On the face of it, it calls for no specific philosophy to value the workable knowledge of a thing above parroting its name pretending to knowledge; common wisdom suffices for that. However, this should not conceal the deep significance names and the act of naming have for the human being, as a popular paraphrase from [Confucius, chapter 13] acknowledges: "The beginning of wisdom is to call things by their proper name."
By the act of naming, we carry the named thing over from an ineffable realm into the realm of language and linguistic behaviour. Thus, we start conversing with the thing and that brings us a kind of power over the thing. A footprint of such power is the persistent and colourful theme in cultural history across religions, geographies and societies of the belief that a dominance or a creation begins with knowing and reciting names (just recall the magical word “abracadabra”). Moreover, we not only stand in an almost instinctive need to name, but also to be named – imagine for a moment yourself as nameless.
Beside functional aspects, naming enables us to articulate a discourse around a thing, to internalise it, attaching associations, finding out connections. Hence, the name serves as an epistemic substratum. A name is, so to say, a peg to hang an identity on the named thing. We may discern this aspect of naming clearly in mathematics, where the importance of notation cannot be overstated and naming has a central role in forming notation.
Consider we are trying to work out a solution for a geometrical involving a triangle. We draw the figure and concentrate on it. Standing by itself unnamed, it is beyond our control of reasoning. It is, as it were, on the limbo of existence as a mathematical object, hanging over there:
Now, label the edges and vertices of this triangle and take a look at it again and consider the determinative difference:
This step is not merely a matter of functional convenience, it is the power of naming. The following observation from a colleague of the eminent mathematician Alexandre Grothendieck, who was one of those explicitly deliberating over naming, is quite illuminating:
[Grothendieck] was a master at naming, and he used that ability as one
of his main intellectual strategies. He had a particular talent for
naming things before possessing and conquering them, and many of his
terminological choices are quite remarkable. . .
His strategy, then, was to name. That is where I took the title of
this article: "A country of which nothing is known but the name",
because that was truly his way of going about things. ([Cartier, p. 289] emphasis in the original)
Hence, descriptive or not, sooner or later, we have to attribute, to use Frege’s term, an Eigenname in order to further our knowledge. It is worth taking into account in the present context that by ‘Eigenname’ (translated in philosophical texts as ‘proper name’ which is its usual English equivalent, but notice that ‘Eigen’, a cognate of English ‘own’, is a peculiar word, thus left untranslated in some technical cases as eigenvector, eigenvalue and eigenvariable), Frege actually signifies a logical name rather than a grammatical name, a close analogy being the logical/physical name difference in computer science.
Returning to Feynman's anecdote, we may say that it is not entirely trifling to merely link a name with an object. We may say that it is a preliminary stage of an epistemological buildup.
Surely, we may cite other interesting ramifications here (Wittgenstein's connection between meaning and use is only one of them). However, the foregoing remarks are intended not to lay out a thorough consideration of the intrinsic relation names bear to knowledge, but to suggest a subsequent course of discussion. As Friedman bluntly puts it, “in the world of ideas, to name something is to own it. If you can name an issue, you can own the issue.”
Cartier, Pierre. "A Country of Which Nothing is Known but the Name: Grothendieck and "Motives"" in Alexandre Grothendieck: A Mathematical Portrait edited by Leila Schneps (International Press of Boston, Sommerville, 2014).
Confucius. The Analects. https://china.usc.edu/confucius-analects-13
Friedman, Thomas L. “The Power of Green” in New York Times Magazine April 15, 2007.