Banno

Perhaps it will help to say that part of Kripke's purpose is to oppose the reification (making real) of modal proposals. They are suppositions, not al...

Not too bad for a silly question.

I find that a bit perplexing. To be clear, this thread is about Kripke, and I do not agree with Kripke's theory of reference. My own view is that refe...

"could".

And yet the folk in my question example, who do not have access to a suitable definite description, ask about Nixon. Seems to me a falsification of th...

Why?

Well, I don't agree. Take a look at 's post. While there are those who say that existence in possible worlds must be treated in the same way as existe...

I asked before what it means for a counterfactual to obtain - to be true? Not "Banno had bacon" But "Banno might have had bacon". The "had bacon" bit ...

Interesting - indeed, fascinating. I had taken sentence as a grammatically correct concatenation of words. Now you say there is more to it.

Nice.

Well, I disagree. And perhaps the reasons will become clearer as we proceed through the book. But for now, will you agree that one can use a name desp...

Yes. So if they ask "What is 'Nixon'", the answer is "a word". If they ask "What is Nixon", the answer is "A president".

Perhaps; but they refer to Nixon without the benefit of a definite description, in order to ask who Nixon is.

Suppose they do know Nixon is a person. That is not a definite description. Thay ask "Who is Nixon?"; isn't their question about Nixon?

One is a word, the other a person.

So... Their question was about Nixon.

SO they are asking you how to use the word "Nixon". Ok, what is your answer?

OK; "What is Nixon?" Still about Nixon.

Neat. Any background on this? Other examples?

I don't see an argument pushing in this direction in the first lecture. Are you jumping ahead?

Not too shabby. I'm impressed by your brevity.

Indeed he was.

Only proper names are rigid designators.

SO let's have a look: Suppose Nixon had had grey eyes. No problem? So the sentence "Suppose Nixon had had grey eyes" is about Nixon. Suppose Nixon had...

I wonder, could someone still use the name "Nixon", despite not knowing anything about him? It just seems to me that if someone overheard you using th...

A child can play "duck, duck goose" well before they could articulate the rules. Again, it is worth noting the distinction between explicating the rul...

Sure. But there is more here. The tale will grow in the telling. The thrust is that there are ways to understand rules apart from listing them.

Cool. Looks good. But is this an observation, so that it just so happens that all sentences have a subject; or is it a definition, as in, if it doesn'...

Does every sentence have to have a subject?

32. Augustin's description was "as if the child could already think, only not yet speak". Wittgenstein damming the notion of a private language.

Consider the OP.

Yes, and I think the answer to the area of squares will have to come from a bit of algebra. But it feels like cheating. SO I might broaden my point to...

Yep. Best toy ever. But I'm stuck on Eta1: sum of the area of two squares. Now I know there is a simple way of seeing the answer, but my intuition or ...

Euclidea.

Pfff. Do some of the work for yourself. Consider it homework.

Next comes Creative's summation of Lecture One.

Nuh. Epistemology. But arguing in this way is misguided since there is considerable (understatement) overlap.

If you are saying that chats involving modality are different to chats that do not involve modality, then, yes, they are. They are modal.

So? What do you mean by "obtain"?

See, this fills me with dread. If "Banno" is a rigid designator - which it is - then it refers to Banno in any possible world in which Banno exists. S...

What? The sentence is about Banno and eggs and cornflakes. What referential component has a problem?

Yes.

SO I'm going to invite you to re-think that post, and get back to me.

But hang on - the referent is Banno. that's what is referred to by the rigid designator "Banno". I find myself asking at what stage I conclude that yo...

In what way is the proposed conversation without a sense? It is about me, my cornflakes, and the eggs I didn't eat. The meaning seems to me to be pret...

Calling it a world seems to cause so much grief. It comes from the practice in formal logic of calling a given set of objects used in an interpretatio...

Give me time! I'm only doing this in order to procrastinate.

No. Look again at "What if Banno had eggs instead of cornflakes this morning?" The stipulation is "Banno had eggs"; this, not a law of nature or a puf...

Yes.

off you go then.