The Puzzle of Names

Resumo

The literature is unclear on whether informativeness and substitution failure present two different problems to a theory of proper names for natural languages. In this paper I argue that the problems are intimately related and show how the tradition has failed to notice it. I offer an account of why this is so and present a new version of the problem. This finding is directly relevant for the prospect of discovering an adequate solution to the problems in question. The resulting formulation gives us a good idea of the kind of solution required.