March 3, 2026

On baptisms

Key Points

Baptisms are crucial for establishing a name's reference, and their significance is often overlooked.
The analysis reveals that traditional views of baptism as just ceremonies or simple uses of names are inadequate.
A new account suggests that a baptism involves instituting a rule for future references to the object.
Understanding baptisms enriches our comprehension of how names function in language and communication.

Abstract

Suppose a causal theory of reference for utterances of proper names is correct. For an utterance of a name to refer to an object: (1) there must be a ‘baptism’, an event where the name is bestowed on the object; (2) the utterance must be suitably causally related to the baptism. The latter condition has seen significant research, but the act and conditions of baptising are surprisingly under-explored. I offer an account of baptisms. Most previous work has assumed one of two simple pictures: that baptisms are explicit ceremonies or that they are uses of a name with certain relational properties, each motivated by certain paradigmatic cases. In the first two sections of this essay I describe both pictures and explain how they fail. The paradigm cases are telling though, and in the third section I develop an account of baptisms which explains all the cases so far considered. On my account, a baptism of an object with a name is an act of instituting a rule to the effect that later uses of that name will refer to that object.

On baptisms

Key Points

Abstract

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