Nicknames as Tools for Managing Face
Contemporary orthodoxy analyzes names as universally accessible tags that track referents across space, time, and possibility. I argue that paradigmatic nicknames, like ‘Crooked Hilary,’ ‘Shrimpy’, and ‘Bubblegum’, also perform this tracking function, but are marked by contrast with proper names in enforcing restrictions on who they can be used by, with, and when; and in framing their referents by projecting affective valences and social identities for them. While proper names also typically carry social information, it is part of nicknames’ characteristic communicative function to manage social identity, in ways that an adequate overall theory of meaning needs to explain.
Philosophers of language have tended to treat names merely as tools for talking about individuals, either directly or as part of a denoting phrase. We argue that names are every bit as much tools for tracking, maintaining, and performatively updating our positions in social space, as well as projecting a linguistic persona. This pushes us towards a revised picture of the meanings of names, one which incorporates what we shall call a ‘social sense’.
Elisabeth Camp is Professor of Philosophy at Rutgers. She obtained her PhD from the University of California, Berkeley, held a post-doc at the Harvard Society of Fellows, and taught at the University of Pennsylvania before moving to Rutgers in 2013. Her research focuses on thoughts and utterances that don’t fit a standard propositional model of minds and languages, including metaphor, maps, and animal cognition. She is the author of more than forty articles in philosophy of language, mind, and aesthetics. Recent publications include “Stories and Selves: A Twisted Love Story about the Meaning of Life,” (Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 2024); “Playing with Labels: Identity Terms as Tools for Building Agency,” with Carolina Flores (Philosophical Quarterly 2024); and an edited volume, The Poetry of Emily Dickinson: Philosophical Perspectives (Oxford University Press, 2021).
Eliot Michaelson is a Professor of Philosophy at King’s College London. He work focuses alternately on core issues in the philosophy of language and issues at the border of the philosophy of language, ethics, and social philosophy.
Ethan Nowak is Assistant Professor in Philosophy at Stanford University. He previously held permanent positions at Cardiff and Umeå, after a Leverhulme Early Career fellowship at King’s College London and a teaching fellowship at University College London. He received his doctorate from the University of California, Berkeley, the BPhil from the University of Oxford, and his undergraduate degree from Reed College. He works primarily in the philosophy of language, with a particular interest on linguistic justice, broadly construed.
The Aristotelian Society, founded in 1880, is a charity registered in the United Kingdom (no. 254021).
© The Aristotelian Society 2021. All rights reserved.
