Again, I'm not familiar with it, but seems to be about nomenclature.

That's my reading to bottom of p.166. Kripke then passes on to proper names. — Banno

Yes, and I think this is where it gets interesting...

So maybe Kant’s term isn’t a mere idiom after all. Which is neither here nor there with respect to the thread. — Mww

As Kripke mentions Kant's "synthetic a priori judgements" in the second sentence of his chapter, and as @Banno includes the same term in his OP, the meaning of "synthetic a priori judgements" cannot be irrelevant to the thread, otherwise, why mention it in the first place.

Kantian transcendental idealism, not needing any inverted commas — Mww

It deserves commas as it is a name, not a description. First, Kant was an empirical realist. Second, in edition B of the Critique of Reason, Kant inserted a refutation of idealism. Third, also in edition B, Kant said "Transcendental Idealism" was a poor choice of name. Fourth, there is debate as to how we can have transcendental knowledge, and whether what Kant calls transcendental knowledge is no more than knowledge by inference.

Kripke wants to unite the contingent with identity, which Kant deemed, if not impossible, then at least logically insufficient in regard to a brand new philosophy. — Mww

Kripke didn't want to unite contingent with identity, he wanted to unite necessity with identity. As he writes "According to this view, whenever, for example, someone makes a correct statement of identity between two names, such as, for example, that Cicero is Tully, his statement has to be necessary if it is true."

Kripke didn't want to unite contingent with identity, he wanted to unite necessity with identity. — RussellA

That might be a better way of putting it, but it really means the same thing due to the way that "contingent" is being used. The contingent statement is really just a special type of necessary statement, as a proper separation between the two is not provided. This is just a category error, but it is intended as the means to bridge the gap between identity and logical necessity.

The two of course are fundamentally incompatible, as identity is within the thing itself, while logical necessity is within the human mind. Therefore identity will always present itself as infinite possibility, hence fundamentally incompatible with logical necessity which is a limitation of possibility. That's why it's an exercise in sophistry.

Sorry, but if you read the paper, Kripke posits the logicality on the empirical finding that Hesperus is Phosphorus. — Shawn

Silly me, to think I posted a comment before reading the article.

Kripke starts off by writing that it is often taken for granted that contingent statements of identity are possible: “How are contingent identity statements possible?” This question is phrased by analogy with the way Kant phrased his question “How are synthetic a priori judgments possible?” In both cases, it has usually been taken for granted in the one case by Kant that synthetic a priori judgments were possible, and in the other case in contemporary philosophical literature that contingent statements of identity are possible."

He later writes that he believes that identity statements are necessary and not contingent: "To state finally what I think, as opposed to what seems to be the case, or what others think, I think that in both cases, the case of names and the case of the theoretical identifications, the identity statements are necessary and not contingent. That is to say, they are necessary if true; of course, false identity statements are not necessary. How can one possibly defend such a view? Perhaps I lack a complete answer to this question, even though I am convinced that the view is true."

Although Kripke writes "x has a certain property F", one questions how this fits in with Russell's Descriptivism where x is its set of properties.

identity is within the thing itself, while logical necessity is within the human mind. Therefore identity will always present itself as infinite possibility — Metaphysician Undercover

How can an object such as an apple, having a self-identity, have infinite possibilities ?

But surely it may have turned out that Superman had taken on a different secret identity? — Banno

Superman might have taken on a different secret identity - Lois Lane, even. But in such case, Lois Lane would not be the woman we know who loves Superman, and Clark Kent would not be the man we know as 'Clark Kent' (viz, Superman), but a mere bespectacled reporter of no interest to us. But given that it turns out that Clark Kent is Superman in disguise, necessarily, Clark Kent is Superman.

As usual, necessity doesn't constrain reality, only language. 2 Rabbits + a lot of lettuce and carrots = 137 rabbits + a lot of droppings. Blame it on the boogie.

All the posts by unenlightened are necessarily unenlightened's posts. If my account was hacked, there might be posts with my name on them, but they would not be my posts. Contrarywise, if I had a sock-puppet account, all those posts would necessarily be unenlightened's posts too, though they had another name on them.

Ehhhh…..as Kripke says, guy writes a book on something, another guy writes a book on how wrong the first guy was. Been that way since Day One. You and I, operating under the auspices of basic logical laws, reject the accordance of contingency with identity, but if somebody comes along and tweaks this definition, or fiddles with that perspective, he can obfuscate the established laws accordingly, and posit something nobody’s ever thought of before.

If you and I are going to get along with the pure analyticalists, we have to concede that when Kripke says, “ for any two objects x and y, if x is identical to y….”, it is more the case x is congruent to y rather than x being identical to y. Pretty simple, really; x is x and therefore not-y. Two objects having common properties is not the same as two objects being identical.

As for the category mistake, here’s my agreement with it:

“For every property F…..” F can be any property, such that if F belongs to x, and if x is identical to y then it is necessary that F belong to y. If F is the property of being round, and if x is round and y is identical to x, then y is round. That’s fine, in that x is, e.g., a round cue ball and y is, e.g., an identically round baseball. Which is also fine, insofar as the conditional is “for any two objects”, satisfied by one cue ball and one baseball.

It remains that a cue ball is not a baseball. But if x is to stand as identical to y, one of every property F is obviously not sufficient to cause x to be identical to y because of F. So keep adding F’s to x, maybe hundreds of F’s, such that when those properties also belong to y, they become closer and closer to both x and y being either a cue ball or a baseball. Still satisfies “for any two objects”, as well as for any property F which belongs to x also belongs to y.

The kicker: “For every property F….”, in order for the cue ball x and the baseball y to be identical, every property F must belong to both equally. It follows that in order for x to be identical to y, a space F belonging to x is the same space F belonging to y, and x and y simultaneously be commonly imbued with every other possible F equally. But two objects sharing the same space F is a contradiction, which negates the case. It must be, then, that they occupy different space F’s but still be commonly imbued with every other F equally. How does that happen, you ask….surely with bated breath. Well…..the space of x in one world, and the space of y in another world. What else?????

Hence contingent identity, contingent on the possibility of other worlds. Under the assumption of another merely possible world, however, such world can only have possible space, from which follows only a possible y can have the property of possible space, or, more correctly, only a possible y can occupy a possible space possibly, which reduces to a real x being identical to a possible y, which is not the original argument. In effect, then, in order to assume x = y identity necessarily, mandates a veritable maze of contingent possibilities.

And that’s a category mistake. Dunno if it’s yours or not, but it works, doesn’t it? The article goes on to circumvent these mistakes, re: “let us use necessity weakly”, or actually, to deny them altogether, re: “I will not go into this particular form of subtlety** here because it isn’t relevant”, in order to justify the notions contained further on in it.

But still, if a theory starts out illogically, and if the circumventions are not all that valid, wouldn’t it jeopardize the whole? Kripke is just saying, if it was this way, we could say this about it. But if it couldn’t be this way, why still talk as if it could? He goes on to talk about it in a different way, that’s all.
(** existence as a predicate, reflecting on existence in possible worlds)

In the search for a married bachelor, no matter how many worlds are searched, one will never be found.

In the search for a Superman who isn't a Clark Kent, one will never be found iff Superman is defined as Clark Kent.

Such are the consequences of identity and necessity.

Yet language rarely works that way. Another world's Superman can have all the properties as our world yet not be Clark Kent, yet we'd call them the same things.

So what makes Superman be Superman, if not for his being also Clark Kent? Which properties are accidental versus essential? Which properties of primary versus secondary? Does this get us anywhere, or do we just end back up at meaning is use, and admit that the entire hypothetical construct of prescribing meaning to words (e.g. Clark Kent = Superman) doesn't exist in our linguistic world and that's what caused this whole quandary in the first place?

So what makes Superman be Superman, if not for his being also Clark Kent? — Hanover

Imagine Lois travels to an alternate universe where Superman landed in Mexico instead of Iowa. He was raised by the Cortez family and they named him Julio.

So what makes this guy Superman?

Imagine Lois travels to an alternate universe where Superman landed in Mexico instead of Iowa. He was raised by the Cortez family and they named him Julio.

So what makes this guy Superman? — frank

De re modality, to answer your question...

De re modality, to answer your question... — Shawn

De re and de dicto are about how one interprets an ambiguous statement. How does that tell us something about how some guy in an alternate universe is Superman?

the meaning of "synthetic a priori judgements" cannot be irrelevant to the thread, otherwise, why mention it in the first place. — RussellA

Has nothing to do with it’s meaning; only with juxtaposition. If Kant can justify the one, then it is reasonable to suppose Kripke should be able to justify the other. Successors denied the one, successors may well deny the other. Nowhere in the article is one related, compared, or otherwise connected, to the other, and because it isn’t, whatever meaning it has, is irrelevant with respect to the article.
———-

I have two searchable editions, in which transcendental is found 568 times but transcendental knowledge doesn’t come up at all. You probably meant knowledge of the transcendental, which was never intended to be knowledge as such. Transcendental, in its strictest sense, is merely a sub-system of thought, premised on the complete absence of anything empirical. Included in that, are conditions of which there is no conscious awareness, hence cannot be known. In a purely logical system they don’t have to be known; they only need to be non-contradictory. As such, the subject knows of a logical validity, but not the objects that belong thereto.

In the B edition, Kant inserted a refutation of idealism. — RussellA

Yes, that being “material” idealism of Descartes and Berkeley. In A, it is the fourth paralogism.

Kant was an empirical realist. — RussellA

Yes, but more than that. (A370)

Kripke didn't want to unite contingent with identity, he wanted to unite necessity with identity. — RussellA

Then why would he present as a problem of philosophy, “how are contingent identity statements possible?”. Upwards from pg10, does he admit “identity statements are necessary, and not contingent”. If the second, why ask the first?

No more Kant. will take us to TPF court, and I can’t afford the fines.

De re and de dicto are about how one interprets an ambiguous statement. How does that tell us something about how some guy in an alternate universe is Superman? — frank

Because when we speak about Superman, we can posit his existence in a possible world as a counterpart or a counterfactual. Whereas, people claim that this is impossible because they're thinking about the whole issue as de dicto, Superman couldn't be anything other than himself as we have come to know of him in our world.

An object such as Phosphorus is a set of properties: brightest natural object in sky, visible by naked eye during day, has no rings, etc.

It depends whether the name Phosphorus is a reference or a description.

If Phosphorus refers to the planet Venus, through empirical observation, we can infer, along the lines of Hume's constant conjunction, that Phosphorus in the morning is the same body as Hesperus in the evening. From (1), x is Phosphorus, y is Hesperus, and as both x and y refer to the same body, x is identical to y.

If Phosphorus is a description, from Russell's Descriptivism, Phosphorus is a description of a set of properties, whereby Phosphorus has no existence over and above its properties. From (4), x is the set of properties bright, visible, no rings, y is the same set of properties bright, visible, no rings, and as both x and y refer to the same set of properties, x is necessarily y.

IE, as regards referring, two bodies having the same properties, but each body existing over and above its properties, are contingently the same a posteriori. As regards description, two sets of the same properties are necessarily the same a priori.

No more Kant. ↪Banno will take us to TPF court, and I can’t afford the fines. — Mww

Neither can I. :smile:

Imagine Lois travels to an alternate universe where Superman landed in Mexico instead of Iowa. He was raised by the Cortez family and they named him Julio.

So what makes this guy Superman? — frank

Let us suppose he can leap tall buildings in a single bound, that should be enough to claim he's a superman. To be sure, he's not the Superman of we've defined the Superman as the single entity in our world.

But such are definitional decisions. We could define Julio as Superman if we so wished.

If a bachelor is an unmarried man, they can exist anywhere, but the bachelor, if defined as only that one, can exist but one place.

What have I missed?

This seems the answer implicit in the phrase "identity and necessity." That which we identify and define as a specific entity, by necessity is that specific thing, existing in but one world. To allow it in other worlds, eliminates its identity.

That which we identify and define as a specific entity, by necessity is that specific thing, existing in but one world. To allow it in other worlds, eliminates its identity. — Hanover

Not in de re modality.

This seems the answer implicit in the phrase "identity and necessity." That which we identify and define as a specific entity, by necessity is that specific thing, existing in but one world. To allow it in other worlds, eliminates its identity — Hanover

True, although there seems to be a spectrum from a completely defined entity (like Superman as we know him) all the way to a Superman who is radically different from ours, so that the rigid designator, "Superman" is almost devoid of any essential properties. I think @Banno likes the latter extreme where rigid designators are hollowed out, although I think he would agree that we can't hollow them out completely because that would become meaningless.

For the most part, we do have some essential properties in mind when we talk about hypotheticals.
Those properties may be specifically mentioned, or we may discern them from context. But however those essential properties are specified, they become necessary in the context of the statements in which they appear, even though we also know they're contingent.

The point of it is just to explore the way we think and speak.

Not in de re modality. — Shawn

I don't think "de re" is a kind of modality. It's an aspect of intensional speech, like "Brian believes someone likes potato chips."

For the most part, we do have some essential properties in mind when we talk about hypotheticals. — frank

I look at it more as if there are a handful of typically associated properties attached to the object and if a certain number are present, it's considered the object.

It's like a medical syndrome. If you have 5 of 8 symptoms, you have ADHD, but no one is essential. Sort of like that. That dispenses with the essence problem. I'd argue I've described what is meant by the family resemblance.

It's like a medical syndrome. If you have 5 of 8 symptoms, you have ADHD, but no one is essential. — Hanover

I think you at least have to have a common origin for all the possible versions of you. Like could you have been born female?

An ableist slur, of course.

I don't think "de re" is a kind of modality. — frank

De re is about something. Have you read the wiki on de re-de dicto?

That's you about to get pooped on.

De re is about something. — Shawn

It sure is.

Necessity de re: is a controversial form of necessity which assumes that it can be stated about objects whether or not they necessarily have certain properties. The counter position is that necessity can only be assumed de dicto, i.e. as a property of the linguistic forms with which can be spoken about objects. See also de dicto, de re, planet example.

- de dicto de re

De re/ de dicto is a distinction with multiple renderings in modal logic. The one I gave above can only be indicative. A better approach is to drop the that terminology and use boxes and diamonds.

That's about metaphysical de re/de dicto. That's a question about whether what I believe about you is a property of you, or is it just a relation between me and a proposition. Or something like that.

It's important because people get somewhat confused when stipulating a de re modality in a possible world whilst believing that the identity of the individual only obtains de dicto, in our world.

Are you too seeing that?