Do the Gödel Vignettes Involve a New Descriptivist Meaning? A Critical Discussion of Devitt and Porot's Elicited Production Test on Proper Names

Proper names—expressions such as “Barack Obama” or “New York”—play a crucial role in the philosophical debate on reference, that is, the relation that allows words to stand for entities of the world. In an elicited production test, Devitt and Porot prompt participants to use proper names to compare the Descriptivist Theory and the Causal-Historical Theory on proper names’ reference. According to the Descriptivist Theory, names refer to the entity that fulfills the description that speakers associate with them. In contrast, the Causal-Historical Theory holds that names refer to the entity at the origin of the causal-historical chain of uses, regardless of any description. Devitt and Porot consider a criticism of their work, which they call “New-Meaning objection”: upon reading the vignette, the participant gains access to some facts unknown to the people within the fictional scenario. As a consequence, the descriptivist participant may undertake the elicited production test by relying upon a new meaning that is in force within a linguistic community “in the know.” In that case, the Descriptivist Theory predicts the same name usage as the Causal-Historical Theory. While Devitt and Porot address the objection also with a follow-up experiment, they consider the criticism theoretically flawed, arguing that names do not change meaning any time speakers acquire new information about the world. In this article, I argue that, contrary to Devitt and Porot's claim, their vignette inclines the descriptivist participant to assume that the name has acquired a new meaning.