I think it's upstreams all the way down. — fdrake

Maybe I'm taking this too far, but is this another way of saying "We are blank slates, and can only learn from experience" i.e. empiricism? Are there some faculties of mind which start "upstream", and are not created by input from downstream? Huge question, of course, but a serious explanation for how an epistemic stance is chosen must have a tentative answer, I think.

A dispute between Alice and Bob regarding sample size 19 vs 20 wouldn't just be about whether sample size 19 or 20 was good, it would be about whether it is reasonable to believe 19 or 20 is the minimum one to allow study results to update your beliefs. — fdrake

OK. And how do we want to fill in "good"? Presumably with something stronger than "reasonable to believe for purposes of updating beliefs through study results." What might that be? This is a good (sorry!) question to ask a realist.

An IRL example of a thresholding dispute . . . — fdrake

Very helpful.

there was no way to organise the putatively factual, the methodological concerns, and our values in a hierarchical fashion. There was no upstream or downstream. — fdrake

Are you sure? Didn't you end up doing precisely that? Or maybe I'm reading "hierarchical" differently from you. I'm thinking you could have (and probably had to) give reasons for what you decided to do, and in explaining them, you'd implicitly be indicating the hierarchy that wound up prevailing. But I could be way off.

So embarrassing. Maybe I'll sleep for 20 years.

:smile: Isn't it your bed time...? — Banno

Ha! Argumentum ad tempus requiescendi.

I will try to articulate the annoyance better, but probably not tonight, as the moon rises slowly over the Gulf of America . . .

can you give a reason for saying that {1,2,3} are red, that does not involve showing us or at least looking at the beads? — Banno

No. So take me to the next step -- what does that tell us about "red"?

It's not that use reduces to extension, but that the use of a (proper) name is it's extension - what it refers to. — Banno

I agree, because what else could a proper name refer to? Some "essence of Banno"? But I'm suggesting that a color name is different, because in addition to referring to the various extensions of "is red," it also (appears to) refer to something intensional, namely the quale we can each call to mind. I know how much you value ordinary usage, and I would maintain that this is a clearcut case: No one scratches their head and says, "Yes, but what is Banno? What does 'Banno' mean? How can I use 'Banno' intensionally?" whereas we surely do talk this way about most terms that have definitions in addition to an extension. A proper name merely signifies without defining. So I still think the burden of argument is on you to explain why this way of talking has to be mistaken.

We want to say that there is more to being red than being {1,2,3}; but note that that "more" is intensional rather than extensional — Banno

Yes. Does this mean you countenance an intensional use that is not extensional -- or by "we want to say," did you mean that we'd like to but we can't justify doing so?

I am drawn to the critters of no try realism and anti-realism — Joshs

I'm dying to know what your software misunderstood here! :grin:

The passage you offer is very on-point. In the OP, I only devoted a single sentence to Chakravartty's idea that stance voluntarism would explain why the realism-antirealism debate can never be resolved. But this is an important claim he wants to make -- one that Pincock would certainly have to deny.

The reasons offered by Fine et al. are in a similar vein, but not identical. What I think they have in common with Chakravartty's viewpoint is the idea that the desideratum of "resolving a disagreement" between two epistemic stances is, on analysis, incoherent.

For realists, it is a significant achievement to determine, for some scientific theory or hypothesis, that this claim, with its semantic content independently fixed, is true. If the determination of the truth or falsity of a claim were entangled with the interpretation of its content, however, such that what the claim says was not determinable apart from those interactions with the world through which we assess its truth, then realists would be unable to specify the claims (i.e., the contents of those claims) about which they want to be realists.

This passage in particular fits with what @fdrake and I were discussing. I bolded the phrase about semantic content as independently fixed because it's a version of the question, Can we really separate "upstream" from "downstream" input in a neat way that maintains a distinction between epistemic and doxastic stances? The rest of the passage plays this out: If "what the claim says was not determinable apart from those interactions with the world through which we assess its truth," then interpretation and truth-value are viciously circular. It's a bit like the creationist/evolutionist example. Once the interpretation of terms like "fact" or "evidence" become dependent on an epistemic stance, we have to look for an interpretative truth that is outside the stance itself. How do we find it? Oddly, this could be considered an argument in favor of either the realist or the pragmatist position!

That is, and here I'm grossly overgeneralising, the extension. — Banno

I think you are. I was "seeing the picture" up to this point, but you'll have to work harder to explain how use reduces to extension. I believe you still need to respond to the bead question: How do we make coherent a situation where the extension remains the same but the color changes?

I don't really know what to do with this, and I might be missing a lot of subtleties, but my suspicion is that the distinctions between stance and doxastic attitudes, and stance and object level claims, aren't as clear as the argument needs to go through. — fdrake

Starting with your final thought . . . I agree. The more I reflect on both papers, the more I wonder whether Chakravartty and Pincock really have the same conception of what an epistemic stance is. Chakravartty gives a clear enough description, which I quoted, but we can see that, because he wants to present stance selection as a broad process involving many factors, he can't be precise about what is and isn't a stance, compared to a doxastic process within a stance. As we've noticed, merely using the "upstream/downstream" idea doesn't settle all the important questions about how that works. And it matters whether a stance is immune from "downstream" input.

Pincock, in contrast, needs a stance to be largely independent of its subject matter, and determinable by rational ("theoretical") criteria alone. Is this even the same thing that Chakravartty describes? A stance, described thusly, results in a huge meta-commitment such as "realism." Whereas Alice and Bob don't seem to have such a disagreement. Their differing stances look much less philosophically weighty -- and that may be Chakravartty's point, in part.

I think the following is an option - upstream, downstream and alongside relations are allowed between stances and evidence, it just so happens that there is One True Dialectic that correctly links them. The One True Dialectic would have to fully understand how it related to all of its own principles, and conditions of revising them. I don't believe such a thing exists, but I would want an argument to rule it out. — fdrake

Great. Such a dialectic would presumably be capable of resolving -- or explaining away -- that nasty circle I described, in which a defeater changes a stance, in turn putting into question whether the defeater was legitimate evidence. I'd be very interested in Pincock's take on this: Does non-voluntarism about epistemic stances mean that there must be such a dialectic?

The paper advances the idea that a selection mechanism might work on stances, and render some of them rationally impermissible and some rationally permissible. Above and beyond that, there is the possibility of there being a single stance which is obligate to hold {about some domain}. — fdrake

Yes. It's important to remember that Chakravartty is not an "anything goes" guy. He certainly believes that some epistemic stances would be ill-chosen, on grounds of irrationality.

. . . the core of the article's imaginative background on the matter. It cleaves the enactment of an epistemic stance from what it concerns, which could be read as cleaving how things are done from what's done, even though what's done influences how things are done through learning, and how things are done influences what's done through norms. — fdrake

To use some old language, an epistemic stance is imagined as -- conceivably, if not in practice -- an a priori commitment, an armchair commitment that could be determined without recourse to any questions about "what it concerns." The appeal would be strictly to the "how," the process, rather than what that process is working with. We could even go so far as to call it an analytic understanding of epistemology. (Or is this way too strong for Chakravartty, who is very concerned with contexts?) For a non-voluntarist like Pincock, this becomes an appeal to rationality itself, which on this understanding will dictate our epistemic stance.

But, as you point out, this immediately seems to lead to some inconsistencies about what's a factual claim and what's a criterion for a factual claim. Granting that creationism is incorrect, is this because it is a false factual claim, or is it better characterized as a false conclusion based on an epistemic stance that is much too liberal in what counts as evidence? In other words, do the creationist and the evolutionist even agree on what counts as a factual claim -- do they share the same epistemic stance about this? I would say they do not, meaning that their disagreement is in part about stances, not just the facts on the ground. They will have different understandings of how to determine what a "fact" is. And this is where Pincock's realism comes in. He would of course claim that their understandings are not merely different; one is correct, the other ludicrously wrong.

It would then seem that the stance is secretly a list of propositions and attitudes toward them, rather than a means of assigning propositions to attitudes given a context — fdrake

I know what you mean. If a non-voluntarist is going to claim that they have a rationally/theoretically mandatory epistemic stance, they will be asked their reasons for believing this. Will the reasons they give be the same kind of reasons that two people would give who share an epistemic stance but disagree on a particular scientific interpretation? This is hard to understand. And it tempts us to say that all this talk of stances is really a way of justifying some core propositions about method or process which are believed/disbelieved/held as uncertain, not merely "adopted." We want to link propositions with these same attitudes within an epistemic stance -- that's the whole point of having one -- but where are we standing before the stance? What's the further argument that there are worse and better (maybe even obligatory) reasons for enacting the stance?

There's a lot more in what you wrote that is interesting and worth pursuing, but I'll stop here. Since this question of what might make an epistemic stance attractive or even obligatory keeps showing up as central, I really should write Part Two, which concerns Pincock's incoherence argument. So I'll try to do that fairly soon.

So now you are making use of a private rule... this (indicating the qual) is red...

And how can we say that what you pick out by "this" is the same as what I pick out?

I don't see that question as having any significance. — Banno

This seems to conflate several issues. Why is my description of my red quale a private rule? What would be the (correct, presumably) use of a public rule to describe the quale? I'm not seeing the alternative.

As for whether you and I are naming the same quale, wouldn't the answer be: Conceivably we aren't, but it's unlikely, given how color names are learned. And again, even if our meanings turned out to be different, it would have no bearing on whether we intended rather than extended (so to speak). When I point to the red beads and call them "red", this has nothing to do with their extension. Because, as above, the same beads might be green, with no difference in extension. If the extension were all that mattered, how would I know if they were red or green? So what then is the difference?

What I'd really like -- what I think would help most for me to see this picture -- would be to hear your alternative account of how, for instance, we can label "red" without allowing that "red" means that color (or quale). And, anticipating you, if that account involves learning how a word is used, what is the "extensional version" of that? What do we teach a child when we teach them color names? "When you point to that, say 'red'?" And if the child replies, "Why?" what do we say?

(It is like a chess problem, isn't it? :wink: ). So, turning to the colored beads:

{1,2,3} may be extensionally equivalent to "is red", but would you really want to say that "{1,2,3}" means the same thing as "red"? — J

We agree that we know what "is red" and "is green" mean, sufficiently well to imagine them ourselves, and to pick them out in the visual field. (And I'm not trying to beg the question by employing "mean" as if we both understand it the same way. Please feel free to translate as you see fit.). If I understand you, you're saying that extensional equivalence explains this. Or at least that's how I interpret your:

If everything that applies to {1,2,3} applies to "...is red", then what more is there to "meaning"? — Banno

The "more" would be the quale "red." In pointing to the beads, I happen also to be pointing to beads 1,2,3, but if you and I are discussing redness, that would be beside the point.

Perhaps another good place to pause -- do you see something awry yet?

Is there more here than the collapse of "meaning" that occurs as one attempts to say what meaning is? — Banno

I think so . . . Let me try it from the idea of qualia. I suppose you agree that, if I ask you to close your eyes and imagine "red," and then "green," the two color patches or whatever you come up with will look different in your imagination. That is because (I would say) "red" and "green" have different meanings, at least as far as "meaning" is commonly understood. Are we on the same page so far?

Great OP and interesting paper. — fdrake

I'm glad it engaged you.

I was wondering if Chakravartty or Pincock have any writings about how one might adapt one's values, or change stance, given evidence? — fdrake

I don't know; I only know of these two philosophers from reading the cited papers. An important question, though. I would imagine that a stance voluntarist could give a convincing account of how they switched from one stance to another, given evidence. Someone like Pincock will have a much harder time, as they may have to actually deny that cogent evidence could arise. But notice what Pincock says toward the end of his paper: "A realist should not endorse . . . dogmatic loyalty to IBE [inference to the best explanation]. . . The only viable form of scientific realism is a cautious realism that responds appropriately to the historical record of success and failure for various modes of inference." We're left with wondering exactly how to interpret "appropriately", but the overall tone is not inflexible.

The construal of an epistemic stance, and indeed of epistemic values, seems to be {in the paper's words} "upstream" of matters of fact and questions of ontology, rather than "alongside" or possibly "downstream" of matters of fact and question of ontology — fdrake

Yes.

A stance doesn't judge matters of fact, it is a means by which matters of fact are judged - much like an assembly line for bikes can't be ridden as a bike. In that regard a commitment to a stance is an enactment of it. — fdrake

Yes. Moving on to "defeaters":

But that would render discoveries, facts, results - methodology - as potential changes for the admissibility of methodologies, and thus undermine a stance's construal as "upstream" from facts and matters of ontology. — fdrake

Your entire discussion of defeaters is very good, and I think puts the "upstream" problem in the right context, but let me zero in on the conclusion here. If an epistemic stance is supposed to tell us what we ought to believe, does that mean it has to be a one-way street? Or to stay with the river metaphor, does the justificatory stream flow in a single direction?

Well, how do we cobble together our epistemic stance in the first place? If Chakravartty's characterization is largely correct, it's a combination (hodge-podge?!) of factors, many of which are undoubtedly traveling "upstream" from the downstream events and evidence of our lives. At a certain point, we find we have a stance, however tentative. So the question is, does this stance now put up a kind of dam against any pesky evidentiary salmon that wants to swim upstream with new information that could put the stance itself into question?

I think this depends on how deep the epistemic commitments go. Someone like Pincock probably wants to say that some elements that comprise the commitments are irreversible, on pain of irrationality or incoherence. Your example of conservative Alice and cowboy Bob, however, doesn't seem nearly that bedrock. Couldn't a scientific realist make room for both Alice and Bob in the Temple of Reason? After all, neither one is questioning realism per se. They just have different risk tolerances when it comes to beliefs. The stance voluntarist will say that such tolerances are (largely) unresolvable by rational argument, which is not to say they aren't motivated by theoretical reasons. The stance-obligatorist (if that's a word) will deny this, and perhaps argue that even the difference between 19 and 20 represents the difference between what is rationally obligatory, given a realist stance, and what is incorrect.

This of course relates to your question about how a stance might change. My stance provides certain criteria for what counts as evidence tout court. Does that include evidence for the stance itself? Can the very stance that certifies item D as evidence in good standing be changed as a result of D, when what D defeats is some element of stance E? But then, that might mean D wasn't evidence in good standing after all, if the new stance no longer recognizes D as valid. This is a truly headache-producing circle, and I don't know the answer, other than to say that it motivates my question in the OP, "Is the argument for something being true, and worthy of belief, within a given epistemic stance the same kind of argument we’d give for the stance itself being rationally obligatory?"

construing fact, method, methodology and meta-methodology as inferentially related. — fdrake

Yeah, that's what it would be if there's no "rigid rational" epistemic stance that can trump all others, and travel both upstream and downstream is permitted.

The flexibility that goes into defining what allows one to adopt or enact a stance seems to give such wiggle room. — fdrake

I'm leaning that way too but let me give Pincock his say in Part Two.

Focusing on metaphysics rather than epistemology is taking us farther and farther from the OP. — T Clark

I don't agree. What you say here is critical to the issues the OP raises. After all, Chakravartty himself refers to a realist commitment to scientific method as a "metaphysical stance." When you write, "It's not our only choice of the way to see things, even for science," you're coming to grips with the key point that separates Chakravartty and Pincock. So please stay on the thread if you're interested!

But doubt this will convince you — Banno

It's not so much a matter of being convinced. I feel as you did, in an earlier thread, where you said something to the effect of, I'm frustrated because I can't see a point that is so obvious to others. (This might have been in regard to Rodl's concerns about Frege.).

If everything that applies to {1,2,3} applies to "...is red", then what more is there to "meaning"? — Banno

This would be the source of my frustration, here. No matter what angle I squint at it from, I keep seeing a need for "meaning" in order to give a convincing account of how intension works. But . . . better philosophers than I have contested this, so I'm going to keep pondering it.

I understand. But of course you know that many religious people maintain that complete faith in God erases these fears and doubts. The Abraham story pushes this to the limit. Could a father feel any faith in God under such circumstances?

Sorry, sometimes my sense of humor is obscure. Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling is famous, and kind of required reading if you're interested in the Abraham story, so I thought you were kidding about "obvious." He examines the agony of faith vs. ethics from many perspectives, imagining Abraham's reactions in several versions of how the story might have played out.

OK. Since this thread focuses on comparing and contrasting two philosophers, I can see why it wouldn't interest you.

It depends on what you are trying to achieve. If you're trying to achieve the most logical outcome, then you should. — Philosophim

This, I think, is close to Chakravartty's sense. He specifies "minimal constraints of internal consistency and coherence” -- so, broadly speaking, logical. In that sense, then, you're saying that such a stance is not voluntary or optional; we should choose it. How would you argue for that? Or do you think Pincock's position basically sets out that argument?

Oh, you never know. Might not be so obvious after all . . .

OK. And would you say that's a voluntary epistemic stance, in Chakravartty's sense?

If you truly believe there’s a God and God is good, why would you hesitate to obey them? — praxis

We shouldn't assume that the Hebrew Scripture writers were unfamiliar with angst and doubt. The very question you ask is, I believe, why the story of Abraham was written and became part of the canon. Kierkegaard has a good book about it. :smile:

So would Chakravartty's view be correct, and Pincock's incorrect, as you understand it? That is, Pincock would be wrong in trying to argue for a particular version of "rationality" that ought to be adopted, on pain of no longer being rational at all?

Or perhaps I should ask, do you think there's a single version of what is rational -- and hence what should inform our epistemic stance -- when doing science?

Thanks for your thoughts on Chakravartty's paper -- I'm glad you were able to connect his ideas with your own perspective. "Where to go from here?" you ask. Well . . . now read the Pincock paper (also linked)! It is a direct response to Chakravartty.

what bothered me the most is that realism and antirealism are set up as mutually exclusive and incomprehensible. Fact is, you can use both. — T Clark

This occurred to me too. If I had to make one overall criticism of analytic philosophy, it's the tendency to separate ideas into convenient binaries for purposes of discussion, ignoring what is actually done with those ideas in the real world. Pincock makes a strong case for why realism and anti-realism do have something fundamentally incompatible about them, however.

whether the idea of objective reality is a useful one. — T Clark

I think both Chakravartty and Pincock would agree that it is useful. Pincock, though, would add that it has the additional virtue of being real or true.

You haven't disrupted anything, no worries.

A presupposition is an assumption that establishes the context for a philosophical or scientific discussion. — T Clark

I agree, this is in the same family as "epistemic stance," as used by Chakravartty and Pincock.
(@tim wood, above, also noticed the resemblance to Collingwood.). One difference may lie in the idea of an "absolute presupposition," which I think is too strong. For Chakravartty, at least, an epistemic stance is tentative, flexible, and dependent on a lot more than what I think you're calling metaphysics. Really, as I read him, it isn't an assumption at all, but a carefully chosen "best practice." In the context of doing science, he wants an epistemic stance to walk the line between filtering out weak knowledge claims while not squelching ones that deserve a hearing. Pincock's interest in rational obligation may be a little closer to something absolute. But of course Collingwood points out that different absolute presuppositions may apply in different situations, so perhaps the difference is small.

The debate I'm focusing on, though, is precisely whether this is a good characterization of what an epistemic stance (or presupposition, if you like) entails. Chakravartty would agree with Collingwood that such a stance is not chosen exclusively based on rational criteria, nor can it be defended that way. But Pincock disagrees. So would many others who believe that realism and objectivity are not optional but rather obligated by a certain understanding of rationality.

I hope you find time to read the two papers. Your input would be welcome. But if not, I'll go on to fill out more of the debate within a day or two.

Yes, definitely related. An oldie but goldie, for sure. Why do you suppose it's yet unresolved, and continues to get new expressions in contemporary phil?

Take another look at the beads. I've claimed that {1,2,3} is extensionally equivalent to "...is red". . . The point is that if there is agreement we need explain nothing further. — Banno

I see the attractiveness of this position. But there's a synonymy problem still. {1,2,3} may be extensionally equivalent to "is red", but would you really want to say that "{1,2,3}" means the same thing as "red"? What about the lack of substitutivity? If the items {1,2,3} were green rather than red, we would discover "the same" extensional equivalence, but it would now be with "is green". Any number of items can be 1, 2, and 3, but that won't necessarily make them red.

In short, how is this different from the number-of-planets problem, where we agree that, as Quine says, "failure of substitutivity reveals merely that occurrence to be supplanted is not purely referential" (140)?

Gotta get offline now but I'll keep in the conversation, very interesting.

Well, the need would be to bridge the gap between planets, which are physical objects, and statements about them, which are not, to say nothing of synonymy, which looks to be yet a different thing.

To put it differently, do we know that we're "saying the same thing" about X by checking X and comparing it to what you and I have said? A kind of rough-and-ready extension of a correspondence theory? Doesn't that presuppose that you and I mean the same thing?

OK, let's fill this out. If planets and planètes have the same extension, then "The number of planets is greater than 7" means the same thing as "The number of planètes is greater than 7". Is there any intermediary step that would show this to be true? (Not necessarily doubting you, just checking your work. :wink: )

What they have in common is not some other entity we call the proposition, but that they say the same thing about the number of planets. — Banno

But are you entitled to the phrase "say the same thing" without explaining what it means? Synonymy again. Is this meant to be a brute fact? Some statements simply "say the same thing" and that's as far as we can go with it? This is where the proposition comes in handy.

But as I said, I'm happy with "says the same thing" and "expresses the same proposition" being equivalent.

I'm inclined to say that 'says the same thing as' is ordinary-language-speak for 'expresses the same proposition as'. The key idea in common is that there is a something -- meaning, sense, content -- that can persist despite differing verbal articulations of it. Are there uses of 'same thing' that would come out with a different truth value than 'same proposition'? Likewise for 'says' and 'expresses'? Until we think of one, I'm going to consider them cognates, one in slightly fancier dress.

The number of the planets > 7 = Le nombre de planètes > 7

Just to be clear: Do you read the '=' sign here to mean 'says the same thing as' or 'expresses the same proposition as'? Or would this difference, if any, not be significant? I'm looking for paraphrases that don't use "proposition."

Property or predicate? How does the use of each differ? — Banno

This is a good question. What would you say?

When you ask "What if Elizabeth had not had Elizabeth Angela Marguerite Bowes-Lyon (such an English name...) as her mother", you are thereby asking about Elizabeth... becasue you make it so.

And of course her name might have been Kate. In which case she would still be the very same person. — Banno

If the name changes but she is still the very same person, then a name cannot be an essential property -- or, if you like, any sort of property. (Though I don't really see why 'is called Elizabeth by everyone who knows her' can't be a property. How is it different from 'has red hair'?)

But compare "She might have had different parents. In which case she would still be the very same person." You're not maintaining that this is true in the same way that the Eliz-vs-Kate case is true? Indeed, it isn't true at all, is it? We might mistakenly designate her as the same person, but that would be an error -- if we agree with Kripke about the importance of parentage.

if the dream caused your kicking, it must cause kicking to all other folks who has the same dream or similar dream kicking. But it doesn't. Maybe it does to some folks, but definitely not to all the folks. Hence it is not causal event. It is random or contingent event or reaction during the sleep. — Corvus

Or maybe it's necessary but not sufficient. In order to produce the kicking, some other factors have to be in play as well.

During sleep, your thought and willful motivations wouldn't be present for your Kicking to be based on the thoughts process or willful motivation on the dreaming. — Corvus

Fair enough. I was definitely interpreting "thought process" generously to include whatever a dream is. Maybe we should just say "mental event" instead -- I think we can include more than just conscious thoughts as possible relata in the mental/physical causation problem. Memories, for instance -- where might they fall on the "willful" spectrum?

I see the difficulties you're bringing up. But "exactly the same dream" is an unnecessarily high bar. What we're interested in is, e.g., whether physical kicking is correlated with a dream that also involves some kind of kicking. If this turns out to be largely true -- it's easily testable if we accept subjective reports from dreamers -- then the next question would be, does one precede the other? Again, and assuming brain scans are sensitive enough to detect when dreams occur (I don't know if this is the case), we could easily test either hypothesis. Kick, then dream; or dream, then kick?

Well, but what about a long dream which the subject reports as including a kick? How could we tell if the events in the dream caused the physical kick, or whether the kick occurred unrelatedly, and was then incorporated into the the story of the dream? This would certainly be a hard case to determine, but it seems to me that if we gathered enough data from simpler dreams showing that, let's say, the act of dreaming precedes the physical kick, we'd consider it strongly probable that this is usually the case in the longer dreams as well.

Notice, too, that this is all based on the hypothesis that the relation is causal. To me, that's by no means certain. If the physical kick supervenes on the dream-moment of kicking, then at best we might be able to say that the dream as a whole caused the kick, but the dream-kick and the physical kick, on this view, would be simultaneous. This is where the parallel with mental causation in waking life becomes clear: We want to say that my thoughts do result in physical actions, but that doesn't have to mean that there is a moment in time at which thought X causes action Y, with a teeny temporal gap. The thought process as a whole may be the causative part of the relation.

A proper name works only if those in the community agree as to its use. If a proper name does not in our conversations pick out an individual unambiguously, then it has failed to be a name. — Banno

Yes, a proper name is a convention. There is nothing to it beyond whatever a given community agrees is a sufficient "baptism."

But that determination need not be the origin story, as Kripke suggests. We might just as well depend on the community in which "Glunk" picks out Glunk. If we agree that "Glunk" picks out Glunk, the presence or absence of an origin story is irrelevant. — Banno

Hmm. I'm not so sure. The question is, Can "Community picks out Glunk" produce the same plausibility responses for us that "Glunk is picked out by his birth" does for Kripke?

Let me use the Queen Elizabeth example, as it's easier to quote directly. Kripke asks, "How could a person originating from different parents, from a totally different sperm and egg, be this very woman?" He acknowledges that others may have different intuitions about this, but for him, "anything coming from a different origin would not be this object."

So now we ask, "How could a person, Glunk, who is not so-baptized by his community, be this very person?" My intuition here is quite different from the Elizabeth-from-different-parents example. I would say that Glunk, under whatever name, is surely the same person. In other words, his name is not anything like an essential property. The name may be essential to how we designate him, but that's not the same thing.

Or if you prefer, and I think this amounts to much the same thing, we could use Davidson here, and say that the correct use of a name or a demonstrative is that which makes the vast majority of expressions that include it, true. — Banno

This is all well and good if the issue is indeed about the correct use of a name. But I think Kripke is talking about something different. It's the de re vs. de dicto question, yes? There has to be something about a rigid designation that transcends nomenclature or terminology. I appreciate that a community-wide agreement to name something is not the same as my personal, private-language decision to do so. But they are the same sort of thing. I don't think you can get to "independent determination of the referent" simply by letting "independent" mean "independent of me." I read Kripke as talking about an entirely different, ontological independence. Which comes with its own problems, of course, but this is a start.

So in this case, the syndrome would seem to trigger the dream, if any. Clearly it's hard to find a one-size-fits-all explanation.

With your caveat "most instances," I find this persuasive, thanks.