ABSTRACT
I Proper names appear to be meaningless tags or identifiers. In a particular context of use, ‘Whitehead’ or ‘Baghdad’, ‘Bush’ or ‘Mahatma’, ‘Mohandas’ or ‘Vyasa’ pick out a particular historic or fictional or legendary place or person, but connote nothing. ose words, lexically, may have a meaning, but that meaning never provides the reason for the application of that name to that particular. Vyasa — whoever he might have been — never was a diameter, nor was the American president leafy, and even if the author of Process and Reality (Whitehead 1978) had white hair or scalp, that was not why he was so called. And it is not self-contradictory (but merely false) to say that the Mahatma was not that great a soul.
