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Back Blurb
NaN lays out a way of thinking about the relation between language and the world which permits just as formal and rigorous a treatment of notions like ‘meaning’, ‘truth’, and ‘reference’ as had Russell’s and Frege’s.
Overview
Proper names
A name which ordinarily is taken to uniquely identify a referent in the real world. Bertrand Russell proposed descriptivist theory of names, which held that proper name refers not to a referent but a set of true propositions that uniquely describe the referent. Kripke rejected this, holding that names come to be associated with individual referents because social groups who link the name to its reference in naming event (i.e. a baptism) which henceforth fixes that value of the name to that specific referent in the community. This was called “casual-historical theories of reference.”
Today “direct reference theory” is common, which holds that proper names refer to their referents without attributing any additional info, connotative or of sense, about them.
NaN concerns
- How do names refer to things in the world?
- Do objects (including people) have essential properties?
- What is the nature of identify?
- How do natural kind terms refer and what do they mean?
Kripke outlined a causal theory of reference, according to which a name refers to an object by virtue of a causal connection with the object as mediated through communities of speakers.
Naming and Necessity played a large role in the implicit, but widespread, rejection of the view—so popular among ordinary language philosophers—that philosophy is nothing more than the analysis of language.
Lecture 1
Some of the views that I have are views which may at first glance strike some as obviously wrong. My favorite example is this: It is a common claim in contemporary philosophy that there are certain predicates which, though they are in fact empty - have null extension - have it as a matter of contingent fact and not as a matter of any sort of necessity. Well, that I don’t dispute; but an example which is usually given is the example of unicorn. So it is said that though we have all found out that there are no unicorns, of course there might have been unicorns. Under certain circumstances there would have been unicorns. And this is an example of something I think is not the case. Perhaps according to me the truth should not be put in terms of saying that it is necessary that there should be no unicorns, but just that we can’t say under what circumstances there would have been unicorns. Further, I think that even if archeologists or geologists were to discover tomorrow some fossils conclusively showing the existence of animals in the past satisfying everything we know about unicorns from the myth of the unicorn, that would not show that there were unicorns.
…You may say, ‘The man over there with the champagne in his glass is happy’, though he actually only has water in his glass. Now, even though there is no champagne in his glass, and there may be another man in the room who does have champagne in his glass, the speaker intended to refer, or maybe, in some sense of ‘refer’, did refer, to the man he thought had the champagne in his glass.
What is the relationship between names and descriptions?
Really a proper name, properly used, simply was a definite description abbreviated or disguised. Frege specifically said that such a description gave the sense of the name.
Frege (there is a sort of looseness or weakness in our language):
In the case of genuinely proper names like ‘Aristotle’ opinions as regards their sense may diverge. As such may, e.g., be suggested: Plato’s disciple and the teacher of Alexander the Great. Whoever accepts this sense will interpret the meaning of the statement ‘Aristotle was born in Stagira’, differently from one who interpreted the sense of ‘Aristotle’ as the Stagirite teacher of Alexander the Great. As long as the nominatum remains the same, these fluctua tions in sense are tolerable. But they should be avoided in the system of a demonstrative science and should not appear in a perfect language.
But of course it is not only that; even a single speaker when asked ‘What description are you willing to substitute for the name?’ may be quite at a loss. rel:Things about Eva I didn’t realize
Lecture II
Theory of naming in Lecture I he was criticizing
- To every name or designating expression ‘X’ there corresponds a cluster of properties, namely the family of properties φ such that A believes φX
- One of the properties, or some conjointly, are believed by A to pick out some individual uniquely.
- If most, or a weighted most of the φs are satisfied by one unique object γ, then γ is the reference of X
- If the vote yields no unique object ‘X’ does not refer.
- The statement, “If X exists then X has most of the φs” is known a priori by the speaker.
- The statement, “If there exists, then X has the most φs expresses a necessary truth” (in the Idiolect of the speaker.)
- C - For any successful theory, the account must no be circular. The properties which are used in the vote must not themselves involve the notion of reference in such a way that it is ultimately impossible to eliminate.
Actually sentences like ‘Socrates is called “Socrates” , are very interesting and one can spend, strange as it may seem, hours talking about their analysis. I actually did, once, do that.
Lecture III
It is … not the case that the reference of a name is determined by … uniquely identifying marks.
- properties believed by the speaker don’t need to uniquely specify a referent for a name
- even if the conditions uniquely specify a referent, those conditions don’t need to identify the specific referent intended by the speaker.
- even if there is some “initial baptism” event, the uniquely identifying mark fixes the reference to an object even if there are counterfactual situations in which the object lacks those unique marks.
- statements of identity between objects are simple even though philosophers have tended to complicate them unnecessarily. Identity statements about objects are not the names of objects.
Gold:
Kant thinks that it is analytically true - true by definition - that gold is a yellow metal.
Kripke retorts that if gold appeared yellow because of a pervasive optical illusion and were actually blue, it would be incorrect to conclude that there has turned out to be no gold.
Instead of it turning out that what was thought to be gold was some other substance, it would be the case that the stuff called gold turned out to be blue.
Kripke argues that natural kind terms like gold refer to the stuff itself, rather than any of the qualities used to identify gold.
Tigers:
Tiger is another natural kind of term. If the qualities attributed to tigers turns out to be an optical illusion, again, it would not be the case that there turned out to be no tigers.
Suppose tigers were thought to be striped because they were always seen in the shade of trees from a distance. The fact people identified that very sort of animal through a mistaken perception doesn’t prevent people from referring to tigers.
Likewise, if there were an animal that had all of the external features of a tiger but was a reptile rather than a mammal, it would be wrong to say that another kind of tiger had been discovered. It would be the case that a false tiger had been discovered.
Kripke likens the hypothetical false tiger to iron pyrites, or “fool’s gold.” This substance is so called because it has many of the superficial properties people use to identify gold but is not the same substance. Because it is not the same substance as gold, it does not count as gold.
Natural kind terms are like proper names according to Kripke. That is, they are rigid designators. Where proper names identify the same single object in every possible world, natural kind terms identify the same single substance in every possible world.
Kripke ends by noting that he equates the type-type theorist in philosophy of mind with the materialist in philosophy of mind. He argues that such theorists are fundamentally mistaken in their view of the relation between body and mind.