@Frank what's your take on this conundrum?

If we were Native Americans, We might adopt names with meaning. Instead of speaking of 'Nixon', which after all identifies anyone who happens to have that name, including my doctor, his wife and children, we might call him 'Big Chief Cover-Up.' And it would make no sense to suppose that Big Chief Cover-Up was not a big chief and didn't get involved in a cover-up, because his name identifies this as his essence. This is not to say that they or we believe in formal immutable essences, because after some momentous event, one changes one's name - before the election, he would have been called 'Dances with Words', or something.

Similarly, when making counterfactual histories about the Nazis, no one supposes that Hitler was a decent chap. There are rules about these things; about how far and in what direction one can change reality and take the audience with you. Kripke is not addressing these rules, (and I think Frank would like him to), because they are too subtle, conventional, complex and vague for philosophy. For Kripke, names are entirely arbitrary, like the x's and y's of algebra - because he is a logician and therefore an idiot.

"Suppose Maverick was a conformist" holds no terror for him, any more than a mathematician balks at "Let 'i' be the square root of -1", having just declared that all squares are positive.

What page are we supposed to be up to, and did we include the introduction?

The way these things typically work best, by the way, is if:

(a) we stay structured re everyone reading along and commenting at the same pace,
(b) everyone comments as they read, and ultimately takes their comment to just be their comment, which means, among other things, that:
(c) we're all respectful of other's comments, no matter how much of a different take they are than our own (something this board has a big problem with in general, and I get wrapped up in it, too, as a reaction to people not being respectful towards my comments), so that
(d) we don't feel a need for everyone to have the same opinion. We're okay with others continuing to disagree with us.

what's your take on this conundrum? — Wallows

Some would say that Becoming is primary and the contradiction of a changing identity is a product of analysis. And this is analytical philosophy. :)

Do you agree about the a posteriori necessary statements?

This is - or perhaps was - a thread dealing with a particular book. Insofar as the aim was to understand the book, some effort must be put in to seeing how the author is making use of the terms involved.

Of course, as Un and Frank repeatedly point out, we can use words in ways other than the way the author does.

However if your aim is to understand the approach taken by the author, then understanding what he is doing with the words involved is the only way to achieve and understanding that is anything more than superficial.

It's a hackneyed example, but true: if your aim is to play chess, then don't continually point out that you can actually move the bishop to any square you like. All it shows is that you have misunderstood what is going on.

@unenlightened pointing out that Native Americans (is that how they choose to be referred to? As part of the fauna?) might use names in a way that is different to how Kripke uses names, while potentially very interesting, is beside the point.

@Terrapin Station asks us to respect the chess player who moves the bishop to any square they like. Sure, but let's also understand that that they are not a good chess player, and that their behaviour is not conducive to improving your game.

Some would say that Becoming is primary and the contradiction of a changing identity is a product of analysis. And this is analytical philosophy. — frank

A capitalised "Becoming" is hardly common in Analytic philosophy, but rather the obsession of the Other Folk.

However if your aim is to understand the approach taken by the author — Banno

I think his point is a little more modest than you would have it. Let's stick to that modesty and we won't have any run-ins with the Other Folk.

I think his point is a little more modest than you would have it. — frank

SO you understand both my position and Kripke's? Well, set out Kripke's position for us. That's what we are here for,

And it would make no sense to suppose that Big Chief Cover-Up was not a big chief and didn't get involved in a cover-up, because his name identifies this as his essence. This is not to say that they or we believe in formal immutable essences, because after some momentous event, one changes one's name - before the election, he would have been called 'Dances with Words', or something. — unenlightened

Since Unenlightened brought the topic up of essences. What makes one's essence real?

Could we perhaps adopt a minimalist position, that we can set out at least some of our modal questions and assertions by stipulation?

And proceed by saying that these are the ones Kripke wants to talk about?

What is an essence?

What is an essence? — Banno

Something that ensures one's identity contrasted with others? It's what instantiates one's identity over all possible worlds to a singular predicate.

If an essence is a bunch or properties that some individual must posses in order to be that individual, then isn't the essence a description of the individual that must be the same in every possible world?

That is, a definite description that is also a rigid designator.

But that doesn't work.

So that's not what an essence is.

So that's not what an essence is. — Banno

Then what is it? Just a wild guess on my part; but, an essence can be a definite description that is not shareable.

an essence can be a definite description that is not shareable. — Wallows

Then in what way would it be a description?

Perhaps there is not really such a thing as an essence. Or perhaps the notion has no use.

Then in what way would it be a description? — Banno

Nixon being president of the 37'th United States is not shareable.

Perhaps there is not really such a thing as an essence. Or perhaps the notion has no use. — Banno

Perhaps; but, I see some utility of using it contextually speaking about things like tables or chairs or the 37'th President of the United States. It does invoke some metaphysics; but, it can be remedied with treating the subject as a host of descriptions that are unique and non-transferable.

Nixon being president of the 37'th United States is not shareable. — Wallows

In what way? I can tell someone - a child, perhaps - and isn't that sharing? Don't we share this understanding?

In what way? I can tell someone - a child, perhaps - and isn't that sharing? Don't we share this understanding? — Banno

I am using 'not sharable' in a different sense here. By which I mean to imply that there was no other person at the time that could have been President of the United States because Nixon was never assassinated or didn't die from typhus or cancer during his presidency or prior to becoming the 37'th President of the United States.

In addition to the principle that the original of an object is essential to it, another principle suggested is that the substance of which it is made is essential. Several complications exist here. First, one should not confuse the type of essence involved in the question 'What properties must an object retain if it is not to cease to exist, and what properties of the object can change while the object endures?', which is a temporal question, with the question 'What (timeless) properties could the object not have failed to have, and what properties could it have lacked while still (timelessly) existing?', which concerns necessity and not time and which is our topic here. Thus the question of whether the table could have changed into ice is irrelevant here. The question whether the table could originally have been made of anything other than wood is relevant. Obviously this question is related to the necessity of the origin of the table from a given block of wood and whether that block, too, is essentially wood (even wood of a particular kind). Thus it is ordinarily impossible to imagine the table made from any substance other than the one of which it is actually made without going back through the entire history of the universe, a mind-boggling feat. (Other possibilities of the table not having been wooden originally have been suggested to me, including an ingenious suggestion of Slote's, but I find none of them really convincing. I cannot discuss them here.) A full discussion of the problems of essential properties of particulars is impossible here, but I will mention a few other points: (I) Ordinarily when we ask intuitively whether something might have happened to a given object, we ask whether the universe could have gone on as it actually did up to a certain time, but diverge in its history from that point forward so that the vicissitudes of that object would have been different from that time forth. Perhaps this feature should be erected into a general principle about essence. Note that the time in which the divergence from actual history occurs may be sometime before the object itself is actually created. For example, I might have been deformed if the fertilized egg from which I originated had been damaged in certain ways, even though I presumably did not yet exist at that time. (2) I am not suggesting that only origin and substantial makeup are essential. For example, if the very block of wood from which the table was made had instead been made into a vase, the table never would have existed. So (roughly) being a table seems to be an essential property of the table. (3) Just as the question whether an object actually has a certain property (e.g. baldness) can be vague, so the question whether the object essentially has a certain property can be vague, even when the question whether it actually has the property is decided. (4) Certain counterexamples to the origin principle appear to exist in ordinary parlance. I am convinced that they are not genuine counterexamples, but their exact analysis is difficult. I cannot discuss this here. — Kripke, pg. 113, footnote 57

I see some utility of using it contextually speaking about things like tables or chairs or the 37'th President of the United States. — Wallows

The table and chairs, yes - and this is what I would like to talk about (p. 47 is where it starts, but there is so much more later on). But if being the 37th president is part of the essence of Nixon, then the definition of essence as necessary properties - properties an individual must posses in order to be that very individual - fails. It gets replaced with something like "essence is the properties that belong to an individual in the actual world"...

But that would mean that every property one possesses is a part of the essence.

Don't copy-and-paste at me. Paraphrase or quote the bit you think I should be looking at.

Peter Geach has advocated (in Mental Acts, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1957, Section 16, and elsewhere) a notion of 'nominal essence' different from the type of essential property considered here. According to Geach, since any act of pointing is ambiguous, someone who baptizes an object by pointing to it must apply a sortal property to disambiguate his reference and to ensure correct criteria of identity over time-for example, someone who assigns a reference to 'Nixon' by pointing to him must say, 'I use "Nixon" as a name of that man', thus removing his hearer's temptations to take him to be pointing to a nose or a time-slice. The sortal is then in some sense part of the meaning of the name; names do have a (partial) sense after all, though their senses may not be complete enough to determine their references, as they are in description and cluster-of-descriptions theories. If I understand Geach correctly, his nominal essence should be understood in terms of a prioricity, not necessity, and thus is quite different from the kind of essence advocated here (perhaps this is part of what he means when he says he is dealing with 'nominal', not 'real', essences). So 'Nixon is a man', 'Dobbin is a horse', and the like would be a priori truths — Kripke, pg. 114, footnote 58

Don't copy-and-paste at me. Paraphrase or quote the bit you think I should be looking at. — Banno

Those are entire footnotes dedicated to elucidating what Kripke thinks about 'essence'. I doubt I could make a better claim than he has about the issue. Sorry.

...was no other person at the time that could have been President of the United States — Wallows

A property had by only that individual - that is, the property picked out by a definite description.

Those are entire footnotes dedicated to elucidating what Kripke thinks about 'essence'. — Wallows

Good god - you might as well copy-and-paste the entire text of the book; it is all about essence. Put some effort in.

I'm not following you here. I meant to imply that essential properties of objects are their relations to other objects. Does Kripke ever talk about facts?

A property had by only that individual - that is, the property picked out by a definite description. — Banno

Well, yes. Now, what?

Nixon being president of the 37'th United States is not shareable. — Wallows

So you are saying something like, since Nixon actually was president 37, no one else could actually have been president 37.

But it remains that someone other then Nixon might have been president 37.

So you are setting up "essence" to mean the collection of definite descriptions that are true of an individual in the actual world.

This post just by way of working out what you mean.

So you are saying something like, since Nixon actually was president 37, no one else could actually have been president 37.

But it remains that someone other then Nixon might have been president 37. — Banno

Yes, someone else could have been president of the US; but, nobody else was. Hence, the designator for the 37'th president of the US is Nixon, and this is strongly rigid in this world.

So you are setting up "essence" to mean the collection of definite descriptions that are true of an individual in the actual world. — Banno

Had Nixon lost the election, then the definite description of being the 37'th president of the United States would not have referred to him; but, it does in our world.