I'll do it. — Snakes Alive
Will you start at the beginning, or before that, at the preface? — Banno
There's also a lot of Wittgenstein in Kripke or known as Kripkenstein. — Posty McPostface
'Kripkenstein' is a reference to Kripke's particular take on Wittgenstein on interpreting a rule, which he (Kripke) expounded in his book Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language. The topic is quite different from the topic of Naming and Necessity. — Pierre-Normand
(...) Do you care to join us on this reading group Pierre? — Posty McPostface
For sure. I may not be able to participate assiduously, but, if this gets going, I'll likely comment occasionally. — Pierre-Normand
Do you care to lead this reading group? Pretty please? — Posty McPostface
A definite description picks out one and only one individual. Agreed? — Banno
And it can be successful even when it doesn't work - as the man with the champaign example shows. — Banno
And the thing a proper name or a definite description picks out is its referent. — Banno
Some curious stuff about unicorns that we can come back to. — Banno
(p.26)Now, what is the relation between names and descriptions? There is a well known doctrine ofJohn Stuart Mill, in his book A System of Logic, that names have denotation but not connotation. To use one of his examples, when we me the name 'Dartmouth' to describe a certain locality in England, it may be so called because it lies at the mouth of the Dart. But even, he says, had the Dart (that's a river) changed its course so that Dartmouth no longer lay at the mouth of the Dart, we could still with propriety call this place 'Dartmouth', even though the name may suggest that it lies at the mouth of the Dart. Changing Mill's terminology, perhaps we should say that a name such as 'Dartmouth' does have a 'connotation' to some people, namely, it does connote (not to me-I never thought of this) that any place called 'Dartmouth' lies at the mouth of the Dart. But then in some way it doesn't have a 'sense'. At least, it is not part of the meaning of the name 'Dartmouth' that the town so named lies at the mouth of the Dart. Someone who said that Dartmouth did not lie at the Dart's mouth would not contradict himself
I'm not aware of this example. — Posty McPostface
p. 25So you may say, 'The man over there with the champagne in his glass is happy', though he actually only has water in his glass. Now, even though there is no champagne in his glass, and there may be another man in the room who does have champagne in his glass, the speaker intended to refer, or maybe, in some sense of 'refer', did refer, to the man he thought had the champagne in his glass.
Prior to Philosophical Investigations the ideal way to give the meaning of something had been thought to be by specifying both genus and differentia. So a 'triangle' is defined as 'a plane figure (genus) bounded by three straight sides (differentia)'. Logically, this sort of definition can be seen as a series of conjunctions; A triangle is a plane figure and has three sides. More generally, "P" might be defined using a simple conjunction of "A" and "B":
P =def A AND B
By examining closely the use of terms such as 'game', 'number' and 'family', Wittgenstein showed that for a large number of terms such a definition is not possible. Rather, in some cases a definition needs to be a disjunction of conjuncts,
P =def (A AND B) OR (C AND D)
but furthermore the way we use such terms means that we can both extend and detract from the series by adding or removing some of the conjunctions.
P =def (A AND B) OR (C AND D) OR...
Nor should we conclude that because we cannot give a definition of "game" or "number" that we do not know what they are: "But this is not ignorance. We do not know the boundaries because none have been drawn".[5]
a name attains meaning when it has a rigid designator that instantiates a concepts or a web of beliefs about it — Posty McPostface
For example, if someone said 'Aristotle does not exist' means 'there is no man doing such and such', or in the example from Wittgenstein, 'Moses does not exist', means 'no man did such and such', that might depend (and in fact, I think, does depend) on taking the theory in question as a theory of the meaning of the name 'Moses', not just as a theory of its reference. Well, I don't know. Perhaps all that is immediate now is the other way around : if 'Moses' means the same as 'the man who did such and such' then to say that Moses did not exist is to say that the man who did such and such did not exist, that is, that no one person did such and such. If, on the other hand, 'Moses' is not synonymous with any description, then even if its reference is in some sense determined by a description, statements containing the name cannot in general be analyzed by replacing the name by a description, though they may be materially equivalent to statements containing a description. So the analysis of singular existence statements mentioned above will have to be given up, unless it is established by some special argument, independent of a general theory of the meaning of names; and the same applies to identity statements. In any case, I think it's false that 'Moses exists' means that at all. — Saul Kripke
a description need (not) to refer to an object for that object to have meaning in the first place? — Posty McPostface
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