AP started out examining fake languages with the hope that something would be learned in the process.. — Mongrel

Is "AP" analytic philosophy? Yes, Frege, Russell, Carnap, Quine, Davidson, Kripke and many other philosophers have devoted much energy studying formal and ideal languages. The paybacks have been tremendous although, for sure, many lines of inquiry have led to dead ends and/or have spawned degenerative research programs. All one can do is try to sort out the philosophical wheat from the chaff. I am fond of David Wiggins' methodological dictum that whenever one uses some technical or semi-technical term in order to make a substantive philosophical point, one ought to check one's own sanity through trying to convey the same point in plain English (or whatever ordinary language one speaks). Many of my favorite philosophers belong to quietist or broadly OLP traditions (i.e. ordinary language philosophy) and hence I'd be the first one to complain about the overuse of formal methods in analytic philosophy. But such tools, however overused they may be in some quarters, can still be indispensable to enforcing rigor, when needed, and can provide insight through the disentanglement of formerly conflated ideas.

I would also like to stress that, although the necessary a posteriori status of propositions expressed with the help of the "actually..." operator may merely be a quirk of a formal meta-language (two-dimensional semantics), that is not so for the same status possessed by the sorts of statements Kripke focused on: statement exemplifying essential properties of natural kinds, or the necessity of identity. That propositions such as those are necessary a posteriory was a genuine philosophical insights, in my view.

Also insightful are the worries Soames raises against the validity of Kripke's demonstration of the aposteriority of such necessary statements (in chapter 15, volume 2 of his Philosophical Analysis in the Twentieth Century, see especially note 15.) But what it is that Soames' valid criticism highlights, in my view, is the limitation of the idea (tacitly relied on by both Kripke and Soames) that what utterances express (and what the objects of propositional attitudes such as beliefs are) are Russellian rather than Fregean propositions. Such an approach makes it hard to fathom that one can think of a particular under a Fregean mode of presentation, or sense (Sinn), that isn't equivalent to a definite description. The view of singular Fregean senses as being essentially object involving has been developed by Gareth Evans in his book The Varieties of Reference and by John McDowell in his paper De Re Senses. Hilary Putnam, who, like Kripke, has been a target of Evans' constructive criticism had written a harsh review of Evans' book, initially, and then eventually came to gain an appreciation of its profound significance.

Also, just in case anyone would be interested, regarding the recent state of the debate regarding necessity and philosophy of language, E. J. Lowe (while commenting on Soames' Reference and Description: The Case Against Two-Dimensionalism) has this to say:

"What I am objecting to, at bottom, is a presumption that seems to be shared by both the anti-descriptivists and their neo-descriptivist opponents: namely, that philosophically interesting modal and essentialist theses in metaphysics can be extracted from a combination of semantic theory and empirical science. Because they differ radically regarding semantic theory, the rival camps have very different views as to the ground and character of such modal and essentialist theses and as to how our knowledge of them is attained. What neither camp seems to be prepared to acknowledge is that questions concerning modal truths and modal knowledge cannot be decided by appeal to semantic theory and empirical science, since these are not questions to do with either the workings of language or scientific facts. This is why I am deeply suspicious of the idea that a resolution of the descriptivist/anti-descriptivist debate, if it is ever achieved, will have any genuine bearing whatever on substantive issues in metaphysics. Serious metaphysicians and philosophers of science, I suggest, would do well to ignore the debate as an in-house dispute between philosophers of language and simply get on with their own business in their own way."

Lowe's full piece, followed by Soames' reply, appeared in Philosophical Books, 2007, 48,1

All excellent points, Pierre. Thanks!