An abstract object is not in your head.

Yep... thanks TS.

I don't know why "entire category" is important here. Any revision is a revision.

Perhaps I misunderstood what you were saying about identifying essential properties. It appeared that you were saying that there's some nonsense there.

This was just my point. Hence the revisionism, insofar as 'contingency speech' is an ordinary feature of language as revealed through counterfactuals. Andrewk is poised to reject an entire grammatical construction as literally nonsensical. — The Great Whatever

True. And you're doing the same thing with different biases. I'm not saying there is any unbiased approach, but noting that we're all doing it might reveal to us that we're not talking about freakin' rigid designators. We're talking about our ontological preferences.

Andrewk's primary point appeared to be that an alternate Nixon isn't the actual Nixon and so contingency speech can't be taken literally.

You answered that by saying that contingency speech isn't about an alternate Nixon. It's about Nixon.

First of all, the point Andrewk made (sans the crap about processes) is one that Spinoza and Leibniz would agree with. Schopenhauer would agree with it, so it's not straight from the loony bin. Does pondering that get us any closer to understanding Kripke? No.

It appears to me that you're doing the same thing on the other side. You seem to be insisting that all possibility is logical possibility. You also seem to want to say that we can't pick objects out by specific properties (and by way of this, identify essential properties). We do it all the time, so aren't you revising language use if you insist on this?

Kripke wanted to separate logical possibility from epistemic possibility (something his forebears didn't want to do). That and the rigid designator are the tools he thought he needed to establish that there can be informative necessary truths. Did he succeed?

Now you're doing it too... letting your ontological prejudices interpret for you. What did you call it? Linguistic revision?

Jeez.

That we can suppose individuals to have different properties is the very thing that is being questioned. If individuals just are some set of concrete properties then we're not actually supposing them to have different properties; we're just considering something else entirely, and erroneously claiming these two different things to be in some respect the same thing. — Michael

And it's a valid point. It's a decent philosophical topic. But Kripke was addressing the nature of inquiry. We build knowledge one verified proposition at a time. We're always sort of straddling the known and the unknown with the assumption that there's a logical relationship between the two. In this scenario, the known is the aposteriori necessity: necessary because I'm using it to narrow down possible worlds under consideration as I ponder what could be.

It's this pronged image that results in what would be a conundrum if we were involved in a metaphysical thesis. But it's not. The possible worlds we're considering are abstract objects.

We don't talk about names. We talk about objects. Who thought Kripke meant something else?

The concept of some eternal essence that resides in a realm of immaterial forms is not something Kripke talked about. I'm not even sure how that came up. However, if I talk about Obama-the-person, it is not logically possible that the object I'm talking about is not a person. I'm not sure how much more obvious that could be.

Good question.

'this table is made of clay' is an entirely contingent statement — mcdoodle

Why do you say that statement is contingently true?

There's a wiki article about the Rawagede massacre in 1947. In 2009, the Dutch state promised to pay 20,000 euros to the widows of the victims.

Interesting. African slaves were first introduced to N. America by Dutch slave traders.

You don't know what intension is... you don't fool me. You need to in order to get Kripke...

If x is an essential property of Y, then "Y is/has x" is necessarily true.

Kripke didn't stray much from this meaning of essence. Your statement that he equated essence with necessity is simply not true. I attribute that comment to sloppy language. Typing on a phone maybe... as I am now.

That's awesome. Can you explain why we can't do without the concept of intensionality?

Do you know what intension is?

A cool way to look at the impetus behind rigid designators (the answer to the question you asked is at the end:)

"There is a natural and initially attractive conception of inquiry according to which ignorance about a given subject is a matter of lacking information about which, of certain relevantly different possible states the world could be in, it is actually in; and complete ignorance is a condition in which one doesn’t know which, of all the possible states that the world could be in, it is actually in. According to this conception, when an agent is in this condition, (i) all metaphysically possible states of the world are epistemically possible— i.e., every way that the world could possibly be is a way that, for all the agent knows, it might actually be, and (ii) every epistemic possibility is a metaphysical possibility— i.e., every way that, for all the agent knows, the world might be is a way that the world really could be. Inquiry is the process of escaping from this position of ignorance. By investigating the world or relying on the testimony of others, the agent learns contingent truths that distinguish the way the world actually is from other ways it might possibly be, but isn’t. Each time the agent learns one of these truths, he narrows down the class of metaphysical/ epistemic possibilities compatible with what he knows, and within which he locates the way the world actually is. According to this conception, acquiring information is equated with narrowing down the range of metaphysically possible world-states that are compatible with what one knows. We may also speak of the truth of one proposition as providing information supporting the truth of another. On this conception, the truth of a proposition p provides information supporting the truth of a proposition q by ruling out certain possible ways in which q might fail to be true. Thus, the truth of p supports the truth of q only if the set of possible world-states with respect to which both p and the negation of q are true is non-empty. There are two immediate consequences of this conception of inquiry. The first is that necessary truths are uninformative. Since they are true with respect to all possible world-states, knowledge of them provides no information, and is irrelevant to locating the way the world actually is within the range of possible ways it might be. Second, there are no necessary truths which, though knowable, are knowable only aposteriori. To say that a proposition q is knowable only aposteriori is to say that one can have the justification required to know q only if one has empirical evidence supporting its truth. However, according to the conception of inquiry just sketched, this is impossible. In order for the truth of anyproposition p to support the truth of q, and hence to provide evidence for it, there must be possible world-states with respect to which q is untrue, which are ruled out by the truth of p. Since q is necessary, there are no possible world-states with respect to which it is untrue; hence there can be no evidence for q. This means that, on the conception of inquiry just sketched, there can be no necessary truths which, though knowable, are knowable only aposteriori. Although a number of philosophers have taken this conception of inquiry, and the consequences that follow from it, to be plausible and even axiomatic, the conception is directly challenged by the frame-work developed by Kripke in Naming and Necessity. 1 This challenge is illustrated by the following examples. 1. Gregory Soames is not identical with (i.e., is not the same individual as) Brian Soames. 2. If Saul Kripke exists, then Saul Kripke is a human being. 3. This table is not made out of clay. 4. If this table exists, then this table is made of molecules. It seems evident that each of these sentences expresses a proposition that is knowable only aposteriori, on the basis of some sort of empirical evidence. In the case of (1), one needs to find out who Gregory and Brian are, and to assure oneself that they are different. In the case of (2), if the question were ever raised as to whether Kripke was a sophisticated robot, or an alien sent from another world, one would need empirical evidence to rule out these possibilities— though, of course, given their fanciful nature, not much evidence would be required. A similar point is true of (3), the justification of which might be provided by a cursory examination of the table. In the case of (4), the evidence required to know the truth that it expresses is much greater, and more sophisticated. Still, since in all four cases empirical evidence is required to know the truths expressed, all four propositions are knowable only aposteriori. They are also necessary. In each case, the subject expression is a rigid designator— the names Gregory Soames and Saul Kripke, plus the demonstrative phrase this table. 2 Because of this, the sentences express necessary truths iff the properties they attribute to the referents of their subjects are essential properties— the properties of being non-identical with Brian Soames, of being human, of being not made out of clay, and of being made of molecules. These do seem to be essential properties; in fact they seem to be essential properties of anything that has them. For example, it is plausible to think that any individual who really is not the same individual as Brian Soames could not have existed while being the very same individual as Brian Soames. Because the name Brian Soames is itself a rigid designator, we can also make the point in another way: since the property of being non-identical is an essential property of any pair of things that have it, if two individuals (such as my two sons) really are non-identical, then there is no possible circumstance in which they are one and the same individual. Similar points hold for the other properties mentioned in these examples— anything that really is human could not have existed without being human, any object not made out of clay could not have existed while being (originally and entirely) made out of clay, and anything that really is made up of molecules could not have existed without being made up of molecules. Thus, sentences (1– 4) all express necessary truths. Since they are also knowable only aposteriori, they are examples of the necessary aposteriori. How can this be? How can a proposition that is necessary (and known to be necessary) be knowable only aposteriori? Kripke’s answer appeals to our knowledge of which properties are essential. He argues, quite plausibly, that we know apriori that properties like non-identity, being human, being not made out of clay, and being made out of molecules are essential properties of the things that have them. So we know apriori that if things have these properties, then they have them necessarily."


Soames, Scott. Philosophical Analysis in the Twentieth Century, Volume 2: The Age of Meaning (p. 374). Princeton University Press. Kindle Edition.

And anytime someone says Kripke is dealing with essences, you can be 100% sure they don't know what they are talking about. — StreetlightX

Essential properties.. yes he did.

Indeed, and the LOI is necessarily true, hence how RDs just "pick out" or signify some existant among and relative to others in lieu of LOI obtaining. — numberjohnny5

Yea. But a strong adherence to the LOI is a route to hard determinism, which is a feature of human thought, but the opposite is also there, manifest in words like could, would, and should.

If you can see some route where the LOI blasts those words out of language and renders us incapable of saying things like "If I'd only known..." "I wish I hadn't done that....", and so on.. then we would dispense with possible worlds because all of that would be completely meaningless to us.

I knew about the Kellogg story. The guy behind it was Sylvester Graham (graham crackers). It would really astonish me if that package of insanity made its way to Indonesia. Wasn't Indonesia dominated by the French? There is no culture on the planet that is further from American sensibilities about food than the French.

The first problem with the entailment angle on truthmaking is that any object which exists will end up being a truthmaker for a necessary truth. My dog is a truthmaker for the proposition that 2+2=4. And there are other problems.

So we'll attempt to remedy this by adding relevance to entailment. Is it possible to become systematic about the concept of relevance?

I think Spivak is failing to realize the prevailing situation. Most pale people and otherwise don't actually give a flip about suffering people anywhere.

Male circumcision was Jewish and wasn't embraced by Gentiles until early to mid 20th Century unless I'm mistaken. If the transmission of the custom happened as you describe... is there evidence of this?

And on top of that, the question you're asking is really about the value of life.

Not going to bother explaining why...not to your know it all self anyway. :p

Self love requires self acceptance.

The confidence you demonstrate shows decent self estimation. Possibly it's a defense. The oyster is defending itself when it makes the pearl.

We're all sinners. Nobody's perfect. If you don't accept that about yourself, you won't accept it in others.

You are incredibly preachy btw. Bullied were you?

You love your neighbor as you love yourself.

Common decency demands that when presented with a victim, you don't ignore him or her and immediately try to find a counterpart in America to focus on.

It's similar to the measurement problem. I'm not sure there's any proof this way or that. There's lots of biases to go around. You're no one unless you have a bias. You are your bias. :)

Sometimes saints start out suffering from a disorder called scruples (belief that one is evil). Nietzsche had it. So..as much as it's probably true that sans personality no mental illness would exist, the same is true of those in the grave.

The human mind comes standard with two opposing views of actual events: that every one is necessary (and so determinism) vs they are not necessary (which opens the door to volition.) The one that logic seems to march inevitably toward is determinism. The opposing view is a little more mind-bending and that's phil of mind.

Kripke's deal is not so grandiose as to try to resolve these puzzles. It's in the nature of AP to bite off little pieces and enjoy them without worrying about some giant master plan. So if rigid designators seem crazy it may be a case of way over estimating Kripke's ambitions.

The process that I (perhaps rigidly) refer to as 'me' did not win the lottery of date 7 December 2016, so if I wish to talk about a process that wins the lottery of date 7 December 2016, that must be some other process. It can be a process in an imaginary world that is similar to this in almost every respect except those relating to the lottery, but it cannot be this process. — andrewk

True. The actual you didn't win the lottery. If assertions you make include a phrase like ".. in the actual world" then you aren't using rigid designation as a tool and your proposition is necessarily true or false (see Scott Soames' Actually )

When using rigid designation, the concept of actuality doesn't intrude much (as it doesn't when we think in terms of logical possibility.)

No, she wasn't assumed - she actually was corrupt. Have you not been watching the news? — Agustino

She's been in the news since 1992. I saw a fair amount of it.

It's always risky to make statements about what others mean. So to soften that, let me say that what I mean by the previous paragraph is that, if when people say 'Imagine if BO could speak fluent Mandarin' they don't mean the interpretation I gave, then I have no idea what they mean. — andrewk

I'll affirm that you don't have any idea what TGW meant. Nevertheless, his explanation of rigid designators was a fair assessment of Kripke's intentions.. which was the topic of the OP.

There's a Frontline documentary that explains the part the Obama administration played in the Syrian disaster. Repeated statements of encouragement to Syrian rebels didn't proceed from a well thought out plan. The president and sec. state just sort of bumbled their way into it. I feel like we're experiencing the downside to the term limits of the US president. I think Obama is better seasoned now, having made these mistakes.

I'm not sure what you mean by democracy being under attack. If it is, the main threat to it is subversion that causes people to lose faith in it. To some extent, I think that loss of faith is why Trump was elected. His opponent was assumed to be corrupt.

It's the way in which criticism is generated which bugs me, all the time (both on the left and on the right) you see people set up a caricature of their opponents and attacking them on that basis. It's odd that those who tend to claim moral superiority are so often inclined to judge everyone who doesn't share their opinion while not realising that they place their own values onto those who are unable to do anything with these values. — Gooseone

Unfortunately caricature isn't necessary. Daniel Pipes is an example of a guy who has command of a lot of facts and chooses to twist them to create the inflammatory picture he thinks is necessary to wake people up to the threat he sees. In my view it just eliminates him altogether as a worthy resource.

And I think that's the situation in a nutshell: everybody is clear-sighted regarding the particular threat that worries them: for some it's the threat of terrorism, for others it's the threat of victimization of innocent Muslims. I guess it's the possibility of bloodshed that makes people feel it's ok to stretch and twist the facts.

"Nixon might have lost the election."

This is a bit of language use that would crash a rationalist approach like Leibniz's. He would say that any Nixon who didn't win the election couldn't be Nixon... that winning the election is part Nixon's identity.

I think Hume would also say that Nixon was a bundle of properties (one of which was being a winner).

The concept of the rigid designator is at least food for thought.

Too busy to think it through then, huh? OK.

I don't think there's any need for me to walk you through what you actually said.

I think it follows that insight is intrinsic to both analysis and synthesis. In the former we intuit how things may be broken down into parts and in the latter we can intuit how elements not obviously related to one another may possibly be related. — John

Yeah... the very concept of entailment (that things are related) has to be apriori knowledge.

Do you think there are other types of entailment besides logical? I think entailment works within a Hegelian dialectic. A dialectical movement which preserves and negates both premises and in doing so generates a synthesis which is negatively determined. I guess what is entailed must be part of the synthesis.

Hegel dialectic has three moments:
1) understanding of the subject, its definition, what it means.
2) It cancels, negates and preserves 1) in a moment of self-sublation
3) the moment in which a new unity is grasped, the synthesis. — Cavacava

This is kind of trippy. The object of entailment isn't a proposition here. It's a pending comprehension of the dependence of the subject?

May be off track from your thoughts here, but I see a trail here leading to the object of entailment in all cases being Everything. That's also happening with my use of Leibniz's CIC to explain entailment.. and it's also the reason entailment is not a useful concept for describing truthmaking... every thing ends up being a truthmaker for every truth-bearer.

I also thought about entailment that might be involved in genealogical arguments, but these arguments are, it seems to me, to me more speculative reconstructions of history, which offer alternate explanations and suggest new possibilities. I not sure but don't think anything like logical or dialectical entailments are involved. — Cavacava

I happen to be reading Geneology of Morals right now. Ha!