Editing Proper name (philosophy) (section)

=== Causal theory of names ===
{{main|Causal theory of reference}}
The [[causal theory of names|causal-historical theory]] originated by Saul Kripke in ''[[Naming and Necessity]]'',<ref>Kripke, Saul. ''Naming and Necessity.'' Basil Blackwell. Boston. 1980.</ref> building on work by, among others, [[Keith Donnellan]],<ref>Donnellan, K. S. (1970). Proper names and identifying descriptions. Synthese, 21(3-4), 335-358.</ref> combines the referential view with the idea that a name's referent is fixed by a baptismal act, whereupon the name becomes a [[rigid designation|rigid designator]] of the referent. Kripke did not emphasize causality, but rather the historical relation between the naming event and the [[speech community|community of speakers]] within which it circulates, but in spite of this the theory is often called "a causal theory of naming".<ref>Robert Audi. 2015. The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy. Cambridge University Press, pp.</ref>

The pragmatic naming theory of [[Charles Sanders Peirce]] is sometimes considered a precursor of causal-historical naming theory. He described proper names in the following terms: "A proper name, when one meets with it for the first time, is existentially connected with some percept or other equivalent individual knowledge of the individual it names. It is then, and then only, a genuine Index. The next time one meets with it, one regards it as an Icon of that Index. The habitual acquaintance with it having been acquired, it becomes a Symbol whose Interpretant represents it as an Icon of an Index of the Individual named." Here he notes out that the baptismal event takes place for each person when a proper name is first associated with a referent (for example by pointing and saying "this is John", establishing an [[indexicality|indexical relation]] between the name and the person) who is henceforth considered to be a conventional ("symbolic" in Peircean terms) references to the referent.<ref>Pietarinen, A. V. (2007). Peirce on Proper Names. Psychology, 1, 127.</ref> [ "who is...a conventional....references to the referent" is grammatically incorrect, rendering the whole sentence incoherent]