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In the philosophy of language
Philosophy of language

Philosophy of language is the reasoned inquiry into the nature, origins, and usage of language. As a topic, the philosophy of language for Analytic philosophys is concerned with four central problems: the nature of Meaning , language use, language cognition, and the relationship between language and reality....
, an empty name is a proper name that has no referent
Sense and reference

The distinction between Sinn and Bedeutung was an innovation of the German philosopher and mathematician Gottlob Frege in his 1892 paper ?ber Sinn und Bedeutung , which is still widely read today....
.

The problem of empty names is that empty names have a meaning that it seems they shouldn't have. The name "Pegasus
Pegasus

In Greek mythology, Pegasus was a winged horse sired by Poseidon, in his role as horse-god, and foaled by the Gorgon Medusa....
" is empty; there is nothing to which it refers. Yet though there is no Pegasus, we know what the sentence "Pegasus has two wings" means. We can even understand the sentence "There is no such thing as Pegasus." But what can the meaning of a proper name be, except the object to which it refers?

There are three broad ways which philosophers have tried to approach this problem.

  1. The meaning of a proper name is not the same as the object (if there is any) it refers to.






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    In the philosophy of language
    Philosophy of language

    Philosophy of language is the reasoned inquiry into the nature, origins, and usage of language. As a topic, the philosophy of language for Analytic philosophys is concerned with four central problems: the nature of Meaning , language use, language cognition, and the relationship between language and reality....
    , an empty name is a proper name that has no referent
    Sense and reference

    The distinction between Sinn and Bedeutung was an innovation of the German philosopher and mathematician Gottlob Frege in his 1892 paper ?ber Sinn und Bedeutung , which is still widely read today....
    .

    The problem of empty names is that empty names have a meaning that it seems they shouldn't have. The name "Pegasus
    Pegasus

    In Greek mythology, Pegasus was a winged horse sired by Poseidon, in his role as horse-god, and foaled by the Gorgon Medusa....
    " is empty; there is nothing to which it refers. Yet though there is no Pegasus, we know what the sentence "Pegasus has two wings" means. We can even understand the sentence "There is no such thing as Pegasus." But what can the meaning of a proper name be, except the object to which it refers?

    There are three broad ways which philosophers have tried to approach this problem.

    1. The meaning of a proper name is not the same as the object (if there is any) it refers to. Hence, though "Pegasus" refers to nothing, it still has a meaning. The German philosopher Gottlob Frege
      Gottlob Frege

      Friedrich Ludwig Gottlob Frege was a Germany mathematics who became a logician and philosophy. He helped found both modern mathematical logic and analytic philosophy....
       seems to have held a theory of this sort. He says that the sentence "Odysseus was set ashore at Ithaca while sound asleep" obviously has a sense. ... the thought [expressed by that sentence] remains the same whether "Odysseus" has reference or not." Bertrand Russell
      Bertrand Russell

      Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell, Order of Merit , Fellow of the Royal Society , was a British people philosopher, mathematical logic, mathematician, historian, advocate for social reform, and pacifism....
       may also have held a similar theory, that a proper name is a disguised definite description
      Definite description

      A definite description is a denotation phrase in the form of "the X" where X is a noun-phrase or a singular common noun. The definite description is proper if X applies to a unique individual or object....
       that signifies some unique characteristic. If any object has this characteristic feature, the name has a referent. Otherwise it is empty. Perhaps "Aristotle
      Aristotle

      Aristotle was a Greeks philosopher, a student of Plato and teacher of Alexander the Great. He wrote on many subjects, including physics, metaphysics, Poetics , theater, music, logic, rhetoric, politics, government, ethics, biology and zoology....
      " means "the teacher of Alexander
      Alexander the Great

      Alexander the Great , also known as Alexander III of Macedon was an ancient Greeks King of Macedon . He was one of the most successful military commanders of all time and is presumed undefeated in battle....
      ". Since there was such a person, "Aristotle" refers to that person. By contrast, "Pegasus" may mean "the winged horse of Bellerophon
      Bellérophon

      Bell?rophon is an opera with music by Jean-Baptiste Lully and a libretto by Thomas Corneille and Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle first performed at the Palais Royal, Paris on 31 January 1679....
      ". Since there was no such horse, the name has no referent. This is the so-called description theory of names
      Theory of descriptions

      The theory of descriptions is one of the philosopher Bertrand Russell's most significant contributions to the philosophy of language. It is also termed Russell's Theory of Descriptions ....
      . The difficulty with this account is that we may always use a proper name to deny that the individual bearing the name actually has some characteristic feature. So, we can meaningfully say that Aristotle was not the teacher of Alexander. But if "Aristotle" means "teacher of Alexander", it would follow that this assertion is self-contradictory, which it is not. Saul Kripke
      Saul Kripke

      Saul Aaron Kripke is an American philosophy and logician, now emeritus from Princeton University. He teaches as distinguished professor of philosophy at CUNY Graduate Center....
       proposed this argument in a series of influential papers in the 1970s. Another difficulty is that different people may have different ideas about the defining characteristics of any individual. Yet we all understand what the name means. The sole information carried by the name seems to be the identity
      Identity (philosophy)

      In philosophy, identity is whatever makes an entity definable and recognizable, in terms of possessing a set of qualities or characteristics that distinguish it from entities of a different type....
       of the individual that it belongs to. This information therefore cannot be descriptive, it cannot describe the individual. As John Stuart Mill
      John Stuart Mill

      John Stuart Mill , United Kingdom philosopher, political economy, civil servant and Parliament of the United Kingdom, was an influential liberalism thinker of the 19th century....
       argued, a proper name tells us the identity of its bearer, without telling us anything else about it. Naming is rather like pointing.
    2. A theory that became influential following Kripke's attack is that empty proper names, have strictly speaking, no meaning. This is the so-called direct-reference theory. Versions of this theory have been defended by Keith Donnellan
      Keith Donnellan

      Keith Donnellan is a contemporary philosopher and Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Los Angeles. He has made important contributions to the philosophy of language, most notably to the analysis of proper names and definite descriptions....
      , David Kaplan
      David Kaplan (philosopher)

      David Benjamin Kaplan is an American philosopher and logician teaching at UCLA. His philosophical work focuses on logic, philosophical logic, modality, philosophy of language, metaphysics, and epistemology....
      , Nathan Salmon
      Nathan Salmon

      Nathan U. Salmon is an American philosophy in the analytic philosophy tradition, specializing in philosophy of language, metaphysics, and philosophy of logic....
      , Scott Soames
      Scott Soames

      Scott Soames is a professor of philosophy at the University of Southern California. He specializes in the philosophy of language and the history of analytic philosophy....
       and others. The problem with the direct-reference theory is that names appear to be meaningful independently of whether they are empty. Furthermore, negative existential statements using empty names are both true and apparently meaningful. How can "Pegasus does not exist" be true if the name "Pegasus", as used in that sentence, has no meaning?
    3. There are no empty names. All names have a referent. The difficulty with this theory is how to distinguish names like "Pegasus" from names like "Aristotle". Any coherent account of this distinction seems to require that there are, i.e. there exist, objects that do not exist. Given that "Pegasus does not exist" is true, it follows that the referent of "Pegasus" does not exist. Hence there is something — the referent of "Pegasus" — that does not exist.
    Some philosophers, such as Alexius Meinong
    Alexius Meinong

    Alexius Meinong was an Austrian philosopher, a Philosophical realism known for his unique ontology....
     have argued that there are two senses of the verb "exists", exemplified by the sentence "there are things that do not exist". The first, signified by "there are", is the so-called "wide sense", including Pegasus, the golden mountain, the round square &c. The second, signified by "exist" is the so-called "narrow sense", encompassing only things that are real or existent. The difficulty with this "two sense" theory is that there is no strong evidence that there really are two such distinct senses of the verb "to be".

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      Meinong's jungle

      Meinong's jungle is the name given to the repository of non-existent entities in the ontology of Alexius Meinong.Meinong, an Austrian philosopher active at the turn of the 20th century philosophy, believed that since non-existent things could apparently be reference, they must have some sort of being, which he termed sosein ....
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