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Baruffio is a blog for people who take silly things way too seriously. It’s where you can read ludicrously in-depth analyses of a single spell. It’s where the only argument against a conspiracy theory is that it’s not consistent. It’s where we’re still talking about Harry Potter, after all these years.

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Snape was wrong when he suggested that the Marauder’s Map is “plainly full of Dark Magic,” but it really is a remarkably powerful artifact and it’s not at all obvious how it works. How does it know your name, in order to label your dot as it tracks you throughout the castle? To figure that out, we’re going to have to start from the beginning, and figure out what names even are, and how they work.

Sonorous!

What is the Marauder’s Map and how does it work?

It was a map showing every detail of the Hogwarts castle and grounds. But the truly remarkable thing was the tiny ink dots moving around it, each labelled with a name in minuscule writing. Astounded, Harry bent over it. A labelled dot in the top left corner showed that Professor Dumbledore was pacing his study; the caretaker’s cat, Mrs Norris, was prowling the second floor, and Peeves the poltergeist was currently bouncing around the trophy room (PoA, Chapter 10).

The idea here is pretty straightforward: the Marauder’s Map is a map of Hogwarts that also reveals the location of everyone inside the castle—or at least, the locations of people and certain cats. It reveals your location by placing a dot on the section of the map that corresponds to where you are in the castle, and by labeling that dot with your name.

In the books, the Map has no problem figuring out everyone’s name and labeling them correctly. But how does it do that? How does it know our names?

In order to answer that question, we first need to settle a more basic question about the relationship between words and the world. This question might seem silly, but there is actually a great deal of controversy over the correct answer:

I think we should start by making an assumption that’s common among philosophers of language, which is that names designate. In other words, names (at least most of them) stand in a particular relation to things in the world. It’s because of this designation relation that names hook onto the world.

This might seem like an obvious assumption, but not everyone agrees. Before moving on, let’s discuss an objection to this assumption, and why we’re going to stick with it anyway.

Some people don’t think names designate

Some philosophers, influenced by Ludwig Wittgenstein, have argued that the answer we gave above, and the evocative metaphor of words hooking onto the world, is altogether misguided. The objection is that instead of thinking of words as labels that stick to various objects, we should think of words, including names, as tools that we use to do things. On page 78 of his Philosophy of Language: A Contemporary Introduction (Second Edition), William Lycan suggests that this is what Wittgenstein himself was getting at in his later work:

Wittgenstein [offered] a further analogy [in Philosophical Investigations]: A builder and his assistant have just four kinds of building stones that they use. They speak a little primitive language that has just four corresponding words in it: “block”, “pillar”, “slab”, and “beam”. They build things, engaging in their nonlinguistic activities aided by a certain primitive sort of linguistic activity: the builder says “slab”, and the assistant brings a stone of the appropriate shape. Now, someone might say, “Of course, that word ‘slab’ bears the [designation] relation to a block of this shape, and its meaning is the proposition that the assistant is to bring such a block to the builder.” But according to Wittgenstein this would be missing the point. In this little primitive language-game, the word “slab” does have a function that is obviously connected with blocks of that shape, but the point is the function and not the [designation] relation. The point of the builder’s making the noise “slab” is just to get the assistant to do something, to trigger conventionally (the assistant having learned his trade) a pattern of useful activity. The activity does involve things of this shape, but the primary point is to initiate action, not to [designate].

The idea here, roughly, is that names, and words in general, are less like tags and more like hammers. Instead of asking what a name is attached to, we should ask what a name is used for. In Wittgenstein’s example, the words “block”, “pillar”, “slab”, and “beam” are used to make the assistant retrieve certain building materials.

According to this sort of theory, words in general work a lot like spell-words do. Here’s an example from Chamber of Secrets, right after Gilderoy Lockhart admits that he didn’t do any of the brave things he claimed to do in his books:

He pulled out his wand and turned to them.

“Awfully sorry, boys, but I’ll have to put a Memory Charm on you now. Can’t have you blabbing my secrets all over the place. I’d never sell another book …”

Harry reached his wand just in time. Lockhart had barely raised his, when Harry bellowed, “Expelliarmus!” (CoS, Chapter 16)

It doesn’t seem to make much sense to ask what “Expelliarmus” designated there. It didn’t designate anything. It was used by Harry to disarm Lockhart.

Problems with the words-as-tools theory

As appealing as this words-as-tools theory is, it’s got some real problems. Here’s one:

Look again at how we talked about the “Expelliarmus” case: we said that “it doesn’t seem to make much sense to ask what ‘Expelliarmus’ designated there.” It doesn’t seem to make much sense to ask what “Expelliarmus” designated in that context, but it does make sense to ask what “Expelliarmus” designates in general.

In general, “Expelliarmus” designates Expelliarmus. “Expelliarmus” is the name of a spell. When we use the word “Expelliarmus”, we’re not always using it to cast a spell. Sometimes we just want to talk about the spell, like Harry and Zacharias Smith do during the first meeting of Dumbledore’s Army:

“Right,” said Harry, […] “shall we get practising then? I was thinking, the first thing we should do is Expelliarmus, you know, the Disarming Charm. I know it’s pretty basic but I’ve found it really useful—”

“Oh, please,” said Zacharias Smith, rolling his eyes and folding his arms. “I don’t think Expelliarmus is exactly going to help us against You-Know-Who, do you?”

“I’ve used it against him,” said Harry quietly. “It saved my life in June” (OotP, Chapter 18).

I think the right conclusion to draw here is that, while “Expelliarmus” designates Expelliarmus, we don’t always use “Expelliarmus” to talk about Expelliarmus. Sometimes, as we’ve seen, we use it to cast the spell. Just because a word designates a certain thing doesn’t mean that we can’t use it to do things other than talk about what it designates. Malfoy does just this in Prisoner of Azkaban:

“Well, look who it is,” said Malfoy in his usual lazy drawl, pulling open the compartment door. “Potty and the Weasel.”

I’m not sure what “Potty” designates, but it’s not Harry. And “the Weasel” doesn’t designate Ron—many philosophers of language think that the determiner “the” means that “the Weasel” can only designate the unique Weasel, and so doesn’t designate anything in a world with many weasels, such the world of Harry Potter. But Malfoy is nonetheless using “Potty” to talk about Harry and using “the Weasel” to talk about Ron. Let’s introduce another bit of technical language and say that while “Potty” does not designate Harry, Malfoy is using it, in this context, to refer to Harry.

Context is important for referring, but not for designating. If “Harry Potter” designates Harry Potter, it does so all the time, and whether or not anyone is using the name. But Malfoy has to be in the right sort of situation in order to refer to Harry using “Potty”. Basically, he has to be in a situation where the people he’s talking to realize he’s using “Potty” as if it was a name for Harry. This is how Kent Bach describes it on page 518 of “What Does it Take to Refer?” in the Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Language:

Speaker reference is a four-place relation between a speaker, an expression, an audience, and a referent: you use an expression to refer someone to something.

The difference between designation and reference will be important later on, but the point of bringing it up now is to show that while the words-as-tools theory is right to say that we use words for different purposes in different contexts, that doesn’t mean we should think that words never designate anything.

There are other objections to the words-as-tools theory. One is that while it might be true for some words and maybe even some phrases, it’s not generally true; some words and phrases might be tools, but some aren’t. We’re interested in names right now, and names seem the least like tools; they really do seem more like labels or tags. (And this objection could be pushed a little further: aren’t tags ultimately a sort of tool? Even if all words are tools, does that really rule out words that are meant to be used as tags?)

Another objection to words-as-tools is that even if I understand the conventional ways to use English words, that’s not all there is to understanding English. This is one of William Lycan’s objections, from page 81 of Philosophy of Language:

Could I not know the use of an expression, and fall in with it, mechanically, without understanding it? I have known undergraduates who are geniuses at picking up academic jargon of one sort or another and slinging it around with great facility, but without understanding.

(A similar example is in Goblet of Fire, when Harry and Ron make up predictions about what will happen to them instead of really doing Divination, but aren’t caught by Professor Trelawny because they write the sort of stuff she expects to hear.)

We could program a computer (or enchant a hat) to reply to English sentences with other English sentences; it might be well-designed enough to give replies that a fluent English speaker would give. But if the computer’s replies were chosen by making statistical generalizations from a database of recorded conversations, we would probably say that the computer doesn’t actually understand English. It can use English words, but it doesn’t know what they mean.

There’s more that could be said on both sides, but let’s put away the words-as-tools theory, and accept for the time being that names really do designate things. Now let’s talk about meaning.

The meaning of names

So far we’ve just talked about whether or not names designate things. But at least for most words, you’re probably more familiar with the question, “what does this word mean?” We’re going to stay focused just on names, so our question is “what do names mean?”

We have no problem explaining what most words mean, so it may seem odd that the meaning of names is such a big problem. For example, the meaning of “squib” is “person without magical power but with at least one parent who is a witch or wizard.” The meaning of “thestral” is something like “winged horse visible only to those who have seen and understood death.” But it’s not nearly as obvious what the meaning of “Harry Potter” is.

We’re going to look at three different theories of names, which each provide a different answer to the question, “what is the meaning of ‘Harry Potter’?” The first theory is Descriptivism, the second is Millianism, and the third is Nominal Descriptivism. I think Nominal Descriptivism is the correct theory, and I’ll explain why, but keep in mind that there are many philosophers who disagree.

Descriptivism

As its name suggests, Descriptivism claims that the meaning of a name is a description of the person or object designated by that name. According to this theory, names such as “Harry Potter” are a lot like general terms like “squib” and “thestral”. The meanings of those words also describe the things they designate.

But the meaning of “Harry Potter” can’t be just any description that describes Harry Potter. For example, the meaning of “Harry Potter” can’t be “the boy who lived”. It’s true that “the boy who lived” is commonly used to refer to Harry Potter, and has become associated in the popular imagination with Harry Potter, but “the boy who lived” doesn’t uniquely describe Harry. Strictly speaking, any living boy is a boy who lived; Harry is not really unique in that respect. And as I mentioned above, “the” implies uniqueness. There are many maps, but only one Marauder’s Map, so it is the Marauder’s Map. If there were multiple Marauder’s Maps, then it would not be correct to use “the”. “The Marauder’s Map” only designates the Marauder’s Map while it is the unique—the only—Marauder’s Map.

For this reason, “the boy who lived” does not designate Harry, even though it is very often used to refer to him. So if Descriptivism is true, then the meaning of “Harry Potter” has to be something other than “the boy who lived”. It has to be something that uniquely describes Harry, something like “the wizard born to James and Lily Potter on 31 July 1980, who survived a Killing Curse cast by Voldemort on Hallowe’en in 1981”. That describes nobody else.

According to Descriptivism, “Harry Potter” is really nothing more than an abbreviation of “the wizard born to James and Lily Potter on 31 July 1980, who survived a Killing Curse cast by Voldemort on Hallowe’en in 1981”. The only difference between the following two sentences is their length:

If Descriptivism is correct, then we use “Harry Potter” instead of “the wizard born to James and Lily Potter on 31 July 1980, who survived a Killing Curse cast by Voldemort on Hallowe’en in 1981” only because it’s more convenient; the meaning is the same.

How would the Map work in a Descriptivist world?

Let’s suppose that Descriptivism is correct. What would that tell us about how the Marauder’s Map works? We’re not worried about how it determines that some person is in, for example, the Gryffindor common room; presumably that’s taken care of by the Homonculous Charm. What we want to know is how the Map goes further, and determines who that person is. Without asking anyone, how does it figure out your name?

Let’s make some assumptions about Hogwarts in order to make this easier. We’ll suppose that the Map already has access to the names of everyone who is in the castle. If the Map didn’t have the names, then it’s hard to see how the Map could match up people with their names. It would have to be able to deduce a person’s name just from “looking” at them; and I’m not sure if that can be done.

But why are we allowed to assume that the Map already has access to the names of everyone in the castle? I think we’re allowed to do so for the following reason: Hogwarts is protected from intruders by a number of enchantments. One of these enchantments might well be an enchantment that prevents unauthorized people from entering the castle. At the beginning of the year, the Headmaster or Headmistress teaches Hogwarts the names of the new students, so that they may enter. Individuals who never attended the school but are either permanent or temporary residents—Peeves, Filch, Mrs. Norris, the visitors from Beauxbatons and Durmstrang—are added on a case-by-case basis. Hogwarts determines who is designated by each name, and allows them entry. The Marauder’s Map simply piggy-backs off this system of enchantments.

So: Hogwarts learns the name “Harry Potter”, and therefore the Marauder’s Map does too. How does the Map then take that name and figure out who it designates?

If Descriptivism is true, then what the Map learns when it learns the name “Harry Potter” is that the meaning of “Harry Potter” is “the wizard born to James and Lily Potter on 31 July 1980, who survived a Killing Curse cast by Voldemort on Hallowe’en in 1981”. So in order to label Harry Potter’s dot on the Marauder’s Map, the Map just needs to discover which of the people within Hogwarts is the wizard born to James and Lily Potter on 31 July 1980, who survived a Killing Curse cast by Voldemort on Hallowe’en in 1981. Whoever in fact fits that description is Harry Potter, according to this theory.

How the Map actually goes about this investigation is something J.K. Rowling might have to tell us. How the Map can reach back into the past and figure out with complete certainty which of these people now in the castle was then the wizard who survived a Killing Curse is a complicated question. It’s also a question that we’re not going to try to answer. We now know what the Map needs to do in order to label its dots, if Descriptivism is true. How it does that is a question for another day.

And it might not even be worth trying to answer this second question, because Descriptivism is probably not the correct theory anyway.

Problems with Descriptivism

Descriptivism is intuitive and straightforward, but it has some big problems. Here are two:

  1. If “Harry Potter” just means “the wizard born to James and Lily Potter on 31 July 1980, who survived a Killing Curse cast by Voldemort on Hallowe’en in 1981”, than anyone who understands the name “Harry Potter” thereby knows—just on the basis of understanding the name!—that Harry Potter survived a Killing Curse cast by Voldemort. But surely this isn’t right: we only know that Harry survived Voldemort’s Killing Curse because we have historical evidence about what happened that Hallowe’en. It’s not something we can learn simply by knowing what “Harry Potter” means. And if Harry’s name alone told us that he was born on 31 July 1980, then this could not have happened in The Goblet of Fire:

    Harry looked around; the whole class was staring at him. He sat up straight; he had been almost dozing off, lost in the heat and his thoughts.

    “I was saying, my dear, that you were clearly born under the baleful influence of Saturn,” said Professor Trelawney, a faint note of resentment in her voice at the fact that he had obviously not been hanging on her words.

    “Born under—what, sorry?” said Harry.

    “Saturn, dear, the planet Saturn!” said Professor Trelawney, sounding definitely irritated that he wasn’t riveted by this news. “I was saying that Saturn was surely in a position of power in the heavens at the moment of your birth … your dark hair … your mean stature … tragic losses so young in life … I think I am right in saying, my dear, that you were born in mid-winter?”

    “No,” said Harry, “I was born in July” (Chapter 13).

  2. It seems perfectly true to say “It could have been that Harry Potter did not survive that Killing Curse cast by Voldemort.” If Lily hadn’t died trying to save him, her love wouldn’t have protected him from Voldemort’s curse, and he would also have died. But if Descriptivism is true, then the following are equivalent:

    • “It could have been that Harry Potter did not survive that Killing Curse cast by Voldemort.”

    • “It could have been that the wizard born to James and Lily Potter on 31 July 1980, who survived a Killing Curse cast by Voldemort on Hallowe’en in 1981 did not survive that Killing Curse cast by Voldemort.”

    And while the first is true, the second seems false. How could it be that the wizard, whoever it is, who survived a Killing Curse not have survived that Killing Curse? We seem to be contradicting ourselves. But we are definitely not contradicting ourselves by saying that Harry Potter might not have survived that Killing Curse.

For these reasons, I think that Descriptivism cannot be the correct theory of names. So we should move on to examine Millianism.

Millianism

The two problems for Descriptivism that I listed above were originally presented by Saul Kripke in a series of lectures at Princeton in 1972. Descriptivism was much more widely accepted then than it is now, and it was Kripke’s lectures that caused philosophers to abandon Descriptivism and look for a better theory of names. Many settled on Millianism, which is called that because it was inspired by the philosophy of John Stuart Mill.

According to Millianism, the meaning of a name just is the designation of the name. The meaning of “Harry Potter” is nothing more than the person designated by that name—Harry Potter, the wizard himself. Compare this with Descriptivism: according to that theory, “Harry Potter” designates Harry Potter because the meaning of the name—“the wizard born to James and Lily Potter on 31 July 1980, who survived a Killing Curse cast by Voldemort on Hallowe’en in 1981”—uniquely describes Harry Potter. According to Millianism, “Harry Potter” designates Harry Potter because the meaning of the name just is Harry Potter. The meaning of “Harry Potter” isn’t something that describes or picks out that wizard; the meaning is that wizard.

This theory does not face the two problems that face Descriptivism:

  1. If “Harry Potter” does not mean “the wizard born to James and Lily Potter on 31 July 1980, who survived a Killing Curse cast by Voldemort on Hallowe’en in 1981”, then understanding the name “Harry Potter” not not require knowing that Harry Potter survived a Killing Curse cast by Voldemort, or knowing when Harry was born. Understanding the name just requires knowing who it designates.

  2. If Millianism is true, then the following are not equivalent:

    • “It could have been that Harry Potter did not survive that Killing Curse cast by Voldemort.”

    • “It could have been that the wizard born to James and Lily Potter on 31 July 1980, who survived a Killing Curse cast by Voldemort on Hallowe’en in 1981 did not survive that Killing Curse cast by Voldemort.”

    So there is nothing strange about denying the second while agreeing with the first, if Millianism is correct.

But while Millianism avoids the problems that plagued Descriptivism, it faces its own set of challenges, as we’ll see. But first let’s look at how the Marauder’s Map would function if Millianism were true.

How would the Map work in a Millian world?

If Millianism is true, what the Marauder’s Map has to do in order to label its dots is actually very little. Since the meaning of a name, according to Millianism, just is the thing designated by that name, when the Map learns the name “Harry Potter”, what it learns is who “Harry Potter” designates.

So just learning “Harry Potter” gives the Map everything it needs to pinpoint and label Harry Potter. Descriptivism gave the Map only a description of Harry Potter; Millianism gives the Map Harry Potter himself.

This is great, because we don’t have to ask Rowling how the Map can investigate who fits the descriptions associated with names. But unfortunately, Millianism has serious problems that make it a less attractive theory than you might think.

Problems with Millianism

  1. Plenty of people have multiple names. Alastor Moody is more often known as “Mad-Eye Moody”. If, like Millianism says, the meaning of “Alastor Moody” and the meaning of “Mad-Eye Moody” are both just the ex-Auror, then they should be completely interchangeable. But they’re not, because we often don’t realize that two names designate the same person:

    “There are those who’ll turn innocent occasions to their advantage,” Moody retorted in a menacing voice. “It’s my job to think the way Dark wizards do, Karkaroff—as you ought to remember …”

    “Alastor!” said Dumbledore warningly. Harry wondered for a moment whom he was speaking to, but then realised “Mad-Eye” could hardly be Moody’s real first name (GoF, Chapter 17).

    But if Millianism was true, then “Alastor Moody is Mad-Eye Moody” is obviously true, because the two names are perfect synonyms. If Millianism was true, then nobody would ever disagree with “Alastor Moody is the Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher at Hogwarts” while agreeing with “Mad-Eye Moody is the Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher at Hogwarts.” But before Harry’s name came out of the Goblet of Fire, he would have done just that.

  2. If the meaning of “Harry Potter” is just Harry Potter, then if Harry Potter doesn’t exist, the name is meaningless! If the only meaning it has is the person it designates, then there’s no meaning if there’s no person.

    While Harry Potter is alive, while he does exist, “Harry Potter doesn’t exist” is a perfectly meaningful sentence—except that it’s false. But when Harry ceases to exist, there is no longer anything for “Harry Potter” to designate, so “Harry Potter doesn’t exist” is not meaningful, because “Harry Potter” has quite literally lost its meaning. Just when we would want to say that Harry Potter doesn’t exist, it seems that we no longer can.

These objections are convincing enough for me to think that Millianism cannot be the correct theory of names either. Fortunately we have one more candidate that is better than either Descriptivism or Millianism.

Nominal Descriptivism

The theory of Nominal Descriptivism was given that name by Kent Bach. The name makes perfect sense, because this is what the theory says: the meaning of any name “N” is “the thing designated by ‘N’.” (Since we’ve been talking about names of people, from now on we’ll say “the person designated by ‘N’.”)

That’s it!

As an example, Nominal Descriptivism says that the meaning of “Harry Potter” is “the person designated by ‘Harry Potter’.” According to this theory, the following differ only in length:

This simple theory avoids the problems that plagued both (regular) Descriptivism and Millianism.

How Nominal Descriptivism avoids the Descriptivist problems

  1. Descriptivism had the bizarre consequence that it’s true by definition that Harry Potter survived a Killing Curse. This meant that anyone who understands the name “Harry Potter” thereby knows that Harry survived a Killing Curse, just like anyone who understands the word “squib” knows that squibs don’t have magical power. All Nominal Descriptivism says is that anyone who understands “Harry Potter” thereby knows that Harry Potter is designated by “Harry Potter”. That’s not a bizarre consequence at all.

  2. Descriptivism was forced to deny that Harry Potter might not have survived the Killing Curse cast by Voldemort, because part of the meaning of “Harry Potter” was “the wizard who survived a Killing Curse cast by Voldemort”. As it turns out, Nominal Descriptivism denies this too, but for a very different reason.

    Nominal Descriptivism says that the meaning of “Harry Potter” is “the person designated by ‘Harry Potter’.” That is a definite description, and we saw above that definite descriptions—like “the wizard born to James and Lily Potter on 31 July 1980, who survived a Killing Curse cast by Voldemort on Hallowe’en in 1981”—are supposed to uniquely designate someone. This means that the sentence “the person designated by ‘Harry Potter’ lives in the cupboard under the stairs of 4 Privet Drive, Little Whinging, Surrey” is only true, strictly speaking, if there is just one person designated by “Harry Potter”. If there is more than one person in the world named “Harry Potter”, then it’s not actually true that the person designated by ‘Harry Potter’ lives in the cupboard under the stairs of 4 Privet Drive, Little Whinging, Surrey. And if Nominal Descriptivism is true, then it’s likewise false that Harry Potter lives in the cupboard under the stairs of 4 Privet Drive, Little Whinging, Surrey.

    Indeed, pretty much everything said using the name “Harry Potter” will be literally false if there is more than one person named “Harry Potter”. But this is not as bad as it seems! A lot of what we say is literally false, even though we don’t realize it: suppose there’s a party in Gryffindor Tower and Fred says “there’s no butterbeer.” He’s actually saying something false because he’s denying that there’s butterbeer, period. And surely there’s butterbeer somewhere; in the Hogwarts kitchens, in the Three Broomsticks, and so on. But what Fred meant is that there’s no butterbeer in Gryffindor Tower. For the same reason, if Harry says “I’m Harry Potter,” he’s technically uttering a falsehood, but as long as the people he’s talking to understand that he’s referring them to himself (remember that reference is a four-place relation between a speaker, audience, name and object), everyone knows what he means.

    It’s for this reason that “Harry Potter might not have survived that Killing Curse cast by Voldemort” is literally false; there are almost certainly multiple people named “Harry Potter”. But depending on who the speaker intends to refer to when they say that Harry Potter might not have survived that Killing Curse cast by Voldemort, what they meant (“he might not have survived”) may be true or false.

    (If you still think that this is a big problem for Nominal Descriptivism, keep in mind that we never discussed how regular Descriptivism and Millianism deal with multiple people sharing a name. If there is even one other Harry Potter, then “Harry Potter” can’t just mean “the wizard born to …” (like Descriptivism says), and it can’t mean that Harry Potter (like Millianism says), because what about the other Harry Potter(s)? These theories would have to be tweaked to cope with this complication, and those tweaks may end up being just as unintuitive.)

How Nominal Descriptivism avoids the Millian problems

  1. A big problem for Millianism was that it gave us the strange result that there’s absolutely no difference between names that designate the same person—“Mad-Eye Moody” and “Alastor Moody” should be interchangeable everywhere. But if Nominal Descriptivism is correct, then “Mad-Eye Moody” means “the person designated by ‘Mad-Eye Moody’” and “Alastor Moody” means “the person designated by ‘Alastor Moody’.” Now the names are no longer synonymous, and there is no mystery as to how Harry could fail to realize that Mad-Eye Moody is Alastor Moody.

  2. Millianism also seemed unable to make sense of statements like “Harry Potter does not exist.” Nominal Descriptivism has no problem with these negative existentials: if Harry Potter means “the person designated by ‘Harry Potter’,” then everything becomes clear: we are just denying that anyone is designated by “Harry Potter”.

How does the Map work in a Nominal Descriptivist world?

This will be a bit complicated. Remember that in a (regular) Descriptivist world, when the map learns “Harry Potter”, it learns that Harry Potter is the wizard, whoever it is, who was born to James and Lily Potter on 31 July 1980, and who survived a Killing Curse cast by Voldemort on Hallowe’en in 1981. In a Millian world, the Map simply learns who Harry Potter is. But in our Nominal Descriptivist world, all the Map can learn is that the name “Harry Potter” designates whoever it in fact designates. Not very helpful at all!

In the Nominal Descriptivist world, unlike the previous worlds we examined, learning the meaning of a name does not give you enough information to determine who is designated by that name. So the Map will have to look elsewhere for information about who’s designated by what names.

Where will we look next? We’ve been trying to figure out a semantic fact: what individual(s) are designated by “Harry Potter”. Previously we were able to figure this out using another semantic fact—the meaning of “Harry Potter”. But now that semantic fact has failed us. So we will have to look at metasemantic facts: in particular, the facts about why “Harry Potter” designates the individuals it does. How did it come to be that Harry Potter (that Harry Potter; the wizard, the hero of our stories) came to be designated by “Harry Potter”? How did he get his name?

Semantic and metasemantic facts

I mentioned above that Saul Kripke argued against Descriptivism in a series of lectures, later published as Naming and Necessity. An important feature of his argument is that while he insists that the meaning of a proper name like “Harry Potter” cannot be some definite description like “the wizard who was born to James and Lily Potter on 31 July 1980 and survived a Killing Curse cast by Voldemort on Hallowe’en in 1981”, he admits (on pages 57–58) that a description like that may be used to fix the designation of “Harry Potter”:

It seems plausible to suppose that, in some cases, the [designation] of a name is indeed fixed via a description in the same way that the metric system was fixed. When [someone] first saw Hesperus, he may well have fixed [the designation] by saying, “I shall use ‘Hesperus’ as a name of the heavenly body appearing in yonder position in the sky.” He then fixed the [designation] of “Hesperus” by its apparent celestial position. Does it then follow that it is a part of the meaning of the name that Hesperus has such and such a position at the time in question? Surely not.

The idea is that there are multiple ways to name something or someone. Let’s imagine Lily Potter naming her baby. There are at least two different ways she could do it:

The important point here is that when Lily says these things, she is fixing the designation of “Harry Potter”, but she is not giving a definition of “Harry Potter”. We’ve already seen why “Harry Potter” cannot be defined as meaning “the wizard who was born to James and Lily Potter on 31 July 1980 and survived a Killing Curse cast by Voldemort on Hallowe’en in 1981”, or as meaning the person himself.

The fact that Lily fixed the designation of “Harry Potter” by, let’s say, pointing and saying “that child shall be ‘Harry Potter’” is therefore not a semantic fact. It’s not a fact that can be expressed as “‘Harry Potter’ means such-and-such”, nor can it be expressed as “‘Harry Potter’ designates the so-and-so.” It’s a metasemantic fact that tells us about the semantic facts. Knowing this metasemantic fact, we can then use it to figure out the semantic fact that “Harry Potter” designates the baby that Lily Potter pointed at when she said “that child shall be ‘Harry Potter’.” It’s this semantic question—who is designated by “Harry Potter”?—that the Map needs to answer, in order to label Harry when he arrives at Hogwarts. But it won’t be able to answer that question without first learning some metasemantic facts about how Harry got his name.

We face again the question of how the Map reaches back into the past. How can it know for certain when and how a person was named, so that it can learn what name they were given? I’m afraid this is a question for another day. We now know what the Map needs to know. I won’t here try to answer how it might come to know it.

Further reading