A cool way to look at the impetus behind rigid designators (the answer to the question you asked is at the end:) — Mongrel
[The proper name] designates the same thing in all possible worlds. — StreetlightX
So it is stipulated that we are talking about him, but it isn't stipulated who he is or what it means to be identical to him.
Being Barack Obama is what Barack Obama does, presumably. We don't stipulate that. He instantiates that property just by being who he is. That should be obvious.
Well, think of something like "water is H2O". According to Kripke, this is necessarily true. It doesn't make sense to consider a counterfactual world where water has some other chemical composition — Michael
And I believe andrewk's position is that the logic (or metaphysics) of identity is such that a counterfactual person sharing the identity of an actual person doesn't make sense. — Michael
We might stipulate that, but the logic (or metaphysics) of identity might be such that such a stipulation is incoherent. I can stipulate that in some possible world triangles have four sides, or that the square root of 2 is a rational number, but then my stipulation is in error. — Michael
Rigid designation isn't dependent on essential properties.
It's not that hard people, rigid designation means the individual denoted is invariant over worlds of evaluation. That's it.
You're making this into something it's not. Yes, Kripke talks about essential properties. No, that's not going to help you understand what rigid designation is to begin with. — The Great Whatever
The point is that individuals are treated as just being these sorts of pegs in ordinary language, for the non-logical cases. It's an interesting fact that we can do this in spite of metaphysical protestations to the contrary. — The Great Whatever
An individual isn't essentially a person. That individual may be a person in the actual world. So for instance I'm a person, and an individual, but I might have been a frog (maybe even a sentient one). So it makes no sense to say that 'people are just referential pegs.' The individual in modal logic is held in abstraction from its properties – and being a person is such a property. — The Great Whatever
It's not that hard people, rigid designation means the individual denoted is invariant over worlds of evaluation. That's it. — The Great Whatever
There's some sort of misunderstanding here. An individual is whatever it is. So I'm an individual, and I'm concrete, not abstract – a person, of flesh and blood. But I'm not essentially a person, since I could coherently suppose I weren't one. When I talk about what I am, this means what I actually am. To say that I 'am' some abstract thing underlying all my properties is wrong: it's just that I can suppose myself to be any number of other things. — The Great Whatever
If by 'individual' you mean what's in the model theory of modal logic, then that's a bit of formal machinery, and this formal object, if you like, is just a sort of peg. But in the 'real world' (the only world that there is), there's no such thing as a free-floating individual without properties – it's just that we model individuals separately from worlds in modal logic to reflect the fact that we cans suppose them to have different properties.
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
"Michael" (when used to refer to me) refers always and only to me in whichever possible world we discuss; — Michael
As long as what is what they name the Earth? — John
This all depends on what sort of thing the term "I" refers to, i.e. the ontological nature of the self. If the self just is some set of concrete properties then nothing that doesn't have these properties can be coherently supposed to be you, even though you might (erroneously) claim otherwise. For counterfactuals to work it is required that the ontological nature of the self (or whatever thing is referred to by the rigid designator) isn't just as some set of concrete properties (that the counterfactual does away with). — Michael
I don't see how this can be done without claiming that the ontological nature of the self (or whatever thing is referred to by the rigid designator) is as some abstract thing, and so to argue for either Platonism or for identity as a conceptual/linguistic imposition.
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. — Mongrel
Kripke’s causal theory of reference is a necessary component of a posteriori necessity.
The causal theory of reference is an explanation of how terms acquire specific referents. Referring terms that it may include are proper names, natural kinds, and logical terms. A causal theory of reference claims that the referent of a name is fixed by the original act of naming. Future uses of the name continue to successfully refer to the referent via a causal chain. The chain can then, in principle, be traced back to the original act of naming. Kripke indicates that this explanation is more appealing than the descriptive theory of names developed by Bertrand Russell and Gottlob Frege. The descriptive theory says that names are attached to a uniquely identifying description of that thing. A name’s semantic contents are identical to the descriptions associated with them.
Consider these two theories’ approach to the following question: To whom does the name “Richard Nixon” refer?
The causal/ historical theory could proceed thusly: Suppose the parents of a newborn baby boy gesture to their child and declare “We shall name him Richard Nixon!” From that time onward, that person is referred to as “Richard Nixon”. When someone uses the name “Richard Nixon”, that act can be traced back to the initial baptism of the child by his parents. The name refers to the object originally designated as “Richard Nixon”.
According to the descriptivist theory of names, the referent might be fixed like so: the name “Richard Nixon” refers to the man who won the 1968 election, the 37th President of the United States, etc. Only one person satisfies this description and that is “Richard Nixon”. This could be true for a number of different unique descriptions that identify “Richard Nixon”. So the name “Richard Nixon” would refer to whoever satisfies the particular unique description.
My answer to "To whom does the name 'Richard Nixon' refer" is: To whoever (or whatever) the person using the name "Richard Nixon" on a particular occasion has in mind as the extension of the term. — Terrapin Station
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