In search of names

Alright, friends—we've come to the end of the 2025 run of Many Minds!

Our final episode of the year is an audio essay by yours truly. This is a classic format for the show, one that we only do every so often. Today's essay is about names. It's about the question of whether animals have something like names for each other. And it's also about a deeper question: What even is a name? How do humans use names? How does the historical and ethnographic record kind of complicate our everyday understanding of what names are. I had a lot of fun putting this together, and I do hope you enjoy it.

Now, the holiday season is a time when people might be shopping around for new podcasts to listen to. That makes it a great time to recommend us to your friends and family and colleagues. You can think of it as an especially thoughtful gift, one that's absolutely free, and that keeps on giving throughout the year.

Speaking of gifts, as an addendum to this episode you'll find a little stocking stuffer after the credits. It's a reading of a poem that figures prominently in today's essay.

Without further ado, here is my essay—'In search of names.' Enjoy!

A text version of this essay is available here.

Notes

2:00 – The text of 'The Naming of Cats' by T.S. Eliot is here. See also the full collection, Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats. The lines about cats' taste preferences and cats having different kinds of minds comes from another poem in the collection, 'The Ad-Dressing of Cats.'

3:00 – The 2019 study finding that cats know their names, and the 2022 study showing that cats know the names of their friends.

4:00 – For an overview of research on dolphin "signature whistles," see here.

5:00 – For the 2024 study reporting name-like rumbles in elephants, see here.

6:00 – For the 2024 study reporting vocal labels for individuals in marmosets, see here. A critical response to the study is here; the authors' response to the criticism is here.

12:00 – For overviews of cross-cultural variation in names and naming practices, see here, here, here, and here. Richard Alford's 1988 study, published in book form, is here.

13:30 – The study reporting name signs in Kata Kolok is here.

15:00 – For research on expectations based on the sounds of people's names, see here and here.

16:00 – For recent work on the "face-name matching effect," see here. For the study on "nominative determinism" in the medical profession, see here. (Note that, while this latter study does report empirical data, its rigor is questionable. And, yet, at least one other study has reported similar findings.)

17:30 – For the example of over-used names in Scotland, see here.

19:30 – For discussion of names in New Guinea, see here. For examples of research on "teknonymy," see here and here. For discussion of Penan "necronyms," see here.

20:30 – For an overview of name taboos, see here. For more on "alexinomia," see here.

22:30 – For an example of recent work on "name uniqueness," see here.

23:00 – William Safire's column on dog names is here. The study of gravestones in the world's oldest pet cemetery is here.

Tile image credit: Image by Jon Tyson via Unsplash

Many Minds is a project of the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute, which is made possible by a generous grant from the John Templeton Foundation to Indiana University. The show is hosted and produced by Kensy Cooperrider, with help from Assistant Producer Urte Laukaityte and with creative support from DISI Directors Erica Cartmill and Jacob Foster. Our artwork is by Ben Oldroyd.

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