A challenge and query re rigid designators
Rigid designators appear to me to be nothing more than about how convention works in terms of language usage. For example, a name given to a referent is consistently held to designate that referent over time by the "namer". That particular name might also be learned and used by others to refer to the same referent. The referent, however, is not dependent on its name to stand as the thing it is. Rigid designators are just about "namers" being consistent in their language use when refering, and that's all that's going on there.
Further, to take a famous example, in some possible worlds the planet Venus might be named by names that are not "Hesperus" and "Phosphorus". That entails that "Hesperus" and "Phosphorus" aren't rigid designators because it's not necessarily true that only the actual names "Hesperus" and "Phosphorus" refer to the planet Venus. In some possible worlds the names "Treetus" and "Seetus" might refer to the same planet Venus, for instance.
Furthermore, the identity statement "Hesperus is Phosphorus" is true in all possible worlds if both names refer to the same referent in the same sense (i.e. iff "Hesperus" and "Phosphorus" only refer to the same planet Venus, excluding all other variables e.g. location of Venus). We could say, however, that identity statements (according to propositional logic) are necessarily true in all possible worlds, but that the actual names themselves that are used when constructing identity statements are conventional and therefore contingent.
Any thoughts or views on this would be welcome.
Further, to take a famous example, in some possible worlds the planet Venus might be named by names that are not "Hesperus" and "Phosphorus". That entails that "Hesperus" and "Phosphorus" aren't rigid designators because it's not necessarily true that only the actual names "Hesperus" and "Phosphorus" refer to the planet Venus. In some possible worlds the names "Treetus" and "Seetus" might refer to the same planet Venus, for instance.
Furthermore, the identity statement "Hesperus is Phosphorus" is true in all possible worlds if both names refer to the same referent in the same sense (i.e. iff "Hesperus" and "Phosphorus" only refer to the same planet Venus, excluding all other variables e.g. location of Venus). We could say, however, that identity statements (according to propositional logic) are necessarily true in all possible worlds, but that the actual names themselves that are used when constructing identity statements are conventional and therefore contingent.
Any thoughts or views on this would be welcome.
Comments (280)
So if you use modals or attitude reports, what makes the modal true can depend on different individuals if you use a non-rigid designators:
Sue thinks the president is incompetent.
Sue can think this without believing the president is any particular person: she simply believes that the unique person who is the president, whoever that is, is incompetent (she might know it is Michael, or might not). Her belief will be validated by any individual being incompetent, so long as s/he is the president. But
Sue thinks Michael is incompetent.
Sue can only believe this if she thinks some particular person, namely Michael, is incompetent. And only Michael's incompetence is relevant to her belief being true.
I agree with your take on it more or less.
Conventional rigid designator talk always struck me as hopelessly muddled. I don't understand The Great Whatever's explanation either--to wit:
"Rigid designation is about the evaluation of a proposition at a world"--not sure what "the evaluation of a proposition" is saying. Do you just mean its truth value?
"That names could mean something else, or refer to different individuals, if the language were different, doesn't make them any less rigid designators."--in those cases, though, just how are any designators rigid?
"What a word means is contingent, but given what a name means, its value, the individual it refers to, is invariant over possibilities" --its value is invariant over possibilites by virtue of what?
Yeah, the value of a proposition relative to a world is a truth value. The value of a name inside the sentence expressing that proposition relative to a world is an individual. The point is that, regardless of world of evaluation, the name will always refer to the same individual.
Formally, if you like, the semantic value of a name can be represented either simply as an individual, or as a constant function from worlds to individuals, making the world of evaluation vacuous. This contrasts with definite descriptions like 'the president,' which are represented by non-constant functions from worlds to the president in that world (which might be different individuals in different possibilities).
Quoting Terrapin Station
Because the issue is not what the words might have meant, but what they do mean. Given what a name does mean, its value doesn't change over possibilities. This is different from non-rigid designators like definite descriptions, which can contribute different individuals depending on the world of evaluation, even holding fixed what they mean.
Quoting Terrapin Station
I'm not sure what you mean. Are you asking why names mean what they mean? That's a complicated question: the more basic descriptive claim is just that they mean a certain thing, which we can see even without knowing why they come to mean this.
But if you want to know concretely what rigid designation means, knowing a bit of modal logic is helpful. In modal logic, values or extensions are given relative to possible worlds: the point is just that something is rigid if the possible world with respect to which it's evaluated makes no non-trivial contribution to its value. So names are still, like in non-modal logic, behaving like individual constants, that just denote some individual.
(I'm bypassing issues with "meaning" versus "definition" by the way)
But what a word means is simply what people use it to mean at any given time. That can shift (and it's also not universal). So it wouldn't be rigid.
Again, a claim that something is a rigid designator is not a claim that it must mean something or couldn't have meant something else. It's a claim about what it actually means.
Well, so it's just rigid at a particular time, to particular persons? That would make sense, at least, although I wish someone would have explained that to me long ago if that's all it's saying. (That never seemed to me to be all it was saying.)
For example, if I say that 'tree' means tree, and always picks out trees relative to a world of evaluation, it's not a rebuttal to say that 'tree' might have meant turnip instead. That's just irrelevant. The point is what the word means, not what it might have meant if the language were different.
Also, the fact that a name might have referred to something else doesn't mean that it might not have been a rigid designator. It just means it might have been a rigid designator designating some other thing. The claim is that proper names as a class are semantically rigid designators, whatever they refer to.
Here's what I'm getting at:
For any term, including "Hesperus" for example:
"a" actually means m only at time T1 to person S (and of course, it can also mean m (ignoring nominalism) to person U, V, etc. at time T1, too.)
At time T2, "a" might mean l instead to person S. (Of course, it could still mean m to S at T2 (again ignoring nominalism), but it won't necessarily.)
Also, at time T1, "a" might mean k to person U.
Even at this, I was about to ask if "rigid designator" is simply saying that "a" means m to S (and U, V--whoever else) at all possible worlds at T1, but then it struck me that that's still muddled, because how the heck would we know that in possible world w, "a" would still mean m to S at T1?
Meaning is always to someone.
Meaning can change over time, and can vary per person. How would that not be relevant to what a word means? That IS what/how words mean something.
Oy, this is remaining muddled. So what the heck is "rigid" about any of this? We're talking about reference/meanings. Well, they can change over time (so they're not rigid in that regard) and they can vary per person (so they're not rigid in that regard) and we can't know plus we're not presenting an argument for how they'd refer to the same things by the same persons in other possible worlds (so that's not rigid either). What's rigid then?
What is the argument for that? How in the world would we know that someone wouldn't change how they use a word in a different possible world or a different context or whatever? (I really should read Naming and Necessity again, obviously, but my memory of it was that a lot of it was muddled nonsense.)
'If the winner were rich, I would be his friend.'
'If Michael were rich, I would be his friend.'
Suppose that in the world of utterance, Michael is the winner. Yet these sentences mean very different things. The first means that if it were the case that the person who won, whoever that might be, were rich, the speaker would be that person's friend in that world. The second says only of a single person, Michael, that this would be the case. So despite the fact that Michael is the winner (these are the same person), 'the winner' is non-rigid and can denote people other than Michael in other possible worlds (namely, whoever won). But 'Michael' always denotes the same guy, Michael, and the truth of the second sentence is not dependent on who won, whether it is Michael or not, but on Michael, whether he won or not.
One thing we should probably clear up is the possible world ontology we're using. Are we talking about possible worlds in a "realist" sense--that is in a Lewisian or MWI sense, where there literally are other worlds where counterparts of us exist? Or are we simply talking about counterfactuals and possibilites in our one world?
If the latter, by the way, and we're focusing on how a term is actually used, then it turns out that there's only one possible world--the actual world.
Aside from that, a distinction makes sense between S saying "the winner" where S does not have a specific person in mind and S saying "Michael" where S does have a specific person in mind.
However, as soon as we say something like "'Michael' always denotes the same guy," we're introducing a temporal element, and "'Michael' always denotes the same guy" is only the case if we're talking about whoever is uttering the sentence, for all T, having the same guy in mind as a referent. But we don't at all know that that would be the case.
Maybe you don't really want to introduce a temporal element--in which case we should avoid the phrase "always denotes." Maybe we just want to say that for everyone who uses "Michael" as the name of the same particular guy NOW, they NOW use that name for that same particular guy . . . which is pretty vacuous.
We can't even introduce "Michael" in a variety of sentences for this without introducing a temporal element though--the people using the name "Michael" in a particular way NOW can only entertain so many sentences with the name "Michael" at the same time.
It doesn't matter. The question of rigid designation is an empirical semantic one, independent of these metaphysical claims. Rigid designation can be employed in any ontology of possible worlds.
Quoting Terrapin Station
This is false, insofar as languages have explicit mechanisms for evaluating relative to non-actual possibilities, including modal adverbs, sentential modals, conditionals and counterfactuals, attitude reports, and so on.
Quoting Terrapin Station
No. Again, this is not about the change of meanings over time. It is about which individual is denoted relative to which possible world.
Quoting Terrapin Station
What a name refers to doesn't depend on who someone has in mind. It depends on what the word means. If I confuse Michael and Brett, and say 'Brett is the winner,' when Brett lost, and I meant that Michael is the winner, I've literally said something false about Brett, though this was not my intention. I may have meant something true that came out wrong, and my interlocutors may be willing to accommodate me and reconstruct what I meant to say.
But that makes no sense. If we're talking about real alternate worlds, we have no idea what our counterpart might be actually using a term to refer to in that alternate world.
Quoting The Great Whatever
You're ignoring the "focusing on how we're using the term in the actual world" part. It's vacuous if we're not talking about real possible worlds to say that "in all possible worlds we're using the term to refer to x" if we're focusing on how we're using the term in the actual world, because with respect to how we're actually using the term, there's only ONE possibility--the actual way we're using the term. I'm not saying there aren't counterfactuals and so on. But if there's only one real world, there's only one actual way we can be using the term. There are no other worlds for usage of the term. There's just usage of the term in talk about counterfactuals and so on (though we're limiting ourselves to a single moment in time, so we can't do too much talking about counterfactuals and so on).
Quoting The Great Whatever
What I'm referring to is the word always. That's a temporal term. If you don't want to introduce temporal considerations, you need to not use a term like that. Once you introduce temporal considerations, you can't avoid the possibility that we can start using a term differently at another time, and there's no rigidity in that.
Quoting The Great Whatever
Of course it does! That's ALL it depends on. That's all there is to it.
Quoting The Great Whatever
What the word means is determined by how individuals think about it!
Quoting The Great Whatever
You can change your mind about who you're referring to by each name (for example if you don't know them that well or whatever and you keep forgetting who is who per what they call themselves for example). And you can also say a different sound than what you meant to say (saying "Brett" when you wanted to say "Michael"). I'm not sure which situation you have in mind there. In both cases, reference is purely a matter of what one has in mind. You can't use words incorrectly. You can use them unconventionally, and you can change your mind about how you use them, or say something you didn't mean to say, etc.
It's not about what terms they use to talk about things in their world. It's about what terms we use to talk about things in their world.
Counterparts aren't necessary for a possible world semantics, and even if they were, I don't see how it's relevant.
Quoting Terrapin Station
Again, the point is not how the word would be used in different possibilities, or what else it might mean. It's what, given what it actually means and how it's actually used, the word can refer to given different worlds of evaluation.
Quoting Terrapin Station
This strikes me as a pointless quibble, but no it's not. Here 'always' means 'in any situation,' which is a perfectly ordinary use of the word. If you want to change the wording, fine. The point is that regardless of world of evaluation, the individual referred to is the same.
Quoting Terrapin Station
It depends on the conventions of the linguistic community, which aren't reducible to any single speaker's intentions.
Quoting Terrapin Station
Yes you can, as evidenced by the fact that you can use them correctly.
Similar to the above question, how many situations can you have for the same individual at the same time?
Quoting The Great Whatever
Conventions refer to contingent commonaltiies among many individuals, sure. Why would we only be talking about conventions though? It's not as if conventions are right by virtue of being conventions. All of the unconventional references are equally references/meanings.
Quoting The Great Whatever
No you can't. Obviously you can't use them incorrectly, either. You can use them unconventionally. But conventional/unconventional doesn't map to correct/incorrect.
I'm not sure what you mean.
But consider this; do you understand the difference between talking about a possible world where Barack Obama isn't the president and a possible world where there's a man called "Barack Obama" who isn't the president?
Any number? So the same individual could consider 1,000 different propositions about John at the same time?
But notice if you say 'the winner might be home,' the possibilities that qualify to make this true are not necessarily those that include just one individual being home, viz. John. A possibility in which Michael is home also qualifies, so long as he's the winner.
This is because 'the winner' is a non-rigid designator: it refers to the winner in a world, whoever that is. 'John' just refers to John in every world, whether he's the winner or not.
There can be a difference, sure, if I'm imagining the person who I call "Barack Obama" now, as the president, not being president instead, versus imagining a different person called "Barack Obama" now, who is also not president.
Okay, but what I was asking was how many different propositions can the same individual consider at a time?
Then you understand the concept of a rigid designator. When you talk about a possible world where Barack Obama isn't the president the term "Barack Obama" used here doesn't just refer to some person called "Barack Obama" in that possible world but the specific person who in this world is the president (and who might not even be called "Barack Obama" in this possible world).
Because as soon as we start to introduce more scenarios, re propositions someone is considering, we introduce a temporal element during which reference can shift.
This hits on the distinction between the value of a word as used at the actual world and evaluated elsewhere, versus used and evaluated both at some non-actual world, but doesn't hit on the rigid/non-rigid distinction. This applies also to definite descriptions, for example.
But any term could or could not be a rigid designator per that--it just depends on how I think about it. If I think about the term so that it picks out some specific thing (person, object, phenomenon--whatever) and I think about that thing under another possibility, then that's a rigid designator. Likewise, any term might not be a rigid designator for me, because I can think of it rather as an "office" that can be filled by someone else. It would just be however I think about the term in question at the time in question. (Which is what the initial post of this thread stated)
Say that the denotation of a term x relative to a world w is [x](w).
So for example, say x is 'the winner.' Then [x](w1) = the winner in w1, say John, and [x](w2) = the winner in w2, say Michael.
Now say x is 'John.' Then [x](w1) = John, and [x](w2) = John.
Notice that the value of 'the winner' changes with respect to the world of evaluation, because the winner might be different people in different worlds: in w1, the winner is John, while in w2, it is Michael.
But the same isn't true for 'John.' Regardless of the world you pick, 'John' denotes John. This is because, regardless of world, John is John, and not anybody else.
So 'the winner' is a nonrigid designator, while 'John' is a rigid designator.
That's ALL it means. It has nothing to do with change in meanings of a word over time, or intentions of the speaker, or anything like that.
What might work for me, although I don't know if this would be agreeable to folks who think that rigid designators make sense, would be to simply say that (a) conceptually, there are "offices" that can be held by different persons (or even objects, etc.) at different times, and (b) there are particular individuals who can hold different offices.
An "office" is simply something like "Mayor of Springfield," or "Central High School janitor," or "largest tree in Sherwood Forest," or "winner of the contest" (to use your example) etc. Whereas particular individuals are "this tree," "that person," etc.
That way it's not about reference, meaning, etc.--since my views are very different about those things, and it's also not even about possible worlds, really. It's just a conceptual distinction where one side of it, (a), hinges on people thinking about things in a certain way, but the other side, (b), does not hinge on that.
I don't think the jury is out on whether rigid designation makes sense, though. There are standard ways of defining it in modal logic and intensional semantics, and many of the empirical consequences are clear. Most of this thread has been misunderstanding of what a rigid designator is, which is not the same as criticism.
The problem with making it about reference is that what makes a reference is simply how an individual is thinking about it.
And the semantic consequences you get in modal contexts like counterfactual conditionals and their truth conditions are independent of your referential intentions.
Convention is a matter of a lot of individuals having the "same thing" (per behavioral cues) in mind. So that's ONLY what people are thinking about. Additionally, that's just convention. That's just one answer to what something refers to--the conventional answer. (And often there are multiple conventions.) But there are (practically) countless things that something refers to--every single thing that someone has in mind at every single usage of a term are things that a name refers to.
Semantic consequences can NOT be independent of what persons have in mind (or they just ain't semantic consequences).
Hence why this is muddled unless we make it not about references as I attempted above. It relies on beliefs about meaning, reference, etc. that are completely wrong.
I don't, and this is close to the heart of why I have never been able to make any sense of Kripke's approach.
In my view, 'Barack Obama' is a name that I use to refer to an element of my model of the world and, when I'm talking to someone else, it refers to what I believe to be a shared element of our two models.
Since I cannot talk to someone in a different possible world, the second of these meanings becomes moot. As for the first meaning, I can imagine any world I like, and label any arbitrary element of it with the name Barack Obama - a mountain, a colour, a sort of dance. If I also label a country in that world 'USA' and imagine it having a president then I suppose it's true to say that Barack Obama (the imaginary mountain) is not the imaginary president of the imaginary USA in that world. But I can't see what insight that gives us to anything interesting.
No it's not. It's a matter of a complex behavioral pattern. An individual having something in mind isn't enough to override this. If I say 'tree' to mean 'turnip,' I've said the wrong thing, made an error, regardless of what I meant. 'Tree' doesn't mean turnip.
For example, I could imagine that Barack Obama was named something else other than 'Barack.' This would seem to be incoherent on your proposal, but it's clearly not.
Yes it is. I said (per behavioral cues)--that's your complex behavioral pattern, but the behavior is what it is simply as a matter of those individuals having in mind whatever they do.
Quoting The Great Whatever
No, you haven't. You simply define it unconventionally. It's not wrong or an error to be unconventional. To say that convention makes something correct is to forward an argumentum ad populum.
Words "mean" whatever people use them to "mean," and that's not a statement about the mob. It's a statement about everybody, no matter how idiosyncratic.
'Barack Obama' is a name that refers to Barack Obama (a man, not an element in your model of the world).
I don't know how to answer this. Words have conventional meanings, and it's possible to use them wrong. If you deny this, I literally don't know what to say, and we may have reached the end of our disagreement. The Humpty Dumpty school of thought on language is a dead end, of course.
Our philosophy of language should reflect what the world is really like, what's really going on with language usage, etc. Mine does this.
Individual intentions don't override conventional practices of the linguistic community, which give a word its meaning.
Yeah, per how individuals think about them. To say that they mean something outside of that is simply nonsense.
To say that you can use words wrong is an argumentum ad populum. That doesn't mean that you're using words correctly by just making up whatever meanings--because there is no correct or incorrect.
The conventions just determine the conventions. That's it.
No, per how the community uses the term. This is not the same thing: most people don't even think about words much if at all, or understand how they're used, despite using them in a certain way, and competence is distributed across the community. Individuals have little power over this, and intentions of individuals even less.
But the convention is itself a rule that can be broken, much like moving chess pieces a certain way. Of course, you're free to make up your own rules and play a different kind of chess, but assuming that you're trying to play a game with someone, there must be some set of rules that you both agree to follow. Linguistic conventions are the rules that a language-speaking community agrees to follow to enable successful communication.
[quote=the great whatever]There is a difference between imagining Barack Obama was different, and imagining that a different person was named 'Barack Obama.' I have a hard time believing you don't understand this difference[/quote]
Last time I checked, saying. 'I assert P. I can't believe you don't understand that P' did not amount to a proof of P.
This is a bit of language use that would crash a rationalist approach like Leibniz's. He would say that any Nixon who didn't win the election couldn't be Nixon... that winning the election is part Nixon's identity.
I think Hume would also say that Nixon was a bundle of properties (one of which was being a winner).
The concept of the rigid designator is at least food for thought.
it's actually worse for Terrapin's incoherent position than you are painting it. He cannot even play a game with himself of assigning unconventional meanings without relying on linguistic conventions.
How will he tell himself that " I declare that X will mean Y" without accepting and making use of the conventional meanings of "I", "declare". "that". "will" and "mean".
You can't even tell yourself that a conventional word will mean something different, or a completely made-up word like 'splarg' will signify some object, without referring to the object it will signify by using a conventional word that is normally used to used to signify that object.
Quoting andrewk
I don't think it has much to do with ontology. You can just think about it in terms of conceptual models if you like. If there's some element that's either unique to a model or shared between many models, and if there's a term that refers only (and always) to that element, then that term is a rigid designator (but that's not to say that different rigid designators can't have the same spelling and pronunciation, of course, e.g. if there are two men called "Barack Obama").
Quoting andrewk
I don't think that Barack Obama being the president is a necessary part of his identity, though. Although in one sense we might say that he's not the same man he was before he became president, in another sense it's correct to say that he is the same man (i.e. that he isn't two different people). To say that the man who is the president once wasn't the president seems to be both sensible and true.
I agree. I regard people, and objects more generally, as processes. So the event that is the human called BO doing POTUS things in 2016 is a part of the same process (which we could call a 'man') as the event that is a little boy called BO learning to read with his mother at the age of three.
Where I seem to differ from the views of a number of people in this thread is that I believe that when people say 'Imagine if BO could speak fluent Mandarin', what they mean is 'Imagine if we lived in a different world that was the same as this in almost every respect, and had a POTUS called BO that was almost identical to the one in our world, except that that one could speak fluent Mandarin.'.
It's always risky to make statements about what others mean. So to soften that, let me say that what I mean by the previous paragraph is that, if when people say 'Imagine if BO could speak fluent Mandarin' they don't mean the interpretation I gave, then I have no idea what they mean.
Given that interpretation, whether BO is a rigid designator seems to be a matter of arbitrary choice, with no meaningful consequences. We can declare that the imaginary, Mandarin-speaking person is BO, so that the name BO is a reference to either the real one or the imaginary one. Or we could declare they are not. It makes no difference (Or so it seems to me).
I'll affirm that you don't have any idea what TGW meant. Nevertheless, his explanation of rigid designators was a fair assessment of Kripke's intentions.. which was the topic of the OP.
I (Michael) can imagine a world that is like this one in almost every respect, except that the person very like BO, who is named BO in that world and became POTUS, learned Mandarin.
That's what people seem to mean when they use counterfactuals like '.... if BO spoke Mandarin ...'.
If anybody wants to offer a different interpretation, that would be fascinating and I'd love to discuss it.
Why would people mean something so at odds with what they say? That seems like a really bizarre reconstruction. Surely, if I say to imagine something about Barack Obama, I mean to imagine something about Barack Obama, not 'a man almost the same as him in every respect...etc., etc..' If I meant that, presumably I would say that.
I guess what I'm saying is, the fact that you can, or think you do, reinterpret what people say into a highly idiosyncratic metaphysical system has no bearing on what the words actually mean. A far more plausible hypothesis is that in imagining that Barack Obama could speak Mandarin, you are imagining that Barack Obama, not someone else, could. It seems very bizarre to me to say we can't ever actually imagine anyone as different from the way they actually are, that we must instead construct additional creatures similar to them in some respect. Whether you personally are committed to such a picture for whatever reason, I fail to see why anyone should be persuaded by it.
Well, consider that right now I could say "I might win the lottery on Saturday" and "I might not win the lottery on Saturday". Surely in both cases I'm talking about me in a possible future, not just someone who is a lot like me. I don't see why I can't make the same sort of claim about a possible past (e.g. "I could have won last Saturday, even though I didn't").
Perhaps it just comes down to a disagreement over which properties are necessary and which are contingent. And, I wonder, what makes it the case that being a planet or being the president is one or the other?
Does the "I" there refer to you or to someone who is like you? If the former then you understand the concept of referring to yourself as being something other than what you are right now (in this case, as a lottery winner). Isn't that enough to make sense of rigid designators?
Referring to last week's lottery, we can say 'I bought a ticket in last week's lottery and, prior to the draw, I was unable to predict whether that week's lottery winner would be me.'
It's only when this week I want to consider a counterfactual in which I did win last week's lottery, that I need to consider alternative worlds, and people like me in those worlds.
We don't need to consider counterfactuals to consider possible worlds. We can just consider possible futures if you like. When you use the term "I" to talk about yourself in a number of possible futures (one where you win the lottery, one where you don't, one where you win twice, etc.) the term "I" is a rigid designator that refers always and only to you. If you were to claim "I might win the lottery tomorrow", that claim is made true if and only if you win the lottery tomorrow. It's false if anyone else wins because the term "I" doesn't refer to them. Whereas with a claim like "someone will win the lottery tomorrow", the term "someone" isn't a rigid designator as that claim will be made true if I win or if you win or if anyone else wins.
It's when it is applied to counterfactuals that it seems to become incoherent. The process that I (perhaps rigidly) refer to as 'me' did not win the lottery of date 7 December 2016, so if I wish to talk about a process that wins the lottery of date 7 December 2016, that must be some other process. It can be a process in an imaginary world that is similar to this in almost every respect except those relating to the lottery, but it cannot be this process.
True. The actual you didn't win the lottery. If assertions you make include a phrase like ".. in the actual world" then you aren't using rigid designation as a tool and your proposition is necessarily true or false (see Scott Soames' Actually )
When using rigid designation, the concept of actuality doesn't intrude much (as it doesn't when we think in terms of logical possibility.)
This is basically an assertion that nothing could be other than exactly as it actually is, which is not going to be a helpful metaphysical thesis for examining natural language. Rigid designation is a matter of accounting for the behavior of referential expressions more than it is a metaphysical thesis, though Kripke thought it had consequences for the latter.
Where your metaphysical theses require you to make highly implausible claims about language, such as that we can't suppose that something were other than how it is, my inclination would be to abandon that thesis, at least where within a mile of accounting for natural language. But it's up to you.
Whether or not I agree to that depends on what the 'could' in that sentence means.
I think when people say things 'could have turned out differently', they just mean they would not have been astonished if they had turned out differently. With that meaning, I think things 'could have happened differently'.
How do you interpret the sentence 'That could have turned out differently' (or perhaps a concrete example thereof, to make it more tractable)?
It seems that way to me. That then leads us in the direction of Aristotelian essences. Under that approach Barack Obama is any process in any possible world that has the 'essential/necessary properties' of BO, but which need not have the nonessential/contingent ones.
Does one have to subscribe to an essence-based metaphysics in order to make sense of Kripke's approach to counterfactuals? If so then I suppose that leaves me out. I had to give up in believing in essences decades ago when I realised I just couldn't persuade myself any longer that the small, circular, odourless, tasteless wafer at communion really was the bleeding, crucified body of Christ.
If an essentialist approach is not required, then the question remains: what does it mean to say that a human-like organism in another possible world, that shares many of the properties of the BO of this world, is Barack Obama? Or, more crudely, what is the difference between a BO-like organism in an alternative possible world that is BO, and one that is not?
It seems me, then, that if we're to make sense of counterfactuals then we can't be a realist about identity. Identity is a linguistic/conceptual imposition. Unless these referential pegs/this haecceity is some mind-independent thing?
This seems to touch on the ship of Theseus paradox. What makes it the case that the ship that left is the same ship that returned (if anything)? I'd say that our conceptual/linguistic imposition (we think about and talk about it as being the same ship) is what makes it the same ship. We model it as being the same ship. As TGW says, we simply stipulate ex hypothesi that it's the same ship. That's all the "essence" there is.
And so by the same token, we do the same with Barack Obama.
I think the problem only arises when you try to be a realist about identity, which is why things like the ship of Theseus paradox and the Sorites paradox (and counterfactuals, as you're trying to explain) are only a problem for the realist.
Kripke's deal is not so grandiose as to try to resolve these puzzles. It's in the nature of AP to bite off little pieces and enjoy them without worrying about some giant master plan. So if rigid designators seem crazy it may be a case of way over estimating Kripke's ambitions.
The question of whether an individual in another world is really the same as one in this world (the 'trans-world identity problem') has its roots in a deep conceptual confusion, that other worlds are like distant countries we view with lenses and try to determine correspondence relations between theirs and ours. This is just wrongheaded. Alternate possibilities are just that – alternate ways things could have been. And there's nothing incoherent about the same individual being supposed to be some other way. It's not like there's some other universe you're 'looking into' and seeing a numerically distinct copy of Barack Obama and asking whether that copy is 'the same' as 'ours.' It's not a sci-fi scenario, it's just a way of modeling how we talk about alternate possibilities involving the same individual.
That sentence conveys no information whatsoever. Can you explain what it means to you or not?
Maybe somebody else will come along that can serve as interpreter.
Also, I find it hard to believe you don't see the difference between supposing that Obama himself were different, and supposing someone like Obama were. Are you serious?
I suppose we'll find out if it happens. It didn't happen with my interpretation of what 'BO could have spoken Mandarin' means, because you said that my meaning was the wrong one and, in order to know it was the wrong meaning, you must have understood it.
It seems to me that you are committed to saying that in supposing things about Barack Obama, we are not supposing things about him, but someone else who is qualitatively like him. But this seems like an untenable position, or it's not clear to me how to make it coherent.
Actually when I look back on the post sequence I see that the verb in question in the discussion of BO and Mandarin was 'imagine if', not 'could have'. The discussion turned to 'could' when you asked if my position was that nothing 'could' be different from how it is. I muddled the two together in that sentence in the last post. I should have either written about imagining BO speaking Mandarin, or alternatively, whether anything in this world could be different from how it is.
Since I think the 'could' and 'imagine if' qualifiers have different interpretations, and your latest question best matches the 'imagine if' one, let's concentrate on that.
Do I interpret the invocation 'Imagine if Barack Obama spoke Mandarin' as equivalent to
'Imagine if there is someone very like Barack Obama, in this world, who speaks Mandarin.'?
No. I interpret it as 'Imagine a world that is almost identical to this one, including having a USA and a president of that country called BO, who is like the BO in this world in almost every respect except that he can speak fluent Mandarin'.
Additionally, you're forced to claim that in imagining if Barack Obama were a certain way, we don't imagine if Barack Obama were a certain way, but some sort of counterpart or duplicate of him in an alternate world. Prima facie this is wrong: to imagine something about Barack Obama is to imagine something about him, the very man we refer to whenever we use the name 'Barack Obama.' Why, in these constructions, would this suddenly change to us referring to someone completely different? Why doesn't the name just refer to who it usually refers to, i.e. Barack Obama?
Because BO is a process that has a bunch of known properties, one of which is that it doesn't speak Mandarin. Change any one of those known properties, however trivial, and we are talking about a different process (we can talk about alternative unknown properties - such as whether BO will live to 100 - without difficulties, because that is simply a question of what we currently know) . Believers in Aristotelian essences may try to get around that by dividing the properties into essential and non-essential ones. But as I have explained above, I do not accept that approach.
Hence, since one cannot imagine a BO that speaks mandarin (one says one does, but one also says that one laughs one's head off), one does the closest possible thing, which is to imagine a world identical to this in almost every way except that the POTUS differs from our POTUS in only one noticeable way - that he speaks Mandarin.
I understand the position of a Kripkean who is an Essentialist, although I do not share it. But I cannot understand how anybody that is not an Essentialist can subscribe to Kripke's account of language.
What reason is there for this? Why can't we talk about the same person, with alternate properties? Prima facie we do this all the time.
Quoting andrewk
But this is ridiculous. Clearly we can imagine such a thing, and to say one laughed one's head off is clearly an idiom, whereas the counterfactual language we're speaking of is literal and non-idiomatic.
I have no problem with taking it as idiomatic. But maybe it is literal if we take what is - for me - the most intuitive interpretation of the verb 'imagine', which is to visualise an alternative world. That world can be very different, as in a fantasy novel, or it can be almost identical to this one except that POTUS speaks Mandarin.
In the case of future contingencies 'imagine' has a subtly different meaning, so let's stick to counterfactuals for now. As I understand it, you think that (counterfactual) 'imagine' does not mean what I said it means to me. But unless you can explain what it means to you, without circularity, I don't think we can make any progress.
If a rigid designator is more or less a signifier of some sort, then any sign, symbol, pattern, behavioural cue, and even combinations of the above could be used as rigid designators. In other words, rigid designators aren't restricted only to proper names. A sentence or paragraph could be used as a rigid designator, or a piece of architecture could be used as a rigid designator, or a unique sort of handshake, for instance.
Now, in all possible worlds the identity of a particular/individual/object remains constant or doesn't change: A = A obtains in all possible worlds and is therefore necessarily true. We can say that that possibility is one of rigidity, i.e. involving no change or involving absolute consistency. That premise has to obtain for the idea of rigid designators to obtain, that is, rigid designators obtain iff rigid identities obtain.
So it seems, then, that rigid designators are just "markers" of some sort that reflect, acknowledge, or represent the law of identity of a particular (which is implicit within Kripke's notion of rigid designators). Persons construct the associations between a marker and the law of identity of a particular. Those associations are constructed by persons and shared in common making them conventional and contingent, and the law of identity of a particular is, obviously, necessarily true.
So I think the notion of rigid designators is equivocating the associations between markers of some sort with the (implicit) law of identity of particulars.
Second, the point is that even if to imagine means to visualize, the point is that if we imagine B.O. being able to speak Mandarin, we imagine him ,viz., Barack Obama, viz. the same guy we always use 'Barack Obama' to refer to, speaking Mandarin, not someone else.
For the sake of argument, let's say that wasn't true: that instead words are used as signs/symbols that individuals assign private meanings onto; and that a common or shared meaning by individuals was just a sign/symbol being used conventionally but that involved individuals attempting to match (via guesswork) what everyone is using that particular sign/symbols for.
How would that alter your view (if at all) of rigid designators?
Do you think we can at least agree that an impasse has been reached?
But of course if you just don't want to go on or don't care, I don't mind.
If I may, one way to think about this is to consider what allows you to speak of two worlds with different Obamas in the first place. Kripke's point is that your very ability to speak of two different Obamas, has, as it's prerequisite, the ability to think of an entity designated Obama of whom 'can speak mandarin' can be predicated of (or not) in the first place. That is, you wouldn't even understand what it means to speak of 'two different Obamas' had you not already had some idea of a 'an Obama' which can be in some way different in two different worlds to begin with. Otherwise it wouldn't be two different Obamas, it would be two different people altogether. You wouldn't be able to speak of 'different Obamas'. This is why a proper name is a rigid designator: it designates the same thing in all possible worlds. Your very ability to speak of 'different Obamas' is parasitic on your ability to think a singularly designated Obama who can be different in the first place.
Or another variation: Who or what is different in the different possible worlds? Obama - the singular.
Quoting andrewk
Part of your confusion I think stems from treating this as an 'metaphysical' problem. It isn't. Summerised brutally, Kripke's point about rigid designators can be put like this: to the degree that language works as it does, a thing is called what it is because it is called that. Rigid deisgnators are such because they have nothing to do with the 'properties' of the thing in question; this is why it is referred to as an 'anti-descriptivist theory' of naming: no elaboration of the properties of the thing in question can settle why a thing is named as it is. Rather, it is a matter of language: because language functions in this stupid, tautological manner (in which a thing is called what it is because it is called that), rigid designators mark the same thing in all possible worlds.
It seems to me that Kripke's approach stems from interpreting phrases like 'Imagine if Obama spoke Mandarin' as meaning something different from what I believe people would say they meant - if they stopped to think about it, which - unless they are interested in philosophy of language - they almost certainly never will. His rigid designator approach is an attempt to solve a problem that he believes exists based on his interpretation of what people mean, and which I believe doesn't exist based on my interpretation.
But who knows whether Kripke or I am right about what people mean? We're all just guessing.
This gives me an idea for a practical research project for a philosophy of language PhD candidate. They could survey people - selected particularly for never having had any exposure to academic philosophy - and ask them a bunch of questions about phrases involving imaginings, both counterfactual and future-contingent - to find out what they feel those phrases mean when they use them. The tricky thing is that the PhD candidate would have to be someone that is not particularly committed to any particular PoL account, otherwise they might unconsciously bias the sampling by the phrasing of the questions.
I did a survey of one (!) with a non-philosophical, but highly intelligent, friend of mine the other day - asking him what he thought it meant if someone said 'Japan could have won the war in the Pacific and colonised Australia'. He said he'd have to think about it and get back to me. I haven't heard back yet.
I wrote a post above along those lines -- that rigid designators are akin to signfiers a la Mill's non-connotative proper names, in which they just represent the law of identity of a particular.
Did you manage to read my other longer post (above) re "So it seems, then, that rigid designators are just "markers" of some sort that reflect, acknowledge, or represent the law of identity of a particular (which is implicit within Kripke's notion of rigid designators)...." ? I'm interested to know your thoughts about it.
Whether you're speaking literally or figuratively here is irrelevant though. As is the talk of 'visualizing'. It's a question of formal identity conditions. Is the identity of thing qua proper name given by a set of descriptive features? Or are descriptive features irrelevant? Kripke affirms the latter, and then offers a reason why: because we can imagine situations in which every descriptive feature of a thing is replaced, and have the proper name still refer to the thing in question (cf. the thought experiment about Godel and Schmitt, which is alot of fun to read about if you're interested). Kripke makes an argument for this in Naming and Necessity, so it's isn't a case of 'interpreting' willy nilly. What Kripke or the normal person 'means' - or even what they think they mean - is not very relevant to the argument at all. Intentionality has got nothing to do with it.
Do you then think it makes sense to consider a possible world where the Earth is a star rather than a planet? Or where Napoleon was born a horse (to horse parents)?
I don't think that TGW's claim that we can simply stipulate that one thing in a possible world is the same thing as something in the actual world really cuts it.
The importance of Kripke's intervention though (imo) has to do with the way in which he tackles questions of modality - that is, necessity and contingency with respecting to naming. For Kripke, a name is necessary - but this necessity is itself contingent (upon what he calls a primal baptism). It's no accident that Kripke more or less invented modal logic. It's where all the good stuff is.
I'm not sure about the relevance of this question - what does this have to do with rigid designation or naming? (honest question, I really don't understand).
It seems to be that you're saying that being Barack Obama is simply something we stipulate.
You said (of Kripke's position) that "we can imagine situations in which every descriptive feature of a thing is replaced and have the proper name still refer to the thing in question". So we can imagine a situation in which the Earth is a star and in which Napoleon was born a horse (to horse parents)?
I don't think we can. I think that this is a nonsensical counterfactual. In no possible world is the Earth a star or was Napoleon a horse. There's a limit (even if not a clear one) to which we can change the descriptive features.
As long as/insofar as that's what people name it. ;-)
A name is necessary in virtue of what? Insofar as rigid designators are used, they appear to me nothing more than signifiers or markers that a particular exists in the way that it does, and that includes possible worlds.
I can't really wrap my head around that statement. Nothing about it meshes with hiw I think about necessity.
Naming some thing is about using a sign/symbol to refer to some thing. Rigid designators name some existant, no? They refer to some particular thing - a thing that exists in all possible worlds. The law of identity is necessarily true for any particular existant thing, no? The identity of some thing can be relayed as A = A. So rigid designators simply signify that some existant thing exists, implicitly acknowledging the law of identity when it does.
If my parents never had children then I would never have been born. The term "I" here is a rigid designator that either refers to a person who doesn't exist in the possible world in which my parents never had children, or doesn't refer to anything in that possible world.
I've read Naming and Necessity, and more than once, though it's been a long time since I read through more than a passage here and there. A lot of it struck me as untenable to put it politely. Same with Kripke's Wittgenstein book. Although admittedly, that's the case for me with the work of every philosopher (other than myself, haha).
I just commented in another thread that I'm like the anti-Sturgeon when it comes to Sturgeon's law, but that's certainly not the case when it comes to people doing philosophy.
So in the possible worlds where you don't exist, all the rigid designator is doing is acknowledging ¬(A=A), therefore, ¬A relative to the possible worlds where you do exist i.e. A = A or A.
I don't at all recall the answer to this, but what did Kripke say about indexicals with respect to rigid designation? I'd be surprised if he considered indexicals to be rigid designators, but maybe he did.
Wait, it wouldn't be denying identity in those possible worlds.
I'm including fictional existents too, like Pegasus, for instance.
The law of identity matters in virtue of this discussion because if it didn't obtain the concept of "rigid designator" wouldn't be useful. Rigid designators only work if the law of identity obtains, and insofar as the latter obtains, rigid designators can be employed. But then, if that's true, then rigid designators are simply signposts that the law of identity obtains in all possible worlds when referring to some X.
It would be acknowledging that in some possible worlds A = A for some particular X relative to some possible worlds in which that X doesn't exist (¬(A = A)).
I wish I could remember any time you presented an argument. Argument, of course not referring to degree of verbosity.
~(A=A) would be conventionally read as negating identity in general. Rather you'd be saying something like (?w) (~A) & (A-->(A=A)) . . . Although that last part should be more along the lines of "insofar as there is A in any world, then . . ." but there's no way to formalize that that I know of.
Ah, thanks for letting me know; I've not studied predicate logic yet.
The idea is rather that it's not clear in the slightest what necessity would refer to in any sense (logical, metaphysical, whatever) if necessity fits that example.
Of course, you can just ignore that, and you probably will, but it doesn't help that usage of the term make any sense.
I still don't understand your conditional: "if the law of identity didn't obtain the RD wouldn't be useful"... But useful for what? What (as-yet-unspoken) premise gives rise to this 'if'?
Useful as a signifier/marker/signpost that the law of identity obtains for existents insofar as one can make references to existents. That's the only use or function I see RD's having.
Yes, as I said in previous posts, the law of identity is implied when using RDs to refer. I can't think of another use for RDs in terms of what's entailed if and when they're employed.
Duh.
There's no standard sense of "necessity" in light of which it's necessarily true that something is called by a particular name simply by virtue of being called ("baptized as") that name.
(Interestingly, Barack Obama is used as an example in that article, too. Great minds think alike. ;))
Indeed, and the LOI is necessarily true, hence how RDs just "pick out" or signify some existant among and relative to others in lieu of LOI obtaining.
Well could you explain to me why it's "really not it" and what "it", as in RDs, really are then? The whole point of me starting this thread was to understand and get to grips with RDs, and anyone whose help I receive is appreciated.
Yea. But a strong adherence to the LOI is a route to hard determinism, which is a feature of human thought, but the opposite is also there, manifest in words like could, would, and should.
If you can see some route where the LOI blasts those words out of language and renders us incapable of saying things like "If I'd only known..." "I wish I hadn't done that....", and so on.. then we would dispense with possible worlds because all of that would be completely meaningless to us.
Oops--someone doesn't know what "standard sense" refers to.
You can however modify descriptivism - that a name has a description lurking invisibly behind it - so that it works in conjunction with modal logic. Or you can call names anaphoric, like pronouns. I confess, having recently driven myself half-crazy trying to understand all this academically, I still don't accept rigid designators. I think however TGW has done heroic work in this thread in explaining the established position.
One difficulty I still haven't resolved in my own mind is what world we're in when we talk about these names, and what 'possible' worlds are. TGW follows the accepted view about 'the world of evaluation' or 'the world of the utterance' but I'm dissatisfied with that. It seems to me a pseudo-objective way of saying who the interlocutors are. Among philosophers, for instance, Socrates is just Socrates, but among football fans he's a Brazilian great, and if you're a philosophical football fan, you need a context to know which is which. (Of course you could be a MOnty Python fan and merge the two) So the pro-rigid-designator says there is no such thing as the meaning of a word 'to you', but there is a meaning of a word in one language community rather than another. I find that awfully muddling. But maybe it's just me.
A problem I have with the SEP entry on rigid designators, for example, is that statements ilke this: "A rigid designator designates the same object in all possible worlds in which that object exists and never designates anything else," are never actually supported/argued for. They never present how we'd know that there are terms that designate the same object in all possible worlds in which that object exists and never designate anything else. Because on the face of it, the idea seems completely dubious to me, especially given what reference is in the first place on my view.
So maybe Kripke argued in support of the idea rather than just presenting it as if it were obvious. I don't remember. Hopefully I'll be able to find my copy of Naming and Necessity.
(. . . just tried a preliminary search for it. If it's where I think it is, it's going to take some time to get to it, as it's in a storage area of my place and I'm going to need to move a bunch of other stuff out to get to it--stuff where I have no idea yet where I'm putting it/what I'm going to do with it, and I need to clean it up anyway.)
I saw someone on another board saying that the idea of rigid designation is wrapped up with the idea of essences, and he seemed to be saying that this was the case explicitly with Kripke. If so, that's going to be a problem for me because I don't buy the notion of essences beyond them being things that individuals contingently/subjectively require to bestow a particular name on something. There's certainly nothing generally rigid or necessary about that.
Re the rest, it would at least be nice if someone would present a case for how we'd know/why we'd believe that there are terms that designate the same object in all possible worlds in which that object exists and never designate anything else.
I'll just reread it from there.
In modal logic? You mean the thing Kripke invented? Yes I can see how his usage would be soooo outside of the standard usage of modal logic.
I don't quite know what you mean by "a strong adherence to the LOI is a route to hard determinism". LOI is just the application of a logical concept that says some x exists/obtains in different instances of time in which x is identical to itself in every instantation of x.
Here's another passage:
"Then, though we can imagine making a table out of another block of wood or even from ice, identical in appearance with this one, and though we could have put it in this very position in the room, it seems to me that this is not to imagine this table as made of wood or ice, but rather it is to imagine another table, resembling this one in all external details, made of another block of wood, or even of ice. These are only examples of essential properties." (And then in a footnote to that:) "Peter Geach has advocated (in Mental Acts, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1957, Section 16, and elsewhere) a notion of 'nominal essence' different from the type of essential property considered here."
And later: "If I understand Geach correctly, his nominal essence should be understood in terms of a prioricity, not necessity, and thus is quite different from the kind of essence advocated here"
"All the cases of the necessary a posteriori advocated in the text have the special character attributed to mathematical statements: Philosophical analysis tells us that they cannot be contingently true, so any empirical knowledge of their truth is automatically empirical knowledge that they are necessary. This characterization applies, in particular, to the cases of identity statements and of essence."
"The example I gave asserts a certain property-electoral victory-to be accidental to NIxon, independently of how he is described. Of course, if the notion of accidental property is meaningful, the notion of essential property must be meaningful also. This is not to say that there are any essential properties--though, in fact, I think there are. The usual argument questions the meaningfulness of essentialism, and says that whether a property is accidental or essential to an object depends on how it is described. It is thus not the view that all properties are accidental. Of course, it is also not the view, held by some idealists, that all properties are essential, all relations internal."
Kripke was important in the development of modal logic. He didn't invent it.
And he's one person. Again, one person doesn't make standard usage. Many people do.
Essential properties.. yes he did.
"There is a natural and initially attractive conception of inquiry according to which ignorance about a given subject is a matter of lacking information about which, of certain relevantly different possible states the world could be in, it is actually in; and complete ignorance is a condition in which one doesn’t know which, of all the possible states that the world could be in, it is actually in. According to this conception, when an agent is in this condition, (i) all metaphysically possible states of the world are epistemically possible— i.e., every way that the world could possibly be is a way that, for all the agent knows, it might actually be, and (ii) every epistemic possibility is a metaphysical possibility— i.e., every way that, for all the agent knows, the world might be is a way that the world really could be. Inquiry is the process of escaping from this position of ignorance. By investigating the world or relying on the testimony of others, the agent learns contingent truths that distinguish the way the world actually is from other ways it might possibly be, but isn’t. Each time the agent learns one of these truths, he narrows down the class of metaphysical/ epistemic possibilities compatible with what he knows, and within which he locates the way the world actually is. According to this conception, acquiring information is equated with narrowing down the range of metaphysically possible world-states that are compatible with what one knows. We may also speak of the truth of one proposition as providing information supporting the truth of another. On this conception, the truth of a proposition p provides information supporting the truth of a proposition q by ruling out certain possible ways in which q might fail to be true. Thus, the truth of p supports the truth of q only if the set of possible world-states with respect to which both p and the negation of q are true is non-empty. There are two immediate consequences of this conception of inquiry. The first is that necessary truths are uninformative. Since they are true with respect to all possible world-states, knowledge of them provides no information, and is irrelevant to locating the way the world actually is within the range of possible ways it might be. Second, there are no necessary truths which, though knowable, are knowable only aposteriori. To say that a proposition q is knowable only aposteriori is to say that one can have the justification required to know q only if one has empirical evidence supporting its truth. However, according to the conception of inquiry just sketched, this is impossible. In order for the truth of anyproposition p to support the truth of q, and hence to provide evidence for it, there must be possible world-states with respect to which q is untrue, which are ruled out by the truth of p. Since q is necessary, there are no possible world-states with respect to which it is untrue; hence there can be no evidence for q. This means that, on the conception of inquiry just sketched, there can be no necessary truths which, though knowable, are knowable only aposteriori. Although a number of philosophers have taken this conception of inquiry, and the consequences that follow from it, to be plausible and even axiomatic, the conception is directly challenged by the frame-work developed by Kripke in Naming and Necessity. 1 This challenge is illustrated by the following examples. 1. Gregory Soames is not identical with (i.e., is not the same individual as) Brian Soames. 2. If Saul Kripke exists, then Saul Kripke is a human being. 3. This table is not made out of clay. 4. If this table exists, then this table is made of molecules. It seems evident that each of these sentences expresses a proposition that is knowable only aposteriori, on the basis of some sort of empirical evidence. In the case of (1), one needs to find out who Gregory and Brian are, and to assure oneself that they are different. In the case of (2), if the question were ever raised as to whether Kripke was a sophisticated robot, or an alien sent from another world, one would need empirical evidence to rule out these possibilities— though, of course, given their fanciful nature, not much evidence would be required. A similar point is true of (3), the justification of which might be provided by a cursory examination of the table. In the case of (4), the evidence required to know the truth that it expresses is much greater, and more sophisticated. Still, since in all four cases empirical evidence is required to know the truths expressed, all four propositions are knowable only aposteriori. They are also necessary. In each case, the subject expression is a rigid designator— the names Gregory Soames and Saul Kripke, plus the demonstrative phrase this table. 2 Because of this, the sentences express necessary truths iff the properties they attribute to the referents of their subjects are essential properties— the properties of being non-identical with Brian Soames, of being human, of being not made out of clay, and of being made of molecules. These do seem to be essential properties; in fact they seem to be essential properties of anything that has them. For example, it is plausible to think that any individual who really is not the same individual as Brian Soames could not have existed while being the very same individual as Brian Soames. Because the name Brian Soames is itself a rigid designator, we can also make the point in another way: since the property of being non-identical is an essential property of any pair of things that have it, if two individuals (such as my two sons) really are non-identical, then there is no possible circumstance in which they are one and the same individual. Similar points hold for the other properties mentioned in these examples— anything that really is human could not have existed without being human, any object not made out of clay could not have existed while being (originally and entirely) made out of clay, and anything that really is made up of molecules could not have existed without being made up of molecules. Thus, sentences (1– 4) all express necessary truths. Since they are also knowable only aposteriori, they are examples of the necessary aposteriori. How can this be? How can a proposition that is necessary (and known to be necessary) be knowable only aposteriori? Kripke’s answer appeals to our knowledge of which properties are essential. He argues, quite plausibly, that we know apriori that properties like non-identity, being human, being not made out of clay, and being made out of molecules are essential properties of the things that have them. So we know apriori that if things have these properties, then they have them necessarily."
Soames, Scott. Philosophical Analysis in the Twentieth Century, Volume 2: The Age of Meaning (p. 374). Princeton University Press. Kindle Edition.
All I really get from that are that:
(1) The idea of rigid designation is hinging on some notion of essentialism after all,
(2) Soames is saying that "things are what they are" and "things are not what they are not" are necessary truths, which I have to say that I agree with insofar as that goes.
I still can't manage to square this with a workable support of the concept of rigid designation, because (2), which I agree with, isn't something that I can square very well with any idea of essentialism, and the whole thing seems to be ignoring that we're talking about people naming things, thinking of things referentially, etc.
I also don't agree that my (2) is sufficient for saying that the four numbered propositions he gives could somehow be necessary a posteriori. In other words, I agree that if something is made out of molecules then it's made out of molecules, but that doesn't amount to "If this table exists, then this table is made of molecules" being necessary (at least logically), or "This table is not made out of clay" being necessary metaphysically.
In a nutshell, though, rigid designation kind of rests on a claim that language must be used a particular way, and on my view, there are no true statements of that sort. There's no way that language must be used.
Yes. I have multiple graduate degrees in philosophy (as I also do in music theory/composition, although that part is irrelevant. ;-))
You want me to support someone else's thesis that I don't agree with by imagining possible arguments for it? (I could do that, but it just seems like an odd request.)
This also explains his attempt to distance himself from Geach in the long note on p. 155, where he explicitly distinguishes between Geach's 'nominal essence' which is marked by it's appeal to "a prioricity, not necessity, and thus is quite different from the kind of essence advocated here." Finally, he is explicit that 'essential properties' do not serve to pick out objects in either possible or actual worlds: "Some properties of an object may be essential to it, in that it could not have failed to have them. But these properties are not used to identify the object in another possible world, for such an identification is not needed. Nor need the essential properties of an object be the properties used to identify it in the actual world, if indeed it is identified in 'the actual world by means of properties". (p. 53).
I'm happy to maintain to to speak of essences in Kripke is basically playing with fire: what is 'essential' is not essence, but necessity. Essence, if and when it is employed, serves a rhetorical rather than conceptual role. Soames in any case seems to lean on the notion of an 'essential property' far more than Kripke himself, perhaps I think to mark a distinction from Quine's anti-essentialism. But Kripke's own emphasis is always laid not between essentialism and anti-essentialism, but between necessity and a prioricity, which captures the break from Quine in a far sharper - and more philosophically useful - manner. Too many readers of Kripke take essence as primary. This couldn't be a worse mistake.
Kripke didn't stray much from this meaning of essence. Your statement that he equated essence with necessity is simply not true. I attribute that comment to sloppy language. Typing on a phone maybe... as I am now.
Alrighty then.
Yet Kripke speaks a number of times throughout the text of essential vs accidental properties.
The use of the sitting U.S. President as a stock example of a proper name in AP goes back at least to Harry Truman, I think. Kripke's lectures use Nixon, for example. It's a really odd unspoken tradition, and you can tell what year range an article was written in by which president is referenced.
The problem is Kripke approach confuses the rigidity of designator for the thing. The two Obamas are not the same thing at all. They are two different people. No doubt people know what it means to be an "Obama," but there is not a single Obama in all possible worlds.
In any case, "Obama" refers to a specific person entirely themselves and unique to their world. They are always two different people altogether. Here "Obamaness" only signifies a similarity in meaning between two all together different people-- it is not actually a proper name and rigid designator.
Proper names are rigid designators, by they aren't defined by the presence of a property ("Obamaness")."Obama" is a precise designator of an individual in each case. There are two (or more) Obamas, each given in themselves, designated by their own "Obama," not several people who are the same thing defined by the property of "Obamaness."
The quote from Soames is very useful, thank you. My perennial difficulty with all these arguments is that I don't understand how the examples are examples of necessity. To take his four...There are Soames's known by different first names; there are Saul Kripke's that are pet rabbits as well as human beings; 'this table is made of clay' is an entirely contingent statement; the idea that a table is 'made' of molecules is contestable.
I know I have a great reluctance to accept the project of making natural language over into logical form. Perhaps I'll never get over it.
Or perhaps a light bulb is going to go on soon in a great room where all the wise people are gathered and I finally understand what you all mean? I do hope so. In the meantime I hope you'll all carry on part-enlightening me while talking to each other :)
In an important sense, this is true. Each proper name refers to one specific thing in any possible world. By using a name, we can talk about a thing in any world we might imagine. We can, for example, talk about the Mandarin speaking Obama in our own world. He might even converse with "our" Obama.
The issue is that it is frequently misread as a question of "essence." Instead of recognising each individual thing named in all possible worlds, people treat it as a question of a single thing with the same property in any world. Even you did this above. Supposedly, the property of "Obamaness" makes these those people same, as if anyone called "Obama" was the same person in any possible world, rather than altogether different people who happened to be named "Obama" or have some other similarity.
Why do you say that statement is contingently true?
As long as what is what they name the Earth?
It's not that hard people, rigid designation means the individual denoted is invariant over worlds of evaluation. That's it.
You're making this into something it's not. Yes, Kripke talks about essential properties. No, that's not going to help you understand what rigid designation is to begin with.
Really, you're all making this way more complicated than it has to be.
The point is that in imagining alternate scenarios we stipulate that it is he, not some other person or counterpart, that we are making alternate conjectures about. So it is stipulated that we are talking about him, but it isn't stipulated who he is or what it means to be identical to him.
It might be that if the alternate scenarios get too far afield from an individual's actual properties, we have trouble imagining how this could be the 'same' individual. But that just means we have trouble understanding how this individual could have such-and-such properties. This is easy to encode into the model theory with Kripke's machinery by limiting the possible worlds that exist in the model (which would effectively be a way of introducing essential properties). If you're uncomfortable with that, you could instead just say that modals are context-sensitive, and have changing accessibility relations, depending on how far we're willing to depart from actuality. A world that departs too far (say, by making Napoleon a horse) is logically possible, but for most intents and purposes will never be considered for counterfactual evaluation. That said, I personally don't see anything logically incoherent about any such stipulation, even if it's generally a weird thing to stipulate. 'If I were a horse, I'd be a racehorse,' and so on.
We might stipulate that, but the logic (or metaphysics) of identity might be such that such a stipulation is incoherent. I can stipulate that in some possible world triangles have four sides, or that the square root of 2 is a rational number, but then my stipulation is in error.
And I believe @andrewk's position is that the logic (or metaphysics) of identity is such that a counterfactual person sharing the identity of an actual person doesn't make sense.
This is vacuous. I might as well say that being a triangle is what a triangle does or being a bachelor is what a bachelor does or being a squiloople is what a squiloople does. Such claims don't really claim anything. A far more meaningful thing to say is that being a triangle is what three-sided shapes do or being a bachelor is what unmarried men do or being a squiloople isn't a meaningul state of affairs, being that "squiloople" doesn't mean anything.
I don't agree with Kripke on this, and his belief seems to stem from scientism that's at odds with ordinary usage. In ordinary usage 'water' likely denotes a qualitative kind not essentially bound to any chemical structure. In a context of chemistry in which we take ourselves to mean by 'water' some specific compound, that's different.
In other words, I don't in ordinary use see anything incoherent about supposing that water had a different chemical structure. But I do see something incoherent about supposing water is, say, qualitatively like zinc. That doesn't seem to make sense, since it would then lack the qualities that water has in virtue of being some qualitative kind.
Quoting Michael
The error is supposing that there is a such thing as 'an actual person' versus 'a counterfactual person.' This is so in some logics, like Lewis' counterpart logic, but the standard view is that there's simply individuals. There's no actual Obama and other Obama, such that we can ask 'are these two identical?' Rather there's just Obama – and we can ask of him, that one guy, what might have been if such-and-such.
Rid yourself of the notion of a 'counterfactual person.'
Quoting Michael
It might be, but I don't think it is. In the case of 'triangle,' this is a count noun, not a proper name, so it's different: I agree that properties are (albeit sometimes very loosely) essential for falling beneath the extension of a count noun. For example, I'd be hard pressed to suppose that something were a metal yet had no extension.
As for 2, it's not clear whether this is a sort of proper name or not. Suppose it is a proper name, and suppose it denotes a certain object, say the set {{}, {{}}}. Now, there's something about this set that makes its root irrational, and that'll hold regardless of what properties you assign to individuals in worlds. In other words, what varies from world to world in your model theory may be such that it is not modelable to have this set have a rational root relative to a world: the logic simply won't allow it.
You can do this for a human being too, if you want. But I just think it doesn't reflect ordinary language use – we don't think of people as having many essential properties, even if some properties may be more or less conversationally relevant. It doesn't even sound totally absurd to me to say something like, 'If I were the number 2...' It's a bit mystical, a bit Pythagorean, but OK, so what? That only shows that the only time such a supposition is going to be workable is if we're weird Pythagoreans. But, you say, a person can't be a number! True, but that's not the point, for then I can just say that I am not essentially a person.
The point is that individuals are treated as just being these sorts of pegs in ordinary language, for the non-logical cases. It's an interesting fact that we can do this in spite of metaphysical protestations to the contrary.
Yes, I think there's been a bit of a mix up between rigid designators and counterfactuals. We don't need the latter to make sense of the former. Even if we agree that counterfactuals make no sense, and that I cannot be anything other than exactly what I am now, the term "Michael" (when used to refer to me) refers always and only to me in whichever possible world we discuss; it'll just be that I don't exist in these (non-actual) possible worlds.
It's exactly because of rigid designators that @andrewk is able to say that no Mandarin-speaking person in any possible world is Obama.
So we talk about people as if they're just "referential pegs". But the question, then, is whether or not people are just such things. If they're not – if them being who they are is by virtue of certain (physical?) facts about them then our ordinary talk is in error, which is andrewk's position. And if they are, then it seems to be that them being who they are is a linguistic imposition (what else does it mean to say that they're "referential pegs"?).
But you seem to deny both of these, which is why I can't make much sense of your position.
This seems consistent with a fictionalist/quasi-realist interpretation. You just seem to be saying that we talk about individuals as if they're some abstract thing that can be separated from their actual properties. But the key thing about fictionalism/quasi-realism is that such talk is wrong (even incoherent), and I think that it's this that andrewk is addressing, claiming that individuals aren't some abstract thing that can be separated from their actual properties. So maybe you're just talking past each other?
And it's clearly not incoherent because everyone but andrewk understands it. His idiosyncratic philosophical commitments simply force him to reject it, but that's the worse for him.
In other words, if the logics designed to account for the most ordinary linguistic phenomena are at odds with what you think, there's a problem, insofar as you're interested in those phenomena and not metaphysical theorizing divorced from it.
If by 'individual' you mean what's in the model theory of modal logic, then that's a bit of formal machinery, and this formal object, if you like, is just a sort of peg. But in the 'real world' (the only world that there is), there's no such thing as a free-floating individual without properties – it's just that we model individuals separately from worlds in modal logic to reflect the fact that we cans suppose them to have different properties.
What makes some x invariant in all possible worlds is that that x is that x, implying the LOI.
The concept of some eternal essence that resides in a realm of immaterial forms is not something Kripke talked about. I'm not even sure how that came up. However, if I talk about Obama-the-person, it is not logically possible that the object I'm talking about is not a person. I'm not sure how much more obvious that could be.
This all depends on what sort of thing the term "I" refers to, i.e. the ontological nature of the self. If the self just is some set of concrete properties then nothing that doesn't have these properties can be coherently supposed to be you, even though you might (erroneously) claim otherwise. For counterfactuals to work it is required that the ontological nature of the self (or whatever thing is referred to by the rigid designator) isn't just as some set of concrete properties (that the counterfactual does away with). I don't see how this can be done without claiming that the ontological nature of the self (or whatever thing is referred to by the rigid designator) is as some abstract thing, and so to argue for either Platonism or for identity as a conceptual/linguistic imposition.
That we can suppose individuals to have different properties is the very thing that is being questioned. If individuals just are some set of concrete properties then we're not actually supposing them to have different properties; we're just considering something else entirely, and erroneously claiming these two different things to be in some respect the same thing.
Conversely, if we are actually supposing these individuals to have different properties, then being a particular individual is an abstract state-of-affairs, leading to either Platonism or anti-realism.
And it's a valid point. It's a decent philosophical topic. But Kripke was addressing the nature of inquiry. We build knowledge one verified proposition at a time. We're always sort of straddling the known and the unknown with the assumption that there's a logical relationship between the two. In this scenario, the known is the aposteriori necessity: necessary because I'm using it to narrow down possible worlds under consideration as I ponder what could be.
It's this pronged image that results in what would be a conundrum if we were involved in a metaphysical thesis. But it's not. The possible worlds we're considering are abstract objects.
The problem is that this is stated like a descriptive fact, and the fact in question is an empirical fact--what makes it true or false is what people use "Michael" to refer to.
As long as people name it "Earth" then that's what we're talking about in terms of names/designators.
What I am telling you is that counterfactuals do work, and in this way, Q.E.D. Your other option is massive error theory or linguistic revisionism, or an adoption of an alternate framework like counterpart theory.
I think I've already explained this, and I'm not sure what you mean. Obviously 'I' refers to the speaker, who is generally a person. A person is concrete, not abstract. Identity isn't a linguistic imposition – someone's self-identical just by being whoever they are. Nor is there any Platonism involved. It's just that a person can be supposed to be other than what they actually are, and this is modeled in modal logic by having the domain of individuals and the set of worlds that assign them properties distinct.
Jeez.
You answered that by saying that contingency speech isn't about an alternate Nixon. It's about Nixon.
First of all, the point Andrewk made (sans the crap about processes) is one that Spinoza and Leibniz would agree with. Schopenhauer would agree with it, so it's not straight from the loony bin. Does pondering that get us any closer to understanding Kripke? No.
It appears to me that you're doing the same thing on the other side. You seem to be insisting that all possibility is logical possibility. You also seem to want to say that we can't pick objects out by specific properties (and by way of this, identify essential properties). We do it all the time, so aren't you revising language use if you insist on this?
Kripke wanted to separate logical possibility from epistemic possibility (something his forebears didn't want to do). That and the rigid designator are the tools he thought he needed to establish that there can be informative necessary truths. Did he succeed?
This was just my point. Hence the revisionism, insofar as 'contingency speech' is an ordinary feature of language as revealed through counterfactuals. Andrewk is poised to reject an entire grammatical construction as literally nonsensical.
My answer to "To whom does the name 'Richard Nixon' refer" is: To whomever (or whatever) the person using the name "Richard Nixon" on a particular occasion has in mind as the extension of the term.
A simpler, better answer: "Richard Nixon" refers to Richard Nixon.
That's not a better answer, as (a) it doesn't address that the answer depends on who is using the term in a particular occaasion, and (b) depending on what the quote-free Richard Nixon refers to to you, your answer could very well be wrong with respect to a particular utterance of "Richard Nixon."
Because it doesn't matter. It always refers to Richard Nixon.
Quoting Terrapin Station
Words don't refer to someone 'to me.' They have conventional referents.
True. And you're doing the same thing with different biases. I'm not saying there is any unbiased approach, but noting that we're all doing it might reveal to us that we're not talking about freakin' rigid designators. We're talking about our ontological preferences.
Perhaps I misunderstood what you were saying about identifying essential properties. It appeared that you were saying that there's some nonsense there.
The individual is to his properties as a building is to its bricks.
If when we refer to a building we're referring to its bricks then to suggest that that building might have been constructed from different bricks is to suggest that those bricks might have been different bricks. But then it doesn't make sense to claim that they're the same bricks.
Alternatively, when we refer to a building we're not referring to its bricks. But then what is the ontological nature of the building? Concrete or abstract? Realist or anti-realist?
Very funny. Of course it matters. That's what extension [i]is--what someone has in mind as the extension of a term.
[/i]Quoting The Great Whatever
Yes they do. All that "conventional" is is the fact that a lot of people have the "same" thing in mind with a reference. It's a lot of "to mes"--it's to Betty and Joe and Frank and Gina and everyone who happens to have that thing in mind on a particular occasion.
Quoting Michael
This doesn't seem right to me. You can suppose a building were made of different bricks just fine without assuming that the bricks themselves were different (perhaps they were used for the construction of yet another building).
Then individuals are just elements of some logical model, which makes them an abstract thing. So either Platonism or anti-realism.
Then the term "building" here doesn't refer to its bricks. Which means it refers to something other than those bricks. So is this other thing concrete or abstract? If the latter than Platonic or conceptual?
Something's extension is what someone has in mind as its extension? Why is it not just its extension? Clearly I can't give a speech and use 'Richard Nixon' to refer to Dwight Eisenhower. When everyone inevitably tells me I'm using the wrong name, I can't protest and say I wasn't, because I meant to refer to Nixon, making everyone in the audience wrong and not me.
Quoting Terrapin Station
'Richard Nixon' refers to Richard Nixon. Not to whoever you want it to refer to. I can't make sense of saying something like, "to me 'Richard Nixon' refers to Dwight Eisenhower." How can something refer to someone 'to me?' It just refers to whatever it refers to by linguistic convention. What you're proposing isn't a convention at all, but individual whim, which is very different.
Yes.
Quoting The Great Whatever
What extension is is what they have in mind. There's no "just its extension" aside from that.
Quoting The Great Whatever
You could have anything conceivable in mind with the terms you use, including what other people would name "Dwight Eisenhower" instead. And people will assign their own meanings to the terms you use--as they must, since meaning is inherently mental/subjective/private.
Quoting The Great Whatever
Your speech might be not understandable to others. And that could be because you have something very unusual in mind with the terms you're using. You can't be using them incorrectly (or correctly). You could be using them unconventionally though. When people can't understand you, then usually they spend some time trying to ferret out just how you might be using terms in an unusual way. This certainly happens, and it happens fairly frequently.
Quoting The Great Whatever
The only way that anything refers to anything is by an individual thinking about it in a particular way. And an individual can think about it any conceivable way. Again, this is all that reference is. If you posit it as something else, well, then you've how language works factually wrong.
Quoting The Great Whatever
Again, that's what reference is. What an individual has in mind (extensionally) by a term.
Individuals as formal objects in models. So we have two separate notions of an individual. We have the ontological individual, which just is the concrete thing (e.g. a collection of bricks), and the formal object, which is a conceptual/linguistic imposition (unless you're a Platonist about these models).
Is that a reasonable response? Or is it stupid?
Also, the formal object doesn't need to be a linguistic imposition. It could be an M&M if you want. You could say, let this blue M&M stand in for / model Barack Obama.
Well, andrewk's position seems to be that when we talk about Obama we're not talking about a formal object, but the actual person. So that the formal object Obama can coherently be supposed to have different properties is not that the actual Obama can coherently be supposed to have different properties.
Well, I agree. Of course when we're talking about Obama we're talking about Obama.
And of course the actual Obama can be supposed to have different properties. We do it all the time.
So now we're back to the issue of the building and its bricks. If when we're referring to the building we're not referring to its bricks then what is the building? A formal object?
A building is lots of things. It's a physical object with certain physical constituents, but also a socially delineated area that can survive a change of its material parts (perhaps within reason). Where exactly the boundary is drawn is perhaps not clear, but the fringe cases don't make the obvious ones less intelligible. I submit that we all know what a building is.
So is the difference between the building and its bricks a concrete difference or an abstract difference? Is the difference the sort of thing that obtains in the absence of us thinking and talking about it in a certain way, or is the difference a conceptual/linguistic imposition?
A building is also a chunk of material, but one that has to fit certain minimal requirements of shape that make it possible to enter it and distinguish it from an outside, and also which possible fits in a larger social configuration allowing it to be something that's conventionally entered into.
I think it's sensible to say that a naturally occurring structure that's not a building might become one even without redesign if people began to inhabit it. I don't think that means it's a conceptual or linguistic distinction, it just means unsurprisingly that social facts about the world and how people behave can change things.
So in what sense are two physically different things the same thing? Obviously they're not physically the same thing. If it isn't a concrete identity then I suppose it must be an abstract identity? Which either means a conceptually-imposed identity or a Platonic identity. And which also means we're talking about the thing as a formal model, and it is only with this that the counterfactual claim makes sense (else we're suggesting that the bricks are different bricks but still the same bricks).
What is it exactly we are talking about when we refer to the Earth?
What is so hard to understand about that?
Does the formal identity 'Obama' signify a totality of processes from birth to death, or the entity that undergoes these processes?
That doesn't explain in what sense two physically different things are the same thing. Are they the same in a concrete sense or an abstract sense?
How about, a functional or social sense?
Is the building not formally the same, but actually different? Of course in order to be able to say that the building is actually different we must say that it is formally the same.
There is a concrete difference between the building in the morning and the building in the evening. So what does it mean to say that it's the same building? It isn't physically identical, so it being the exact same building must be some abstract fact.
I wasn't thinking of Aristotle. When we say the building is now different because a brick has been replaced by another, isn't it the case that we can only say that insofar as are referring to the same building? Because it wouldn't make any sense, or would be at least redundant, to say that the different building is now different. I thought I was agreeing with you, from a slightly different angle, not disagreeing.
Obviously it's insane to insist that any object can only remain the same so long as it remains physically the same in every respect. What's relevant to its identity can stay the same even if peripheral things are changed.
So in the first place, your contention is misleading, because if we say, for example, that a piece of jade isn't identical physically from morning to evening, and therefore it can't be the same piece of jade unless abstractly, this is wrong insofar as the physical aspects of it relevant to its identity, including its composition and gross physical integrity, are identical.
And in the second place, there is no reason to insist that all differences are either those of minute physical arrangement or abstract.
What are the other options?
It's not insane to insist that any object can only remain physically the same so long as it remains physically the same in every respect. If there's a non-physical sense of sameness, such that two physically different things are the same, then what is it?
You've claimed that no concrete properties are a necessary part of a thing's identity.
What else is there?
It can retain a functional identity, a physical identity more loosely grained than identical in every respect, a social identity, etc.
Quoting Michael
Sure it's insane. Such a view would be committed to saying you can't dent a chair without making the chair stop existing, which is an insane conclusion.
Why would you even think that identity of a thing depended on exact physical identity in every respect? Nobody talks about identity in this way.
I think you misread. I said "It's not insane to insist that any object can only remain physically the same so long as it remains physically the same in every respect."
So we can't make counterfactual claims about a thing's function or social identity? These are the necessary concrete properties?
It's still insane though. As if the only relevant criterion for remaining the same is exactly the same in every respect.
Quoting Michael
We're not talking about names anymore, but count nouns like 'building,' which don't denote individuals but properties.
It's not insane. It's a tautology. If a thing isn't physically the same then it isn't physically the same.
Then let's use "the White House" as an example rather than just "building".
And with that in mind, coupled with your accusation of insanity, let's address the fact that your position leads you to accept the sensibility of "my mother could have given birth to the White House".
I would say that Obama is a name we give to a process that at least encompasses birth to death. Like most human concepts, it has fuzzy boundaries, so in some contexts we may want to extend the domain of reference to include times before or after death - eg a foetus, an embryo, maybe even a parent's sperm or ovum and, at the other end, a corpse, a skeleton or ashes.
When we talk about imagining Obama speaking Mandarin, I would explain that as the activity of visualising a world in which there is a POTUS and that POTUS is exactly like Obama except that he speaks Mandarin.
The objection from the Kripke side seems to be that what we visualise is 'the Obama', not a POTUS almost identical to Obama. My response to that is
'what's the difference?'
What experiment could you do to determine whether the being you visualise is 'the Obama' or just almost identical to him? If there is no such experiment (and I believe there is not) then there's nothing to argue about. The Kripkeans can say that what I am visualising is the Obama, and I can say that I am visualising somebody almost exactly like Obama, and the difference is only the words we choose to use. It's like asking whether Swampman is the 'same person' as the one that got hit by lightning. It is or isn't depending solely on which way you want to define it. The difference is just the choice of words.
Nor is there any point in appealing to common, non-philosophical usage in this matter, because non-philosophers don't trouble themselves with such distinctions. In my experience, they would be perfectly happy with either form of words.
Kripke appears to define Obama to be the actual Obama process in this world, together with all counterfactual and contingent-future visualisations of Obama. By contrast, I define Obama to be solely the actual Obama process in this world (I haven't yet worked out whether it can make sense to me to include contingent-future visualisations. I'm still mulling that over). Hence Kripke's Obama can possibly speak Mandarin, and mine cannot, because it is an Obama-like entity that possibly speaks Mandarin. But the difference is only words. There is no difference of substance.
So Kripke and I can agree that the rigid designator 'Obama' refer to the same ensemble of actual and visualised entities. We just categorise those entities differently.
Nevertheless, I am left wondering:
(1) What problem does Kripke think he is solving by introducing the rigid designator concept, that is not adequately covered by Wittgenstein and/or Russell (subject to minor adaptations for unusual cases they did not consider)?
(2) Under Kripke's approach, it seems possible, on a formal basis, to imagine that Obama is a mountain. I don't know how that can mean anything without having to sign up to essentialism boots and all.
Way to go TGW. You've got people believing that Kripke was an idiot.
Well... on a formal basis, we can imagine an Obama as a mountain. For any Obama, we might pose that they turned into mountian or suggest they were always a mountain. Any of these positions is a possible state of the world. Rather than idiotic, it's correct.
Kripke sort of denies this though, for he treats any named entity as a state with necessary properties. To suggest Obama might be a mountian would be incohrent to him, because it would break the rule that Obama necessarily had a human body. Kripke's problem is he more or less mistakes the actual for formal-- Obama has a human body, he doesn't necessarily have a human body. Kripke claims the later.
I know, but that's also the problem: he treats reference as if it has nothing to do with the actual world. As the only consideration was the formal reference someone has imagined (e.g. I'm talking about Obama who necessarily has a human body.).
Descriptivism is wrong. Reference isn't defined by describing some property of a thing in the world. Mountain Obama is a testament to that-- if I suggest that possible state is true, I'm certainly not describing who I'm referring to.
But this doesn't mean the actual world becomes entirely irrelevant. What I'm referring to is actual in some world, a state of existence which may change or be different to what I think it is in countless ways. I can't just take an idea about what I'm referencing and proclaim it's necessarily true.
No. "Same" does not have to mean "exactly the same in every respect."
Quoting Michael
Then yes, you can say "what if the White House were blah blah blah," including something other than a building.
The difference is the two have different truth conditions. For example, what you say is truth condition of the counterfactual could be fulfilled by supposing that some impostor heard about Obama, was jealous of his political power, so took on his name and killed him to take his place, all while knowing Mandarin. This is the sort of scenario that verifies an individual like B.O. who is president, has the same name, etc. speaks Mandarin. But it's not a scenario in which Obama speaks Mandarin; it's one in which his impostor does.
Quoting andrewk
You can't 'define Obama.' He's a real-live person that already exists how he does.
Quoting andrewk
Proper names are rigid designators, so to treat them as such gives them a correct semantics. I've already explained in detail how the truth conditions of non-rigid designators like definite descriptions differs from that of rigid designators in all sorts of modal contexts.
Honestly, just read the fucking book, it's really short and easy. Read the modal, espitemological, and semantic arguments in Naming and Necessity.
Not to be rude but it's genuinely frustrating that people would rather argue ad nauseum about stupid shit rather than actually go to the source of what they're arguing about where all of this is laid out clearly, and have their misunderstandings be dispelled in a couple hours of reading.
If you want to know "what problem Kripke thinks he is solving," if you really want to know, read the goddamn book and stop speculating about something you can easily research yourself.
Quoting andrewk
Kripke himself would deny this, but this is an additional consideration not inherently tied to the notion of rigid designation. I'm just saying I disagree with Kripke on this point, and we can indeed imagine Obama is a mountain. If you can't, well I'm sorry, you have a worse imagination than the pages of a children's picture book.
I agree that in that situation Obama does not speak Mandarin. That's because the real Obama in that imaginary scenario is the one that was killed, and that one does not speak Mandarin. As I understand it, for Kripke as well as for me, there can only be one process in any visualisation that corresponds to a given rigid designator. In the situation you have described, that process is the person that was killed by the impostor. So on my interpretation, as in Kripke's, the impostor is not Obama.
So that scenario fails to differentiate between the two forms of words, as they both lead to the same conclusion.
The point is that your view cannot say this, because as you've just gone through explaining, you cannot tell the difference between these two scenarios. So this:
Quoting andrewk
Is wrong. You have no criterion by which to say which of the two is Obama, because you've stipulated that stipulating such a thing is impossible.
There is only one scenario - lookalike impostor murders American presidential candidate named Barack Obama with Kenyan father, takes his place, and nobody notices. There are two ways of describing it - Kripke's and mine. You seem to be claiming that there is a difference - other than choice of words - implied by the two descriptions of the single scenario. You have not explained what that difference is.
Quoting The Great Whatever
I don't need to say which is Obama because in my description, we only talk about which one is like our world's Obama in almost every respect, and that one is the murder victim.
What practical difference is there between Kripke's and my descriptions of this scenario?
But they're both like Obama in most relevant respects. Just change the scenario however you want.
You can say it, but you're speaking nonsense.
So are you saying that in some respect it's the same building but in some other respect it's a different building?
1. You have an axe. After some time you replace the head. After some more time you replace the handle. Do you have the same axe you started with?
2. We each have an axe. After some time, I replace the head of my axe with the head of your axe and you replace the head of your axe with the head of my axe. After some more time I replace the handle of my axe with the handle of your axe and you replace the handle of your axe with the handle of my axe. Do you have the same axe you started with?
3. We each have an axe. After some time, I replace the head and handle of my axe with the head and handle of your axe and you replace the head and handle of your axe with the head and handle of my axe. Do you have the same axe you started with?
4. We each have an axe. After some time, I give you my axe and you give me your axe. Do you have the same axe you started with?
1 and 2 seem identical. 2 and 3 seem identical. 3 and 4 seem identical. Therefore 1 and 4 seem identical. At least when it comes to the physics of the scenarios. The only difference seems to be in the way they're phrased. So if the answer to 1 is "yes" and the answer to 4 is "no" then whether or not it's the same axe is determined by linguistic/conceptual factors, and so being the same axe is a linguistic/conceptual imposition.
Of course, you can avoid this by answering "no" to 1 as well, and argue that being the same axe depends on being made of the exact same physical stuff, but then you can't make counterfactual claims about the physical constitution of that axe (as anything made of something else necessarily isn't that axe).
In my view there are two issues here:
(1) whether something, independent of how we think about it, is literally the same a la logical identity/identity of indiscernibles/A=A identity.
(2) whether per individuals' conceptual abstractions, they consider something "the same x."
That makes these Ship of Theseus issues quite simple/straightforward and not at all perplexing.
Per (1), as soon as anything about x has changed, and on my view even as soon as any time has passed, x is not literally the same x.
Per (2), it's just a matter of what someone requires, with respect to their conceptual abstractions, a la necessary and sufficient criteria, and relative to their knowledge/awareness of changes, to call the thing in question "the same x."
So the answer to whether something is the same x, a la (2), can vary per individual, and there are no correct or incorrect answers in that regard, as what they're telling us is something about what their particular conceptual abstractions are, in conjunction with telling us something about their knowledge/awareness of changes.
The thread has moved on a lot and I don't have enough time to keep up with such a fast-paced exchange.
But, going back, forgive me if this is the sort of point that means I just don't understand, I do think there is some illumination missing for me. 'This table is made of clay.' To me that is contingent upon who is speaking, in what location, when, and what contextually they mean by 'clay', which has a rather imprecise meaning to it. So what is necessary about it?
I see that the end-point is attempting to arrive at a logical formulation that expresses natural language as if it were an expression in modal logic. 'There is something and it's a table and it's one and only (one table and it's in a certain location) and it's made of clay,' with the addition of the word 'necessarily' in there somewhere which has a relation to 'in all possible worlds'. I've just not grasped that this makes sense. I can see in my mind's eye the symbolic logic that's its purported counterpart and I'm happy manipulating that; I don't grasp how that happens in the flow of natural language.
I'm with you on all of that, mcdoodle.
And I also think that we never fail to make big boo-boos when we attempt to conflate logic and natural language. That's also the problem with, for example, the Gettier objections to knowledge as justified true belief--the objections hinge on a conflation of logic with natural language and how people actually think about things.
This is why Logic 101 profs will always hammer on not trying to see formal logic as analogous to natural languages . . . it's one of those wise pieces of advice that folks tend to forget.
Well, blimey :)
I think it would have to be truth-apt before it could be necessarily true. We would have to know what table the statement is about.
Clearly not, since in due time the White House might become something other than a building due to gradual changes. Yet it would still have the continuity of a single individual. I'm not speaking nonsense; you lack imagination.
Quoting Michael
All uses of "same" mean "same in some respect." That's how the word is actually used.
I was referring to the claim that in some hypothetical situation my mother could have given birth to the White House. It's nonsense.
Quoting The Great Whatever
So you agree that in some respect it's not the same building?
And we do use the word "same" to refer to something being the same in every respect. For example, my father and my brother's father are the same person.
How exactly is that nonsense?
Quoting Michael
No, here you used "person" as a sortal. We might say, for example, that Bruce Wayne and Terry McGinnis are the same superhero (Batman), but not the same person. Or we might say that conjoined twins at certain points are the same body but not the same person.
Sortals usually have to do with essences and counting. I'm not sure how his usage of "person" amounts to either.
He's simply saying that two different designations in this case refer to something logically identical, a la Hesperus and Phosphorus. "Same" is often used to denote logical identity, not just aspects of something but that two different designations refer to "one and the same thing," logically identical in every aspect, at least extensionally.
So. I am not too sure about Kripke, but I would not define Obama as the Obama process at all but as the one who undergoes the process and is fully present at every stage of the process as the entity that undergoes it.
Rigid designators are about the criticism of the theory of descriptions. "Aristotle is the author of Metaphysics" is contingent. Aristotle could not have written Metaphysics. This implies that descriptions might not be the contents of names. "Aristotle is Aristotle" is necessary. Aristotle could not have failed to be Aristotle himself. This implies that the contents of names are the referents themselves.
The title of the book written by Kripke is 'Naming and Necessity'. It's about naming and necessity. Suppose that I name someone as 'Fred'. Then, subsequent uses of the name by me continuously refer to the same person in every possible world. The first is naming, and the second is necessity.
The question is what is this 'the one' to which the sentence refers. It sounds like the elusive 'persistent self'. Hume searched but couldn't find it. Nagarjuna denied it existed. I find myself currently persuaded by their arguments, so to me the definition of a person as a process is far more intuitive and less problematic than as a metaphysical object called a self.
I agree though that for somebody whose metaphysics does include a notion of a persistent self - a 'soul' perhaps - it would make sense to define a person that way.
I agree with that, hence why I view RDs simply as signifiers or signposts in terms of law of identity (LOI) claims like "Aristotle is Aristotle".
Quoting mosesquine
I don't think so. The "content of names" is different than the referent of names. In my view, the content of a name is just the connotations one assigns to a name. A name is not identical with a referent or external object (and a name doesn't have to refer to any external object either in order to be a name: it can just have connotations about the formal structure of the symbols that make up a name, for instance. The name "Rhonda" or "thc$^&gian", for example, can be used just as a visual and/or auditory image unto which I assign a colour, a type of sound, a texture, and so on. In that sense, the name "Rhonda" both holds said connotations and is the referent of those connotations, i.e. it's self-referential as a symbol that doesn't refer to objects external to my thinking about the name "Rhonda" or "thc$^&gian").
Quoting mosesquine
Again, I generally agree that that's all RDs seem to be doing: people using proper names to posit LOI claims relative to non-LOI claims. And you could change the name "Fred" to "Jo" to refer to the same person, with both "Fred" and "Jo" either having the "same" connotations or different connotations. So "Fred" and "Jo" and any other name you use to refer to the "same" person are useful signifiers or signposts that imply the LOI.
Which is a good motivation--I've always felt that the theory of descriptions was ridiculous, but unfortunately, rigid designators are no better.
Quoting mosesquine
I'd say that's metaphysically necessary, but there's nothing necessary about it linguistically.
Quoting mosesquine
There's nothing necessary about that, though. It's a contingent matter whether you continue to use the name a particular way.
Obviously the scenarios are not physically the same, since there's more to physicality than the material components making something up – there is also how they are exchanged, their origin and dissolution, and their causal histories. Aside form this, there is more to differentiating one thing from another than its physical instantiation, unless we construe the latter so widely as to rob it of significance. There are social an conventional facts as well. And of course, the notion that linguistic and physical (in the crude sense of 'material makeup'; but apparently being in a different place doesn't count as a physical difference? Is there no physical difference in a chemical reaction, whose parts are the same before and afterward, but rearranged?) changes exhaust the possibilities is also ridiculous.
Finally, the notion that this hinges on the way it's 'phrased' is just plain wrong: the reason your situations are phrased differently is because they describe different situations, on a plausible reading: no one competent in English would at first blush imagine an identical scenario reading read 1 and 4.
Sorry Michael, I think this just sucks. Not that your posts usually do.