Beyond Formalism: Naming and Necessity for Human Beings

253 Pages·1994·8.408 MB·English

by  Rosenberg, Jay F.

BEYOND FORMALISM
Naming and Necessity for Human Beings
Jay F. Rosenberg
Ridgeview Publishing Company
www. ridgeviewpublishing. com

.... TO THE MEMORY OF MY PARENTS

If you send your concepts to spend the night with Procrustes,
MoTTo
you should not be surprised when, the next morning,
they come back all the same size.

CONTENTS
PREFACE Xi
.... Dialectical Preliminaries 1
1 .... Essential Properties, Thought-Experiments,
and Modal Intuitions 6
2 .... Rigid Designators, Proper Names, and Possible Worlds 28
3 .... Referential Alternatives: Names and Descriptions 57
4 .... Theoretical Desiderata for Nominal Reference 86
5 .... Idiolectic Sense, Confluence, and Isonymy 109
6 .... Reference and Belief in Epistemological Perspective 135
7 .... Logical Analysis in Epistemological Perspective 159
8 .... Roots and Roles of Logical Form 183
NOTES 199
WORKS CITED 225
GENERALINDEX 229
NAME INDEX 239

PREFACE
I BEGIN with a brief personal history: Some twenty years ago,
when Saul Kripke's "Naming and Necessity" was first published
in Harman and Davidson's anthology, Semantics of Natural Lan
guage, like most philosophers, I found it both brilliant and stimu
lating. Unlike most philosophers, however, I also thought it was
largely wrong. Kripke's essentialist modal theses struck me as
quirky and implausible, and while his critique of a particular
interpretation of "Descriptivism"-that is, the thesis that the
referent of a proper name is determined by way of an associated
(descriptive) sense-was plainly on target, the specific version of
Descriptivism that he had singled out for criticism seemed both
deliberately and unnecessarily naive. Meanwhile, Kripke's own
adumbrations of an alternative "causal-historical" picture of
proper names and natural kind sortals pointed toward the sort of
theory that would inevitably disconnect the ostensible semantics
of such expressions ("direct reference") from their roles and
modes of functioning in contexts of individual understanding and
interpersonal communication.
It also seemed to me obvious where things had gone wrong.
Kripke's first brilliant achievement had been the development of a
formal (model theoretic) semantics for systems of quantified
modal logic with identity. What he had now done, in essence, was
to transform key elements of his ingenious formalisms into
substantive metaphysical views and philosophical theses regard-
xi
xii Preface
ing aspects of natural languages. Once those views and theses had
been disentangled from allegiance to the formal archetypes that
inspired them, I thought, they would themselves be subjected to
appropriate critical scrutiny and, fairly soon (now that, thanks to
Kripke, the issues had been so well joined), they would in turn
give way to a family of more defepsible philosophical convictions.
But that wasn't what happened.
What happened was rather that a surprisingly large number
of philosophers simply adopted the new Kripkean ideas, images,
and idioms root and branch. Instead of being treated simply as the
latest story, one still in need of substantial improvement, they
became the phenomena to be saved. The quirky essentialist theses
became premisses in ("Twin Earth" style) thought-experiments,
mobilized in support of a wide variety of claims, and the causal
historical picture of "direct reference" became the subject of a
series of epicyclic refinements and modifications which continues
unabated today.1
There, as far as I was concerned, the matter rested. I had my
own philosophical agenda,2 and while it indeed required me to
say something about representation, the account which emerged
funded its own claims of (relative) necessity epistemologically
and located the significant stratum of extensional word-world
(token-object) regularities at a level of analysis below that occu
pied by explicitly meta-level semantic notions. Such Kripkean
images and idioms as "possible worlds" and "rigid designators"
proved to be simply irrelevant to the stories I was engaged in
telling, and so, while their popularity spread and epicycles accu
mulated, I personally gave them little attention.3
In 1989, I stepped down from the chair of the Chapel Hill
department. As they customarily do in the case of a retiring
chairperson, the University of North Carolina bestowed a semes
ter's research leave upon me-presumably to get me out of town
and facilitate an orderly transfer of power without the necessity of
staging a coup. I had the good luck to be able to combine this leave