The accessibility relation. It tells you what pairs of worlds are connected to each other, and in what directions. So if we had two worlds A,B and a relation on them R which consisted of pairs (A,B), (A,A), (B,B) and (B,A), reading (x,y) as 'y is accessible from x', this would then mean B is accessible from A, (A,B), A is accessible from B (B,A), A is accessible from A (A,A) and B is accessible from B (B,B). Prosaically, B 'is a possible world' for A, A 'is a possible world' for B, A is a possible world for itself and B is a possible world for itself.

When the accessibility relation is reflexive, it means that a world is always accessible from itself. This means what is actual in it is possible in it.

Fair.

The only avenues I've found that grant me some semblance of understanding, though it's probably very different to a true psychoanalytic exegesis, are through Beauvoir and, ashamedly, Jordan Peterson. Though I've not read much primary literature on either, which is a shame in the first case but a mercy in the second. So this is probably butchery.

So Beauvoir locates women as occupying the position of the other. In order to partake in the play of symbols that constitute discourse, a woman has to forsake that otherness and speak with their stolen tongue; within a symbolic system whose condition of intelligibility and usual function excludes sexual difference as something to be negotiated linguistically, as already incorporated, rather than perturbed through sexual difference from within; femininity is only ever a linguistic trope rather than a regime which organises intelligibility. In this sense, femininity is a void buttressed on all sides through elision; an annihilation, through exclusion, of sexual difference. That this difference remains unarticulated is constitutive of the role of the other, despite the nascent intelligibility it can obtain through phenomenological and literary analysis, as with Beauvoirs' writings. To think the feminine then requires bending your mind orthogonally to the usual social, normative and philosophical modes of variation; it requires opening a space in which femininity can dwell and thus express itself through the articulation of sexual difference. In essence, femininity is not metabolised through discourse, it is skimmed over through already articulated concepts. Though whether this otherness, being as it is an interpersonal category rather than a ontological one, can be equated or treated as exemplary with the indifference of multiplicities to intelligibility/synthesis rather than analogised to them makes me pause for thought. It looks like a greedy generalisation, filtering too much and saying too little of the domain of concepts Beauvoir was working in.

And Peterson, where to start in this philosophical/psychological pot-luck? Masculinity is order and logos, femininity is disorder and pathos. For Peterson, the feminine is necessary interruption in the masculine, a never sated problematic and the impetus behind every life project; the dragon of chaos is the snake beckoning from the tree is taste of the apple. These are the inverted mirror of masculinity as anima and animus, a never fully integrated limit point which completes the mind through its inclusion, which spurs order forwards through its incompletion. This conception of the feminine as an interruption connotes the event as a motivating force for change which is never fully articulated, and thus multiple.

I can kind of see where transposing these concepts into ontology might lead, but I'm hesitant to brand them as anything but errors (my errors) in context recognition.

With respect to the conversation between you and fdrake, part of my initial response was motivated by trying to rephrase Lacan's logic of the ('feminine') not-all: 'there is nothing which is not...'; which is set against what he calls the 'masculine' logic of universality: 'everything is...'' - the latter being a claim of identity (X=...), while the former leaving the identity of X somewhat indeterminate, and simply 'qualifying' it in some way. Also, as I was reading a bit to formulate this very paragraph a bit better, I realized I more or less borrowed wholesale from a Zizek discussion of this very topic (I kinda had this at the back of my mind when I wrote the initial response, but only dimly! ... Went searching and hey -) : — StreetlightX

Do you think you could indulge a selfish request? How is a unity male and a multiplicity female? I can never get past my WTF barrier with Lacan.

I just mean: how ok are you with a metaphysics that means nothing new can come into existence? — csalisbury

Nah. I think it's a result of bad framing. It's an interesting failure though, I think fundamentally it doesn't work very well because the operation which creates the fuckoff big object, just as in Spinoza, is a relatively unmoored conceptual operation taking little inspiration from more local problems. So in one breath I was criticising him for a focus on intellection in grasping an eternal and infinite substance, in another I derived a similarly inert and timeless material solely through reason. Sometimes it's fun to be a hypocrite.

I guess there's also a silent presence here. I tried, over a half-decade ago, to understand Badiou, and I didn't. I know you've read him. When we bring set theory, oneness, novelty, Spinoza etc together, that makes me think of Being and Event, and that the inconsistency of the 'giant set' is somehow relevant. I wish I understood Badiou better but the feeling in my bones is that B&E is dealing with something problematic in the account you presented. — csalisbury

Badiou was in my mind when I was writing that post, I think the relevant distinction he has is between 'counts-as-one' and 'non-all'. Counts-as-one is a intellectual/practical operation which treats something as a unity; an intelligible whole; which stands out against the inconsistent/intelligibility resistant real; the non-all.

The departure point of my account creates a ghostly intelligibility where in fact there is none; to be real becomes equated with membership in a gigantic constructed set; precisely what Badiou uses Russel's paradox to highlight the flaw in. Moreover, the distinction between counts-as-one and non-all is roughly a distinction between intelligibility and the real; the former an operation which synthesises unities given a circumscribed context (and indeed circumscribes those contexts), and the latter that which disperses all such syntheses.

I don't know what you mean, really.

Sometimes you just gotta go ham.

This might be a naive question, or else betray my misunderstanding, but how does this work time-wise? If we have relational closure tout court isn't that a kind of 'freeze' - as in, doesn't that preclude, by definition, the coming-into-existence of anything new? — csalisbury

Yep. There's no special emphasis on becoming in this picture, transformation is done 'in advance' as the sending of an object to another. There's no becoming separate from its products, held pristine forever in a glorified relational database, an accountancy of being;, an ontology for the insensate, the stubborn and the puritan.

But if you start from the modes, and work back to substance - this whole issue (if there is one) vanishes. — csalisbury

Except this lingering conception that stuff has to be 'made of' stuff.

I think I understand your broader picture, but I'm not totally sure because I'm not familiar with the term 'relational closure.' Googling it is bringing me to a lot of math-y articles I'm not sure I'm capable of understanding without a lot of work. Is it possible to summarize the concept? — csalisbury

I'm using it in a mathy way. The concept is quite straightforward in maths. A set is closed under some operation or function or relation just when you can't take elements of that set to some element outside of that set using the operation.

So, the set {1,2,3} is not closed under addition, since 1+3=4 and 4 isn't in the set, but the set {0} is closed under addition, since 0+0 is 0. If we abstract a level to functions, say f(x) = x^2, then the first set is not closed under the function since f(2)=2^2=4, but the second set is closed under the function since f(0)=0^2=0. Abstracting a level again to relations, which are like functions that can map one thing to many things, and defining the following relation R on the set {1,2,3,4}:

0->1
0->2
1->1
1->2
2->2
3->3
3->4
4->3

then the set {1,2,3} isn't closed under R, since 3 can be sent to 4. Neither is the set {0} closed under the relation, since 0 can be sent to 1 and 2. The relational closure would then be the smallest set of all elements that we can't 'get outside' of using the relation. For R this is {0,1,2,3,4}.

Abstract again to some collection of objects X and quantify over a set of relations {R,S,T}, then we can say a set X is closed under R and S and T if and only if it is closed under each of them in the above sense. Now imagine the set of all objects and the collection of all relations (taking any set as its substrate). We can say that the collection of all objects is closed under the set of all relations just when it is closed under each of them. This invites considering the relations first and characterising their substrate as the smallest set they are closed under, similarly to treating modes/interactions first and synthesising to attribute/substance later.

In my example of desire to Schop, we have that desire is a relation of an object to a state of mind, thus whatever the relational closure is must contain both states of mind and objects. This translates mathematically to applying the set of all relations to a set of objects, then applying all relations to what the relations have sent all the set of objects to, and aggregating all elements which are produced in this procedure into one giant set. This set then satisfies the property that all the relations can only send stuff to within the set, in the jargon making a closed category, which I'm identifying with substance through a massive sleight of hand (there are still a pre determined collection of individuals to be transmitted through the relations, and it also construes 'everything' as expressible through mathematics).

And in terms of your OP, when you say 'as opposed to what', this connotes with the domain of the application of a property or concept an exterior domain which does not include it; which must exist on the condition of possibility for the sense of the concept or property. By constructing the above object, we also construct an incredibly generic characterisation of everything, 'it is in the set', but this expresses nothing more than that it, in some sense, is.

Relevant discussion you might like.

I'll start going through the Riemann paper on the 13th.

These are problems that arise from the hard problem of consciousness. These are the (practically) intractable, ever-debatable problems and hence the more interesting question, in my opinion. — schopenhauer1

My taste differs a lot. I see intractable problems, most of the time, as resulting from confused questions. With appropriate framing, what's intractable usually becomes irrelevant.

Of course this itself is a claim that needs its own justification. The fact that you mention ontological registers, means there is a substantive difference. What are these differences is the question I am posing. — schopenhauer1

I don't see it that these differences apply over ontological registers - as this posits a priori distinctions between different mediums of variation. Rather, I see it that differences should be worked out immanently and in relation to some topic of study (or relationships between study topics); the distinctions which obtain of ontological registers depends upon which perspective you view them from. EG, a spider cares little for Brownian motion or the theory of pressure waves, but it absolutely cares about whether movements in its web are localised and relatively extreme or dispersed and relatively minor. This would transform questions like: 'how do organisms relate to pressure waves?' or 'how is it possible to get information from pressure waves?' provisionally into localised versions, which can then have commonalities synthesised from them. There's no guarantee, though, that the synthesis reveals a global truth about being.

So, a deflationary answer; ontological registers can have distinctions from each other, but these distinctions depend upon topicality and relevance. It is rare that such broad ideas can subsume all of their details, rather they serve as orientations for thought in a scoping circumscription of relevance that unfolds along with the questions we ask.

It was just an example, but how it is that all material is mental or all mental is material is the hard question. — schopenhauer1

I'm trying to undermine the distinction. All is matter? Then what are thoughts, social structures, history made of? All is mind - then what are tables, rocks, vortices made of? So I tried to situate both in an indeterminate substrate in which interactions of both interact, so that we need not draw the distinction and be confused by its consequences.

Really though, I think stratifications of being don't neatly track stratifications of substance, precisely because we end up with things like emergence and multilayer dependence of things which are supposed to have an independent nature. Nature is more aligned with interdependence and transformation acting over all and intermingling all ontological registers, than a stratification into separable mediums of variation.

Thanks for the reference. Please notice that I attributed to Popper the idea that falsification obtains of singular propositions rather than scientific theories. And explicitly contrasted that to Lakatos. Falsification works as a demarcation criterion, but in practice things are different, we don't throw the baby out with the bath water. Lakatos starts from not throwing the baby out with the bathwater, and attempts a descriptive account of science from there.

The ice cream has a molecular structure- explained through chemistry. Desires have perhaps a molecular counterpart (interactions of the brain), but it would be odd to say, "my desires are molecular" (other than trivially/metaphorically). Rather, your desires have a psychological aspect, that is to say, it is explained through psychology rather than chemistry. It is these type of distinctions that the interactions of the psychology on the material that you are describing, do not answer simply because of its interaction. — schopenhauer1

Being the subject of a different set of investigation techniques doesn't say anything about the constitution of what's considered. Calculus doesn't have to overlap with anatomy, and on this basis we should not conclude that the entities of mathematics aren't related to those anatomy studies. How surprising it is that the impact of a fall has effects on the body, and that falling often leads to pain. Surely pain, falling and bodies are made of different substances, then. Philosophy should really deal with the interaction problem of falling down and the pain of grazing knees.

I'll wait on you providing the reference later, then.

Popper confronts and solve the Duhem-Quine Thesis in "Logic of Scientific Discovery". — Inis

According to Popper, falsification of any theory is logically impossible. — Inis

Ok!

I can give a rough picture of his account, though it will be lacking on detail.

Scientific progress is often characterised as an interlinking between theory; which generates propositions about the world; and experiment; which tests those propositions. This basic picture is correct.

Testing, as Popperian falsification is typically characterised in the following way: a proposition about the world is posited, an experiment either refutes or is consistent with that proposition. But this does not describe the activities of reasoning that science consists of very well at all. Consider the cases of the discovery of Neptune and the precession of Mercury.

In Neptune's case, Newtonian mechanics was applied to the orbital behaviour of another planet, Uranus, and it was found not to describe it very well. At this point, other astronomers posited the existence of another planet whose gravitational effects fixed those predictions; the planet who fixed those predictions was discovered where it was predicted to be, and Newtonian mechanics was vindicated.

In Mercury's case, Newtonian mechanics was applied to Mercury, and it was found that there was a deviation from the predictions. Scientists were reluctant to put Newtonian mechanics in the bin since it had been so successful, and instead posited that the astronomical measurements which established the deviation from the theory instead were in error. More precise measurements came along and vindicated that Mercury's orbit was not exactly predicted by Newtonian mechanics. Eddington's question to Einsten, then, made Einstein (and his wife!) go through all the tensor calculus required to predict the orbit of Mercury with his theory, and it was found to match the astronomical measurements. In this case, then, Newtonian mechanics was found to be wrong, and Einstein's theory supplanted it in some relevant sense.

What these cases show is the role of auxiliary hypotheses and hard cores in the process of scientific reason. We have a 'hard core' of a theory, which is constituted by its necessary commitments, and we have a belt of 'auxiliary hypotheses' surrounding that hard core which provide the interface of that hard core with experiment. The hard core in the Newtonian case was (roughly) the three laws and their associated calculus, especially Newtonian gravitation - and auxiliary hypotheses were observations, calculations and predictions about the motion of bodies; especially planets and their orbits. In the both cases, an auxiliary hypothesis was posited to protect Newton's theory of gravitation from refutation. In the case of Uranus' orbital measurements, this was that there was another planet which accounted for the deviation. In the case of Mercury's orbital measurements, this was that the measurements were of poor quality.

Let's pause at this point to highlight something important. Newtonian mechanics and Einsteinian mechanics required extra assumptions to interface with the real world; these were measurements of mass, orbital position and so on; the theories themselves made no specific predictions about the real world without having these other auxiliary hypotheses to provide grist to their mills.

Back to the account, we're now in a position to distinguish Lakatos from Popper in terms of falsification. There are two big differences.

Firstly, Lakatos characterises falsification as operative not on singular propositions, but on series of propositions. Such a series might be 'The laws of Newtonian mechanics + observations about Uranus' orbit' or 'The laws of Newtonian mechanics + observations about Mercury's orbit', and when falsification strikes (when 'Nature shouts "No!" as he puts it), it does not act on a specific proposition, but on the composites "The laws of Newtonian mechanics + observations about Uranus' orbit'. The composites are treated in the sense of logical conjunction, so when we falsify "The laws of Newtonian mechanics + observations about Uranus' orbit', we de Morgan's law it up and negate a single set of conjuncts. In the Uranus+Neptune case, the negation operated on the existence of relevant celestial bodies, in the Mercury case, the negation first was thought to operate on the measurements of Mercury's orbit then when they were shown as good, it operated on the hard core of Newtonian gravitation.

The habits of scientists, then, are when Nature shouts no, they prefer to reject an auxiliary hypotheses and posit a new one rather than reject some part of the hard core. This is what makes the hard core 'hard' - it is refutation resistant in the practice of scientists - whereas the auxiliary hypotheses are the easier candidates for refutation.

The second difference from Popperian falsification is that the rejection entailed by Nature shouting 'No!' is weakened. We don't reject Newtonian mechanics entirely just because it fails to model the orbit of Mercury, we rather constrain its application to a domain of relevance, and this is done adaptively with respect to theoretical and experimental demarcations. So we actually maintain belief in falsified propositions by continuing to use the theories, though with a restricted domain of relevance.

This emphasis on sequences of theories means that Lakatos thinks science does not consist of a linked series of singular propositions subject to experimental refutation, it instead consists of a transforming sequence of hard-cores and auxiliary hypotheses over time, and temporally demarcated hard-core + auxiliary hypotheses composites are termed 'research programs'. It is research programs which are the active unit of science, not propositions and their falsifications; for it is research programs which modify theories, make predictions, reject propositions, and change hard-cores.

This, then, gives an account of scientific revolution; rejecting a hard core, as in the case of Mercury, yields a novel research programme, Einsteinian mechanics. But in distinction to Feyeraband, these research programs are not incommensurable; they do not differ in terms of a conceptual scheme; they can differ in scope of application; and scientific inquiry admits research programmes that, strictly speaking, have contradictory hard cores. Simply because research programmes have a native context of application in which that hard core makes sense.

The relationship between hard cores and auxiliary hypotheses also gives a vantage point from which to view the demarcation problem; what is the difference between pseudoscience and science? Lakatos treats this as a condition of scientific practice; as a property of a research programme; rather than simply turning on the falsifiability of propositions. He also gives a practical account of what it means to treat a hard core as non-falsifiable.

As seen with the Mercury example, scientists can adjoin an auxiliary hypothesis to block rejection of the hard core. If a research programme routinely does this, when their research consists mostly of positing auxiliary hypotheses to protect their hard core, that research programme is called degenerate. When they are not degenerate; when science is progressing through the research programme; they are called progressive. The science/pseudoscience distinction is then transformed to the progressive/degenerate distinction, and from the relationships of singular propositions to falsification to the relationship of research programmes to their propensity for non-rejection of the hard core through the perpetual creation of ad-hoc auxiliary hypotheses. Freudian psychology and Marxism have this character for Lakatos as they do for Popper, though for much different reasons which we have discussed.

I would answer the question with a question; does it make sense to consider two things as being entirely distinct and non-related when they interact? I have a craving for ice cream. This expresses a relation between me and ice cream; my desire isn't extended or capable of temperature except in a metaphorical sense, it isn't the motion of a body nor is it at rest, nevertheless if I were to indulge and satisfy my desire, I'd eat the ice cream and satisfy my desire. It makes as much sense to separate desire and its objects through some prior stratification of being as it does to separate my mouth, the ice cream, and its taste.

Why should we grant logical priority to an intuition of separation when we can establish they are not separate through our acts?

How they interact is a different question from whether they interact. Noticing such an interaction evinces that they indeed do. Approaching this with the framing that an exegesis of how they interact is required to establish that they interact is an artificial imposition; similar to the idea that two objects could not collide and transfer momentum without the calculus in Newtonian mechanics.

I don't think it makes sense to consider how mind and matter are different without looking at how mind and body project themselves into the world, or indeed how matter projects itself into the mind and body. The confusion arises when considering the domain of conception as different from what it concerns, positing a 'here' and a 'there'; isolated domains; which nevertheless, and now problematically, interact.

I think of substance through a perversion of Spinoza.

III. By substance, I mean that which is in itself, and is conceived through itself: in other words, that of which a conception can be formed independently of any other conception.

IV. By attribute, I mean that which the intellect perceives as constituting the essence of substance.

V. By mode, I mean the modifications[1] of substance, or that which exists in, and is conceived through, something other than itself. — Spinoza, Ethics

Replace the reliance on conception with one of interaction. So substance in III becomes the logical space of all interactions of indeterminate types, attributes in IV become isolated domains of interaction of determinate types (like thought/extension), and modes in V become interactions within a given domain (like chains of reason in thought or chains of cause in extension).

The 'isolation' of the domains is present in Spinoza, eg it's used in:

PROP. III. Things which have nothing in common cannot be one the cause of the other.

in the logic of its proof:

Proof.—If they have nothing in common, it follows that one cannot be apprehended by means of the other (Ax. v.), and, therefore, one cannot be the cause of the other (Ax. iv.). Q.E.D.

so thought and extension in Spinoza are independent domains of interaction set up a-priori through the apprehension of substance. I rather want to invert this to get a conception of substance out of the modes. We have that chains of influence/interaction, like billiard balls pushing each other or inferential relations, must have something in common; some shared interaction; just when they are not in an isolated domains with respect to eachother.

So if we start from the billiard balls and chains of thought, and posit that two things are of the same order/attribute just when a relation obtains between one and the other, substance then becomes stratified as the relational closure of each domain. However, thoughts and actions, matter and mind do relate, eg through desires and technology, so are of the same domain because relations obtain of the entities within them. Projecting this 'blending of attributes' back to substance offers the conception that substance is that which is characterised by relational closure tout court. This is close to a traditional monism, having one domain of interaction, when there is but one closed set of interacting entities; when there is one domain of interaction. It behaves like a pluralism when there are multiple closed sets.

Observing relations between entities then allows their categorisation within the same domain, and substance's conception is made to be dependent upon its unfolding rather than its independence from all other domains ('that which is conceived only through itself'). So we switch the logical priority of substance>attribute>mode to mode>attribute>substance, and the method of analysis from (synthetic) contemplation alone to (synthetic) contemplation of observed or conceptual interaction.

None, Lakatos. :razz:

That is, I don't wish to discourage you from participating, but I'd like to take the reference stuff as read, at least here. — Banno

My interests in engaging with your exegesis were in clearing up my thoughts on rigid designators and the causal theory of reference, rather than actually doing real scholarship on the book. As these concerns are largely orthogonal to yours, and you're doing the majority of the heavy lifting, I'll buzz off.

I'll be floating around like a bad smell anyway. Silent but deadly.

I misread you then. Sorry.

Kripke is against trying to equate a rigid designator as a definite description. — schopenhauer1

That's exactly the opposite conclusion than the one he wants to draw. He presents a couple of arguments against the idea that the semantic value of names must be definite descriptions, which were covered in the previous thread and lectures.

If I understood what you meant, perhaps by asking your question more precisely and portraying its motivating context, I'd be more likely to be able to say something interesting.

I did. I just don't care to speculate as I don't see the relevance.

The distinction as (I think) the author sees it is, as I stated in this first post, that Kripke's account is that the name-object relation imbued in a naming practice in Kripke's theory consists of a causal chain which is insensitive or not dependent on information about the referent. The first post consists of 3 arguments that seek to highlight how the causal chain must also be a chain of information/communication and is thus information sensitive.

These remarks are intended to intervene in Banno's exegesis here:

Rather, in so far as the referent of a proper name is fixed at all, it is by what Kripke calls causal chains, but what I might call shared use. — Banno

by highlighting a wrinkle in the equality between causal chains and shared use which is suggested in the quote. Kripke's causal chains are information insensitive, Luntley notes that it is required that they are information/knowledge sensitive in several ways, and fills the holes in Kripke's theory that Luntley highlighted with a knowledge-based account that patches them up.

by an informational structure? A structure that could be described by physics? — frank

I gave examples of perceptions and competences as things which can facilitate successful reference, they provide information about the referent which distinguishes them from other things, but not necessarily through the means of any statement, description (definite or no), or even using language at all.

These informational constraints can apply to 'initial baptisms' as much as they can apply to name use further down the causal chain. However, those further down the causal chain can piggyback the name/object relation of successful reference on those who have had an informational state/cache which allows them to make such a distinction or disambiguation. In those cases, while ultimately dependent on information which contributes to the semantic value of the name which distinguishes the referent sufficiently well, we can trust the identification as deriving from such an informational state and make do with that trust and our intentions to successfully refer.

@Banno@frank, though if you want this thread to remain focussed on exegesis rather than derailed through argument and bickering, I'll leave until then.

Whether you accept that or not, Kripke accepts either ostension or a verbal description for the sake of reference fixing. — frank

I don't think he's actually argued that ostension is a type of description, but he considers that it might be (eg. in footnote 42 in lecture 2). In footnote 33 he even opposes the two in the Neptune example - since its reference was fixed through calculations involving gravity -, 'as opposed to ostension'.

It's strange to me that you are treating ostension as a non-linguistic type of description rather than simply a non-verbal or written one. The distinction matters. So the real issues at stake are whether a causal chain suffices to explain the semantic value of names or whether a richer, informational structure which is embedded in a causal chain is required.

So when I challenged you to find a type of description which is not linguistic, I was trying to highlight the distinction between the account I was discussing and a descriptive theory, one that says incidents of reference fixing or the semantic value of names require descriptions or equivalence to descriptions are at least necessary for vouchsafing reference. The point being that it's possible to give a non-descriptive account of the semantic value of names but nevertheless disagree with Kripke about the specifics.

How does this work? 'The X such that Y pointed to it at t'? how does that make pointing a definite description? Edit: moreover, why would pointing be required to be equivalent to or induce a definite description in order to vouchsafe reference using it?

Anyway, this is super tangential. The more relevant question would be whether perceptions or states of know-how are amenable to the form 'The X such that F'?.

That's not a definite description. 'The X such that F'.... F = pointing...

O rly? Can you give me an example of a definite description which is not linguistic?

I don't know what it would mean for the theory I discussed to be substance based. I haven't even seen the word in the bits of the book I've read.

Do you mean the author agrees that a speaker need not have a definite description in mind when using a proper name or kind name? — frank

Yes. The distinction which the author is operating with is that the relevant information which ensures successful reference is not necessarily descriptive information. Moreover, the chain of communication is recharacterised from Kripke as a chain of knowledge transfer. The author doesn't use the 'That's Cicero' example to illustrate this point, but it will serve.

Consider my example with 'That's Cicero', my reference to Cicero in that instance does not allow anyone else in any derivative causal chain from my reference to ensure success for their reference using the name; successes would be accidental. What remains then is to give an account of what types of information transmitted in these chains of communication ensure the stability of reference using the name; transmitting success from one person to another inducted into this use of the name.

The author leverages a distinction between primary and secondary knowers; a distinction which mirrors the relationship of the originator of a causal chain (the initial baptiser) and those whose references depend upon the initial baptism. A primary knower has a cache of information which is directed towards the object of reference as a topic, this information can be perceptual, competence based, descriptive or anything else relevant; importantly, this information need not be sayable in the form of a proposition. A secondary knower has their reference ensured by the identification done by the primary knowers. To illustrate this, consider 'that's my guitar', the reference could be ensured by the recognition of a sound, and derivative references would be facilitated by my successful identification based on the sound. Thus, these informational states vouchsafe references, and derivative ones can depend solely upon my successful identification rather than the means by which that identification was done.

What, thus, makes this critical modification of Kripke's theory not a theory requiring definite descriptions is that the informational content which vouchsafes reference need not be descriptive or even, more generally, linguistic at all.

What kind of accounting are we looking for here? The initial baptism could involve definite description or ostention. If something else is needed, is it something descriptivists allow that Kripke doesn't? — frank

I don't know the broader account as I've not read the whole book. What I can say though is that the author agrees with Kripke that definite descriptions don't model the reference/referent relation very well.

Either you understand what is written, or you don't. If you don't, then nothing more can be said. If you do, then you know what "odd" and "even" mean. (But then if you do, you don't really need to go through this logical exercise in order to prove the conclusion - you could prove it by other means.) — SophistiCat

For the purposes of a logic exercise all knowledge that you bring to an argument you're analysing has to take the form of stated propositions. You're usually given the stated propositions, and no more. Reasoning 'out in the wild' does not have this restriction, it's more free form and you can bring whatever you like to bear on the problem you're tackling. Whereas all the propositions and the rules you can use to link them (like the rules in the sequent calculus or propositional logic) are stated up front in the exercise.

Edit: in case this isn't clear, a good example here is it's very often required in logic exercises that you can't use 'theorem introduction' rules, so if something like de Morgan's laws or the equivalence between disjunctive syllogism and material implication are not axiomatic inference rules of the system, you can't use them.