Kripke E-Book

John P. Burgess

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: Key Contemporary Thinkers
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 450

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

Saul Kripke has been a major influence on analytic philosophy and allied fields for a half-century and more. His early masterpiece, Naming and Necessity, reversed the pattern of two centuries of philosophizing about the necessary and the contingent. Although much of his work remains unpublished, several major essays have now appeared in print, most recently in his long-awaited collection Philosophical Troubles.

In this book Kripke’s long-time colleague, the logician and philosopher John P. Burgess, offers a thorough and self-contained guide to all of Kripke’s published books and his most important philosophical papers, old and new. It also provides an authoritative but non-technical account of Kripke’s influential contributions to the study of modal logic and logical paradoxes. Although Kripke has been anything but a system-builder, Burgess expertly uncovers the connections between different parts of his oeuvre. Kripke is shown grappling, often in opposition to existing traditions, with mysteries surrounding the nature of necessity, rule-following, and the conscious mind, as well as with intricate and intriguing puzzles about identity, belief and self-reference. Clearly contextualizing the full range of Kripke’s work, Burgess outlines, summarizes and surveys the issues raised by each of the philosopher’s major publications. 

Kripke will be essential reading for anyone interested in the work of one of analytic philosophy’s greatest living thinkers.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Cover

Key Contemporary Thinkers

Title page

Copyright page

Preface

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Background

Plan

1 Naming

Mill vs Frege

Error and Ignorance

Metalinguistic Theories

The Historical Chain Picture

Reference vs Attribution

2 Identity

Modal Logic and its Archenemy

Rigidity

The Necessity of Identity

Resistance

The Contingent a Priori

3 Necessity

Imagination and the Necessary a Posteriori

Natural Substances

Natural Kinds

Natural Phenomena and Natural Law

The Mystery of Modality

4 Belief

Direct Reference

Puzzling Pierre

Poles Apart

Counterfactual Attitudes

Empty Names

5 Rules

Conventionalism

Kripkenstein

The Analogy with Hume

The Skeptical Paradox

The Skeptical Solution

6 Mind

Physicalism

Functionalism

Against Functionalism

Against Physicalism

The Mystery of Mentality

Appendix A: Models

The Logic of Modality

Kripke Models

The Curse of the Barcan Formulas

Controversy and Confusion

Appendix B: Truth

Paradox and Pathology

Kripke vs Tarski

Fixed Points

The Intuitive Notion of Truth

Bibliography

Index

Key Contemporary Thinkers

Published:

Jeremy Ahearne, Michel de Certeau

Peter Burke, The French Historical Revolution: The Annales School 1929–1989

Michael Caesar, Umberto Eco

M. J. Cain, Fodor

Filipe Carreira da Silva, G. H. Mead

Rosemary Cowan, Cornel West

George Crowder, Isaiah Berlin

Gareth Dale, Karl Polanyi

Oliver Davis, Rancière

Maximilian de Gaynesford, John McDowell

Reidar Andreas Due, Deleuze

Eric Dunning, Norbert Elias

Matthew Elton, Daniel Dennett

Chris Fleming, Rene Girard

Edward Fullbrook and Kate Fullbrook, Simone de Beauvoir

Andrew Gamble, Hayek

Neil Gascoigne, Richard Rorty

Nigel Gibson, Fanon

Graeme Gilloch, Walter Benjamin

Karen Green, Dummett

Espen Hammer, Stanley Cavell

Christina Howells, Derrida

Fred Inglis, Clifford Geertz

Simon Jarvis, Adorno

Sarah Kay, Žižek

S. K. Keltner, Kristeva

Valerie Kennedy, Edward Said

Chandran Kukathas and Philip Pettit, Rawls

Moya Lloyd, Judith Butler

James McGilvray, Chomsky

Lois McNay, Foucault

Dermot Moran, Edmund Husserl

Michael Moriarty, Roland Barthes

Stephen Morton, Gayatri Spivak

Harold W. Noonan, Frege

James O’Shea, Wilfrid Sellars

William Outhwaite, Habermas, 2nd Edition

Kari Palonen, Quentin Skinner

Herman Paul, Hayden White

Ed Pluth, Badiou

John Preston, Feyerabend

Chris Rojek, Stuart Hall

William Scheuerman, Morgenthau

Severin Schroeder, Wittgenstein

Susan Sellers, Hélène Cixous

Wes Sharrock and Rupert Read, Kuhn

David Silverman, Harvey Sacks

Dennis Smith, Zygmunt Bauman

James Smith, Terry Eagleton

Nicholas H. Smith, Charles Taylor

Felix Stalder, Manuel Castells

Geoffrey Stokes, Popper

Georgia Warnke, Gadamer

James Williams, Lyotard

Jonathan Wolff, Robert Nozick

Copyright  John Burgess 2013

The right of John P. Burgess to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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Preface

Saul Kripke has been for a half-century and more a major influence in philosophy and allied fields, despite the fact that only a fraction of his work has ever seen print. Recently the pace of publication has picked up a bit, and commentaries based on authorized access to parts of the extensive archives of unpublished Kripkeana have also begun to appear. I have nevertheless thought it best, in an introductory survey, to concentrate on a handful of works, beginning with his major classic Naming and Necessity and his minor classic ‘A Puzzle about Belief,’ that have been before the public for decades, and have by now already long proved immensely influential. Coverage is pretty strictly confined to work in philosophy proper as contrasted with history of philosophy. The famous or notorious Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language is therefore examined only for what it tells us about Kripke’s own views, to the exclusion of all controversial issues of Wittgenstein exegesis. I take into account lesser works, from the long-published ‘Speaker’s Reference and Semantic Reference’ to the just recently released ‘Vacuous Names and Fictional Entities,’ to the extent that they in one way or another illuminate or amplify the views developed in the Kripke’s best-known philosophical works.

Kripke has been as important a contributor to logic as to philosophy, or very nearly so. Moreover, his influence in fields outside philosophy, notably theoretical computer science and linguistics, has to a considerable degree been through his work in logic. An account of Kripke’s thought omitting his technical contributions to logic can give only a partial indication of why he ranks as high as he does among key contemporary thinkers. But a volume in the present series is simply not the appropriate place for a survey of Kripke’s technical papers. I do discuss – not in the body of the text, but in two appendices, the only places in the book where logical symbols appear – the two items among Kripke’s logical works that are most directly relevant to philosophy, his ‘Semantical Considerations on Modal Logic’ and his ‘Outline of a Theory of Truth.’ Those papers are themselves only semitechnical, and my account is semipopular.

At the beginning of each chapter I give a list of the works of Kripke most relevant thereto; ideally these should be read immediately after the chapter itself. Unpublished works of Kripke, to which most readers would have no access, are not discussed in detail, but only mentioned in notes at points where they would be relevant, with citations of publications where one can read second-hand accounts by reliable commentators. Though it is ideally to be read together with Kripke’s works, this book is not a crib going through those works section by section. Kripke does not really need that kind of commentary, since his style is clear, and difficulties for the reader are very much more likely to lie in seeing the woods as a whole than in seeing the trees one by one. That is why I have adopted an expository procedure more or less the reverse of Kripke’s own. Kripke characteristically moves back and forth among several subjects, enlarging our understanding of a given issue a bit more each time he returns to it, and weaving the different topics together. My approach is to try to separate the strands of argument that Kripke intertwines, expounding one line of thought more or less completely before taking up another.

When it comes to providing context, I have given more of my limited space to the historical background to Kripke’s works than to their critical reception. Given the frequency of allusions to his predecessors in Kripke, there is clearly some need for capsule summaries of the views of some of the earlier major philosophers he cites, but another kind of background seemed to me even more needful: an account of the climate of opinion on the topics Kripke addresses as it was a half-century or so ago, before Kripke’s intervention. Kripke’s work has had so much impact that without such background it may be difficult for newcomers to appreciate how very differently the issues struck philosophers before Kripke came on the scene, and hence to appreciate just what Kripke contributed. As to critical responses, there can be no question, in a book of modest size, of attempting to survey the vast secondary literature. My citations are selective, concentrating on works I believe will enlarge rather than distort the reader’s understanding of Kripke’s thought. When I discuss criticisms, I generally limit my discussion to those that in my judgment are based on a good understanding of Kripke’s views, and point to real gaps or tensions in them. There have been a great many objections based on misreadings, and some of these have unfortunately become rather influential, and I issue explicit warnings against a few of the worst; but only a few. Mostly I proceed in the hope and belief that the most effective way to immunize readers against being misled by misrepresentations of Kripke’s work is simply by providing an accurate representation of it.

Acknowledgments

My first debt is, I hardly need say, to Saul Kripke, for providing me with my topic. Since it is well known that he and I were colleagues for many years, I should at once add a disclaimer to the effect that, though we had many discussions on matters of intellectual interest over those years, the topic of discussion was virtually never the interpretation of Kripke’s philosophical works. Nor have I sought to involve Kripke in any way in the production of the present volume. So I am in no way his authorized spokesman.

The philosopher who has most influenced my understanding of Kripke’s philosophical works has been Scott Soames. He is the commentator and critic most often cited in the pages to follow, and those scattered citations hardly begin to express the extent of my debt. Nonetheless, he had no direct involvement in the present project, and he has no direct responsibility for the views I express.

Two experts on Kripke, Mario Gomez-Torrente and Mark Steiner, were good enough to provide comments on an earlier draft, and I have made use of their information and advice in several places, especially in connection with the tricky issues and contentious questions addressed in the middle chapters of this book. Arudra Burra also carefully reviewed the manuscript, and his comments on matters of presentation, from the perspective of an avowed non-expert – his specialty is philosophy of law, a topic rather far from any Kripke has treated, unless there is some real surprise waiting for the philosophical public among Kripke’s unpublished papers – have been most useful, persuading me to undertake any number of revisions of my original organizational plans.

The publisher’s external reviewers also provided useful reports, one full of cogent criticisms, and the other of welcome encouragement. The former moved me to revise many details of presentation, the latter confirmed my decision to stick to my chosen overall approach. Susan Beer, Neil de Cort, Emma Hutchinson, and David Winters of Polity were efficient and helpful throughout.

Introduction

Saul Kripke’s most celebrated work, Naming and Necessity, culminates in a discussion of the mind–body problem, as will the present book. This central issue in modern philosophy goes right back to its origins with René Descartes, who, while not claiming to be able to prove that the mind or soul actually does survive death of the body, claimed to be able to prove at least that it possibly could. His materialist or physicalist opponents generally deny this possibility, maintaining that a living body, with a functioning brain, is necessary for conscious thought and feeling. When the issue is put this way, it is seen to be not just about mind and body, but also about possibility and necessity. Kripke’s greatest contribution to contemporary analytic philosophy is widely held to lie in his clarification of the nature of modality, the category to which the notions of possibility and necessity belong.

Above all, Kripke has striven to disentangle the notion of necessity from two other notions with which, over the course of two hundred years or so of philosophizing, it had tended to become conflated: the notions of the a priori, and of analyticity.1 The notion of the necessary, which contrasts with the contingent, is the notion of what is and could not have failed to be; its home is metaphysics or the general theory of being. The notion of the a priori, which contrasts with the a posteriori, is the notion of what is known or knowable independently of sense-experience; its home is epistemology or the general theory of knowledge. The notion of the analytic, which contrasts with the synthetic, is the notion of what is true by virtue of meaning; its home is semantics or the general theory of meaning. It was Kripke’s achievement to convince many of the importance of carefully distinguishing these three notions.

It is not that before Kripke it had been wholly forgotten that the trio are at least conceptually distinct, but rather that the three notions generally tended to be assumed to be coextensive, exemplified by exactly the same cases, and accordingly the three labels generally tended to be treated as more or less freely interchangeable. It is not that no one ever mentioned in passing cases where one of these notions might seem to come apart from another, but rather that no one systematically explored the gaps between them in a way that made such gaps impossible for subsequent philosophers to ignore. That is what Kripke accomplished in Naming and Necessity.

That work was not written as a book. Rather, it consists of an edited transcript of an audiotape of a series of three lectures given at Princeton in January 1970, with the addition of footnotes and a section of addenda for publication in an anthology two years later as Kripke (1972), and of a further preface for republication in less expensive book form as Kripke (1980). Henceforth ‘N&N’ will refer indifferently to either version. The first lecture introduces the themes that will be developed in the others. Early on, Kripke has some preliminary remarks on the necessary, the a priori, and the analytic. It will be well to begin here also with a preliminary discussion of the three notions, familiarity with which will be presupposed in most subsequent chapters of this book. A preview of what is in those chapters will follow.

Background

The preliminary account of the necessary, the a priori, and the analytic to be presented here will have a different purpose from the preliminary discussion in Kripke. Kripke’s main aim is simply to remind his audience that the three notions are at least conceptually distinct, and that one should not just thoughtlessly use the three labels interchangeably. My aim is in large part to convey how high the stakes were when Kripke stepped up to deliver his three-lecture series, by presenting the issue in historical terms, as Kripke does not. This will involve indulging in broad-brush historical writing, of the kind in which virtually every assertion can be no more than a first approximation to some more complicated truth, a genre of writing that Kripke himself avoids.

One way to view the history of the dwindling of the necessary, in the thinking of many philosophers, first to the a priori and then to the analytic, is as a history of two centuries of attempts at demystification. The mystery of modality is how we can have knowledge of it. It is often hard enough to understand how we are able to know what is and what isn’t; but how can we, beyond that, know that some but not others of the things there are had to have been, or that some but not others of the things there aren’t might have been? The eventual conflation of necessity with analyticity can be viewed as in large part the result of attempts to solve or resolve or dissolve this mystery. I will briefly trace the relevant history from this point of view through three key eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth-century thinkers: Immanuel Kant, Gottlob Frege, and Rudolf Carnap.

Kant, whose Inaugural Dissertation came exactly two centuries before Kripke’s lectures, and whose famous Critique of Pure Reason followed in the next decade, takes the necessary, the a priori, and the analytic to be distinct classifications. All analytic judgments are known a priori and everything known a priori is necessary, but there are necessities that are not known a priori, and a priori knowledge going beyond analytic judgments: In effect, the necessary properly includes the a priori, which in turn properly includes the analytic. Let me illustrate how these distinctions work for Kant.

The existence of God, a stock example considered a necessary truth by Kant’s ‘rationalist’ predecessors such as Descartes or Leibniz, is still believed to be one by Kant, but for Kant it is supposed to be an example of a necessary truth that is unknowable. Kant thought it important for morality – never mind why, for this is not the place to go into Kant’s moral philosophy, nor am I the person to do so – that there should be such unknowable truths. He famously wrote, ‘I have had to deny knowledge in order to leave room for belief’ (Kant 1929, B3). Of course, for necessary truths that are unknowable, there is no mystery about how they are known: They aren’t. For Kant, the existence of God is a necessary truth that is not a priori, and not a posteriori, either, for that matter, since the distinction between a priori and a posteriori, or ‘pure’ and ‘empirical,’ is for Kant a distinction between two kinds of knowledge.2

That seven plus five makes twelve is, by contrast, for Kant an example of a known necessity: We know not only that seven plus five is twelve, but also that it couldn’t have been anything else. Kant, indeed, counts all of mathematical science, both arithmetical and geometrical, as a body of known necessary truths. Kant observes that experience, our greatest source of knowledge, seems unable to give us knowledge that mathematical truths hold of necessity. He gives the canonical formulation of the mystery of modality in a line that Kripke quotes in the addenda to N&N: ‘Experience teaches us that a thing is thus and so, but not that it cannot be otherwise’ (Kant 1929, B3). Kant concludes that knowledge of necessity must be pure or a priori, as opposed to empirical or a posteriori, and indeed he virtually identifies the two classifications of known necessities and a priori truths (apart from the purely verbal point that it is our knowledge that is called a priori and what it is knowledge of that is called necessary). So for him the mystery of modality takes the form of the question: How is a priori knowledge possible?

Well, in one special case he thinks the question not so hard to answer. The special case in question is that of knowledge of certain trivial truths of the form ‘All As are Bs,’ where being a B is simply part of the concept of being an A. That is Kant’s definition of analyticity. Later philosophers, preferring linguistic-sounding talk to psychological-sounding talk, prefer to put it slightly differently: Being a B is simply part of the meaning of being an A. Kant’s examples of analytic judgments are notoriously very bad,3 and it is customary to substitute for them the example ‘All bachelors are unmarried.’ To know this we need not know anything about objects outside us, but only the content of our own concepts, or the meanings of our own words, and that is why examples like this one are for Kant easy cases. Arithmetic, and Euclidean geometry, and even some principles of Newtonian physics, Kant by contrast supposes to be equally known a priori, but synthetic. So his final formulation of the mystery of modality, excluding the trivial case where he thinks there is no serious problem, is just this: How is synthetic a priori knowledge possible? This is the central question of Kant’s theoretical philosophy. Fortunately, for present purposes there is no need to go into his very complicated answer.

Let us instead move forward a century or so to Frege. Frege was the author of the work that founded modern logic, the Begriffsschrift or Concept-Writing, and was besides the grandfather of the analytic tradition in philosophy, the style of philosophizing that prevails in academic departments of philosophy in the English-speaking world today. Early on in the book he explains in the following words why he will have no symbols for necessity or possibility in his conceptual notation: ‘By saying that a proposition is necessary, I give a hint about the grounds for my judgment. But … this does not affect the conceptual content of the judgment’ (Frege 1967, §4). Thus the classification as necessary or otherwise is for Frege a classification pertaining to how something is known, and in this he is typical of much of later analytic philosophy. By a hundred years after Kant, Kant’s supposed unknowable necessities have generally dropped out of the discussion, and the necessary, if not forgotten altogether, as it effectively is by Frege, is identified with what is known or knowable a priori.4 Frege does still distinguish the a priori from the analytic, since he accepts Kant’s claim that geometry is synthetic a priori, but we are at this stage down from three notions to two.

Frege has a new conception of analyticity. For Frege, even in a simple example like ‘All bachelors are unmarried’ there are two components to be distinguished. Pure formal logic teaches us that all unmarried men are unmarried, while our knowledge of the definition or meaning of ‘bachelor’ tells us that we may substitute it as a synonym for ‘unmarried man.’5 So for Frege, the analytic is what follows by logic from definitions, or what reduces to logic on substituting synonyms for synonyms. Because his logic is vastly richer than anything available in Kant’s day or indeed in the whole previous history of the subject, his concept of analyticity is vastly broader than Kant’s. In consequence, he is prepared to reject one of Kant’s examples of the synthetic a priori by reclassifying arithmetic, after a searching examination of its foundations and basic laws, as analytic. Fortunately, for present purposes there is no need to go into Frege’s very complicated arguments on this point, or the even more complicated revised arguments offered by Bertrand Russell after he found a flaw in Frege’s work.

Let us instead move forward a half-century or so to Frege’s one-time student Carnap. Carnap was the most influential representative of the logical positivist or logical empiricist school of the nineteen twenties through forties, but his views on issues relevant to the present discussion were shared well beyond that school. For Carnap, as for other positivists, Kant’s whole classification synthetic a priori has been rejected: Every supposed example has been reclassified either as analytic or else as a posteriori. In particular, in the wake of Frege and Russell, arithmetic is taken to be analytic; while in the wake of Einstein, the question whether the geometry of the physical space in which we live and move is Euclidean or non-Euclidean is agreed to be empirical or a posteriori. So the necessary, having first dwindled to the a priori, now dwindles to the analytic, and we are down from three notions to one.

In Carnap (1947), among other writings going back to the nineteen thirties and with roots even earlier, ‘the Leibnizian concept of necessity’ and ‘the Kantian concept of analyticity,’ as he calls them, are explicitly assimilated to each other. A common ‘rational reconstruction’ or ‘explication’ is offered for both: in effect, a new analysis of analyticity. With Frege’s notion it is really not so very clear why we should be able to have analytic knowledge. The problem is not with knowledge of definitions or synonymy or meaning, which presumably we acquire as we learn our language. The problem is with knowledge of logic, given that logic has been vastly expanded. For Carnap, however, our knowledge of logic, too, is ultimately a matter of knowledge of meaning: of the meanings of the logical particles ‘not’ and ‘and’ and ‘or’ and ‘all’ and ‘some’ and so on. Given this linguistic doctrine of logical truth, analyticity becomes simply ‘truth by virtue of meaning.’

And the mystery of modality seems to be solved: We are able to know, for instance, that seven plus five is necessarily twelve, that in no circumstances could seven plus five turn out to be anything other than twelve, simply because we recognize that the rules and conventions of our language, which we have implicitly learned in learning to speak, do not allow any circumstances to be described as ones in which seven plus five has turned out to be something other than twelve. While this sort of view, and the identification of necessity with analyticity, is especially explicit and prominent in the positivist Carnap, it is not limited to Carnap or the positivists, but is found throughout much of analytic philosophy – down to the time of Kripke.6

Kripke’s achievement has been to reverse the whole development I have just roughly sketched, thus reinstating the mystery of modality, previously erroneously thought to have been dissolved. (He also offers some hints toward a new solution.) According to Kripke, the whole line of thought from Kant to Frege to Carnap went wrong at its very first step. Kant’s claim that experience does not teach us that something could not have been otherwise may be plausible if what is meant is that sense-experience by itself is not sufficient to teach us that something is necessary, that some additional a priori element is required. But in classifying knowledge of necessity as a priori, Kant has in effect assumed experience is never required, in addition to any a priori element, to teach us that something is necessary. This is definitely a mistake, according to Kripke. Most philosophers circa 1970 found it difficult to conceive of cases where experience would be required to establish necessity, but Kripke in N&N presents many plausible examples of such a posteriori necessities.

Kripke also holds that there are, besides a posteriori truths that are necessary, also a priori truths that are contingent. In the end, the only connection among the three notions that Kripke accepts is that whatever is analytic is also a priori and necessary. Thus an a posteriori necessity or an a priori contingency will be synthetic. So will be the disjunction of two unrelated examples of these types, though such a disjunction is both a priori and necessary. And so the analytic is properly contained in the overlap of the a priori and the necessary, giving a Kripkean picture sharply contrasting with the Kantian or Fregean or Carnapian.

Plan

Let me now describe the plan of this book: the topics and texts to be discussed and the order in which they will be taken. N&N consists of three lectures, and three chapters, constituting the first half of this book, will be devoted to it here, interspersed with some discussion of pertinent lesser works of Kripke’s.7 Kripke opens his lectures by saying, ‘I hope that some people see some connection between the two topics of my title.’ Perhaps some did; surely many did not. That there should turn out to be a connection between the question of the meaning of proper names and the question of the nature of necessity was for many one of the great surprises of the lecture series. Kripke was not, however, the first to see a connection between the seemingly arcane linguistic topic of naming and a resonant philosophical topic like necessity. On the contrary, several of his philosophical predecessors, seeing some such connection or other, had already involved themselves with the linguistic issue. Notable among these predecessors were John Stuart Mill (otherwise best known for his work as political theorist and reformer) and Frege (otherwise best known for his work on the foundations of logic and arithmetic, already alluded to above). Their views on naming Kripke takes as foils to his own.

The first two chapters in this book will both be concerned with what Kripke has to say about Mill, Frege, and naming in the first two lectures of N&N. Rather than dealing with the first lecture in Chapter 1 and the second lecture in Chapter 2, I will deal in Chapter 1 with the parts of both lectures that do not involve modality, and in Chapter 2 with the parts of both that do. This way of proceeding involves a deliberate unraveling, in hopes of making logical relationships clearer, of two strands of argument that in Kripke are tightly intertwined.

The first two lectures taken together offer both Kripke’s new picture of how naming works (with criticism of the older pictures it seeks to replace), and what arise therefrom, Kripke’s first examples of a posteriori necessities. Chapter 3 will take up Kripke’s third lecture, in which he vastly expands the range of examples of a posteriori necessities. The same chapter will take briefer note of the addenda to the lectures, in which Kripke offers a hint toward a new solution to the mystery of how we are able to acquire knowledge of necessity and possibility, even after recognizing that the route of reducing the necessary to the a priori and the a priori to the analytic is closed. It is in these parts of his work that Kripke’s most intriguing discussions of the nature of necessity are to be found.

The contents of the second half of this book will be more mixed. Philosophers in the analytic tradition give a good deal of attention to what they frankly call ‘puzzles’ of one sort or another. Generally there is some deeper purpose, some wider moral to be drawn from the puzzling example, though it would be idle to pretend that philosophers only ever engage with puzzles because they have some deeper purpose clearly in view, and never for the sheer challenge of the puzzle itself. Kripke in particular is a philosopher who has never hesitated to digress from work on deep mysteries to work on well-known puzzles, or new ones of his own creation. Chapter 4 will deal with the best known, most-discussed of Kripke’s puzzles, the ‘Puzzle about Belief’ from the paper of that title (Kripke 1979).8 There is indeed a ‘deeper purpose and wider moral’ connected with this puzzle, for it is connected with certain questions about naming left hanging in N&N, and so there will be in this chapter a final discussion of naming.

Returning to more direct confrontation with the issue of the nature of necessity, at the moment when the mystery of modality erroneously seemed to have been solved, it appeared that the source of necessity lay in ourselves, and was traceable back to the rules of our language. But the notion of ‘rule’ itself conceals mysteries. It was supposed by many philosophers that the necessity of, say, the laws of arithmetic could be explained by saying that those laws simply follow from linguistic rules. But what sort of a fact is it that they thus follow? Embarrassingly, it would seem to be a necessary fact, and one the source of whose necessity cannot lie in ourselves. Kripke’s subtle thinking about such elusive problems, insofar as it available to us in print, takes the form of a commentary, Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language (Kripke 1982), on key sections of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations. That Kripke should present his own views only in the context of discussion of another thinker is from one point of view rather unfortunate, because in the literature the examination of Kripke’s views has all too often been neglected in favor of debates over purely exegetical issues, over whether Kripke has got Wittgenstein right. Chapter 5 offers a summary or outline of Kripke’s views on rules that leaves entirely to one side all exegetical questions about Wittgenstein, a summary or outline that it is hoped will help make it clearer that Kripke’s views on this topic are by no means as disconnected from his views on necessity and related issues as they may at first appear.

Chapter 6 takes up Kripke’s contributions to the philosophy of mind, his criticisms of the currently fashionable views known as physicalism and functionalism, criticisms based on considerations developed in part in the course of his study of naming and necessity and in part in the course of his reading of Wittgenstein. Kripke has so far published only fragments of his work on these topics: a compressed, rushed discussion of physicalism at the very end of N&N, a single long footnote on functionalism in the Wittgenstein book that amounts to a little more than one full page of small type, and a remark or two in some very recently published work. What Kripke has to say about the mystery of the relation of mind and body is suggestive, but it cannot become compelling without the release of more currently unpublished material; and so the discussion of Kripke’s work in philosophy ends with hopes for the future, but a question mark for the present. Two optional appendices on Kripke’s work in logic then follow.

Appendix A will offer a semipopular account of the nature of Kripke’s technical work on modal logic. If by the time Kripke stepped down after delivering the third of his Princeton lectures on naming and necessity he had become a very prominent figure indeed in analytic metaphysics and epistemology, even before he stepped up to deliver the first lecture he was already a very prominent figure in logic. He was famous most of all, and from well before he presented any philosophical work on the substantive nature of modality, for his technical work on the formal logic of modality. It is this early work that repopularized Leibniz’s old talk, never perhaps entirely forgotten, but no longer very often echoed before Kripke, of necessity as ‘truth in all possible worlds.’ This usage has since, for good or ill, become ubiquitous among philosophers, even those with next to no interest in the technical side of modal logic, and the appendix will, among other things, show where it first came from.9

Appendix B will show Kripke’s grappling with one of the oldest and thorniest puzzles in philosophy and logic, the notorious liar paradox: If I say that I am speaking falsely, is what I say true or false? If the traditional attribution to the semi-legendary Cretan sage Epimenides can be believed, this paradox goes back to before the beginnings of logic itself. At the very least it goes back to Eubulides, a contemporary of logic’s founder Aristotle. Kripke’s work on this problem, as made available in his ‘Outline of a Theory of Truth’ (Kripke 1975), another transcript of an audiotape of a lecture, has again generated a large literature. I have tried to keep everything as nontechnical as possible, and for that reason have confined myself to no more than an outline of an outline of the ‘Outline,’ though it is hardly feasible to avoid all technicalities while still giving a genuine idea of the nature of Kripke’s contribution.10

Notes

1 What abstract noun should go with ‘a priori’ the way ‘necessity’ goes with ‘necessary’ and ‘analyticity’ with ‘analytic’? There is nothing really wrong with ‘aprioriness,’ but Kripke says ‘aprioricity,’ as if the phrase were ‘a prioric,’ while many commentators write ‘apriority,’ as if the phrase were ‘a prior.’ Other Latin prepositional phrases used in philosophy, such as ‘ex nihilo’ or ‘ad hominem’ or ‘in re’ and ‘ante rem,’ seem to be able to get along without corresponding abstract nouns and, so far as I am concerned, ‘a priori’ can do the same.

2 I owe such understanding as I have of the matters treated in this paragraph mainly to my colleague Desmond Hogan, though he is innocent of any responsibility for any misunderstandings on my part.

3 Kripke’s criticism of the example ‘Gold is a yellow metal’ will be recalled in Chapter 3.

4 One subtlety I am eliding but that Kripke discusses is the slide from ‘known’ to ‘knowable’ here, from treating the a priori as a division within actual knowledge to treating it as a division within potential knowledge. Where potential knowability outruns actual knowledge, it is always the abilities of human-like cognitive agents that are in question.

5 It is really only a synonym if we stretch ‘unmarried’ to mean ‘never married,’ but let us follow tradition and ignore this complication.

6 Its prevalence prior to 1970 is evident in several of the quotations that Kripke produces in N&N, where the philosopher quoted writes ‘necessary’ or ‘contingent’ when clearly ‘analytic’ or ‘synthetic’ is what is meant. Kripke has been so influential that there is for students of philosophy today a serious danger of anachronistic misreadings of earlier twentieth-century material, unless it is clearly recognized that the writers being read were for the most part simply oblivious to distinctions that philosophers since 1970 have thought crucial. The conflation, before Kripke, of the necessary, the a priori, and the analytic is a major theme of Scott Soames’s survey of the history of twentieth-century analytic philosophy (Soames 2003).

7 Notes in this section will merely provide references to other works of the present author where some of the issues discussed in this book are treated in a different way. To begin with, in case any reader has seen my previous account of N&N in Burgess (2006), I should say that though there is inevitably some overlap, I here consider N&N at fuller length and in the wider context of Kripke’s total œuvre, and with substantial attention to later developments, whereas the aim of the volume in which my earlier treatment appears is to provide concise, self-contained guides to specific works considered in themselves.

8 I have proposed a solution to the puzzle in a short note Burgess (2005), but will not insist upon the point of view of that note here.

9 The reader who would like to learn more, and is ready to tackle somewhat more technical material, may consult my fuller expositions in Burgess (2011a) or Burgess (2011c). From Burgess (2009), or any other textbook in the field today, one can see how absolutely central Kripke models have become.

10 My fuller outline of the ‘Outline’ can be found in Burgess (2011b), and the place of Kripke’s work in current thinking on the nature of truth is also discussed in chapters 7 and 8 of Burgess and Burgess (2011).

1

Naming

Let us now begin our examination of Kripke’s magnum opus, N&N. In this chapter we will be concerned mainly with the first two lectures, and specifically with the parts thereof that do not involve modality. The follow-up paper (Kripke 1977) will be briefly noted in the last section.

The plan will be to begin, as Kripke does, with a discussion of the opposing views on naming of his predecessors Mill and Frege. Next we will turn to Kripke’s intervention on the pro-Mill, anti-Frege side. Then we will pause to mention a third alternative, neither Millian nor Fregean. After that we will examine Kripke’s attempt to provide what anyone who rejects Frege will need and what Mill fails to supply: an account of what links a given name to its bearer, along with another loose end.

Mill vs Frege

Kripke’s discussion moves gradually, as will this book, from seemingly rather specialized linguistic issues toward questions of more obvious philosophical significance, and ultimately the mind–body problem. The central linguistic issue for Kripke concerns the relationship between two classes of expressions – names and descriptions.1

With descriptions, there is a distinction to be made between what the expression designates, and what the expression means. For instance, the descriptions ‘the most famous student of Socrates’ and ‘the most famous teacher of Aristotle’ both designate the same person, Plato, but the two are quite different in meaning: Each describes Plato in a way that uniquely identifies him, but the two ways are by no means the same. The central linguistic issue for Kripke is whether when we turn from descriptions to names there is still such a distinction between meaning and designation to be drawn. Does Plato’s name, for instance, have any meaning that identifies its bearer, or describes him in some way?

Kripke was by no means the first philosopher to take up the question of the meaning of names, which indeed can be traced back to Plato’s own time, and he discusses fairly extensively the views of two of his nineteenth-century predecessors, Mill and Frege, who both, like Kripke, saw a connection between the problem of the meaning of names and larger philosophical issues. Now one complication for the reader is that each of Mill and Frege had his own preferred terminology for discussing these matters, and when Kripke is discussing one of them, following scholarly custom he will generally use the peculiar terminology of the one he is discussing. For Mill the meaning/designation distinction becomes the connotation/denotation distinction, and Mill also has a term ‘signification’ for the whole package of denotation plus connotation. For Frege the meaning/designation distinction becomes the Sinn/Bedeutung distinction, usually translated sense/reference.

If we wish to state Frege’s view in ordinary, everyday terms, it would be roughly this: that every name has the same meaning as, or is synonymous with, some uniquely identifying description. The description might serve as something like a definition of the name, and the name might serve as something like an abbreviation for the description. All this is not something Frege says in so many words, but rather is a view that is attributed to him on the strength of two facts: first, that he does say that every name has a sense as well as a reference; second, that when he gives examples of what the sense of a name might be, he gives a description. (For instance, he tells us the sense of ‘Aristotle’ may be ‘the teacher of Alexander.’) Frege allows that the same name may have different senses for different speakers. (Perhaps ‘Plato’ could mean ‘the most famous student of Socrates’ for some, and ‘the most famous teacher of Aristotle’ for others.) That the name should have a single sense, the same for all speakers, is for Frege not a fact about actual natural languages, but a norm for an ideal scientific language. There is some reason to believe that for Frege the norm for an ideal scientific language would go further, and require that each name be synonymous with some description not itself involving names (a description like ‘the most famous student of the philosopher who drank hemlock’ rather than ‘the most famous student of Socrates’). Only in this way could we be sure of avoiding circularities of the kind that would arise if one defined Plato in terms of his relationship to Socrates, and Socrates in terms of his relationship to Plato. But this stronger requirement is not something Frege states explicitly.

If we wish to state Mill’s view using the ordinary, everyday term ‘meaning,’ we face a choice. Mill’s view, stated in his own terms, was that a name has no connotation, so that its signification is just its denotation. Align ‘meaning’ with the technical term ‘connotation,’ and this comes out as saying that names have no meaning. Align it instead with the technical term ‘signification,’ and it comes out as saying that the meaning of a name is just the individual it designates, the individual who bears the name. Both formulations can be found in discussions of Mill in the literature. A minimal, least-common-denominator formulation would be that a name has no descriptive meaning. It should be noted that Mill, despite this denial of descriptive meaning, does allow a name to have a descriptive etymology. (Etymology, unlike meaning, is something a speaker of the present-day language does not need to know anything about in order to speak correctly.) Thus ‘Dartmouth’ derives from ‘town at the mouth of the river Dart.’ What Mill insists is that the name is not synonymous with this description: If an earthquake changed the course of the river, there would be no need to change the name of the town.

Russell, another predecessor whom Kripke discusses, introduced considerable terminological confusion by often writing as if he agreed with Mill, whereas he really agreed more, though not entirely, with Frege. Russell defined a name as a simple symbol designating an object, which object is its meaning. This, we have just seen, is what Mill’s view becomes if we use the everyday term ‘meaning’ in place of his technical term ‘signification’ (rather than his technical term ‘connotation’). But then, as Kripke remarks, Russell turns around and says that few if any of what are commonly called names are genuinely names in this sense. Ordinary names are for Russell abbreviated or ‘truncated’ descriptions, much as Frege maintained. When reading writers influenced by Russell in the later literature, it is often unclear whether by ‘names’ they mean names in the ordinary sense, what traditional grammar calls ‘proper nouns,’ or names in Russell’s idiosyncratic sense, often distinctively called ‘logically proper names.’

When Russell offers an example of what the description associated with a name in the ordinary sense might be, what he offers is sometimes quite similar to what Frege would have offered; but sometimes it is interestingly different. Where Frege might have taken the name ‘Sir Walter Scott’ to abbreviate some such description as ‘the author of Waverley,’ Russell by contrast suggests that the name is a truncation of the description ‘the individual called “Sir Walter Scott.” ’ Where the description Frege would associate with a name generally involves the ‘famous deeds’ of the bearer of the name, the description Russell here mentions involves nothing more than being the bearer of the name. So where Frege gives a description that uniquely identifies the bearer of the name, Russell here gives a description that does nothing at all toward identifying that bearer. For to say ‘Sir Walter Scott’ designates the individual called ‘Sir Walter Scott’ is no help at all in identifying who that is.

As already remarked, both Mill and Frege saw a connection between issues about naming and larger philosophical questions; this is true of Russell as well. The larger project with which Mill connects his view on naming is the critique of certain intellectual holdovers from medieval scholastic metaphysics. The scholastics maintained that some of an individual’s properties are essential and others accidental. With the former, possession of the property by the individual is necessary if the individual is to exist at all; with the latter, it is contingent. A typical scholastic view would be that it is essential to Socrates that he be capable of thinking, but accidental that he be capable of walking. This for Mill is pure medieval superstition: There are no individual essences.

And how does his view about names come in? Well, Mill was an early and forceful advocate of the demystifying identification of necessity with analyticity, though he expressed this view by the slogan that all necessity is verbal necessity, rather than using the Kantian terminology. For Mill, an example in subject–predicate form can be necessary only if the predicate is part of the connotation of the subject. Mill thus would have been willing to grant that ‘All philosophers are rational’ is necessary, because ‘rational’ is arguably part of the connotation of ‘philosopher.’ But Mill would not have been willing to grant ‘Socrates (if he exists) is rational’ is necessary. For on his view of names, ‘Socrates’ has no connotation for ‘rational’ to be part of.

Mill is best remembered today as a political thinker, and what the connection if any is supposed to be between his stout denial of individual essences and his forceful advocacy of press freedom or female suffrage is less than obvious. I do get the impression that in his own mind at least the metaphysical issue and the political issues were battles on different fronts in the same war, a general campaign against reactionary obscurantism of all kinds. It is perhaps more than a mere coincidence that the best-known philosopher to advocate a no-descriptive-meaning view of proper names before Mill’s time was John Locke, another British philosopher who is best remembered today as a libertarian political theorist.

By contrast, the larger projects with which Frege and Russell connect their views on naming are quite apolitical, and the fact that the two philosophers stood at opposite ends of the political spectrum did not prevent their sharing very similar views on naming. Those views were closely connected with the ambition, alluded to earlier, of showing, in opposition to Kant, that arithmetic is analytic. It would take us too far afield into technicalities to try to spell out the connection here in detail, and knowledge of the details is not needed to follow Kripke’s discussion, so I will at this point bring my sketch of historical background to a close.2

We may identify three ideal types of theory about the meaning of names, to which the views of various historical figures approximate. A minimal Millianism holds that a name has no descriptive meaning or connotation or sense. The remaining two types of theory are descriptivist. They both hold that every proper name has a meaning, and indeed the same meaning as some description. The two differ from each other over the nature of the descriptions involved. Fregeanism is the type of descriptivism holding that each name has the same meaning as some uniquely identifying description, ideally one that is name-free. The metalinguistic type of descriptivism holds that a name ‘_____’ is synonymous with ‘the individual called by the name “_____” ’ or ‘the individual bearing the name “____” ’ or something of the sort. Kripke finds hints toward such a view in the remarks of several writers from Russell (in the Scott example mentioned earlier) onwards, and offers some critical remarks about it, but the metalinguistic view was only really developed into a full-fledged theory in the period after N&N, and in reaction to it.3 Since the view was not very influential in 1970, Kripke in N&N gives it less attention than Fregeanism or Millianism. Treatment of it will be deferred here to the section after next of this chapter.

Circa 1970, the dominant view was that some version of or variation on Fregeanism must be right, and Kripke’s anti-descriptivist arguments are directed mainly against the Fregean and kindred positions. But Kripke, before arguing at length against the Fregean view, first emphasizes that it has several advantages or attractions. The first two advantages are just the ability to solve two puzzles, one stressed by Frege, the other by Russell.

Co-designative Names: Hesperus and Phosphorus. One feature of names is that two of them may be co-designative, designating the same individual. Moreover, an identity statement linking two co-designative names can be informative. The full background to the stock example, one used and reused again and again in philosophical discussions to illustrate this point, is as follows.

The Greeks of the time of Homer called the second planet from the sun ‘Hesperus’ (etymologically ‘Evening One’) when they saw it in the evening, and ‘Phosphorus’ or ‘Eosphorus’ (etymologically ‘Light-bringer’ or ‘Dawn-bringer’) when they saw it in the morning. They took themselves to be seeing two different ‘wandering stars’ or planets, and their mythology associated two different minor godlings with them. The pair of terms corresponding to ‘Hesperus’ and ‘Phosphorus’ is ‘Vesper’ and ‘Lucifer’ in Latin, ‘Abendstern’ and ‘Morgenstern’ in German, and ‘Evening Star’ and ‘Morning Star’ in English, though ‘Hesperus’ and ‘Phosphorus’ themselves survive in English as minor, poetic alternatives. Mesopotamian astronomers of the period already recognized that it was the same heavenly body being seen, sometimes in the west in the evening, sometimes in the east in the morning. They associated the planet with their goddess Ishtar. By classical times the Greeks had adopted the same view, associating the planet with their corresponding goddess, Aphrodite. The Romans, in turn, associated it with their corresponding goddess, Venus, and ‘Venus’ remains the primary name for the planet in English.

The point to note in all this is that an identity statement linking distinct names, such as

(1) Hesperus is Phosphorus.

can be news to someone, as it would have been to Homer, whereas any identity statement linking to copies of the same name, such as

(2) Hesperus is Hesperus.

would be news to no one.

Fregeanism easily accommodates this phenomenon, explaining how it is possible. On a Fregean view, each of ‘Hesperus’ and ‘Phosphorus’ has the same meaning as some description, perhaps ‘the brightest heavenly body regularly seen near the western horizon just after sunset’ for the former, and ‘the brightest heavenly body regularly seen near the eastern horizon just before sunrise’ for the latter. Then (1) and (2) amount to

(3) The brightest heavenly body regularly seen near the western horizon just after sunset is the same as the brightest heavenly body regularly seen near the eastern horizon just before sunrise.

(4) The brightest heavenly body regularly seen near the western horizon just after sunset is the same as the brightest heavenly body regularly seen near the western horizon just after sunset.

and there is no difficulty in seeing how (3) can be informative while (4) cannot. Frege used the Hesperus vs Phosophorus (or Abendstern vs Morgenstern) example to motivate his sense/reference distinction.

Empty Names: Pegasus. Another feature of names is that some of them are empty, and do not have bearers, and that for such a name, for instance ‘Pegasus,’ the singular negative existential statement

(5) Pegasus does not exist.

is both meaningful and true. This may be puzzling, because the statement looks as if it were picking out an individual by name, and then saying something about that individual, that it is non-existent; and how can we thus speak about something that isn’t there to be spoken of?

Fregeanism needs some help in solving the problem here. Merely taking ‘Pegasus’ to have the same meaning as some description, perhaps ‘Bellerophon’s winged horse,’ reduces (5) to

(6) Bellerophon’s winged horse does not exist.