Saul Kripke PDF
Preview Saul Kripke
SAUL KRIPKE ARIF AHMED A continuum Continuum International Publishing Group The Tower Building 80 Maiden Lane 11 York Road Suite 704 London SE1 7NX New York NY 10038 www .continuum bboks. com © Arif Ahmed 2007 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN-10: HB: 0-8264-9261-^1 PB: 0-8264-9262-2 ISBN-13: HB: 978-0-8264-9261-6 PB: 978-0-8264-9262-3 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. Typeset by YHT Ltd, London Printed and bound in Great Britain by Cormwell Press Ltd, Trowbridge, Wiltshire CONTENTS Abbreviations vii Preface viii 1 Introduction 1 2 Names 5 2.1 The Frege-Russell Thesis 5 2.2 The Modal Argument 16 2.3 The Semantic Argument 30 2.4 The Epistemological Argument 37 2.5 Summary 40 3 Necessity 41 3.1 Essential Properties of Individuals 41 3.2 A Priori and Essential Properties of Natural Kinds 59 3.3 Modal Illusion 72 3.4 Anti-Materialism 81 3.5 Summary 98 4 Rule-Following 100 4.1 The Sceptical Challenge 101 4.2 Possible Answers to It 107 4.3 Dispositionalism 125 4.4 Summary 134 5 Private Language 136 5.1 Outline of the Sceptical Solution 137 5.2 Detail of the Sceptical Solution 146 5.3 The Argument Against Private Language 155 5.4 Summary 163 V CONTENTS 6 Conclusion 164 Endnotes 167 References 174 Index 179 vi ABBREVIATIONS Those works of Kripke cited in the text and notes are abbreviated as follows: IN: 'Identity and necessity’, in M. Munitz (ed.), Identity and Individuation, 135-64. New York: New York University Press, 1971. Reprinted in A. W. Moore (ed.), Meaning and Reference. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993. NN: ‘Naming and necessity’, in D. Davidson and G. Harman (eds), Semantics of Natural Language, 253-355. Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1972. NN2: Naming and Necessity. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Uni versity Press, 1980. W: Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language. Oxford: Blackwell, 1982. vii PREFACE I wrote this book between June and October 2006 during sabbatical leave from lecturing and teaching duties. I am grateful to the Faculty of Philosophy at Cambridge University and also to Girton College, Cambridge for granting me leave during this period. I am grateful to the Cambridge University Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH) for providing space in which to complete the book. I am grateful to Messrs A. Stewart-Wallace and T. Goldschmidt for helping to prepare the index. And I am grateful to Professor David Braddon-Mitchell of Sydney University for helpful discussions regarding the material in Chapter 2. Professor Kusch’s new book on Kripke’s interpretation of Wittgenstein is an important and ground-breaking addition to the literature. I regret that I only had a chance to see it two weeks before I finished the present study. So I have not here given it the careful attention that it certainly deserves. But I do discuss one of Kusch’s arguments in a footnote to Chapter 5, and I am very grateful to him for helpful comments on it. I wish to thank Blackwell Publishers (UK) and Harvard Uni versity Press (US) for permission to quote from Naming and Necessity, and Blackwell Publishers for permission to quote from Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language. During the writing of this book the best things in my life were Isla and Frisbee (who also taught me a great deal about rule-following). So I dedicate it to them. vtii 1 INTRODUCTION My aim in the following is to describe and assess the main argu ments in Kripke’s two most important works: Naming and Ne cessity and Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language. Limitations of space have prevented me from discussing everything that Kripke does. I have chosen to focus on material that is probably common to most undergraduate courses in Western philosophy. This is as follows: Kripke’s rejection of the description theory (Chapter 2), essence and materialism (Chapter 3), the sceptical paradox (Chap ter 4) and the argument against private language (Chapter 5). Certainly this covers most of what is taught about Kripke in the undergraduate courses most familiar to me, i.e. Part IB Logic, Part II Metaphysics and Part II Philosophical Logic in the Cambridge Tripos. Probably the two most important omissions are Kripke’s outline in NN of a causal theory of reference and the postscript to W on other minds. I am also aware that even what I have discussed deserves lengthier consideration. The reader should therefore take my criti cisms of Kripke with an appropriate pinch of salt: no doubt he can be defended from most of them. But my aim was never to refute Kripke’s views: only to present objections to them. That approach derives from my conviction that the best way to understand a position is to disagree with it. If the text drives the reader back to Kripke’s own work in order to see what more might be said then it will have served its purpose. I have tried my best throughout to follow Kripke’s own admir able practice of not resorting to formal symbolism when plain English will do. Saul Kripke was born in New York in 1940 and was appointed to 1 SAUL KRIPKE the Harvard Society of Fellows in 1963. In 1968 he was appointed Associate Professor of Philosophy at Rockefeller University and in 1977 became McCosh Professor of Philosophy at Princeton. He is currently (2006) Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the City University of New York Graduate Centre. In addition to the works considered here he has made a number of notable contributions to philosophical logic. But Naming and Necessity and Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language are certainly his most important, in fluential, and accessible works, and I confine my attentioriYo these. Kripke’s early work is best understood in the context of two important features of the philosophical scene at the time. The first was that the discipline of metaphysics - the study of such ultimate features of reality as necessity, time and causation - was in some disrepute amongst philosophers. There was pressure from two dif ferent directions towards the view that it could not be both an autonomous and a substantive subject. Wittgenstein had argued - early and late - that philosophy in general, and metaphysics in particular, was autonomous but not substantive. The true method in philosophy was to say nothing except what can meaningfully be said - propositions of natural science - and ‘whenever someone else wanted to say something metaphysical, to demonstrate to him that he had failed to give a meaning to certain signs in his propositions’ (1963:6.53). And Quine had argued (1951) that philosophy was substantive but not autonomous: its methods were continuous with those of natural science and its conclusions as empirically vulner able as the latter. The second feature of the philosophical scene was the then prevalent view that linguistic meaning is somehow mediated by something in the mind of the speaker. This thought goes back at least as far as Locke (1979, Book III), for whom the primary meaning of a term is an idea or image in the speaker’s mind: and it is only via these ideas that a speaker’s words manage to refer to or describe objects in the external world at all. The Lockean picture had certainly been modified by the twentieth century: under the influence of Frege (1956, 1960) it was now believed that your at taching a meaning to a word was not primarily a matter of your associating it with a quasi-sensory state but rather a matter of your associating it with an abstract object or sense (see 2.1.3(ii) and 4.2.7 below). But what persisted was the view that the extra-cranial re ference of a word was mediated by or at any rate somehow involved 2 INTRODUCTION its mental association with something ("sense’) that itself determines the reference. Naming and Necessity challenged both of these received views. With regard to the first: Kripke argues in NN (and also in IN) that we can through philosophical reflection alone reach substantive metaphysical conclusions concerning the intrinsic nature of things - what you might call their essence. We can for instance see that it is part of Queen Elizabeth’s essence that she had her actual parents (3.1.2 below) and that if heat is molecular motion then it is essential to heat that that is what it is (3.2.4 below). Most spectacularly, we can see through reflection alone that mental states cannot be identical to physical ones (3.4 below). The faculty that delivers these wonderful results is called intuition and we shall have a good deal to say about its operation throughout Chapters 2 and 3. With regard to the second view: Kripke gave three arguments against the Fregean position that a name (like “'London’) achieves reference to objects (like London) via its user’s association of it with something (a sense) that specifies its reference. These arguments are widely regarded as having discredited the Fregean doctrine. We shall consider them in detail in Chapter 2. It is not really necessary to say very much about the context of the later work, Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language. Partly this is because Kripke is not attacking some theory that had espe cially wide currency at the time of writing but rather a view of meaning that has always come quite naturally to everyone, i.e. that there is such a thing. And partly it is because the work is written at the level of an elementary exposition, to be used in introductory classes on Wittgenstein (W viii). It is perhaps worth mentioning that the ideas presented in W had been in the air for some time before its publication: Wright’s interpretation of Wittgenstein (1980) is quite similar to Kripke’s, and Fogelin’s (the first edition of his 1987) is remarkably so. And I argue briefly at 4.1.3 that my interpretation of the central argument of W Chapter 2 locates it in a tradition that includes Schopenhauer and Berkeley as well as Wittgenstein himself. But the best way to approach W is not to worry about these anticipations of it. The best way to approach it is to read the book up to p. 15. At this point the basic problem should be clear. The reader should then try to think up his own response to the problem. He should then read the rest of W Chapter 2 and see whether 3 SAUL KRIPKE Kripke has a cogent argument against this response. Then read on to the end of the book. I am confident that nobody who follows this course will complete the book without feeling that his most basic preconceptions of meaning have been profoundly disturbed: and this is a mark of its quality. 4
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