Wolfgang Schwarz

The meaning of 'London'

Noam Chomsky's New Horizons in the Study of Language and Mind contains a famous passage about London.

Referring to London, we can be talking about a location or area, people who sometimes live there, the air above it (but not too high), buildings, institutions, etc., in various combinations (as in 'London is so unhappy, ugly, and polluted that it should be destroyed and rebuilt 100 miles away', still being the same city). Such terms as 'London' are used to talk about the actual world, but there neither are nor are believed to be things-in-the-world with the properties of the intricate modes of reference that a city name encapsulates. (p.37)

I don't know what Chomsky is trying to say here, but there is something in the vicinity of his remark that strikes me as true and important. The point is that the reference of 'London' is a complex and subtle matter that is completely obscured when we say that 'London' refers to London.

Part of the complexity is a kind of polysemy and context-dependence, concernig whether 'London' denotes an aggregate of buildings, of people, an area, etc., and accordingly how the term should be used when describing hypothetical circumstances where these things come apart. Chomsky seems to be especially troubled by this aspect of the complexity, but I find it not all that remarkable. A lot of expressions are polysemous and vague and context-dependent. There is no thing-in-the-world with the properties encapsulated by the intricate modes of reference of 'small'. That is, there is no simple, determinate condition of smallness picked out by every use of 'small'. But who would have thought so?

A more noteworthy fact brought out by the observation that 'London' can be used in all these different ways is that there are a lot of candidates for the referent of 'London'.

People sometimes seem to assume that the world is populated by a fairly small number of well-demarcated objects: a few billion people, a few cities, buildings, and so on. In such a world, one could point at one of its objects, declare that it shall be called 'London' and thereby establish a coherent use of the newly introduced name. In such a world, a Mentalese term could be said to refer to a given object iff it is somehow activated in the presence of that object.

But our world is different. When we point at London, we point at an uncountable number of objects. Think about it from the perspective of fundamental physics. As a material object, London is constituted by a large array of physical particles. There is vagueness and context-dependence in exactly which particles belong to London. Moreover, none of the candidates is especially natural or privileged. From a microphysical perspective, the Northern half of London together with adjacent parts of Hertfordshire and Essex is completely on a par with London. Any candidate reference of 'London' is circumscribed by complicated and physically arbitrary boundaries. Not just in physical space, but also in time and in modality. When did London begin? From a physical perspective, no answer is better than any other. There is an aggregate of particles in the boundaries of London that exists only since 1972, another that has existed for millions of years. What would be the boundaries of London if Kingston were annexed by Russia? (Here we look at modal space.) Where would it be if all its inhabitants now left the city and settled 100 kilometers to the West?

To understand the name 'London', you don't have to know all these details, but you must not be completely oblivious to them either. You have to understand that 'London' does not denote an object that has its inhabitants essentially, or an object that only exists today, or an object whose spatial extension extends to Scotland. Such objects do exist, but they are not what we pick out by 'London'.

So the rules governing the use of 'London' are very complicated. If you wanted to teach them to a computer, you would need a lot of code. In that respect it is misleading to say that the meaning of 'London' is London, because it suggests a kind of simplicity that isn't really there.