He says that it is not the case that cats could turn out to be robots. That if it turned out that cats were automata, we should say that what we had thought to be cats were not cats, but robots.
TO be a cat is necessarily to be an animal.
SO if it turned out that the fellow we thought to be Nixon was actually an automata, then we were wrong to think he was Nixon — Banno
SO you claim that Kripke is wrong? — Banno
He says that it is not the case that cats could turn out to be robots. That if it turned out that cats were automata, we should say that what we had thought to be cats were not cats, but robots.
TO be a cat is necessarily to be an animal.
SO if it turned out that the fellow we thought to be Nixon was actually an automata, then we were wrong to think he was Nixon — Banno
So the man who won the election is a rigid designator only in the actual world... — Janus
We should treat possible states of affairs and descriptions as ontologically above particulars (clumps of things) and individuals. — Wallows
Yes, but we can only imagine possible or counterfactual states of affairs as involving actual particulars and individuals. — Janus
'What if that house had burned down' is not the same as 'what if that house had never existed'. — Janus
There must be some minimum of actuality in our counterfactual imaginings or it just becomes 'what if everything had been different' and then the whole notion of counterfactuality is without any reference to actuality, and hence becomes meaningless. — Janus
A description can be a rigid designator, if its descriptive material happens to pick out the same individual in every world. — Snakes Alive
using a technical device like a modal actualizer, so that "the actual, current president of the US" picks out Trump in all worlds. — Snakes Alive
For the most part, descriptions made use of in natural languages are not rigid designators. But this is a contingent, and so interesting, fact about language. In constructing an artificial language, there is no problem with constructing rigid descriptions. — Snakes Alive
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