Some objections to the metalinguistic theory of proper names

Abstract : Kleiber (1981) brilliantly defended a semantic theory of proper names according to which a proper name N is the abbreviation of the denominative predicate ‘being called /N/ (x)’. He refused to call his theory metalinguistic because he thought that the denominative predicate “being called /N/ (x)” is not metalinguistic; rather, he argued that it is mundane. However, we can call Kleiber’s theory metalinguistic in another sense, because in this theory the signifier of a proper name is part of the meaning of the proper name itself. In this paper, we evaluate Kleiber’s semantic theory of proper names.