Adamitic language …

There is something attractive in the thought that our language of universals was preceded by an Adamitic language which makes use only of proper names. Such a language acknowledges the importance of individuals, as they are perceived, as opposed to the categories they fall under. We are more interested in our friend Mary than in women generally.

But what would the world be like in the days of Adamitic language? How are we to understand the thought of Adamitic language?

… ill-concieved

When, in my perception, I recognise individuality before generality—the individual item before its category—how do I assure myself that I am looking at the same individual when not by realising that it is identical to the one I encountered before, and different from any of the things that are like it? Or: it makes no sense to think of individuals without a conception of categories they are instances of.

Perhaps the original thesis of precedence was not about the precedence of conceptions but of terms? Perhaps we first had terms to refer to individuals, even though in our mind we already possessed the concepts to generalise.

Proper names

There is yet another issue with proper names. Are they to be conceived of as a causal chain originating in a baptising (Kripke)? Perhaps, yes, we must say this talking about the logic of proper names. But their use is rather different: my friend’s proper name captures—for me!—a set of shared experiences, and it retains these. And amongst these shared experiences there is, most notably, the intimacy of reciprocal exchanges of gazings.

Individual animals

Another issue is: we recognize other humans as individuals, but it is sheer impossible to recognise animals as individuals when we are not one of them, so how should we have ever been able to name them, as the nature of Adamitic language assumes we did.