Therefore they communicate to the officers in charge that by elephant they mean an animal that, according to official science, has the properties XYZ, and they also provide instructions for the recognition of animals with such properties. If the officers in charge agree and state they want to capture and transfer a thousand specimens of animal XYZ, the operation may begin.
At this point it is irrelevant to state that the officers of the ECO intend to use the term according to the Experts’ intention. As a matter of fact, between them and the Experts there is the beneficial space of a series of interpretants (descriptions, photos, drawings) and it is on these that the agreement is based. If by chance there are some very rare white elephants in Kwambia, the contracting parties will have to agree on whether the term elephant includes or excludes white elephants, given that the correctness of the ecological operation depends on this agreement.
Yet again, rigid designation has had an introductory function, to get the contract under way, but it is not on this basis that the contract is concluded.
Quid Pro Quo and Negotiations
Let us suppose that someone tells us a peace conference was held in Aix-la-Chapelle in 1748 and that we do not know that Aix-la-Chapelle is the other name for the city of Aachen. We find ourselves confronted with a «white box» that is still unopened and that is not the one in which we habitually collocate the city of Aachen. Perhaps the matter interests us so little that we drop all negotia tions; perhaps we request further information, asking questions about that strange city, our curiosity aroused by the fact that another peace conference was held at the same time as the one held in Aachen; and finally perhaps, out of the principle of charity, we immediately suppose that by the name Aix-la-Chapelle the speaker meant to refer to the same city that we call Aachen. But in any case we would see how much our encyclopedic knowledge, and therefore our knowledge about content, conditions and directs our negotiations for the success of the reference.
Such knowledge also makes it possible to solve the apparent paradox (my example is a somewhat free elaboration of an idea taken from Kripke 1979) of a certain Pierre who had always heard tell in France of Londres and had conceived the idea that it was a most beautiful city, and so he wrote in his diary, Londres est une ville merveilleuse; and then he chanced to go to Great Britain to learn English from the source and visited a city called by its inhabitants London. He found it intolerable and wrote in his faithful diary (unfortunately for us a bilingual one), London is an ugly city. Hence the fears of his Italian translator, who would have to make him say (contradictorily) that Londra is both beautiful and ugly at one and the same time—not to mention the misgivings of logicians who would not know how to deal with two so shamelessly contradictory statements, et cetera.
All this amounts to an injustice with regard to translators, logicians, and normal people. The story offers two possibilities: after having visited the place and on the basis of some description Pierre received when someone told him about London (English city on a river, with a Tower), either Pierre realized that there was only one city where before he had believed there were two, or he is an imbecile who accepted the first reference to Londres on trust, without knowing anything other than that it was a city, and never understood that the names Londres and London refer to the same object. In the first case, let’s give Pierre a chance to converse with other people and correct his beliefs, and perhaps to say that at first he thought (on the basis of unverified rumors) that London was beautiful, and later on he discovered it was ugly.
In the second case, Pierre remains locked in his cognitive and semantic confusion, and—apart from the fact that at this point one wonders why the diaries of an imbecile merit translation—the translator will have to insert some notes, to make it clear that we are dealing with an interesting semiotic and psychiatric document, because Pierre is one of those men who mistakes his wife for a hat or talks of Napoleon Bonaparte (as first consul and the loser of Waterloo) with the intention of referring to himself. All of which is of interest to psychiatry, not semantics.
Note that misunderstandings of this type are far commoner than suggested by the example—chosen with a taste for the improbable—that we have just examined. A collector of old books may see in a catalogue that the first (1662) edition of Gaspar Schott’s Physica Curiosa was published in Würzburg. Then in another catalogue he finds that the first edition was published in the same year in Herbipolis. Therefore he notes in his diary that there are two editions of the same work from the same year, in two different cities—not an unusual phenomenon at that time. But a little extra information would enable him to verify that the pleasant Bavarian town of Würzburg includes among its encyclopedic properties the fact that it was previously designated as Herbipolis (and that the German name is simply a translation of the Latin name). End of the tragedy.
All he had to do was ask. When they listen to acts of reference, people usually ask lots of questions. If our collector does not know enough to ask (or consult highly precise lexicons on such matters), then he simply becomes the subject of an amusing anecdote, like the student who (and this is apparently true) mentioned in a term paper essay the «well-known» debate between Voltaire and Arouet.
All in all, it seems to me that these contractual conditions, backed up by cognitive operations, provide a picture of what we effectively do when we refer to something that is more faithful than the one portrayed by ontological theories of reference. None of this amounts to a suggestion on my part that the question of ontological reference—or the treasures of subtlety that have been spent on settling it—is a trivial matter. And not just because the question is of particular importance in the universe of scientific discourse, where if two astronomers talk about the G14 nebula, they must be sure of what they are saying: even referring to the G14 nebula is a matter for negotiation, certainly more so than occurs in our day-to-day acts of reference (in which we often decide to «let it drop»), and certainly according to far stricter criteria. The problem lies rather in the fact that to be able to refer continuously and pragmatically, we need the regulative idea of ontological reference.
The Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and the Brothers Hyde
In London there are two brothers, John and Bob Hyde, identical twins and alike in every respect. The two (don’t ask me why, but evidently they like it this way) decide to create a single public personality, Doctor Jekyll, and they prepare for this from earliest childhood. They study medicine together, begin their internship, become a doctor (Jekyll) of considerable renown, who is nominated director of the University Hospital. Right from the start, the brothers observe a rule: they impersonate Jekyll on alternate days. When John is Jekyll, Bob stays at home eating canned food and watching television, and vice versa the following day. In the evening, the one who comes home from work tells the other all about his day in meticulous detail, so that the next day the other can take his place and no one will notice the substitution.
One day, John, who is on duty, embarks on an affair with a colleague, Doctor Mary. Naturally the next day, Bob carries on the relationship, and so the affair continues, to the enormous satisfaction of the three protagonists: John and Bob in love with the same woman, Mary convinced that she loves one man.
Now if Mary tells her best friend, Ann, from whom she has no secrets, Yesterday I went out with Jekyll, and granting that Bob was on duty yesterday evening, who is Mary referring to? An ontological theory of reference would allow us to say that, even if Mary thinks that Bob’s name is Jekyll, since she is referring to the person she went out with yesterday evening (who was christened Bob Hyde when he was a baby), she is referring to Bob. But if, this evening, she spends a night of passion with John, and the following day again tells Ann that she went out with Jekyll, to whom is Mary referring? Although she believes that John Hyde’s name is Jekyll, from the point of view of a Divine Mind she is referring to John. Therefore she refers to different people on alternate days, through the same mistaken name, but she does not know it.
It is clear that from a pragmatic point of view this double reference is of minimal importance for us (as it is for her). A celestial accountant, who had to take into consideration the exactitude of all the acts of reference pronounced in the world, would probably have registered that on the fifth of December Jekyll was Bob, and on the sixth he was John. John and Bob might want to see themselves from the
