It's ironic, because professors and instructors often ask their students to name their research papers, essays, and projects with a well-defined, searchable naming scheme.
surname.pdf is almost certainly a half-hearted (because that is all that is possible) way to fit into someone else's naming scheme. Otherwise, it would be cv.pdf, application.pdf, etc. because those are the file names that make sense on my computer.
What you don't see is the directory structure that that file lives in, which gives almost all the necessary information.
~/work/projects/reinventwheel/paper/manuscript.pdf should and does contain more information than "manuscript.pdf". If you're not renaming files when you get them and putting them in the correct context on your machine, I would say it is you that is doing it wrong.
