"It is not merely that there would be a great many borderline cases which some would be inclined to accept as proper names and others to reject, with no principle on which either could defend his judgment. It is, rather, that such an account would be unable to display the connection between the classification of some expressions as proper names and the use of those expressions. Being funny and being red are detachable qualities: someone with no sense of humor or someone totally color-blind misses a lot, but there is nothing else which we can infer that he misses in virtue of his missing these things. By contrast, someone who cannot recognize an expression as a proper name must either fail to understand the expression, or else must simply fail to grasp the concept `proper name' but yet be capable of coming to grasp it. Of someone totally color-blind we may well say that he is never capable of acquiring the concept red: but someone who understand language must already have that by means of which he could come to learn which expressions are proper names and which are not, if we could but find the correct means to explain this concept to him."
Dummett, Frege: phil. lang, 55
hey m.fusco, I just realized that your blog title is an anagram of your name. neato! leave it to you to make a play on words. where are all the m.fuscos in the world????! I swear.
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