Routledge Philosophy GuideBook to Kripke and Naming and Necessity

Harold Noonan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781135105150
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Saul Kripke is one of the most important philosophers of the twentieth century. His most celebrated work, Naming and Necessity, makes arguably the most important contribution to the philosophy of language and metaphysics in recent years. Asking fundamental questions – how do names refer to things in the world? Do objects have essential properties? What are natural kind terms and to what do they refer? – he challenges prevailing theories of language and conceptions of metaphysics, especially the descriptivist account of reference, which Kripke argues is found in Frege, Wittgenstein and Russell, and the anti-essentialist metaphysics of Quine.

In this invaluable guidebook to Kripke's classic work, Harold Noonan introduces and assesses:

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• Kripke's life and the background to his philosophy

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• the ideas and text of Naming and Necessity

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• the continuing importance of Kripke's work to the philosophy of language and metaphysics.

The Routledge Philosophy GuideBook to Kripke and Naming and Necessity is an ideal starting point for anyone coming Kripke's work for the first time. It is essential reading for philosophy students studying philosophy of language, metaphysics, logic, or the history of analytic philosophy.

1
Introductory Overview

The Problem Situation

Saul Kripke’s three lectures Naming and Necessity were delivered at Princeton University in 1970. Subsequently a transcript of the recording was made and the lectures were published in 1972 (Kripke 1972). A corrected and expanded version with a new preface was published in 1980 (Kripke 1980).

The effect of Kripke’s work was immediate and enduring. Naming and Necessity instantly established a new orthodoxy in Anglo-American philosophy. It is still recognized as a masterpiece. One often reads of the Kripkean ‘revolution’ in philosophy.

The two features of Naming and Necessity which caused this were, first, its vigorous defence and unapologetic deployment of modal concepts (the concepts of necessity and possibility, of what must be and what can be), and second, its brilliantly argued rejection of the conception of reference – that relation between language and the world which enables us to use the former to make true or false statements about reality – as dependent on, and determined solely by, the individual language user’s knowledge, intentions and dispositions.

In connection with the first feature, Kripke argued for a sharp division between the metaphysical concept of necessity and the epistemological concept of a prioricity, or knowability independent of experience, and asserted the existence of necessary a posteriori truths, truths which could not have been otherwise but could, on the basis of experience, though only on the basis of experience, be known to be both true and necessary. In connection with the second feature, Naming and Necessity sets forth a set of theses about the meaning and reference of proper names and what Kripke calls ‘natural kind terms’, terms for the kinds of things studied in the natural and biological sciences – water (studied by chemists), heat (studied by physicists) and tigers (studied by zoologists).

To understand why this caused such uproar we need to step back and look at what were the received philosophical views at the time Kripke was developing his ideas.

Analytic philosophy was the dominant school in Anglo-American philosophy in the twentieth century before Kripke came on the scene. It originated in the work of Russell, Frege and Wittgenstein. Associated figures were the members of the Vienna Circle (the logical positivists) including Carnap and W. V. O. Quine, a younger colleague of Carnap.

At the time Kripke was working on the ideas published in Naming and Necessity Quine was the dominant influence on American philosophy and Frege and Russell were recognized as the giants of early analytic philosophy.

These three are Kripke’s principal targets in Naming and Necessity. He targets Frege and Russell in his arguments about naming and Quine in his arguments about necessity.

Early and mid-twentieth-century analytic philosophy had a variety of features. First, there was an emphasis on language as a topic of philosophical importance in its own right. Second, analytic philosophy was associated with a respect for natural science as the paradigm of knowledge. The logical positivists, for example, embraced the verifiability principle as demarcating the line between sense and nonsense, or, as they thought, science and non-science. A third, closely associated, feature of analytic philosophy was its commitment to empiricism. Russell’s method of ‘logical construction’ of knowledge of the external world and the self combined the empiricism of Hume with the new logic (the now familiar predicate logic taught to first-year undergraduates) developed by him and Frege. The members of the Vienna Circle also thought of themselves as the heirs of British Empiricism. Quine viewed his philosophy as empiricism without the dogmas of logical positivism. A fourth feature of analytic philosophy was, of course, its emphasis on analysis as the method of philosophy. There were two paradigms: Russell’s theory of descriptions set out in ‘On Denoting’ (Russell 1905, reprinted in Russell 1956: 41–56) and second, the Frege–Russell logicist programme – the attempt to reduce all of mathematics (Russell) or at least arithmetic (Frege) to the new logic. The seminal documents of this programme were Principia Mathematica, co-authored by Russell and Whitehead and Russell (1910–13), and Frege’s Grundlagen (1884 translated as Frege 1968) and Grundgesetze (1893, reprinted in 1962).

A fifth feature of analytic philosophy, linked to these others and deriving from them, was the rejection of traditional metaphysics. Traditional metaphysicians thought of themselves as concerned with establishing fundamental and necessary truths about the world and as delineating, following Aristotle, the division between the essential and the accidental features of things. Under the influence of empiricism, the earlier and later Wittgenstein, the logical positivists and Quine’s post-positivist insistence on the continuity of philosophy with natural science, such metaphysical inquiries were rejected as proper work for philosophers (or indeed for anyone).

A specific aspect of the twentieth-century rejection of metaphysics by analytic philosophy was the rejection of any notion of necessity distinct from the linguistic notion of analyticity or truth in virtue of meaning, knowable a priori without appeal to experience. From an empiricist viewpoint our convictions about possibility and necessity can seem extraordinary. Given that we are just creatures with experiences at particular times and places how can we have any access to what is necessarily the case – is the case at all times and places to put it in crudely Kantian terms – or to what is merely possible, which we seem just as a matter of definition to have no chance of actually experiencing at all? Shrinking necessity to analyticity was the empiricist’s way of responding to this puzzlement and rendering modality more ordinary and, it was thought, knowledge of it more comprehensible. Building on his assumption that this notion of necessity was the only one of which we could make objective sense (and bracketing his belief that even this notion was not truly intelligible), Quine argued, still more specifically, that no non-trivial sense could be made of the distinction, central to traditional metaphysics, between essential (or necessary) and accidental (or contingent) features of things and hence that no non-trivial sense could be made of what the mediaevals called ‘de re’ (of the thing) as opposed to ‘de dicto’ (of the saying) modal ascriptions. Giving significance to this distinction, which he saw as both the temptation and sole raison d’être of the developing field of quantified modal logic, he argued, required an invidious distinction between different ways of designating the same individual, which treated only some of them as indicating what was necessarily true of that individual, and thus departed from the conception of necessity as merely linguistic – in short, it required ‘Aristotelian essentialism’.

It is this particular Quinean attack on the division between the essential and accidental properties of individuals which is the starting point of Kripke’s onslaught in Naming and Necessity on the previous orthodox demotion of metaphysics. Kripke embraces ‘Aristotelian essentialism’. With his rejection of Quine’s attack goes rejection of the interdefinability of necessary and analytic truth, and the equation or interchangeability (1971: 177) of the latter notion with that of a priori knowable truth. For once nontrivial necessary properties of individuals – ones whose possession does not follow analytically from every way of specifying them – are allowed, necessity can no longer be equated with necessary truth, and Kripke argues, necessary truth itself can no longer be equated with analytic, hence a priori, truth. Thus, reversing the pattern of two centuries of philosophizing about the necessary and the contingent, he argues that there are necessary a posteriori truths and even contingent a priori truths.

A final feature of analytic philosophy taken for granted by everyone before Kripke was the assumption that reference, and, specifically, the relation between proper names and their bearers, is dependent on and determined solely by something in the mind of the speaker – something that makes it the case that, given the way the world is, the user of the proper name is speaking about that thing rather than some other. In the British empiricist tradition beginning with Locke this determination was thought to be done by an idea in the speaker’s mind – a sort of image or quasi-sensory episode. By the time Kripke wrote things had moved on and this Lockean conception had long been rejected. Russell had developed a distinction between knowledge by acquaintance and knowledge by description, the latter ultimately dependent on the former, and argued that all our talk must be about things known in one of these ways, whilst Frege had developed a distinction between sense and reference and argued that reference to any entity was determined by grasp of a sense, a way of thinking of, or mode of presentation of, an entity which belonged to that entity alone (the sense itself is a mind-independent abstract object, like a number, belonging to a ‘third realm’ of non-actual causally inefficacious objects, but the speaker’s reference is determined by his grasp of it, which is a mental act). What remained was the belief that reference is only achievable via a piece of identifying knowledge, or at least identifying true belief, of the object of reference. In the case of ordinary proper names this belief was encapsulated in what came to be known, despite the differences that existed between the two philosophers as the ‘Frege–Russell’ description theory of names (notwithstanding the fact, frequently noted, but also generally acknowledged (Dummett 1973: 110–11) not to diminish the effectiveness of Kripke’s attack, that there is no commitment in Frege to the thesis that the sense of every proper name must be identical with that of some description). According to this position, a proper name (as used by a particular speaker at a particular time) must be understood (by that speaker) as equivalent to some description which picks out the thing named (so the description gives the Fregean sense he then associates with the name, and is that by which the speaker has Russellian knowledge by description of the thing). So I speak about the philosopher Saul Kripke when I use the name (though there are doubtless many other people called ‘Saul Kripke’) because I associate the name with the identifying description ‘the author of Naming and Necessity’. The principle in play here is what Donnellan (1972) has called ‘the principle of identifying descriptions’, and illustrates by a passage from Strawson’s Individuals (1959): ‘it is no good using a name for a particular unless one knows who or what is referred to by the use of the name. A name is worthless without a backing of descriptions which can be produced on demand to explain the application’ (Strawson 1959: 20). Donnellan goes on to say that it seems

at first sight almost indisputable that some such principle governs the referential function of proper names. Must not a user of a proper name know to whom or what he is referring? And what can this knowledge consist in if not the ability to describe the referent uniquely?

(Donnellan 1972: 357)

Nevertheless, Donnellan disputes the principle of identifying descriptions – as does Kripke in Naming and Necessity (the original published version of which occurs immediately before Donnellan’s paper in the volume Semantics of Natural Languages (1972)).

Donnellan’s and Kripke’s arguments, and particularly Kripke’s, are widely held to have devastated the Frege–Russell description theory, along with the more fundamental thought that reference is determined by identifying true belief. These arguments and their extension beyond proper names to general names (of what Kripke calls ‘natural kinds’), together with the related work of other philosophers he mentions, particularly Hilary Putnam, have inspired an alternative conception of how reference in thought and talk is achieved – so-called externalism. According to the externalist, the mind necessarily involves the world; what one means and thinks is partly constituted by what there is in the world. Putnam’s famous slogan is ‘cut the pie any way you like, “meanings” just ain’tin the head’ (1975: 227).

Putnam explains his position by first clarifying the notion of a psychological state. In a wide sense, a psychological state is simply one studied by psychology. So my being jealous of Mary is a psychological state (this is Putnam’s own example). But it entails the existence of Mary. Hence it is not a psychological state in the narrow sense allowed by what Putnam calls ‘the assumption of methodological solipsism’, the assumption that ‘no psychological state, properly so-called, presupposes the existence of any individual other than the subject to whom that state is ascribed’ (1975: 220). A narrow psychological state is thus one an individual could be in even if he were alone in the universe. Putnam now contends that the traditional conception of meaning (up to and beyond Frege and Russell) is an internalist one, in accord with the assumption of methodological solipsism, comprising two unchallenged assumptions: (1) that knowing the meaning of a term is a matter of being in a narrow psychological state and (2) that the meaning of a term (together with how things are) determines its extension – in the case of a general term, the class of things to which it applies, and in the case of a singular term, i.e., a proper name or definite description, the single thing it refers to – in the sense that sameness of meaning entails, given how things are, sameness of extension. These two assumptions entail that the extension of a term is determined by its user’s narrow psychology. But Putnam argues that this is not so, for two speakers can be in the same total narrow psychological state even though the extension of the term in the idiolect of one of them is not the same as its extension in the idiolect of the other.

He argues this point by appeal to his famous Twin Earth argument, a version of which is also used by Kripke. He supposes that there is a distant planet, i.e., not a planet in another ‘possible world’, not a counterfactual state of the Earth, but simply a planet in another galaxy, far, far away, which he calls ‘Twin Earth’, on which everything is very much like Earth. In fact, people on Twin Earth (some of them) even speak what sounds like English. But there are a few differences between Earth and Twin Earth, one being that the stuff in the seas and rivers of Twin Earth has the chemical formula ‘XYZ’, not the chemical formula ‘H₂O’, though there are no differences evident except to the expert chemist. Oscar and his molecule-for-molecule identical twin on Twin Earth (who is not in fact identical, of course, because he is mostly XYZ) are ignorant of the relevant chemistry, Putnam supposes (or we can roll the time back to a pre-1750 chemically uninformed era and consider Oscar’s n-times removed great-grandfather and his twin). Yet the extension of ‘water’ in Oscar’s mouth is the class of H₂O molecules, whilst the extension of ‘water’ in his twin’s mouth is the class of XYZ molecules. However, their narrow psychologies in the sense Putnam de fines are the same. So narrow psychology, ‘what is in the head’, does not determine extension. Internalism is refuted. We shall come back to (and question) Putnam’s argument in Chapter 5. For present purposes, though, the important point is that if Kripke’s arguments against the Frege–Russell theory of proper names are correct then all by themselves they establish externalism as Putnam defines it. For what Kripke argues is that ignorance and error are no bars to reference, which is determined by a set of reference-preserving causal links to an initial baptism, of which links and baptism one may be wholly ignorant. If so, two users of a proper name may, like Oscar and his twin, be referring to different things, merely as a consequence of their uses tracing back to initial baptisms of different objects, even though they are, in Putnam’s sense, in exactly the same narrow psychological state. We will return to Kripke’s arguments shortly. First we must look briefly at their place in his own philosophical evolution.

Kripke’s Philosophical Development

Naming and Necessity emerged from Kripke’s early technical work in modal logic. This work (summarized in Kripke 1963) provided a semantics for propositional and quantified modal logics and established various methodological results. Kripke introduces the idea of a model structure, a triple < G, K, R >, where G is an element of K, K is a set and R is a reflexive relation on K. Intuitively, he says, we may think of G as the actual world, K as a set of possible worlds, and R as a relation of relative possibility. This brought back into the philosophical mainstream the Leibnizian language according to which necessity is truth in all possible worlds and possibility is truth in some. In his technical work Kripke does not say more about what possible worlds are (he does not need to, since he is doing mathematics, not philosophy), but he employs the concept extensively in Naming and Necessity, where, however, he is emphatic that our grasp of modal language is not derivative from our grasp of the concept of a possible world, and is particularly critical of the work of David Lewis, who employs a notion of a possible world (subsequently set out in detail in 1986), which can be explained in wholly non-modal terms, and explains modal notions in terms of it. Kripke emphasizes that as he thinks of them possible worlds are simply total ways the world might have been, or possible states or histories of the entire world (1980: 18). The actual world – better referred to as the actual state or history of the world – should therefore not be confused with the enormous scattered object that surrounds us (1980: 19–20). He suggests that ‘counterfactual situation’ might be better terminology and that one should even remind oneself that the ‘worlds’ terminology can be replaced by modal talk –‘it is possible that’ (1980: 15). At one point Kripke even refers to the ‘metaphor’ of possible worlds.

After taking his undergraduate degree Kripke turned from the technicalities of modal logic to more purely philosophical questions about naming and necessity. He presented his ideas in ‘Identity and Necessity’ (1971), which focuses on the arguments for the necessary, but a posteriori, truth of identity statements containing proper names, whilst making it very clear that identity statements containing descriptions may be contingent, and contains a particularly clear presentation of Kripke’s argument that a priori philosophical reflection, combined with straight...