Kripke, Naming and Necessity

The reading assignment is selections from the first two lectures in Kripke (1980):

These links are to files hosted on Canvas.

More specifically, I want you to read all of Lecture I, and, for Lecture II, up to page 97. This is a lot. But this is also a different kind of reading: it is transcriptions from a lecture, so it is a bit more chatty than what we have been reading. And it was published as a trade paperback, so the pages themselves are a bit smaller. Still, it is a lot.

Getting Started

Like Frege and Russell, Kripke is worried about the semantics of names. Frege understood “name” broadly, to include both proper names, like ‘Beyoncé’, and definite descriptions, like ‘the most successful member of Destiny’s Child.’ Russell focused on the yet broader category of “denoting phrases”, which includes proper names and definite descriptions, but also indefinite descriptions, like ‘a member of Destiny’s Child.” Kripke is interested in names understood narrowly, to include just proper names, like ’Beyoncé’.

After some preliminary remarks, Lecture I focuses on articulating a broad view about how proper names work, which Kripke calls the “Frege-Russell view”. On this view, roughly, each proper name is synonymous with a definite description.

You might go ahead and take a look at the first page of Lecture II now. On that page, Kripke expresses the theory as six theses and a condition. This neatly summarizes much of what happens in the second half of Lecture I.

Kripke’s main thesis is that Frege-Russell view is wrong. He argues that a proper names, like ‘Aristotle’, is a rigid designator: it refers to the same thing in every possible world. A definite description, like ‘Plato’s most famous student’, is not: it refers, in each possible world, to whatever happens to fits that description in that world.

In Lecture II, after continuing to develop the argument against the Frege-Russell view, he offers his own (incomplete, sketchy) account of how proper names work.

Along the way, lots of other things happen. You are treated to a much more thorough and careful discussion of the relationship between “necessary”, “a priori”, and “analytic” that you have seen before. Also, there is extended discussion about how we should think about “possible worlds” when asking questions like, “Might Hillary Clinton have won the election?” Some of this shades into epistemology (the theory of knowledge), and some of it shades into metaphysics (the theory of reality). But the question about language—how do proper names work?—is at the center of it all.

Possible Worlds

Kripke got his start publishing work on “modal logic”—the logic of possibility and necessity—as a teenager, and his views on language are shaped by this.

Modal logic starts with the observation that some sentences are not just true, but necessarily true, and some sentences are not just false, but necessarily false. For example:

  1. All bachelors are unmarried.
  2. Some bachelor is married.
  1. is necessarily true. (2) is necessarily false. That is,
  1. Necessarily, all bachelors are unmarried.
  2. It is not possible that some bachelor is married.

Likewise,

  1. Necessarily, 2 + 2 = 4
  2. It is not possible that 2 + 2 = 5

On the other hand, some sentences happen to be true, but could be false, or vice versa:

  1. There are no purple cows.
  2. Possibly, there are purple cows.

When thinking about possibility and necessity, it is helpful to think in terms of “possible worlds”. A possible world is a complete way the world might be, down to the tiniest detail. This suggests an analysis of ‘possibly’ and ‘necessarily’:

Possible Worlds Analysis of ‘Possibly’
‘Possibly \(p\)’ is true if and only if ‘\(p\)’ is true in at least one possible world.
Possible Worlds Analysis of ‘Necessity’
‘Necessarily \(p\)’ is true if and only if ‘\(p\)’ is true in every possible world.

So, (8) is true, because even though there are no purple cows in our world, there are purple cows in other possible worlds. And (4) is true because there are no possible worlds in which a bachelor is unmarried.

This raises further questions. Some are logical, some metaphysical, some epistemological and some weird combinations of the three.

First: what are possible worlds? Are they concrete universes that exist just like ours (this is a view defended by David Lewis, who Kripke discusses at some length)? Or are they some sort of abstract object—the sort of thing Quine might worry is weird and “elusive”?

Second: can the same thing exist in more than one possible world? Are there possible worlds in which I am a professional circus clown, or only possible worlds in which someone like me is?

Third: how do we know anything about what possible worlds there are, and what things are like in them?

Necessary, A priori, and Analytic

We have seen all three of these before, of course. And we saw Quine’s deep dive on trying to figure out analyticity specifically.

Kripke is primarily interested in teasing the first two apart: he argues that, given a proper understanding of how names work, there are both contingent a priori truths and necessary a posteriori truths, both combinations that were thought to be impossible.

Go Forth and Read!

Slides

Here are the slides for Monday 9/21 and Tuesday 9/23:

References

Kripke, Saul A. 1980. Naming and Necessity. Harvard University Press.