Kripke (1980) Naming and Necessity, Lecture I

Kripke, Saul A. (1980). Naming and Necessity, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 22-70

 

The way I approach these matters will be, in some ways, quite different from what people are thinking today. Some of the views that I have are views which may at first glance strike some as obviously wrong. My favorite example is this (which I probably won't defend in the lectures-for one thing it doesn't ever convince anyone): It is a common claim in contemporary philosophy that there are certain predicates which, though they are in fact empty-have null extension-have it as a matter of contingent fact and not as a matter of any sort of necessity. Well, that I don't dispute; but an example which is usually given is the example of unicorn. So it is said that though we have all found out that there are no unicorns, of course there might have been unicorns. Under certain circumstances there would have been unicorns. And this is an example of something I think is not the case. Perhaps according to me the truth should not be put in terms of saying that it is necessary that there should be no unicorns, but just that we can't say under what circumstances there would have been unicorns.

Further, I think that even if archeologists or geologists were to discover tomorrow some fossils conclusively showing the existence of animals in the past satisfying everything we know about unicorns from the myth of the unicorn, that would not show that there were unicorns. Now I don't know if I'm going to have a chance to defend this particular view, but it's an example of a surprising one. (I actually gave a seminar in this institution where I talked about this view for a couple of sessions.) So, some of my opinions are somewhat surprising; but let us start out with some area that is perhaps not as surprising and introduce the methodology and problems of these talks. [23-24]

The first topic in the pair of topics is naming. By a name here I will mean a proper name, i.e., the name of a person, a city, a country, etc. It is well known that modern logicians also are very interested in definite descriptions: phrases of the form 'the x such that Φx', such as 'the man who corrupted Hadleyburg'. Now, if one and only one man ever corrupted Hadleyburg, then that man is the referent, in the logician's sense, of that description. We will use the term 'name' so that it does not include definite descriptions of that sort, but only those things which in ordinary language would be called 'proper names'. If we want a common term to cover names and descriptions, we may use the term 'designator', [24]

 

Proper Name	Definite Descriptions
The name of a person, a city, a country, etc	'the x such that Φx.'
[rigid/non-rigid] Designators

 

It is a point, made by Donnellan, that under certain circumstances a particular speaker may use a defnite description to refer, not to the proper referent, in the sense that I've just defined it, of that description, but to something else which he wants to single out and which he thinks is the proper referent of the description, but which in fact isn't. So you may say, 'The man over there with the champagne in his glass is happy', though he actually only has water in his glass. Now, even though there is no champagne in his glass, and there may be another man in the room who does have champagne in his glass, the speaker intended to refer, or maybe, in some sense of 'refer', did refer, to the man he thought had the champagne in his glass. Nevertheless, I'm just going to use the term 'referent of the description' to mean the object uniquely satisfying the conditions in the definite description. This is the sense in which it's been used in the logical tradition. So, if you have a description of the form 'the x such that Φx', and there is exactly one x such that Φx, that is the referent of the description.

Now, what is the relation between names and descriptions? There is a well known doctrine of John Stuart Mill, in his book A System of Logic, that names have denotation but not connotation. To use one of his examples, when we use the name 'Dartmouth' to describe a certain locality in England, it may be so called because it lies at the mouth of the Dart. But even, he says, had the Dart (that's a river) changed its course so that Dartmouth no longer lay at the mouth of the Dart, we could still with propriety call this place 'Dartmouth', even though the name may suggest that it lies at the mouth of the Dart. Changing Mill's terminology, perhaps we should say that a name such as 'Dartmouth' does have a 'connotation' to some people, namely, it does connote (not to me-I never thouht of this) that any place called 'Dartmouth' lies at the mouth of the Dart. But then in some way it doesn't have a 'sense'. At least, it is not part of the meaning of the name 'Dartmouth' that the town so named lies at the mouth of the Dart. Someone who said that Dartmouth did not lie at the Dart's mouth would not contradict himself.

It should not be thought that every phrase of the form 'the x such that Fx' is always used in English as a description rather than a name. I guess everyone has heard about The Holy Roman Empire, which was neither holy, Roman nor an empire. Today we have The United Nations. Here it would seem that since these things can be so-unique divine being or is it a name of God? But such cases needn't necessarily bother us.