Empty Names, Propositions, and Attitude Ascriptions

This chapter intends to offer a theory of empty names that is consistent with the doctrine of direct reference and respects the intuition that sentences such as _Vulcan does not exist, Le Verrier imagined Vulcan, and Le Verrier believed that Vulcan orbited between Mercury and the sun_, express propositions to which the name Vulcan makes its contribution and which are either true or false. The theory has recourse to a notion of structured propositions that are quite unlike singular propositions, but it still assumes that all proper names, empty or otherwise, have no descriptive content that is semantically relevant. The new-style propositions are language-bound. Thus, the theory reminds us of sententialism–i.e. the theory that the proper objects of propositional attitudes are sentences–but is not vulnerable to the same objections. It is argued that the new-style propositions fare better than the gappy ones in accounting for the semantics of empty names and, more generally, of attitude ascriptions.