-
Diego Marconi Competence and Proper Names This paper is
concerned with the semantics of proper names from two different
points of view. As everyboy knows, there is a standard account of
the semantics of proper names - it is Kripke's account,
essentially. And there is a certain amount of neuropsychological
research on proper names, or on the mental representation, or
processing of proper names -not too small an amount, at this point.
There is a certain amount of evidence, and there are a few
theories, none of them regarded as definitive, if I read the state
of the art correctly. It may be thought that such
neuropsychological work is simply irrelevant to the concerns of
semantics, and vice-versa. For semantics is concerned with the
truth conditions of sentences per se, and neuropsychology has
nothing to say about that; neuropsychology, on the other hand, is
concerned with several mental performances involving proper names
-retrieving them from memory, or using them as cues to a person's
face- and with their place within semantic memory (in case they
have a special place), and semantics has nothing to say about that.
The truth conditions that semantics is after are defined on the
ground of a metaphysical notion of truth, whereas the only notion
of truth that can be relevant to psychology is an epistemological
notion: i.e. psychology may be interested in, and may have
something to say about the procedures by which we come to regard a
sentence as true, not about the conditions on which it is
"objectively" true.
I tend to think otherwise. For it seems to me that any semantic
theory must be such that an account of language use can be based on
it. And language use, and what underlies such use, is what the
neuropsychology of language is about. So, for example, if it turned
out that our use of proper names is essentially based on
information that is regarded by standard semantic theory as utterly
irrelevant to the semantic value of a proper name, that would raise
a problem. I am neither saying nor implying that that would
constitute a refutation of semantic theory - God forbid. I am
rather suggesting that that would open a gap between the theory of
truth conditions and the theory of use. Some people -semantic
dualists- believe that there is indeed such a gap, and they
rationalize it by having the semantic value of some, or perhaps all
linguistic expressions split into two parts or "factors": a factor
that determines truth conditions and a factor that is relevant to
use. I don't know if this is the right way of taking care of the
gap: it looks more like an expression of resignation in the face of
a problem than like a solution to it. But anyway: let us first see
if there is a problem at all. ILet me start by reminding you of the
main points of Kripke's account of the semantics of proper names.
It has a positive side and a negative side. The positive side can
be stated very briefly: proper names such as 'Plato' or 'Vercelli
refer to whatever they refer to -Plato, that man, and the city of
Vercelli- thanks to acts of dubbing (baptisms, or the like) that
took place some time in the past, and whose efficacy got passed on
to us through a kind of chain of speakers1, each of which meant to
use the word to refer to whatever the previous speakers were
referring to. Some details may change in the process -the phonetic
form of the name, for example: the Greeks did not say 'Plato'- and
occasionally something may go wrong so that the original reference
is lost or replaced, but, by and large, this is how such things go.
The doctrine's negative side is equally important. It is not the
case, according to Kripke, that a proper name's reference is
mediated by something that we might want to call a sense - a
meaning. For example, 'Plato' does not refer to Plato, that man,
because 'Plato' means 'the author of Cratylus ', say, and that man
did in fact write the dialogue
1In Kripke's view, a proper name's reference -in any possibile
world- is determined by "a causal chain of communication" belonging
to the actual world (1980, p.59, fn.22).
-
2
Cratylus. Nor should we say that 'Plato' refers to Plato because
we associate with the word -the name- a certain set of properties,
or a description, or a picture (suppose it is not Plato but one of
us who are alive today, say Bill Clinton) and the person in
question has exactly those properties, or fits the description, or
resembles the picture. Nothing of that kind is the case. There is
no intermediary, unless you want to call a baptism an intermediary.
Anyway, there is no conceptual, not to say mental, intermediary
between the name and the object it refers to. Now, let me point out
Kripke's point is not that no information is ever attached to a
proper name, i.e. that people who use a proper name such as
'Aristotle' or 'Cicero' are somehow bound not to think of anything
in connection with the name. Indeed, he appears to take the
opposite for granted: most people, he says, when they think of
Cicero think of a famous Roman orator2; people who use the name
'Feynman' usually know that he is a physicist; and so forth. If 'X'
is a proper name (or, for that matter, a designating expression of
any kind), people in whose linguistic practice 'X' has any room at
all usually have beliefs of the form 'fX'3: they believe, for
instance, that Cicero was a Roman orator, or that Feynman is a
physicist. And surely Kripke has no objection against such beliefs,
or some of them, being "triggered" whenever the name 'X' is
actively used, or is part of a sentence the speaker understands.
The point is, rather, that no matter how universal and regular such
associations might be -i.e., even if there were a definite set of
beliefs which are somehow 'activated' or 'triggered' in all cases
in which a speaker (any speaker) uses or understands a sentence in
which 'X' occurs- even in such highly unrealistic circumstances
such beliefs would not constitute the meaning of 'X', nor would
they be what determines the reference of 'X'. According to Kripke,
nothing but the name's reference affects the truth conditions of
sentences in which the name occurs. A sentence such as 'Aristotle
was fond of dogs' (Kripke's example) is true if, and only if that
individual, Aristotle, was fond of dogs. Similarly, the sentence is
true at some other possible world if and only if that same
individual, Aristotle, was fond of dogs in that possible world,
i.e. iff that individual is in the extension of 'fond of dogs' as
determined for that possible world. As Kripke says, his is
a doctrine about the truth conditions, with respect to
counterfactual situations, of (the propositions expressed by) all
sentences, including simple sentences (1980, p.12).
Now, of course, the theory -or part of the theory- is not only
relevant to counterfactual situations: the theory is about the
truth-conditions of proper-name-involving sentences in the actual
world, as well. 'Aristotle was fond of dogs' is true (in the actual
world, i.e. simply true) iff that man, Aristotle, was fond of dogs.
If we call 'the semantic value of a word' whatever affects the
truth conditions of the sentences in which the word occurs, then
the semantic value of 'Aristotle' is the referent of 'Aristotle' as
determined by the relevant causal chain. Such a referent may or may
not as a matter of fact coincide with the object picked out by one
or another definite description (such as 'Alexander's teacher' or
'the author of Metaphysics'), which, in turn, may or may not be
associated with the name 'Aristotle' in a particular speaker's
beliefs: nothing of this really matters for the name's semantic
value, although it may matter in other respects. Notice, however,
that Kripke's account is not just a theory of the semantic value of
names as opposed to a theory of competence about proper names; i.e.
it is not a theory of what determines the truth conditions of
sentences involving proper names as opposed to a theory of what is
required in order to understand such sentences.
2"Most people, when they think of Cicero, just think of a famous
Roman orator, without any pretension to think either that there was
only one famous Roman orator or that one must know something else
about Cicero to a have a referent for the name" (p.292). 3"To every
name or designating expression 'X', there corresponds a cluster of
properties, namely the family of properties f such that A believes
'fX'. This thesis is true, because it can just be a definition"
(p.280).
-
3
A proper understanding of this statement ['Aristotle was fond of
dogs'] involves an understanding both of the (extensionally
correct) conditions under which it is in fact true, and of the
conditions under which a counterfactual course of history...would
be correctly (partially) described by [it] (1980, p.6).
Literally, Kripke does not say that understanding the statement
amounts to knowing the relevant truth conditions; only that it
involves such knowledge. However, I won't make much of this. I take
it that for Kripke, understanding the sentence requires that one
knows that the sentence is true iff the referent of the name
'Aristotle' was fond of dogs, and does not require that one has any
particular beliefs about Aristotle (that he was a philosopher,
Plato's student, a Greek, or whatever). There is, then, a problem
for the theory considered as a theory of competence and
understanding. The problem is best illustrated by reflecting on
certain common cases of lexical anaphora. Consider the following
short text: (1)
Napoleon was impatiently waiting for his marshals. The emperor
was furious: his orders had been disobeyed.
There is an obvious sense in which understanding this text
requires that one knows that 'Napoleon' and 'the emperor' are
coreferential, i.e. that Napoleon was the emperor. And yet, in
another sense that is not required. For example, one could
adequately translate the text into French4 without needing to know
that Napoleon was the emperor. But let us look at the first sense.
It could be suggested that, even in that sense, information that
Napoleon was the emperor is not required in order to understand the
text: rather, the text itself provides that information. The text
is so constructed as to suggest pragmatically that 'Napoleon' and
'the emperor' are coreferential (if they were not, the text would
be unnatural, inappropriate, would violate a maxim, etc.). However,
this is not so: the same structure could go with lack of
coreferentiality: (2)
Ney was impatiently waiting for his aide-de-camp. The emperor
was furious: his orders had been disobeyed.
without the resulting text being at all inappropriate in any
respect. If the anaphoric structure were providing the information,
then (2) would be providing the false information that Ney was the
emperor; but it doesn't. If you believe that, on the contrary, it
does, to some extent at least -i.e. it suggests that Ney was the
emperor- think of the following: (3)
Ney had been impatiently expected by Napoleon. The emperor was
furious: his orders had been disobeyed.
If (2) suggested that Ney was the emperor then (3) would
indicate the same; but it doesn't. What I would like to suggest is
that it is natural to regard a speaker who did not "understand" T1
in the appropriate way -i.e. by taking 'Napoleon' and 'the emperor'
to be coreferential- as incompetent, exactly as we would regard a
speaker as incompetent who could not sort our the anaphoric links
in (4): (4)
The mouse was closely watching the cat. The feline was
pretending the rodent wasn't there.
4 I am not sure whether that would be true for translations into
any language. There could be languages in which anaphora must be
marked morphologically.
-
4
Thus, to the extent that the standard theory is not just a
theory of the semantic value of proper names but a theory of
understanding as well, there is a difficulty: for there are cases
where understanding a text seems to require the availability of
information attached to a proper name (it seems to require that one
shares certain beliefs involving the proper name). I do not doubt
that such difficulties could be taken care of, in more than one
way: either by distringuishing two senses of 'understanding' as I
just did, or perhaps by resorting to "pragmatics". I mentioned the
difficulty just to give you an example of the kind of problems I
have in mind. The question I have in mind is the following: what is
exactly the role of beliefs such as 'Napoleon was the emperor' in
our use of the proper name 'Napoleon'? More generally, to what
extent and in what way does our use of proper names involve what
the psychologists call 'semantic information' , i.e. information
about properties of the name's referent? This is the viewpoint from
which I want to look at neuropsychological research. II First of
all, can we speak of proper names as a distinct mental category, or
in other words, does the notion of a proper name have any specific
psychological relevance? The answer to this seems to be 'yes': for
example, proper names can be both selectively lost5 (i.e. the
ability to use proper names is lost, while the ability to use
common nouns is preserved) and selectively preserved6 (while common
nouns are lost). Let me give you some examples. K.S., a patient
studied by Ellis, Young, and Critchley (1989), had normal
competence as far common nouns were concerned, but she could name
very few people (6, controls 16.25), and her deficit extended to
famous animals, famous buildings, and brands - whatever has a
proper name. M.P., a case studied by Hittmair-Delazer et al.
(1994), was only slightly impaired as far as common nouns were
concerned, but he could name only 2/14 famous people (controls
14/14) from pictures, and only 2/22 from verbal descriptions (only
Superman and Batman). On the other hand, M.E.D., a case reported by
Cipolotti, McNeil and Warrington (1993), could verbally name no
objects at all (0/10), and she could name only 3 objects out of 10
in writing; but she could name (in writing) 9 countries out of 10
and 8 famous people out of 10. Similarly, R.I., a patient of
Semenza and Sgaramella (1993), who could name no objects at all
with or without phonemic cues, was able to name 10/10 familiar
people, 18/22 famous people when cued phonemically. Thus, a pattern
of double dissociation emerges: some authors draw the conclusion
that "proper names access from the semantic system to the
phonological lexicon ... on a channel that is separate from the
channel used by common nouns"7.
At this point, let me introduce some quasi-technical
vocabulary8. I will speak of lexical (semantic) competence to mean
the knowledge and abilities underlying our use of words. I will
distinguish two aspects, or sides of lexical competence:
inferential competence is the ability to manage a vast network of
words, underlying such performances as semantic inference,
paraphrase, definition, retrieval of a word from its definition,
synonym-finding, and so forth. Referential competence, or the
referential side of competence, is the ability to map lexical items
onto the world. An ordinary speaker can tell cats from cows, can
point to a numeral on paper, can describe a person as running
rather than walking; she can obey orders concerning her immediate
surroundings -she can follow instructions such as 'Go to the table
and pick up the book on it'- and she can obey an order such as
'Draw a picture of a hammer'. All such performances are based
on
5 McKenna & Warrington (1980), Semenza & Zettin (1988),
Ellis, Young & Critchley (1989), Lucchelli & De Renzi
(1992), Hittmair-Delazer et al. (1994), Semenza & Zettin
(1995). 6 McKenna & Warrington (1978), Warrington & Clegg
(1993), Cipolotti, McNeil, Warrington (1993), Semenza &
Sgaramella (1993), McNeil, Cipolotti & Warrington (1994). 7
Semenza & Sgaramella 1993, p.276. 8 For a more expanded
presentation and justification of these notions, see Marconi 1997,
Ch.3.
-
5
referential competence. There is good reason to believe that the
two sides of lexical competence are mentally separate, though
usually interacting in several ways. There is also some evidence to
the effect that referential competence, in turn, has two sides:
there's naming - i.e. the ability to verbally label objects or
pictures of them- and there's application, the ability to apply
lexical labels in the world, e.g. to find an object corresponding
to a linguistic description or to a word (finding a spoon, or a
hammer, or a black sheep), or to pick out the right picture -a
picture of a spoon, for example. There are people who are very good
at application while their naming abilities are impaired9; the
converse case has also been reported, though less frequently10.
These notions are relevant to the cases I presented a moment ago.
For example, M.P., the patient of Hittmair-Delazer, whose naming
was very poor, had excellent application abilities. He could find
the picture correponding to a given PN in 15 cases out of 15, while
he could name only 3 of those same 15 pictures. M.E.D., a case of
selective sparing of Proper names, had virtually pefect application
for both Proper names and common nouns. In other cases, one can
find dissociation of inferential and referential abilities. Now,
the problem arises whether it is really proper names as such that
constitute a significant mental category, or whether we should
speak of persons' names vs. all other words, or again, whether
there are subcategories of proper names that exhibit different
patterns, both with respect to common nouns and with respect to one
another. We saw a case in which many categories of proper names
were selectively lost (K.S. of Ellis et al.), and a case in which
both people's names and geographical names were selectively
preserved (M.E.D. of Cipolotti and others). I know of at least five
cases in which geographical names were preserved while people's
names were lost11, whereas the converse case is not known to me -
but that may depend on either my ignorance or the fact that not all
cases were tested on geographic names. There is a case (Warrington
and Clegg 1993) in which geographic names are the only words left.
This is a remarkable case, for this person, A.F., appeared to have
lost all competence whatsoever: he couldn't even name a chair. But
as far as names of countries were concerned, he scored between 7/10
and 10/10 in both naming and application. So, there may be
something special about the proper names of countries, though we
cannot really speak of a separate mental category so far (for we
have no double dissociation). In the sequel, I'll pretty much stick
to people's names, for they have been studied more thoroughly and
the evidence is more abundant. Anyway, it appears that all proper
names go together in some respects at least. III Recalling a
person's name seems to be a hard task, harder than recognizing her
from her face or recalling her occupation or other circumstances of
her life. Rather broad investigations of normal subjects found
that
9Kay and Ellis 1987, Miceli, Giustolisi & Caramazza 1991,
Hart & Gordon 1992. 10 A striking case is D.T., reported by
Silveri and Colosimo (1995): "When single pictures of objects were
presented he immediately named them (9/10); when he was requested
to point to one of two pictures in a word-()picture matching task,
he named both of them, pointing at random" (p.4). I know that other
such cases have been reported, some of them also involving proper
names (Kremin 1986), but I have not studied them yet. 11 McKenna
& Warrington (1980), Lucchelli & De Renzi (1992),
Warrington & Clegg (1993), Hittmair-Delazer et al. (1994),
Semenza & Zettin (1995).
-
6
(A) people can correctly tell whether a face is familiar or not
more often than they can specify the person's occupation, and they
can specify the occupation more often than they can recall the
person's name12;
(B) judgments of familiarity are faster than retrieval of a
person's occupation, which is faster than retrieval of the person's
name13;
(C) it is practically never the case that one can recall a
person's name but not his or her occupation. For example, Hanley
and Cowell's (1988) experiments with famous faces produced the
following results: on 97.4% of the trials, where subjects knew a
celebrity's name they also knew his or her occupation and found the
face familiar. Only on 3 occasions out of 10,000 a subject found a
face unfamiliar, did not know the occupation but was able to give
the name; on 20 occasions subjects found the face familiar and
could give the name, but not the occupation. Notice that in all
such cases the subjects correctly guessed the occupation that they
claimed not to know.
Such data have inspired a model of the process of recognition
and naming of people - the so-called Bruce & Young model (1986)
[fig. 1].
[insert figure 1] The model is intended to be strictly
sequential: you cannot access information relative to a person
unless you found her face familiar, and you cannot access the
person's name unless you have accessed "semantic" information. You
simply cannot know that a person's name is 'Saul Kripke' and not
know that he is some sort of professor in the United States. This
is because "names are not accessed directly by recognition units,
but are accessed indirectly through person information" (Young, Hay
and Ellis 1985, p.519; italics added). Similar results have been
obtained from investigating the reverse process, i.e. the retrieval
of a person's biographical circumstances and facial appearance from
his or her name. What was found in this case14 is that recall of
visual information on a person's face depends on prior retrieval of
the person's occupation: you can't go from the name straight to the
face, so to speak, without accessing semantic information in the
process. On the other hand, if you start from semantic information
-from biographical information about the person, for example- you
can access both visual information about the person's face and the
person's name, though not necessarily both. In particular, subjects
may recall a person's facial appearance from biographical
information while claiming not to know the person's name at all.
Now, of course, researchers have been puzzled by some of these
findings: why on earth should it be impossible, for example, to
recall that one has a beard without recalling that he is a
musician? Or, in the case of the reverse process, why should it be
impossible to remember that a certain guy is named 'Boris Becker'
without recalling that he is a tennis star15? Morever, people have
been uneasy about a feature of both the Bruce-Young model and the
reverse model, namely, that they seem to require a separate storage
for proper names - separate with respect to other information
concerning a person's properties, such as his occupation, age,
circumstances in which he is usually met or seen, etc..
In order the avoid the hypothesis of a separate storage for
proper names, a somewhat different model was proposed in the early
'90s. The model would explain why proper names are harder to
retrieve than other kind of information about people without
postulating a separate "box" for proper names, sequentially
successive to the semantic box. This is the Burton and Bruce model
(fig.2).
12 Young, Hay, and Ellis 1985; Hanley & Cowell 1988. 13
Young et al. 1986. 14 Craigie & Hanley 1993. 15 Mme D.T.,
Brennen et al.1996.
-
7
[insert fig.2]
Here the crucial idea is that ease of retrieval is a function of
connectivity. In the Burton and Bruce model, proper names are
regarded as bits of semantic information about people, on a par
with occupation and other life circumstances: there is no separate
pool or box for proper names. What characterizes proper names is
that each of them is (usually) connected with only one Personal
Identity Node, whereas other kind of information is connected with
many PINs (for each of us knows many politicians, surgeons, postmen
etc.). All connections have the same intrinsic weight, and they are
all bidirectional. As a consequence, activation will tend to
circulate in the system:
If the Prince Charles PIN becomes excited, the royal SIU (say)
will also become excited. This, in turn, will activate (to a small
extent) the Princess Diana PIN. Because there are two PINs with
some activation which are both connected to the royal SIU, this SIU
will tend to be kept at a higher activation than if a single PIN
were connected to ii. (Burton & Bruce 1992, p.49).
Therefore, semantic units that have more connections will
generally be kept at a higher level of activation. If retrieval
depends on level of activation, this explains why proper names are
harder to retrieve than (other) pieces of semantic
information16.
The Burton and Bruce model made two predictions: first, semantic
information uniquely attached to a PIN should be as hard to
retrieve as a name; secondly, names and occupations that are highly
distinctive should be harder to retrieve than names and occupations
that are common (for the former would be less "connected" than the
latter). Neither prediction was upheld by later experiments
(Stanhope and Cohen 1993): it turned out that both uncommon names
and uncommon occupations were easier to remember than common ones,
and that uncommon occupations were easier to recall than any name,
common or uncommon17. Notice, moreover, that the Burton & Bruce
model is at odds with data that were already well known when the
model was proposed. For according to the model, the loss of proper
names should be a matter of degree: for example, we should expect
to find cases in which some proper names are preserved while many
are lost, whereas most common nouns are preserved, though a few
-the less common- are lost. What we find instead is a number of
cases in which all proper names are lost while all common nouns
-including the most distinctive- are preserved (McKenna &
Warrington 1980, Semenza & Zettin 1988. etc.).
Concerning the issue of how to account for the surprising facts
we just mentioned -a proper name cannot be retrieved unless
semantic information about the person is retrieved, and it does not
give access to a person's face without giving access to semantic
information about the person- I have my own hypothesis. To begin
with naming: suppose that people are not recognized by matching a
face, or the visual representation of a face, onto a mental
catalogue of faces; suppose instead that people are recognized
because a face (or the visual representation of a face) acts as a
trigger to a set of scenes, stored representations of circumstances
in which that particular face was seen by the subject. Recalling a
scene that concerns a particular face, thus a particular person,
would involve identifying at least some aspects of the scene (where
it took place, what was the role of the people involved etc.),
though not necessarily being able to describe it verbally. However,
in the presence of normal referential competence, such a verbal
description would be straightforwardly generated, so that semantic
information about the person would be elicited by the very fact
that the face is recognized, unless the triggered scenes are too
few or too fuzzy to be identified. The person's name, on the other
hand, is not an element of the triggered scenes for -to put it
briefly- nothing visual corresponds to a proper
16 The authors implemented a neural network model of their
theory, yielding the expected results. 17 Also Hittmair-Delazer et
al. 1994.
-
8
name: a baker can be imaged in the act of baking bread, but
Mr.John Baker cannot be imaged in any particular way because of his
being named 'John Baker'. Therefore, the person's proper name must
be retrieved as an independent piece of information, associated
with the triggered scenes though not as an element of any of them.
Similarly for the application direction: a name triggers a set of
scenes which (normally) generate verbal descriptions and (normally)
include visual representations of the face: thus semantic
information is made available practically in the same breath as
visual information about the person's face, so that it does not
happen that the latter is available without the former being
available as well. This model is speculative of course, but it does
make some definite predictions. For example, for each single piece
of information concerning a person, there would be cases in which
the face is recognized but that particular piece of information
(occupation, social position, biographical details etc.) is not
retrieved, whereas there would never be cases in which the subject
could retrieve some semantic information about the person whose
face is familiar to her without being able to recall any
circumstance in which she interacted with the face. IV Be that as
it may, let us go back to the initial issue. Does neuropsychology
teach us anything concerning the mental representation and
processing of proper names that would be relevant to semantics? Let
me summarize some of the results which appear to be more robust: 1)
A person's name seems to be strongly associated with a set of
properties that are ascribed to the name's bearer. The name cannot
operate as a trigger to a person's face without triggering a
description of the person as well; and, the name cannot be accessed
(from a face) without accessing a description of the person. It
would be interesting to investigate whether the analogue holds for
geographic names as well. 2) A person seems to be mentally
identified by a set of properties more than by his or her proper
name. Recognizing a person involves (or, perhaps, just is) to
ascribe to him a set of properties, though not necessarily a name.
Conversely, a name does not lead us to a person's physical
appearance without also (and probably, first) leading us to a set
of properties that are characteristic of that person. 3) In fact,
the role of proper names in the mental identification of human
individuals (but probably of individual animals, buildings, brands
etc.) appears to be relatively minor. A person can be identified,
satisfactorily to many effects, even if his or her name is not
known or recalled; conversely, the name does not provide access to
a person's identity unless it gives access to a semantic
description. For example, a person's physical appearance cannot be
recalled without recalling a non-physical description of that
person, and possibly only through such a description. Now,
remember, the questions we had in mind were: what is the role of
beliefs such as the belief that Napoleon was the emperor in our use
of the proper name 'Napoleon'? And more generally: to what extent
does our use of proper names involve what the psychologists call
'semantic information' , i.e. information about properties of the
name's referent? It would then seem that the answers must be, to
the first question, that the particular belief that Napoleon was
the emperor is perhaps not crucial to our use of the name
'Napoleon'; however, some such belief must be around if certain
uses of the name are to be possible, for example, if application of
the name on the basis of physical appearance is to be possible - a
pretty common use of proper names. So, coming to the
-
9
second question, it appears that semantic information plays a
major role in the use of proper names.
Now, did anybody seriously doubt that such is the case? I.e.,
did anybody, including Kripke, ever doubt that in order to use the
name 'Napoleon' satisfactorily, one must know quite a bit about
Napoleon? Probably not, even though perhaps not many were aware of
how crucial such knowledge is to many performances that do not seem
to directly involve it, such as putting a name to a face. In
philosophy, the idea was, and is, that the problem of what is
required for the use of names (in that sense) belongs to the
province of pragmatics, whereas semantics proper -the study of the
truth conditions of sentences- has no business with them. Whether
such a split is justified -whether, for example, we can really
accept to have two different and independent notions of
understanding- is the theoretically important question, which I
have not addressed and did not mean to address this time.
-
10
. .--
Face Recognition
Unit
PersonalIdentityNode
"Semantic Information"
Name
Generation
"Familiarity"
"John Baker"
Fig.1 - The Bruce - Young model [simplified] (ca.
1986)
-
11
FRUs
Sem.Info
PINs
Charles
NixonKissinger
NixonKissinger
Charles
royal
WatergatePresident
name:R.Nixon
name:H.Kissinger
"faces"
"people"
. .--
I
Fig.2 - The Burton & Bruce model, 1992
-
12
References T.Brennen, D.David, I.Fluchaire, J.Pellat, Naming
faces and objects without comprehension: a case-study, Cognitive
Neuropsychology 13(1996), 93-110 V.Bruce , A.W.Young, Understanding
face recognition, British J.of Psychology 77(1986), 305-327
A.M.Burton, V.Bruce, "I recognize your face but I can't remember
your name: A simple explanation?", British J.of Psychology
83(1992), 45-60.L.Cipolotti, J.E.McNeil, E.K.Warrington, "Spared
written naming of proper nouns: a case report", Memory 1993 1(4),
289-311. M.Craigie, J.R.Hanley, "Access to visual information from
a name is contingent on access to identity-specific semantic
information", Memory 1993, 1(4), 367-391. A.W.Ellis, A.W.Young,
E.M.R.Critchley, "Loss of memory for people following temporal lobe
damage", Brain 112(1989), 1469-1483. J.R.Hanley, E.S.Cowell, "The
effects of different kinds of retrieval cues on the recall of names
of famous faces", Memory & Cognition 16(1988), 545-555 J.Hart,
B.Gordon. "Neural subsystems for object knowledge", Nature
359(1992),60-64 M.Hittmair-Delazer, G.Denes, C.Semenza,
M.C.Mantovan, "Anomia for people's names", Neuropsychologia
32(1994), 465-476.J.Kay, A.Ellis, "A cognitive neuropsychological
case study of anomia", Brain 1987, 613-629. H.Kremin, Spared naming
without comprehension, J.of Neurolinguistics 2(1986), 131-150
S.Kripke, Naming and Necessity, Blackwell, Oxford 1980 F.Lucchelli,
E.De Renzi, "Proper name anomia", Cortex 1992(28),
221-230.P.McKenna, E.K.Warrington, "Category-specific naming
preservation: a single case study", J.of Neurology, Neurosurgery,
and Psychiatry 41(1978), 571-574. P.McKenna, E.Warrington, "Testing
for nominal dysphasia", J.of Neurology, Neurosurgery, and
Psychiatry 43(1980), 781-8. J.E.McNeil, L.Cipollotti,
E.K.Warrington, "The accessibility of proper names",
Neuropsychologia 32(1994), 193-208 D.Marconi, Lexical Competence,
MIT Press, Cambridge Mass. 1997 G.Miceli, L.Giustolisi,
A.Caramazza, "The interaction of lexical and non-lexical processing
mechanisms: evidence from anomia", Cortex 27(1991), 57-80
C.Semenza, M.T. Sgaramella, "Production of proper names: a clinical
case study of the effects of phonemic cueing", Memory 1993, 1(4),
265-280. C.Semenza, M.Zettin, "Generating proper names: a case of
selective inability", Cognitive Neuropsychology 1988, 5(6),
711-721. C.Semenza, M.Zettin, "Evidence from aphasia for the role
of proper names as pure referring expressions", Nature 342(1989),
678-679 M.C.Silveri, C.Colosimo, "Hypothesis on the nature of
comprehension deficit in a patient with transcortical mixed aphasia
with preserved naming", Brain and Language 49(1995), 1-26.
N.Stanhope, G.Cohen, "Retrieval of proper names: testing the
models", British J.of Psychology 1993 (84), 51-65. E.K.Warrington,
F.Clegg, "Selective preservation of place names in an aphasic
patient: a short report", Memory 1993, 1(4), 281-8. A.W.Young,
D.C.Hay, A.W.Ellis, "The faces that launched a thousand slips:
Everyday difficulties and errors in recognizing people", British
J.of Psychology 1985(76), 495-523. A.W.Young, K.H.McWeeny, D.C.Hay,
A.W.Ellis, "Access to identity-specific semantic codes from
familiar faces", Quarterly J.of Experimental Psychology 38A(1986),
271-295.
