Contextual semantics: Vulcan Might Have Existed, And Neptune Not: On the Semantics of Empty Names

Seminarieserie

Empty names such as 'Vulcan' or 'Sherlock Holmes' have intrigued philosophers of language at least since Frege. They are clearly problematic for
Millian accounts of the semantics of proper names, but
also for certain recent versions of descriptivism trying to accommodate Kripkean intuitions regarding proper names. In 'Proper Names and Relational Modality' (2006), we suggest an alternative such semantics: Introducing the technique of semantic evaluation switching, we develop a semantics allowing (non-empty) proper names to have descriptive contents
while accommodating Kripkean modal intuitions. In this paper, we extend the switcher semantics to empty names.

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