Truthfulness -- I favor any skepsis to which I may reply: "Let us try it!" But I no longer wish to hear anything of all those things and questions that do not permit any experiment. This is the limit of my "truthfulness"; for there courage has lost its right — The Gay Science, B1 aphorism 51

I've suggested that this is a misapplication of Kripke's argument, since that argument relies on fairly clear individuation - objects and individuals; but that after Wittgenstein it's not so clear that sensations and states of mind are the requisite sorts of individuals.

Further, the sensation of cold does not correspond to temperature, as shown in the video, and particular brain states do not correspond to particular states of mind, as shown by the irregularity of neural networks.

There's much plumbing to be sorted here, it seems. — Banno

But I wonder what you make of the last arguments of the article, concerning the sensation of heat and states of mind — Banno

There's a long tradition of examining the ways we're bound to think. I think all philosophers make some use of that kind of exploration, but Hume and Kant are particularly notable for asking about the things we can and can't imagine. Kripke joins them in this for the purpose of showing that if we insist that all necessarily true statements are known a priori, this conflicts with the way we think about counterfactuals.

So there's no recipe here for speaking in a certain way. We're not identifying elements of grammar. We're analyzing a historic philosophical bias with the scalpel of...

the way we think. :grin: — frank

Keep in mind that Kripke is focusing on ordinary language use. This is not an examination of a logical language, so meaning is truly use here.

In a case where "this lectern" is a rigid designator, the baptism is likely to have just happened. It's as if I named the lectern "Bob" but Bob equals this lectern.

The wooden lectern example is pointing to the way we think about objects. Note Kripke's emphasis on what we can and can't imagine. What he's saying should be very intuitive to you. — frank

. Therefore justice is good, because it reduces the number of breaches of law. And that is good for the law-maker. It is advantageous, helpful and accommodating for the law-maker. — god must be atheist

I think we again are not in disagreement.

The wooden lectern is ipso facto necessarily wooden, yet that is understood only empirically. Unfortunately it's an example that is prone to misunderstanding, as in various posts in this thread. — Banno

This is perhaps the key concept, and the article is an articulation of how we can use this approach to talk consistently about counterfactuals. At the time of writing, under the influence of Quine, counterfactuals were generally thought senseless. After this article, and Kripke's other work, they became an important part of the analytic toolkit. — Banno

I'll say again, perhaps more explicitly, that I do not think the examples of heat and pain work to Kripke's advantage. This because heat and pain are not treated well when treated as objects. But while rejecting these last few arguments I am in agreement with much of the remainder of the article.

Just out of curiosity, how could we account for radiant heat with this type of definition? Radiant heat is a real form of heat which we feel. Yet in that case, heat moves from object A to object B without the medium of molecules in between. So how would that heat get from A to B without moving through molecules in between? — Metaphysician Undercover

This is the aspect of the good which survives changes in values systems, it’s formal rather than specific structure. This aspect of the good we all can agree on. Since eventually any good within a particular value system will stop working for us as we move beyond that system, the philosophers I mentioned above agree that it is universally ‘better’ to keep oneself mobile , to celebrate the movement from one value system to one that replaces it rather than getting stuck in any one system for too long. So you see that for these thinkers the universal , formal aspect of goodness as efficacy of relational change ( usefulness) is more significant that the contingent and relative aspect that you highlight. It is this understanding of the universal aspect of the good that allows us to honor an endless plurality of value systems, and along with them an endless variety of qualitative senses of the good, rather than looking for the correct one. We understand that each sense of the good works within its system, and is valid for that reason and within that context. — Joshs

You lost me. How exactly are you understanding ‘proper functioning’ and what does it have to do with the normatively oriented organizational dynamics of living systems? — Joshs

I have a feeling you are conflating ‘proper’ with a specific qualitative content of meaning, which places you squarely back within the circular defining of ‘good’( my qualitative meaning of good differs from your qualitative meaning of it). — Joshs

What a mess. So far every contribution to this thread has used circular terms to ‘define’ the good. — Joshs

Even fairness implies a moral notion of equivalence or balance. Fair refers to a ‘good’ sort of balance. Justice may not be pleasant but it is ‘good’. Hmm, so there is no ‘pleasantness’ associated with aim of justice? What’s needed is a definition of good , pleasant , happy , absence of suffering, that breaks out of the circle and shatters Moore’s contention. We have a number of options to choose from here. We could look at biologically-based thinking that grounds affective valuation in the organizational principles of living systems.

And, Kripke supposes, this goes for any equivalence between heat and the motion of molecules. If "heat" is a rigid designator for that sensation, and "the motion of molecules" is a rigid designator for molecules in motion, then if heat is the motion of molecules, it is necessarily so. — Banno

So, it would seem, if an example like this is correct -- and this is what advocates of essentialism have held -- that this lectern could not have been made of ice, that is in any counterfactual situation of which we would say that this lectern existed at all, we would have to say also that it was not made from water from the Thames frozen into ice. Some have rejected, of course, any such notion of essential property as meaningless. usually, it is because (and I think this is what Quine, for example, would say) they have held that it depends on the notion of identity across possible worlds, and that this is itself meaningless. Since I have rejected this view already, I will not deal with it again

...a thing that is advantageous and pleasant and helpful and accommodating OR at least three at the same time and in the same respect of the aforementioned qualifiers. — god must be atheist

...but it wouldn't make sense if it were otherwise... — Banno

So, in this sense, the expression 'the inventor of bifocals' is nonrigid: under certain circumstances one man would have been the inventor of bifocals; under other circumstances, another one would have — pdf, page 10

What do I mean by 'rigid designator'? I mean a term that designates the same object in all possible worlds — pdf, page 11

...in talking about the notion of a rigid designator, I do not mean to imply that the object referred to has to exist in all possible worlds, that is, that it has to necessarily exist.

Well, I think it is. That is, I'm now reading Kripke as suggesting that heat and the sensation of heat are somehow different things. Not too sure about that. — Banno

Does it? What if the gasses are at thermal equilibrium? Where does energy transfer take place in mixing?

Let's take the air in your room, which is mostly a mixture of nitrogen and oxygen at thermal equilibrium with each other (albeit different concentrations). We know that they almost certainly won't spontaneously separate into regions of all nitrogen and all oxygen (thank God - or entropy - for that!) This spontaneous separation won't happen even if thermal equilibrium is maintained throughout. Indeed, bracketing out energy transfer makes it especially easy to see why spontaneous separation does not happen: the number of combinations corresponding to a state of separation is negligibly small in relation to the number of all possible combinations under the same conditions.

(Gibbs free energy is closely related to entropy, and it will decrease as a result of mixing, just as it does as a result of spontaneous energy transfer.)

Or consider mixing in reverse. You need to do work in order to separate mixed substances, transferring energy into the system - but not the other way around. In this sense, mixing does involve an asymmetric energy transfer. — SophistiCat

Cheers. — Banno

That's a nice way to put it. Although there is also such a thing as entropy of mixing, as when two dissimilar gases mix with each other, in which no energy transfer needs to occur. — SophistiCat

In general, I would describe entropy as the tendency of some macro-scale processes to be strongly time-asymmetric. That is, under the same general conditions we will almost never see their spontaneous reversal. Thus, ice cubes will melt at room temperature and never form out of room-temperature water; cream will mix with coffee and never spontaneously separate from it, and so on.