the speakers’ intentions? We would have to explain that species of ontological wire that binds that word to that essence, and, just to spin out the metaphor a little
