Loser language

On my co-worker's Dilbert calendar today, Wally is being interviewed.

"Your story is perfect for Loser Magazine. It makes me wish I'd written it down because I'm already forgetting...oops, it's gone," says the interviewer. "I'll just make up something that sounds good. And I'll use photos of a model. Thanks, Willy."

Meanwhile Wally, with visibly enthusiastic eyebrows, thinks, "I'm famous!"

Now my question is, is he? The humor in the strip is supposed to come from the fact that he isn't (I think)--the interviewer's incompetence has removed the actual Wally from the article altogether. But if that's so, when exactly did that happen? Certainly not as soon as he replaced some real information with misinformation. If I write in this blog that Eric Lowe is from Oregon, then I'm writing something false about a real person. And if that sentence happens to garner lots of attention from the press, I could in fact make Eric famous--even though the only thing the masses would know about him would be a falsehood. Similarly, I could put up fake pictures, and make Eric famous that way, even though people would have a mistaken idea of what he looked like. So it kinda seems that all the readers of Loser Magazine (and I'm sure there are lots of you reading this) might in fact learn lots of false things about Wally--and so Wally really would be famous, despite nobody knowing anything true about him. Maybe like Johnny Appleseed or something. But this is sort of a baffling conclusion--I mean, if everything is wrong, in what sense is this article really about Wally, and not about, say, Dogbert?

Someone like Saul Kripke might say the line gets crossed with the name. Names are special. They aren't like descriptions, which have meanings that can be true or false, and pick out individuals according to those meanings. A name always picks out the same person. (Different people can have the same name, but whenever you use a name, you mean a particular person. Well, usually. I think I wrote an email recently in which I said "you and Jennifer", when the email was to two people named Jennifer, and I meant both of them. But that felt pretty weird.) If we're feeling jargony, we say that a name is a rigid designator--that is, it designates a person rigidly: it doesn't depend on contingent stuff about the person like their hair color or whether they're a loser.

So Kripke would probably say that as long as the article uses the name "Wally", the article is really about Wally, even though nothing it says or shows about him is true. But as soon as the interviewer took the fateful step of forgeting Wally's name, the game was up. We now have a fanciful article about an imaginary person named "Willy"--and so no matter how popular and famous Willy becomes, Wally is still a loser that nobody's ever heard of.

But that's not an entirely satisfying answer either. For one thing, people make mistakes about names all the time, but it still seems like they're talking about who they mean to talk about even so. For another, why is it that authors write those ridiculous notices? You know, the ones that say,

This story is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogues are products of the author's imagination. Any resemblance to actual events or persons is entirely by coincidence.

It seems like the implication is that, if that notice weren't there, we might think that the story is actually about some particular real people (with different names)--and in fact, those people might sue for libel because the story says false things about them. Think about that.

Here's one more question. If Wally's interviewer put a notice like that at the top of his article about "Willy", would it be true?

(Misinformation touches a sensitive spot right now. Speaking of which, come to the SImps shows this weekend! Guaranteed to be entirely fictional!)