The term was proposed by Wilson in the paper Substances without Substrata for a way to figure out what people actually mean. It’s a way to decide that the claim Caesar was a Roman dictator is supposed to refer to Julius Caesar and not some other individual named Caesar. In practice Philosophers do use the term to mean a variety of different things but the original definition was about that.
The term was proposed by Wilson in the paper Substances without Substrata for a way to figure out what people actually mean. It’s a way to decide that the claim Caesar was a Roman dictator is supposed to refer to Julius Caesar and not some other individual named Caesar. In practice Philosophers do use the term to mean a variety of different things but the original definition was about that.