It has been argued that proper names must be connotative because the use of a proper name conveys more information than the use of a general name. “Few persons,” says Mr Benecke,[49] “will deny that if I say the principal speaker was Mr Gladstone, I am giving not less but more information than if, instead of Mr Gladstone, I say either a member of Parliament, or an eminent man, or a statesman, or a Liberal leader. It will be admitted that the predicate Mr Gladstone tells us all that is told us by all these other connotative predicates put together, and more; and, if so, I cannot see how it can be denied that it also connotes more.” It is clear, however, that the information given when a thing is called by any name depends not on the connotation of the name, but on its intension for the person addressed. To anyone who knows that Mr Gladstone was Prime Minister in 1892 the same information is afforded whether a speaker is referred to as Mr Gladstone or as Prime Minister of 45 Great Britain and Ireland in 1892. But it certainly cannot be maintained that the connotation of these two names is identical.
[49] In a paper on the Connotation of Proper Names read before the Aristotelian Society.
In criticism of the position that the application of a proper name such as Gladstone is determined by some attribute or set of attributes, we may naturally ask, what attribute or set of attributes? The answer cannot be that the connotation consists of the complete group of attributes possessed by the individual designated; for it is absurd to require any such enumeration as this in order to determine the application of the name. It is, however, impossible to select some particular attributes of the individual in question, and point to them as a group that would be accepted as constituting the definition of the name; and if it is said that the application of the name is determined by any set of attributes that will suffice for identification, the case is given up. For this amounts to identifying the individual by a description (that is, practically by exemplification), not by a particular set of attributes conventionally attached to the name as such. The truth is that no one would ever propose to give an intensive definition of a proper name. All names, however, that are connotative must necessarily admit of intensive definition.[50]
[50] Mr Bosanquet arrives at the conclusion that “a proper name has a connotation, but not a fixed general connotation. It is attached to a unique individual, and connotes whatever may be involved in his identity, or is instrumental in bringing it before the mind” (Essentials of Logic, p. 93). So far as I can understand this statement, it amounts to saying that proper names have comprehension and subjective intension, but not connotation, in the senses in which I have defined these terms.
Proper names of course become connotative when they are used to designate a certain type of person; for example, a Diogenes, a Thomas, a Don Quixote, a Paul Pry, a Benedick, a Socrates. But, when so used, such names have really ceased to be proper names at all; they have come to possess all the characteristics of general names.[51]
[51] Compare Gray’s lines,—
“Some village Hampden, that, with dauntless breast,
The little tyrant of his fields withstood,
Some mute inglorious Milton here may rest,
Some Cromwell guiltless of his country’s blood.”
Attention may be called to a class of singular names, such as 46 Miss Smith, Captain Jones, President Roosevelt, the Lake of Lucerne, the Falls of Niagara, which may be said to be partially but only partially connotative. Their peculiarity is that they are partly made up of elements that have a general and permanent signification, and that consequently some change in the object denoted might render them no longer applicable, as, for example, if Captain Jones received promotion and were made a major; while, at the same time, such connotation as they possess is by itself insufficient to determine completely their application. It may be said that their application is limited, but not determined, by reference to specific assignable attributes. They occupy an intermediate position, therefore, between connotative singular names, such as the first man, and strictly proper names.
We may in this connexion touch upon Jevons’s argument that such a name as “John Smith” connotes at any rate “Teuton” and “male.” This is not strictly the case, since “John Smith” might be a dahlia, or a racehorse, or a negro, or the pseudonym of a woman, as in the case of George Eliot. In none of these cases could the name be said to be misapplied as it would be if a dahlia or a horse were called a man, or a negro a Teuton, or a woman a male. At the same time, it cannot be denied that certain proper names are in practice so much limited to certain classes of objects, that some incongruity would be felt if they were applied to objects belonging to any other class. It is, for example, unlikely that a parent would deliberately have his daughter christened “John Richard.” So far as this is the case, the names in question may be said to be partially connotative in the same way as the names referred to in the preceding paragraph, though to a less extent; that is to say, their application is limited, though not determined, by reference to specific attributes. We should have a still clearer case of a similar kind if the right to bear a certain name carried with it specific legal or social privileges.[52]
[52] Compare Bosanquet, Logic, i. p. 53.