In a paper for the Kline Colloquium, Melnyk defends Millikan’s view of the introduction of new referential terms (e.g. names). For those not familiar, I’m not going to rehash all of the details of his defense or Millikan’s view here. I will only mention that Millikan’s view stands in contrast to Kripke’s causal-historical view of the introduction of new referential terms. Melnyk presents the following slight modification on her view, (which he seems to think presents the spirit of Millikan’s position):
MM:Term token T refers to entity E iff (1) T is a token of some type t such that there is some population P of two or more speakers each member of which has in his or her repertoire the practice of uttering a token of t when he or she speaker-refers to E, and (2) T is a copy of a copy…of a copy of, or identical with, some token of t uttered by a member of P who was speaker-referring to E (Melnyk, “What Explains the Introduction of New Referential Terms?”, Kline Workshop Paper, p. 16).
Two objections come to mind. First, MM requires that (i) two or more people are in the population in order for the copying to occur. The copying is a necessary condition of the successful introduction of new referential terms. Second, MM seems to imply that (ii) the necessary copying must occur verbally (cf. “uttering a token”) to be successfully. I don’t believe either of these hold.
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