So my problems are:

-I don't see why an analog system can't deal with or include negation or identity
-I don't see why nature would have to be analog (Leibniz for example effectively proposed it wasn't, and certainly some sections of physics traffic in quanta)
-I don't see what's to be gained from cordoning off what is a transcedental addition versus what is really in nature 'in itself,' and there seems to be no interest in the project if you're not a Kantian (the question of 'is identity in the mind/language/computer, or in the thing itself?' is only of interest to someone with Kantian assumptions)

LOL Scott Soames senpai noticed us ^_^

So then let's try this:

-There is negation in language. This looks indisputable.
-By your argument, language must therefore be a digital system.
-So there is no problem with there being identity of a thing to itself in language.
-Therefore, language must be profoundly metaphysically mistaken, and can't be used as a guide to metaphysics. The problem is that logic is derivative of intuitions based on natural language.

(1) People don't say a thing is identical to itself in ordinary speech [in isolation from some sort of parameter which would make sense of such an identity claim].
(2) To say that a thing is identical to itself [in the absence of some sort of context] is nonsensical. — StreetlightX

Okay, even accepting these are true, this just seems like goalpost-shifting. I never said that to say something is identical to itself is nonsensical in the absence of some sort of context. That's true about pretty much anything (though I'd prefer to say it might serve no communicativ function outside of a context, not that it's 'nonsensical'). As for 'parameters,' you still haven't clarified what those are, and Wittgenstein's claim seems not to make that proviso.

But isn't this only saying that identity statements of this sort generally have communicative functions that they're put to?

Surely this is compatible with the more basic point I'm trying to make, which is that your two earlier assertions:

(1) that people don't say a thing is identical to itself in ordinary speech, and
(2) to say that a thing is identical to itself is nonsensical

are wrong?

Indeed it seems to admit that when doing such an identification, some other fact is motivating it, is to presuppose that such identifications take place, make sense, and are an ordinary part of linguistic usage.

Just goes to show that TGW is merely a part of you, the online you, TGW is you in a similar sense that the spout of the kettle is the kettle. — John

I don't think there is an online me. Yes, I go online, but that doesn't mean there are multiples of me, or something like that, just that sometimes the same person -- me -- is online, sometimes not. Someone could use the name TGW to refer to me offline, and not in respect to any online capacity. It just so happens that one of my names is used more often in an online capacity because that's where it was introduced and circulated.

But you don't 'just' mean that 'they are the same guy'; you 'also mean' that they will respond to the same name, that Mr. Jones is responsible for the Bad Thing you thought someone else was responsible for, etc, etc. — StreetlightX

I don't think I mean any of those things. That might be implied depending on the situation, sure. But that's not what the sentence means. For example, it's possible for Adam to be Mr. Smith, but not respond to both those names.

(I take) Wittgenstein's comment to apply to statements of identity that do not refer to an identity parameter. And it is the case the those sorts of comments are 'useless propositions'. — StreetlightX

I'm not sure what you mean by an identity parameter. Do you mean some quality with respect to which things are identical, like color? If so, there seems to be no such relevant quality for things like 'I'm myself,' which are nonetheless trivially true. I'm the same as myself, in what respect? Well, in no respect, that's not the point of what it says, I just am myself, period.

Maybe some identity statements are useless, or convey useless propositions, but it seems this is so only because they're so trivially true, which only goes to show that numerical identity of a thing with itself is something we're trivially acquainted with. As for the cases with multiple names, etc., these are clearly not useless at all, but it's not clear to me in these cases what sort of identity parameter' you would have in mind. After all, when I say that Adam is Mr. Smith, I don't mean that Adam has identical height to Mr. Smith, or something like that -- no, I mean numerically they are the very same guy.

This simply strikes me as a kind of transcendental illusion, in the Kantian sense. We can say, in a kind of derivative manner, that to assert that Alan = Mr. Jones is to assert the identity of a thing with itself, but the very notion of identity is still a logical category imposed upon an 'existential situation' in which questions of identity or lackthereof are simply absent to begin with. — StreetlightX

But what does it matter whether identity is an imposed category? Have I argued for any specific construal of what numerical identity is? I've only tried to show that your Wittgenstein-inspired comment that to say a thing is identical to itself is nonsensical, is wrong, as is the claim that in ordinary situations we don't do this.

If being TGW has any uniqueness it is parasitic upon being a unique entity that is called 'TGW". — John

Not at all. I didn't have this name until I made it up for online fora, but I was still myself.

Would you not still be a unique entity and identity if you were stranded on an island and had amnesia? — John

Yes, since you just admitted I was the same person in this hypothetical situation, ex hypothesi.

If you have thirty names are they all exactly equivalent of you are called these different names by a different sets of people? — John

No name is equivalent to me -- I am a person, a human being, not a name. I might have names, even thirty of them.

Is your whole identity expressed by your online name TGW or by your everyday name? — John

A name refers to me, and any name I might have does the same, and so means the same thing. I might use different names in different contexts, and so they might be imbued with different shades of significance, but they all refer to the same person (me).

But TGW cannot be a unique identity, because someone else, a million others, could also be TGW. — John

Not so, after all I'm TGW, and no one else can be me.

Of course, other people could have the name 'TGW.' But that is not the same thing as being me (TGW).

Besides, you can replicate this with 'I,' as I just did, by saying 'I'm myself,' which is going to be true whenever someone says it (except for the old 'I'm not myself today,' which is interesting).

Okay, but is it true? Surely if it's redundant, if it adds nothing to what you already know, you recognize that it's true?

And yet, I'm predicating identity with myself of myself. And you understand it and recognize it as true. So contra your previous claim, there is nothing nonsensical at all about it.

Or put differently, the identity Mr. Jones = Alan does not 'stand alone', it is always identity 'with respect to.. x,y,z'. — StreetlightX

So what is it with respect to, in this case?

And what about the 'Adam is Adam' sentence? Surely this is true? There is not going to be any parameter of interest there, is there? Sure, it's trivial, but thats just because numerical identity is trivial, which is the point.

Also note that the fact that we can learn something about language use by uttering or assenting to these sentences doesn't detract from the fact that we are asserting the identity of a thing with itself. In fact, it's precisely because this is what we're doing that it can have these effects. I know how to address Adam because of the equation of him with himself using two distinct names.

He is not Adam — John

Yeah he is. I'm TGW. I'm called 'TGW,' and I'm TGW as well.

One might learn something new upon learning that Adam is Mr. Jones. Not so that Mr. Jones is Mr. Jones. — StreetlightX

Also, just to note, even if none of this goes through, 'Adam is Adam' is still a true sentence, and one that makes sense. The fact that one isn't going to learn anything from it only goes to show that you already know that a thing is itself (duh).

But I don't agree that is what people commonly have in mind in their acknowledgment that a thing may have two or more names. — John

The sentence doesn't say that the man has two names. That may be a requirement for its being true, and it may even be what we intend to convey by using such a construction, but what it says is that a certain individual is identical to a certain individual. Since as you note these are two names of the same man, viz. Adam, what the sentence says is that Adam is himself.

We can change the example to remove the reference to names if that makes it easier. We can say instead:

He is Adam.

'He' is a referential expression that is referring to some guy. 'Adam' also refers to that same guy. We are predicating identity with Adam of Adam himself. To make it even more explicit, we can say:

I'm myself (and no one else).

Is such a sentence not true? Is it nonsensical? That seems to me an incredible claim.

The value of 'Mr. Jones' is Mr. Jones. The value of 'Adam' is Mr. Jones, too. So the meaning of the sentence is that Mr. Jones is Mr. Jones. It asserts identity of one and the same thing.

We might learn something as the result of discovering that the sentence expressing this identity is true, of course, viz. that the two names belong to one man. But at base it asserts the very sort of identity you're saying people don't assert.

It's the difference between x=x and x=y — StreetlightX

But relative to a variable assignment, it's perfectly possible for x=x and x=y to have the same exact value, viz. if x maps to Mr. Jones, and so does y. The fact that you used different variables doesn't mean different individuals are involved. Quite the contrary, the truth of the statement lets us know that just one individual is involved, and that's why it's true.

But that's exactly the point. Since they refer to the same thing, we're saying of one thing that it is itself (that is, it is identical to itself). And this is perfectly ordinary; yet this is precisely what SX has denied we do.

I don't know too much about this, but as I understand it the relative identity has a non-relative identity underlying it, with a domain of non-sorted individuals, and these will obey Leibniz's law. I think this would be true for both Geach and Gupta, but I can't really remember.

On this though, I'd have to disagree. I don't think that at any point during our usual day to day activity, we go around thinking 'that thing there is what it is!' — StreetlightX

No, but people say things like, Mr. Jones is Adam. They're the same person. And so if Mr. Jones went to the bathroom, Adam went to the bathroom. There are equative constructions (with 'be' in English) that predicate identity with something of a subject, and they turn up intuitively true when coreferential expressions are used (the same way these expressions seem to result in truth when you swap out one for the other in true sentences).

And the fact that people don't often say these things doesn't necessarily mean they aren't so – after all, we often avoid saying things that are incredibly obvious, or guaranteed to be true by rules of linguistic usage. But if you were to ask someone, 'Are you yourself?' they would probably, after asking 'why the hell would you ask that?' admit that yes, of course they're themselves, how could they not be?

To say that a thing is identical to itself, when you think about it, is an exceedingly strange formulation. Wittgenstein had something of this intuition when he declared quite flatly in the Tractatus that "roughly speaking: to say of two things that they are identical is nonsense, and to say of one thing that it is identical with itself is to say nothing." — StreetlightX

But this is just false: after all, Mr. Jones and Adam are identical (or more colloquially, Mr. Jones is Adam), so the first part is wrong [unless by 'two things' you mean two non-identical things, in which case the question is begged anyway, and no one would want to say that saying two non-identical things are identical is sensical], and 'Mr. Jones is himself (and not someone else)' is true, so the second part's wrong.

Clearly qualitative identity exists as well, but to deny that people are sensitive to numerical identity seems absurd to me. We are interested, e.g. whether the thing we saw in the sky today is identical to that which we saw yesterday, not in virtue of having the same quality, but in virtue of being the very same thing. And lo and behold it is, the sun. The question of whether the first sun-appearance is qualitatively identical to the second doesn't need to arise, since clearly it is in all relevant respects, but the numerical identity question is substantive.

Language, Truth & Logic - A. J. Ayer
Syntactic Structures - Noam Chomsky
Word and Object - W. V. O. Quine
Aspects of the Theory of Syntax - Noam Chomsky
The Atoms of Language - Mark Baker
Categorial Grammar: Logical Syntax, Semantics, and Processing - Glyn Morrill

The closest thing - that I know of - in formal logic that thinks along these lines in dialetheic logic — StreetlightX

I am not too familiar with dialetheic logic, but my understanding is that dialetheism doesn't have to do with identity, which is a relation, but with the existence of truth value gluts (a single proposition having more than one truth value simultaneously), where these truth values are related by negation. That gives you the possibility of true contradictions. That does not, so far as I know, require changing the law of identity.

I think it's also worth noting that the law of identity itself is not really part of the apparatus of classical logic – propositional logic doesn't even deal with identity of individuals, and first-order logic only introduces the identity relation '=' as a special subcase of a regular relation, which you have to define in giving your interpretation. So you might say, for example, that the '=' relation is the maximal exclusively reflexive relation: it holds between any individual x and itself, and to no others. But that seems to me to be a theory about how identity should be interpreted. Nothing stops you, even in classical logic, from defining the identity relation differently.

What classical logic does so is force you to specify a domain. But a domain is filled with actual things, after all, and if their identity is somehow not determinate, then the choice of the domain sill simply reflect that. I don't think the logic forces you to make this decision. The issues about identity seem to be just to have to do with simple rules of language, such as coreferential expressions preserving truth when swapped out for each other, or the intuitive 'logical truth' of all appropriate statements of the form 'I'm myself.' So to say something like this:

To be absolutely clear, to deny the law of identity isn't - for me anyway - to say that 'things aren't equal to themselves', but to deny that the very category of equality is properly applicable to 'things' at all; that is, it is a category error as such to invoke equality (whether it be to affirm or deny it) when speaking ontologically, other than as a heuristic of everyday speech. Or differently again: there is nothing 'equal' or 'unequal' in nature, no identities. And even in everyday speech, equality is always invoked respect to some quality or another, rather than as a 'brute fact' of identity, as it were. — StreetlightX

I'm not sure what to make of it. Taken seriously at face value, it's clearly false: people do in everyday speech treat things as if they are themselves, and it's not clear behaviorally what the opposite would look like. One option might to invoke cases where people treat the same thing in contradictory manners, but in such cases, we often say of people either that they're making some kind of error, because they're misinformed (like when they don't recognize someone they've met before) or irrational.

If you then want to push back a stage by saying that you deny some set of 'things' to begin with that we can then call equal to themselves, okay, but natural language doesn't seem to disavow this commitment, since it has individual-denoting expressions, so your claim would have to be weakened severely, to be a claim about special modes of philosophical discourse that are at odds with ordinary speech (as Hegel's writing, by his own admission, purposefully is).

As far as equality being invoked with respect to some quality, do you mean things like 'the same statue' versus 'the same lump of clay'? If so, you might be interested in Gupta relative identity.

Yeah, that sounds right. But I think value for authority is the norm in human life generally. So it's only in the context of an oddly liberal society that it comes off as dangerous.

I'd say power is a much better description in this context. It is the power of the man which is protected-- his wife cannot leave him, cannot be without him, cannot partake in sexual relations with anyone but him, etc.,etc. Society gives him the right to have what he wants (her) for the remainder of his life. — TheWillowOfDarkness

?

Men don't get any of that, I'm not sure what you're talking about. An undesirable man won't be married in the first place anyway. Do men want that? I don't know, maybe some? But I think women tend to overestimate their own importance in the eyes of men, as men do in the eyes of women.

The structures are changing and what people want seems to be changing with it. Yes some men want a return to an era where they were valued as heads of family and productive job holders. But the alt right by and large seems to want more radical, risky things.

Yeah, and it's interesting to speculate further on how it pans out. Regardless of the outcome of the election, this reproductively disadvantaged cohort aren't going anywhere and their relative numbers are likely to increase as the wealth gap increases and technology advances. As polygyny is an inherently unstable form of sociosexual organization, certainly in a democracy, it may turn out to be the bug in the system of the neo-liberal enterprise that leads to its demise. My tentative prediction is that we are either headed towards authoritarianism in the states (with a Trump or equivalent at the helm), in which the gap is actually likely to balloon and then burst in serious social upheaval, or the US reverts back to a more enforced egalitarianism like social democratic Europe that reduces the wealth gap and thus the reproductive gap. You then get a kind of irony where what is most in the Alt-Right's interest is something like the Bernie Sander's revolution. The caveat here is that that only applies to the economics. A social-conservatism with more emphasis on families, reduced levels of divorce, and less licentiousness would also suit. Not sure though of the extent that those two can be combined. — Baden

I don't think angry virgins are powerful enough to do anything tbh. Men don't really have any power in that domain, least of all undesirable men.

I tend to think technological shifts will make many of the debates we have now irrelevant and dislodge us from our most basic anthropological moorings. The structure of the family and reproduction, and the way basic human relationships are carried out, is about to topple, for a number of reasons.

Honestly, this criticism is too vague to process. You'd have to say what you mean.

Initially I think no. As it's becoming popularized it's taken on a Trump wing, it looks like. But people like Milo Yiannopoulos that have fomented this change don't strike me as intellectually serious in any way and so not engaged with the movement's ideological origins. The Trumpers seem to be concerned more with the less interesting stuff I mentioned: reactions against PC and feminism and so on.

That sounds plausible to me.

In general there is an odd tendency to see sex as preferably 'free market' in a context where most people despise an unrestrained 'free market.' This is, no surprise, dependent on whether you benefit from the freedom of the market (and let's not kid ourselves, sex is a commodity with a class structure built into it).

Basically I've always wondered this: how does formal logic deal with individuation? I would appreciate being stopped and corrected at any point here given my relative ignorance, but to the degree that logic deals with already-individualized terms and the relations between them — StreetlightX

What do you mean by a term? I ask because the word has a technical meaning in logic, a well-formed string with a denotation (usually of an individual, but it could also be of something else, like a property). If this is what you mean, then terms in logic don't have to be already individuated: they can be compositionally built up from parts, and certainly can come to be organically from how the language's syntax is structured.

So for example if you have a language with a iota operator, this is going to result in an individual when combined with an open formula, to pick out the individual that satisfies that formula. This can have lots of complicated interactions with your logic: you pick out an individual, and not a priori, but rather based on a property it has, and this property might additionally then be sensitive to all sorts of things, like the world parameter in modal logic, which would result in the individual changing depending on the modal context in which it occurs. So there is a lot of room for play in how individuals get picked out of a domain.

Or, if you mean not the terms themselves but the individuals they denote, there's all sorts of apparatuses that do interesting things with individuals rather than just taking them for granted. For example, you have traditional modal logic which separates the domain from possible worlds, capturing the notion that individuals persist across possibilities and that we can talk about the 'same' thing in different situations: but Lewisian counterpart theory will instead say that individuals don't persist in this way, but are rather tied to some single logical possibility or world, and that modal claims about individuals hold in virtue of one possible individual relating to another via a counterpart relation. And more generally the notion of variable domains plays with the idea that what a thing is depends on which possibility is manifested, with individuals being tied more tightly to possible worlds.

There's also apparatuses for trying to capture the way in which the actually existent and the non-existent differ by separating differing levels of the domain, as in free logic, and creating different rules of inference for how individuals behave in the truth conditions of formulas based on which domain they belong to.

There's also tools for dealing with mereology and subpart relations, and for dealing with the complexity of individuals combined from atomic parts (like 'Mary and John'), collective individuals like teams, the way properties either distribute over them atomically, or can apply collectively (as in, 'the crowd split', twhich doesn't mean each individual in the crowd split). There is logic for temporal stages of single individuals and how they persist over time, to model different ways of viewing ordinary individuals, as four-dimensional time worms, or single time-slices, or themselves stages of larger individuals, etc.

But the fundamental problem I think is that you are treating logic as if it were metaphysics. Whether or not logic is metaphysically insightful, and I think it almost always is, it is first and foremost a formal system that combines a syntax with an interpretation procedure. Logics in of themselves are just mathematical objects of a certain sort -- it's a separate question whether they apply to certain metaphysical issues or not. Analytic philosophers I think build logics as the result of certain expressive needs, and these logics can in turn tell us a lot about metaphysical intuitions, including ones about individuation, by formally representing certain relations about statements involving individuals in their truth conditions. This can be very valuable, as philosophizing in the absence of formality gives discussion on complex matters a fuzzy sort of air that becomes difficult to resolve or sometimes even think about in any interesting way.

Also at the back of my mind here is Bergson's critique of the modality of 'the possible' as anything more than a 'back-formation', as it were, where 'the possible' is simply thought of as the double of the actual that simply 'lacks reality' somehow - again the implicit critique is that thinking in terms of 'the possible' is to forego thinking in terms of individuation. — StreetlightX

Modal logic arose out of a desire to capture entailment relations to claims about possibility and necessity, such as the old medieval dictum that must implies can, the Kantian dictum that ought implies can, and so on. In that respect it's remarkably revealing, and different modal systems can be constructed to talk about different sorts of modality. The tack seems to be to develop actual tools for talking in modal terms, rather than to abstractly speculate on notions of the possible, and this is very fruitful. Many discussions about modality are confused because they don't differentiate between modal systems, don't understand the difference between epistemic and deontic modality, and so on. Modal logic itself cannot tell us about the nature of possibility, but again, a logic is a mathematical object, not a metaphysical thesis.

As a further aside, my hunch is that 'continental philosophy' has long been averse to formal logic precisely because kinds of concerns above, but I don't want to dwell on that. — StreetlightX

I think historically speaking this has certainly been a reason given by continental philosophers themselves. But I think a lot of the aversion comes from a more mundane source, which is that continental philosophers just don't get taught it. That is a situation that I think at least Husserl would not be happy about.

I also often wonder about whether there is any sustained reflection on the nature of logic itself - rather than taking it for granted, as it were. — StreetlightX

That's a weird thing to wonder, since analytic philosophy is positively drenched in reflection on the nature of logic, and always has been.

That's interesting. Maybe not quite what I have in mind, but I do think you can get stuck in this sort of world-wise complacency that empties any field of color and depth. Unfortunately in order to get genuinely excited or perplexed by a problem you have to grapple with it seriously, and from the outside it can just seem like everything is so trivial, and you're so above it all, that with your penetrating insight (every philosopher believes himself to be, I think, a secret genius looking at the rest of his field and the rest of humanity with a smug glassy eye) what people really need to focus on is how bamboozled they've been by their own prejudices and 'dissolution' becomes more fashionable than 'solution.' I see elements of this complacency in late Wittgenstein as well as in Dennett, and they become less interesting as a result. I could say the same about Searle, but IMO Searle has never been a very interesting or insightful philosopher.

The lesson, I guess, is don't get old, metaphorically or literally. The next generation is just going to trample your dead body though, so it doesn't matter. Dennett's opinions don't mater.

On first pass I'm inclined to dismiss it as professional solipsism of the type that aging academics always have when they see the new generation interested in something besides what they're interested in. John Searle has recently started making similar comments.

I personally am disappointed that certain philosophical threads have been abandoned. I would very much like for there to be active Husserlian cooperative schools going on, and ideally to participate in them. But they just don't exist; the field moved in another direction. I have a hard time engaging in analytic metaphysics as well, but I don't think I could bring myself to complain about it in a professional capacity if I had it like Dennett does. In other words, I don't confuse my personal disappointment with insight into questions of (in)significance.

I'm also beginning to think that BLM and other divisive movements are being fomented at this precise moment when that old concatenation of power and interest are, or could have been, under their greatest threat from a broad grassroots movement of disadvantaged people of all races and type. It's the old divide and conquer approach which has worked in this country from its inception. — Erik

Maybe -- BLM seems to me sinister because it equates being black with being criminal, and defending criminality as equal to defending black communities. This is of course a narrative that your average Democrat, white or black, implicitly believes in all that they do, and is calculated to keep black people in America a perpetual Democrat-voting underclass.

That's my tinfoil hat speculation for the day. Shrug.

My personal take on this is that rightism is more or less the natural state of things and leftism is a historical aberration that has to be fueled by specific cultural trends. People are naturally in-group supporting, and that cashes to in nationalism and racism and desire to defend their own identity and so on.

Liberalism is a weird historical quirk spurred for the most part by the unique historical position white people found themselves in during the 18th century. It is, by and large, an ideology of modern white people and their hangers-on. It's still an open question of course whether this historical aberration will become the new norm or go back to the nothing that it came from.

The alt right as I've come to understand it is a resurgence of genuine rightism, as opposed to mere modern conservatism (which is just a brand of classical liberalism) and in particular in the US the Republican party, which is not even classically liberal but a weird centrist populist statist mishmash. That means rejection of core tenets of liberalism, not just epiphenomena, welcoming back notions of racial difference, nationalism, hierarchy (possibly even monarchy), and rejecting broad notions of equality generally taken for granted in modern western political discourse. It seems to be mostly a tech savvy revival at this point, but its earlier incarnations (and the 'dark enlightenment' and 'neoreaction' and so on) has its source in oddball internet intellectuals like Nick Land and Mencius Moldbug. Since then it's become a little less interesting, and has attracted broader social issues like the backlash against 'PC' culture, racist and anti-semitic tendencies, anti-feminism, and Trump's campaign. It looks as if right now the term is fast on its way to losing any meaning at all and becoming an Emmanuel Goldstein sort of thing for moderate liberals, identifiable with any vaguely disliked sentiment. Hillary Clinton awkwardly seemed to want to tie it into Trump himself, Wikileaks?, Russia, and so on, it doesn't make much sense.

I'd define it at its most basic with a core lack of sympathy for basic, foundational liberal impulses among a tech-savvy and disenfranchised youth.

That's not how it works in standard modal logic. Individuals are not 'in' worlds, they are assigned properties relative to worlds, while the domain of individuals is world-independent. An individual might not exist in some of those worlds, but it does not 'belong' to any of them.

To introduce that you'd have to have some kind of relative domain, and if you want to make the even stronger Lewisian claim that each individual belongs only to one world, then it becomes possible to spea of the world in which an individual is. But, like Lewisian metaphysics generally, I think this is a profoundly confused way of looking at things.

I asked a layman about this yesterday and he said Pluto was never a planet. I asked, what about before 2006, when the consensus was that it was a planet, and I shit you not, he said that just because you call something a planet, doesn't mean it is one.

Indeed, I have wondered about this myself. What if there is a non-agential good that really ought to be cultivated? — darthbarracuda

That's precisely it, though: 'what if?' The fundamental philosophical question to my mind is not 'why' but 'so what?' If there were such a good, it wouldn't matter to the very process of inquiry asking after it, and so is pragmatically self-defeating. So what if? Nothing, apparently, or nothing that matters to us. And what doesn't matter to us, doesn't matter to us. QED.

About Nixon? That's not even on the subject.

The idea that whether a property of an individual is essential or not is stipulated is not found in Kripke's works.

Man, I hated Naming and Necessity once I dug into it. I still think to this day that it's an example of how not to do philosophy, and although ultimately I think the Kripkean view of names is basically right, that thesis is kind of small potatoes and doesn't say anything Mill didn't already.