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In the philosophy of language a proper name, for example the names of persons or places, is a name which is ordinarily taken to uniquely identify its referent in the world. As such it presents particular challenges for theories of meaning and it has become a central problem in analytical philosophy. The common sense view was originally formulated by John Stuart Mill in ''A System of Logic'' where he defines it as "a word that answers the purpose of showing what thing it is that we are talking about but not of telling anything about it". This view was criticized when philosophers applied principles of formal logic to linguistic propositions. Gottlob Frege pointed out that proper names may apply to imaginary and inexistent entities without becoming meaningless, and he showed that sometimes more than one proper name may identify the same entity without having the same ''sense'', so that the phrase "Homer believed the morning star was the evening star" could be meaningful and not tautological in spite of the fact that the morning star and the evening star identifies the same referent. This example became known as Frege's Puzzle and is a central issue in the theory of proper names. Bertrand Russell was the first to propose a Descriptivist theory of names, which held that a proper name refers not to a referent, but to a set of true propositions that uniquely describe a referent - for example "Aristotle" refers to "the teacher of Alexander the Great". Rejecting descriptivism Saul Kripke and Keith Donnellan instead advanced causal-historical theories of reference which hold that names come to be associated with individual referents because social groups who links the name to its reference in a naming event (e.g. a baptism) which henceforth fixes the value of the name to the specific referent within that community. Today a direct reference theory is common, which holds that proper names refer to their referents without attributing any additional information, connotative or of sense, about them.〔(Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy - Names )〕 ==The problem== The problem of proper names arise within a theory of meaning that is based on truth values and propositional logic, when trying to ascertain the criteria with which to determine if propositions that include proper names are true or false. For example in the proposition ''Cicero is Roman'' it is unclear what semantic content the proper name ''Cicero'' provides to the proposition. One may intuitively assume that the name refers to a person who may or may not be Roman, and that the truth value depends on whether that is the case or not. But from the point of view of a theory of meaning the question is ''how'' the word Cicero establishes its referent. Another problem known as Frege's Puzzle, asks why it can be the case that the two names can refer to the same referent, yet not necessarily be considered entirely synonymous. His example is that the proposition "Hesperus is Hesperus" (Hesperus being the Greek name of the morning star) is tautological and vacuous while the proposition "Hesperus is Phosphorus" (Phosphorus being the Greek name of the evening star) conveys information. This puzzle suggests that there is something more to the meaning of the proper name than simply pointing out its referent. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Proper name (philosophy)」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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