Names are a big deal in the philosophy of language. Gottlob Frege taught philosophers about sense and reference with “Hesperus” and “Phosphorus.” Bertrand Russell used names to demonstrate how the surface form of a sentence can differ radically from its logical form. And Saul Kripke used observations about names to motivate theses in modal metaphysics.

Names are a big deal outside of philosophy, too. We don new names to symbolically mark changes in self-identity (due to marriage or religious conversion, etc.). For many, our first parenting decision is what the child’s name will be. And after God created the animals, it was given to Adam to name them, the implication of which can hardly be missed.

Yet these two areas of concern—the philosophical import of names, and the import of names to everyday life—may appear largely disjoint. Nothing in Naming and Necessity, for instance, readily explains why two people might join their last names when they get married—or indeed why Kripke’s parents would name him “Saul” and not “Paul.”

This is no criticism, of course—philosophers can, and often should, pursue theoretical aims that don’t shed much light on everyday phenomena. But lately, I’ve been interested in some names that raise questions about the semantics and metasemantics of names—traditional concerns in the philosophy of language—and that do so largely in virtue of their social and political significance. In particular, I’ve been interested in deadnames.

A deadname is a name that someone has rejected in virtue of a gender transition. This definition of “deadname” aligns with ordinary usage. Still, it could be plausibly argued that rejected-names-in-general (or rejected-names-and-pronouns, etc.) form the more natural theoretical category. So I’ll take the definition as stipulated and leave it open where to draw the theoretical boundaries.

The right of trans people to go by their chosen names in various contexts has lately been the subject of social debate and political conflict in the U.S. (DeMillo and Callahan; Factora; Fortin; Schmall). Relatedly—and often consequently—deadnames give rise to puzzling conversational dynamics, on exhibit in (1)–(2) and (3)–(4).

For the following exchanges, assume that Cesario likes yellow, is standing over there, and has rejected “Viola” as a deadname.

1. Viola likes yellow.
2. That’s not true. Cesario likes yellow.

3. I see Viola over there.
4. That’s not his name anymore.

These patterns of conversation raise questions about the semantics and metasemantics of names. (2) is a natural enough response to (1), given the latter’s use of Cesario’s deadname; and the exchange appears to imply that “Viola” has failed to semantically pick out—i.e., denote or refer to—Cesario. After all, if “Viola” did pick out Cesario, then (1) would be true—which is exactly what (2) felicitously denies. And one way of hearing (4), as a response to (3), is as claiming that “Viola” no longer denotes/refers to Cesario.

If deadnames fail to denote/refer to those who have rejected them, then we need a semantics and metasemantics of names that accommodates this observation—that is, an account of the narrowly linguistic meanings of names on which such uses of “Viola” do not secure reference to/denotation of Cesario, and a compatible account of how names come to have those linguistic meanings. This strategy is pursued in Koles.

Alternatively, if the above exchanges involve metalinguistic disputes—second-order disagreements not about the content of (1) or (3), but rather about how those contents are expressed—then they may ultimately have little bearing on the semantics and metasemantics of names.

These exchanges will, however, bear on social and ethical questions about names. To understand these exchanges, we would need an account of what is at stake in such disputes—that is, an account of the social and ethical considerations that bear on why we adopt and reject names, and also the significance of uptake by other people. I pursue this strategy in my “Deadnaming, Taboo, and Linguistic Authority.”

So a theory of deadnames should explain what is going on in these sorts of conversations, with respect to both the normative side of things and the semantics/metasemantics of names—and it should also, in my view, explain at least one further observation about the psychology of deadnaming.

I would argue that deadnaming is impactful in the following sense: it tends to induce a psycho-physical response that comprises a jolt of stress chemicals and feels like a psychological slap. The point here isn’t about whether deadnaming is wrongful, but about how it hits—its sting or impact, so to speak.

At first glance, this isn’t a very surprising observation. But it becomes surprising, I think, when we notice that deadnaming has this effect even when it doesn’t communicate anything toxic about the mental states of the speaker. Communicating mental states is (one of, if not) the main function(s) of language.

Deadnaming sometimes reveals a speaker’s toxic attitudes, of course. But not always—deadnaming can be impactful, and carry its characteristic sting, even when it reveals nothing of importance about a speaker’s attitudes. After all, a deadname used out of ignorance or the force of linguistic habit may sting as much as other uses, even when it communicates no toxic speaker-attitude.

In my paper “The Impact of Deadnaming,” I argue that this observation reveals an interesting commonality between slurs and deadnames, and that the resources that best explain deadnaming’s impactfulness are essentially social. In particular, I argue that deadnames are impactful because they are the subject of taboos to which we (may) become strongly attached.

A few philosophers (especially graduate students) have recently been opening up this area of research. In addition to previously cited work, Rose Fonth and Rebecca Sanaeikia have presented research on deadnaming at conferences, and Anna Klieber and Emma Bolton’s forthcoming “Call Me By My Name!” offers a speech act analysis of the topic. In addition, the work on gendered language in Dembroff and Wodak, Kukla and Lance, and McCready bears in obvious ways on how we should understand the phenomenon of deadnaming. And Baker and Green is an instructive article on name change law.

Even so, I think that philosophers have not yet taken deadnaming’s full measure—in my opinion, nearly everything about the phenomenon as a philosophical topic is still up for grabs.

Names matter: philosophically, personally, and politically. And one might hope that new research will not only provide theoretical illumination but ultimately affect policy by informing institutional guidelines, court rulings, and legislation. If philosophers of language have ambitions not just to analyze our linguistic commerce, but to influence it, then this is precisely the sort of topic that merits our attention.

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