Greg Carlson - Names of Kinds and Concepts

It is an everyday fact that many proper names of individuals have misleading, or puzzling descriptive contents. The Black Sea isn’t black, Lake City (Iowa, USA) has neither a lake nor is it a city, and the Royal Gardens Hotel is a hotel, but it lacks connection to royalty, and one looks in vain for gardens. Before asserting that Pepin the Short was short, one needs two facts. Coates (2006) discusses many other such examples. We’re taking it, a la Kripke, that names name by virtue of being rigidly paired with a denotation, and not by calculating a sense provided by the form from which the denotation can be identified. While the semantics of the internal structure of a name is not irrelevant, it is not what determines reference.
Our main purpose is to establish that whatever one says about the relationship between individuals, their names, and the internal structure of those names, is equally applicable to “general names”. Carroll (1985), in his book on the psychology of naming, notes that naming is something people must agree upon, and focuses on both individual and general names with internal structure. For example, whether to call some odd amorphous shape in a cooperative interactive task a “horse’s head”, a “horse”, a “seahorse”, an “odd curvy shape”, is a choice made on the fly. It is a choice made among alternatives, to call the thing this, and not that. He reports a contest to name an association of the employees of the Great Northern Railways, with the winning choice being “The Great Northern Railway Employee’s Association”. The fact that this name also encodes a fully identifying description does not lessen the fact that it is a name; a choice was made among submitted alternatives.
Carlson (1977) notes a number of parallels between bare plurals of English, and proper names. There, the conclusion is tentatively reached that bare plurals function as names of kinds (along with English definite singular generics and the Linnaean Latinate names). However, only a subset of these expressions may cooccur in English with the definite singular generic (“the Coke bottle” vs. ?“the green bottle” (cf: “green bot-tles”) examples due to Partee), and this distinction has been encoded in the literature as isolating “well-established” kinds (Krifka et al, 1995).
The main points of this paper then are two:

1) Establish ways of telling what sorts of constructions are “general names”and which are not (e.g. Prasada & Dillingham (2005) note “polar bears” and “white bears” while coextensive differ along these lines (e.g. “the polar bear” but “??the white bear”)

2) Argue that the descriptive contents of these constructions has the same status as the descriptive contents of individual proper names, and that the descriptive contents is best analyzed “etymologically” (Kroeber’s terminology) rather semantically.

3) And finally, ask the obvious question of what general names name. The answer we tentatively give is that they are names by virtue of taking concepts as their denotata, and explore what consequences this might have for what concept might and might not be.