“Adequate Ideas” and Proper Names: Gareth Evans on Thought and Language

In The Varieties of Reference, Evans claims that thinking about an individual object requires satisfying what he calls “Russell’s Principle” by having an “adequate Idea” of the object. Acquiring an adequate Idea is intellectually demanding. By contrast, Evans agrees that acquiring a proper name, in the sense of coming to be able to use it to refer to its bearer, is easy. There is an apparent tension in these views that is made explicit if coming to use a proper name to refer would enable one to think about its bearer. The present paper argues that this tension is real, so that consistency requires major modification of Evans’s views. Particular attention is paid to his accounts of proper names, and his criticisms of Kripke’s views on that topic.