Having set aside Hermogenes’s “anything goes,” Socrates asks what kind of tool a name is. An awl is a tool for boring, a shuttle a tool for weaving. And a name?
ὄνομα ἄρα διδασκαλικόν τί ἐστιν ὄργανον καὶ διακριτικὸν τῆς οὐσίας ὥσπερ κερκὶς ὑφάσματος.
A name, then, is a kind of teaching tool, one that divides being, as a shuttle divides a web. (Greek quotations throughout; Japanese and English are L/LAB working translations.)
A name does two things: it teaches, and it divides things that are run together. As the shuttle sorts warp from weft, a name cuts being into “this is this, that is that.”
Who makes the tool, and who uses it
What supplies names is custom (νόμος), and Socrates calls the agent behind it the “lawgiver” (νομοθέτης) or “name-maker” (ὀνοματουργός).
οὗτος δʼ ἐστίν, ὡς ἔοικεν, ὁ νομοθέτης, ὃς δὴ τῶν δημιουργῶν σπανιώτατος ἐν ἀνθρώποις γίγνεται.
This is the lawgiver, it seems — the rarest of all craftsmen to appear among men. (389a)
A carpenter fixes his eye on the form (εἶδος) of “shuttle” and embodies that form in oak or in maple. In the same way the lawgiver looks to “the form the name should by nature aim at” and embodies it in different sounds and syllables. So the sounds may differ from place to place — as long as the form embodied is the same.
And who then uses the finished tool and judges it? A weaver uses the shuttle, a lyre-player the lyre. A name is used by the one with the art of asking and answering — the dialectician.
νομοθέτου δέ γε, ὡς ἔοικεν, ὄνομα, ἐπιστάτην ἔχοντος διαλεκτικὸν ἄνδρα, εἰ μέλλει καλῶς ὀνόματα θήσεσθαι.
A name is the lawgiver’s work — but with a dialectician as overseer, if names are to be set well. (390d)
Why this division of labour works
By splitting naming into “the lawgiver makes, the dialectician judges,” Socrates has set up a footing on which the merit of a name can be discussed. Tools come out well or badly made. So there can also be badly made names — an implication that turns, in the second half of the dialogue, into a critique of the nature view itself (article 041).
So far Socrates has moved a step toward Cratylus: “the setting of a name is no trivial business, as you suppose, nor the work of trivial men or of any chance person.” In the next article 039, Socrates himself pours out a flood of examples of these supposedly well-made names.