Naming, Necessity and More: Explorations in the Philosophical Work of Saul Kripke

260 Pages·2014·0.661 MB·English

by  Jonathan Berg

Naming, Necessity,
and More
Explorations in the Philosophical
Work of Saul Kripke
Edited by
Jonathan Berg
Naming, Necessity, and More
This page intentionally left blank
Naming, Necessity,
and More
Explorations in the Philosophical
Work of Saul Kripke
Edited by
Jonathan Berg
Selection and editorial matter © Jonathan Berg 2014
Chapters © respective authors 2014
All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this
publication may be made without written permission.
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First published 2014 by
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Naming, necessity, and more / [edited by] Jonathan Berg University of Haifa,
Israel.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978–1–137–40092–5
1. Kripke, Saul A., 1940—Congresses. 2. Philosophy—Congresses.
3. Necessity (Philosophy)—Congresses. 4. Reference (Philosophy)—
Congresses. 5. Meaning (Philosophy)—Congresses. 6. Wittgenstein,
Ludwig, 1889–1951—Congresses. I. Berg, Jonathan, 1954– editor.
B945.K794N36 2014
191—dc23 2014024475
Typeset by MPS Limited, Chennai, India.
Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Preface viii
Notes on the Contributors xii
Part I Naming
1 Why Rigidity? 3
Hanoch Ben-Yami
2 Tradition and Language 22
Meir Buzaglo
Part II Necessity
3 Over-Assignment of Structure 39
Eli Dresner
4 Modal Paradox 54
Teresa Robertson
5 Personal Identity: What’s the Problem? 81
Nathan Salmon
Part III Meaning
6 A Fregean Look at Kripke’s Modal Notion of Meaning 129
Gilead Bar-Elli
7 Semantics in the Twilight Zone 148
Jonathan Berg
Part IV Skepticism
8 Kripke’s Infinity Argument 169
Oron Shagrir
9 Kripke’s Paradox of Meaning 191
Paul Horwich
10 Skeptical Arguments in Hume and Wittgenstein 202
Mark Steiner
v
vi Contents
Part V Logic
11 The Road to Gödel 223
Saul A. Kripke
Index 243
Acknowledgments
The editor and publishers are grateful to the publishers who have
granted permission for the following papers or portions or versions
thereof to be reprinted here: Chapter 2: Buzaglo, Meir ‘Masoret velashon’
[‘Tradition and Language’], in his Safa lane-emanim [A Language for the
Faithful], Jerusalem: Keter Books and Mandel Foundation, 2008. Chapter 3:
Dresner, Eli ‘Over-Assignment of Structure’, Journal of Philosophical
Logic, 33 (2004), 467–80, publisher: Springer. Chapter 5: Salmon,
Nathan ‘Personal Identity: What’s the Problem?’, in his Metaphysics,
Mathematics, and Meaning: Philosophical Papers, vol. I, Oxford/New York:
Oxford University Press, 2005, pp. 192–225. Salmon, Nathan ‘Trans-
World Identification and Stipulation’, Philosophical Studies, 84 (1996),
203–23, publisher: Springer. Chapter 8: Shagrir, Oron ‘Kripke’s Infinity
Argument’, Iyyun: The Jerusalem Philosophical Quarterly, 57 (2008), 3–24.
Chapter 9: Horwich, Paul ‘Kripke’s Paradox of Meaning’, Polish Journal
of Philosophy, 3 (2009), 23–32, reprinted in his Truth–Meaning–Reality,
Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, 2010, pp. 99–112.
vii
Preface
The chapters in this volume derive from the conference ‘Naming,
Necessity, and More’, held at the University of Haifa in 1999, in honor
of Saul Kripke on the occasion of his being awarded the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy honoris causa. Arranged under the topics of nam-
ing, necessity, meaning, skepticism, and logic, the papers (apart from
his own) relate to Kripke’s writings to varying degrees, sometimes very
closely, and sometimes taking his work merely as a point of departure.
Either way, they bring new insight to Kripke’s work, attesting to its great
depth, extraordinary richness, and lasting significance.
The first part of the collection concerns names and rigid designation.
Kripke famously argues ‘intuitively’ (Naming and Necessity (NN), 49)
that proper names are rigid designators. Hanoch Ben-Yami asks whether
Kripke’s rigidity claim might instead be derived from more basic facts
about our use of proper names. He argues that it can on the basis of
the principle of the independence of reference, which says that the
reference of a name is independent of what is said in the rest of the
sentence in which it occurs. He argues that this principle also provides
explanations of other aspects of our use of referring expressions, such as
the strong rigidity of proper names, the use of names of fictional charac-
ters, the use of definite descriptions in modal contexts, and the use of
natural kind terms. He goes on to consider how Kripke’s conception of
rigid designation might be threatened by the existence of names shared
by more than one individual. After considering and rejecting a number
of possible solutions, including one suggested by Kripke himself, Ben-
Yami proposes a way of restricting the notion of rigidity to what he
calls ‘token rigidity’ and thereby avoiding the problem posed by shared
names.
Kripke’s picture of how our use of names is grounded in chains of com-
munication prompts Meir Buzaglo to develop a dialogue between Kripke
and the medieval Spanish Jewish philosopher and poet Rabbi Yehuda
Halevi on how names are handed down from one speaker to another.
The starting point is the classical distinction, most commonly associ-
ated with Pascal, between ‘the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob’ and
‘the God of the philosophers’. Halevi construes the Tetragrammaton –
composed of the four Hebrew letters Yod, Hey, Vav, Hey – as a name of the
former, and other names as names of the latter; and he insists that ‘the
viii
Preface ix
Tetragrammaton is a name exclusively employable by us, as no other
people knows its true meaning’. This leads Buzaglo to wonder how the
chains of communication by which names are passed on could possibly
be confined in principle to just one group of speakers. What is there
to prevent a ‘philosopher’ from acquiring the name for the God of the
patriarchs? Buzaglo proposes a solution based on the role of a commu-
nity’s traditions, or forms of life, in determining reference. In particular,
the acquisition of a name may be restricted to individuals who follow
the community’s traditions with regard to who is to be recognized as a
semantic authority.
The second part of the book deals with necessity. Eli Dresner aims to
show how certain kinds of talk of possible worlds are just instances of
a general fallacy he calls ‘the measurement-theoretic fallacy of “over-
assignment of structure”: the unwarranted assumption that every
numeric relation holding among two (or more) numbers represents
some empirical, physical relation among the objects to which these
numbers are assigned as measures’. An example of this fallacy would
be to think that if one body has a temperature of 20 °C and another
has a temperature of 10 °C, then the first is twice as hot as the second.
After showing how this fallacy arises in philosophical discussion of the
reducibility of arithmetic to set theory and in the ascription of full-
blown intentional states to pre- or nonverbal creatures or machines,
Dresner turns to possible worlds semantics. Useful as it is in talking
about necessity and other modal notions, possible worlds talk may lead
to questions such as how many possible worlds there are, and whether
there can be numerically distinct possible worlds that are identical – as
well as questions about possible worlds as real objects. Dresner argues
that such illegitimate questions arise from fallaciously transferring the
superfluous structure in systems of possible worlds back to the philo-
sophical discussion of the modal notions that the possible worlds talk
was brought in to explain.
In one of the most widely discussed footnotes in 20th-century phi-
losophy Kripke suggests how one might prove a version of the principle
that ‘if a material object has its origin from a certain hunk of matter,
it could not have had its origin in any other matter’ (NN, 114, n. 56).
This is the starting point for Teresa Robertson’s discussion of what is
sometimes called ‘Chisholm’s paradox’: how can the claim that a given
artifact could not have been originally made from wholly different
matter be retained together with the view that a slight variation in its
material origin is possible? Robertson examines solutions proposed by
Graeme Forbes, Nathan Salmon, and David Lewis, rejecting the first in