Naming and Necessity
Naming and Necessity is a 1980 book with the transcript of three lectures, given by the philosopher Saul Kripke, at Princeton University in 1970, in which he dealt with the debates of proper names in the philosophy of language. The transcript was brought out originally in 1972 in Semantics of Natural Language, edited by Donald Davidson and Gilbert Harman. Among analytic philosophers, Naming and Necessity is widely considered one of the most important philosophical works of the twentieth century.
Overview
Language is a primary concern of analytic philosophers, particularly the use of language to express concepts and to refer to individuals.In Naming and Necessity, Kripke considers several questions that are important within analytic philosophy:
- How do names refer to things in the world?
- Are all statements that can be known a priori necessarily true, and are all statements that are known a posteriori contingently true?
- Do objects have any essential properties?
- What is the nature of identity?
- How do natural kind terms refer and what do they mean?
Kripke also raised the prospect of a posteriori necessities—facts that are necessarily true, though they can be known only through empirical investigation. Examples include "Hesperus is Phosphorus", "Cicero is Tully", "Water is H2O" and other identity claims where two names refer to the same object.
Finally, Kripke gave an argument against identity materialism in the philosophy of mind, the view that every mental fact is identical with some physical fact. Kripke argued that the only way to defend this identity is as an a posteriori necessary identity, but that such an identity—e.g., pain is C-fibers firing—could not be necessary, given the possibility of pain that has nothing to do with C-fibers firing. Similar arguments have been proposed by David Chalmers.
Kripke delivered the John Locke lectures in philosophy at Oxford in 1973. Titled Reference and Existence, they are in many respects a continuation of Naming and Necessity, and deal with the subjects of fictional names and perceptual error. They have recently been published by Oxford University Press. Quentin Smith has claimed that some of the ideas in Naming and Necessity were first presented by Ruth Barcan Marcus. Kripke is alleged to have misunderstood Marcus' ideas during a 1969 lecture which he attended, and later arrived at similar conclusions. Marcus, however, has refused to publish the verbatim transcript of the lecture. Smith's view is controversial, and several well-known scholars have subsequently offered detailed responses arguing that his account is mistaken.
A theory of naming
In the first lecture, Kripke introduced a schematic semi-formal version of the kind of "theory of naming" he was criticising. He began the second lecture by recapitulating the "theses" of this theory, together with the "noncircularity condition" he had discussed in closing the first lecture. Apparently, the theses and condition had been written up on a board for all to see. This text was reproduced, as quoted below, in the "lightly edited" transcript of 1980.- To every name or designating expression
' X' , there corresponds a cluster of properties, namely the family of those properties φ such that A believes 'φX' . - One of the properties, or some conjointly, are believed by A to pick out some individual uniquely.
- If most, or a weighted most, of the φ's are satisfied by one unique object y, then y is the referent of
' X' . - If the vote yields no unique object,
' X' does not refer. - The statement, 'If X exists, then X has most of the φ's' is known a priori by the speaker.
- The statement, 'If X exists, then X has most of the φ's' expresses a necessary truth.
Lecture I: January 20, 1970
In the mid-20th century, the most significant philosophical theory about the nature of names and naming was a theory of Gottlob Frege's that had been developed by Bertrand Russell, the descriptivist theory of names, which was sometimes known as the 'Frege–Russell description theory'. Before Kripke gave his 'Naming and Necessity' lectures, a number of criticisms of this descriptivist theory had been published by leading philosophers, including Ludwig Wittgenstein, John Searle and Peter Strawson. However, Kripke believed that the existing arguments against the Frege–Russell descriptive theory of names failed to identify the real problems with the theory.
Lecture II: January 22, 1970
In 'Lecture II', Kripke reconsiders the cluster theory of names and argues for his own position on the nature of reference, a position that contributed to the development of the causal theory of reference.Lecture III: January 29, 1970
In 'Lecture III', Kripke's main aim is to develop his account of the necessity of identity relations, and to discuss many of the implications of his account to issues like the identity of natural kinds, the distinction between epistemic and metaphysical necessity, the notion of metaphysical essences, and the mind–body problem in philosophy of mind.Kripke begins by summarizing the conclusions drawn in the first two lectures. Central to his previous lectures was his attack on the descriptivist theory of reference. Kripke offers two lines of criticism against Descriptivism. First, he points out that descriptions believed by speakers about a referent are not uniquely specifying, and thus are incapable of fixing reference. His second line of criticism states that even in those limited cases where the speaker does believe something uniquely specifying, what is uniquely specified turns out not to be the referent.
Two other issues arise by way of recapitulation: First, Kripke concedes that there exist certain limited cases where descriptions do in fact determine reference. In these cases, however, they do no other semantic work. They don't allow us to characterize names as abbreviations or synonyms of the description. Second, Kripke argues that while some philosophers offer a revisionary account of identity, this revisionary account is inadequate, and we must instead stay with the standard account of identity, which is not a relation between names, but a relation between an object and itself.
The referent of names is usually determined by a series of causal links between people who have used the name. Second, when the referent of a name is determined by a property attributed to the thing named, the link is contingent, rather than necessary or essential. People begin using the name 'Jack the Ripper' to refer to the person responsible for the murder of five women in London. So, the name was fixed to its referent by a description. However, the person who carried out the murders might have been jailed for another crime and, thus, might never have had the property of murdering those women. So, the link between the property of being a murderer and the person referred to is contingent. Third, identity is not a relation that holds between names. It is a relation that holds between an object and itself. When someone accurately claims that two names refer to the same object, the claim is necessarily true, even though it may be known a posteriori. Thus, Kripke claims to have successfully refuted the assumption made by everyone before him that anything that is necessarily true will be known a priori .
Importance
In Philosophical Analysis in the Twentieth Century: Volume 2: The Age of Meaning, Scott Soames wrote:In the philosophy of language, Naming and Necessity is among the most important works ever, ranking with the classical work of Frege in the late nineteenth century, and of Russell, Tarski and Wittgenstein in the first half of the twentieth century... Naming and Necessity played a large role in the implicit, but widespread, rejection of the view—so popular among ordinary language philosophers—that philosophy is nothing more than the analysis of language.