“The functional fallacy: on the supposed dangers of name repetition”

Whenever the theme of personal naming comes up, both in academic debate and in public

opinion, we encounter a tendency to take for granted that there is some sort of collective

interest in the clear and unambiguous individuation of persons through their names.

“Society” or “culture”, it is presumed, would not function as well if that failed, so homonymy

is automatically taken to be dysfunctional. This kind of explanation carries a deep

sense of validity in common sense attitudes and it clearly imposes itself upon all who have

discussed this issue over the past few decades, both in history and anthropology. In this

essay, I argue that, on the one hand, there are fallacious implications to this explanatory

proclivity, to which I call the functional fallacy, and, on the other hand, that it finds its

power of evidence in the implicit expectations that characterize late modern thinking concerning

what is a person and how persons are constituted. I identify three dispositions that

need to be overcome: sociocentrism, individualism and the paradigm of the soul.