Phil. language doesn't really have 'great' figures so much as incremental technical advances. If I had to pick, probably Frege, for the principle of compositionality and the notion of function application as the model of compositionality. He also seems to be the first person to have clearly distinguished intension versus extension as compositional levels rather than as mere conceptual differences, and the first to coherently articulate the distinction between entailment and conversational implicature, and between entailment and presupposition. All analytic phil. language is in a way footnotes to Frege in broad strokes - the notion of the semantics of a natural language being mathematically describable is paramount.

Wittgenstein is okay, but overrated in the sense that much of what he concretely proposed for specific linguistic structures is not widely taken seriously. The Tractatus does lay a sort of blueprint for a lot of model-theoretic semantics, though. I think much of what Quine did was extremely damaging, like the notion that intensions are 'spooky' or that you can't quantify into modal contexts, and we are still undoing a lot of that damage, although I like some of his non-technical ideas. Kripke is the reverse - his development of model-theoretic semantics for modal logic is extremely important, but his 'higher level' philosophizing was broadly naive and damaging.

It is, and I mean this in the most literal and ingenuous sense of the term, a buzzword.

The recent obsession with 'post-truth' is a media-manufactured panic and strikes me as incredibly, incredibly naive. The idea that politicians have ever told the truth, even as an ideal, is something I just can't believe that anyone believes. And the majority of discourse is just idle talk that has no pretensions to truth and doesn't connect with any sort of reality because it's not supposed to. That includes political opinions. Every good propagandist knows this, and always has.

Sometimes I will, but just because it's one of the things I know about. I won't bring it up first, though. I get a kick out of pretending to believe things and arguing for them sometimes.

I missed this before, but I just feel like this should be preserved as an example of bad philosophy.

Obviously the scenarios are not physically the same, since there's more to physicality than the material components making something up – there is also how they are exchanged, their origin and dissolution, and their causal histories. Aside form this, there is more to differentiating one thing from another than its physical instantiation, unless we construe the latter so widely as to rob it of significance. There are social an conventional facts as well. And of course, the notion that linguistic and physical (in the crude sense of 'material makeup'; but apparently being in a different place doesn't count as a physical difference? Is there no physical difference in a chemical reaction, whose parts are the same before and afterward, but rearranged?) changes exhaust the possibilities is also ridiculous.

Finally, the notion that this hinges on the way it's 'phrased' is just plain wrong: the reason your situations are phrased differently is because they describe different situations, on a plausible reading: no one competent in English would at first blush imagine an identical scenario reading read 1 and 4.

Sorry Michael, I think this just sucks. Not that your posts usually do.

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I was referring to the claim that in some hypothetical situation my mother could have given birth to the White House. It's nonsense. — Michael

How exactly is that nonsense?

And we do use the word "same" to refer to something being the same in every respect. For example, my father and my brother's father are the same person. — Michael

No, here you used "person" as a sortal. We might say, for example, that Bruce Wayne and Terry McGinnis are the same superhero (Batman), but not the same person. Or we might say that conjoined twins at certain points are the same body but not the same person.

You can say it, but you're speaking nonsense. — Michael

Clearly not, since in due time the White House might become something other than a building due to gradual changes. Yet it would still have the continuity of a single individual. I'm not speaking nonsense; you lack imagination.

So are you saying that in some respect it's the same building but in some other respect it's a different building? — Michael

All uses of "same" mean "same in some respect." That's how the word is actually used.

I don't need to say which is Obama because in my description, we only talk about which one is like our world's Obama in almost every respect, and that one is the murder victim. — andrewk

But they're both like Obama in most relevant respects. Just change the scenario however you want.

That's because the real Obama in that imaginary scenario is the one that was killed, and that one does not speak Mandarin. — andrewk

The point is that your view cannot say this, because as you've just gone through explaining, you cannot tell the difference between these two scenarios. So this:

In the situation you have described, that process is the person that was killed by the impostor. So on my interpretation, as in Kripke's, the impostor is not Obama. — andrewk

Is wrong. You have no criterion by which to say which of the two is Obama, because you've stipulated that stipulating such a thing is impossible.

The objection from the Kripke side seems to be that what we visualise is 'the Obama', not a POTUS almost identical to Obama. My response to that is

'what's the difference?' — andrewk

The difference is the two have different truth conditions. For example, what you say is truth condition of the counterfactual could be fulfilled by supposing that some impostor heard about Obama, was jealous of his political power, so took on his name and killed him to take his place, all while knowing Mandarin. This is the sort of scenario that verifies an individual like B.O. who is president, has the same name, etc. speaks Mandarin. But it's not a scenario in which Obama speaks Mandarin; it's one in which his impostor does.

By contrast, I define Obama to be solely the actual Obama process in this world — andrewk

You can't 'define Obama.' He's a real-live person that already exists how he does.

(1) What problem does Kripke think he is solving by introducing the rigid designator concept, that is not adequately covered by Wittgenstein and/or Russell (subject to minor adaptations for unusual cases they did not consider)? — andrewk

Proper names are rigid designators, so to treat them as such gives them a correct semantics. I've already explained in detail how the truth conditions of non-rigid designators like definite descriptions differs from that of rigid designators in all sorts of modal contexts.

Honestly, just read the fucking book, it's really short and easy. Read the modal, espitemological, and semantic arguments in Naming and Necessity.

Not to be rude but it's genuinely frustrating that people would rather argue ad nauseum about stupid shit rather than actually go to the source of what they're arguing about where all of this is laid out clearly, and have their misunderstandings be dispelled in a couple hours of reading.

If you want to know "what problem Kripke thinks he is solving," if you really want to know, read the goddamn book and stop speculating about something you can easily research yourself.

(2) Under Kripke's approach, it seems possible, on a formal basis, to imagine that Obama is a mountain. I don't know how that can mean anything without having to sign up to essentialism boots and all. — andrewk

Kripke himself would deny this, but this is an additional consideration not inherently tied to the notion of rigid designation. I'm just saying I disagree with Kripke on this point, and we can indeed imagine Obama is a mountain. If you can't, well I'm sorry, you have a worse imagination than the pages of a children's picture book.

It's not insane. It's a tautology. If a thing isn't physically the same then it isn't physically the same. — Michael

No. "Same" does not have to mean "exactly the same in every respect."

Then let's use "the White House" as an example rather than just "building". — Michael

Then yes, you can say "what if the White House were blah blah blah," including something other than a building.

I think you misread. I said "It's not insane to insist that any object can only remain physically the same so long as it remains physically the same in every respect." — Michael

It's still insane though. As if the only relevant criterion for remaining the same is exactly the same in every respect.

So we can't make counterfactual claims about a thing's function or social identity? These are the necessary concrete properties? — Michael

We're not talking about names anymore, but count nouns like 'building,' which don't denote individuals but properties.

What are the other options? — Michael

It can retain a functional identity, a physical identity more loosely grained than identical in every respect, a social identity, etc.

It's not insane to insist that any object can only remain physically the same so long as it remains physically the same in every respect. If there's a non-physical sense of sameness, such that two physically different things are the same, then what is it? — Michael

Sure it's insane. Such a view would be committed to saying you can't dent a chair without making the chair stop existing, which is an insane conclusion.

Why would you even think that identity of a thing depended on exact physical identity in every respect? Nobody talks about identity in this way.

Why are those the only options?

Obviously it's insane to insist that any object can only remain the same so long as it remains physically the same in every respect. What's relevant to its identity can stay the same even if peripheral things are changed.

So in the first place, your contention is misleading, because if we say, for example, that a piece of jade isn't identical physically from morning to evening, and therefore it can't be the same piece of jade unless abstractly, this is wrong insofar as the physical aspects of it relevant to its identity, including its composition and gross physical integrity, are identical.

And in the second place, there is no reason to insist that all differences are either those of minute physical arrangement or abstract.

This reads like gobbledygook to me, maybe I haven't read enough Aristotle.

I don't know what you're looking for when you mean 'in what sense.' Does the example not make sense to you? Do you not understand how a building can be the same building even if it loses a brick?

How about, a functional or social sense?

I don't know what you're talking about. You mean a building with different parts? Suppose you knocked a brick off a building. Is it a different building? No, it's the same one, missing a brick. Is this difference abstract? Obviously not.

What is so hard to understand about that?

I don't understand what you mean by 'the nature of the difference.' Bricks are hunks of construction material, and a building is an edifice. An edifice need not be identical to its material parts, because it can retain a functional identity even when they're swapped out, even entirely over time.

A brick is a chunk of material, and maybe a chunk of material in a certain physical configuration, or posed to be in such a configuration, and maybe a chunk of material in a certain social configuration involving construction.

A building is also a chunk of material, but one that has to fit certain minimal requirements of shape that make it possible to enter it and distinguish it from an outside, and also which possible fits in a larger social configuration allowing it to be something that's conventionally entered into.

I think it's sensible to say that a naturally occurring structure that's not a building might become one even without redesign if people began to inhabit it. I don't think that means it's a conceptual or linguistic distinction, it just means unsurprisingly that social facts about the world and how people behave can change things.

No, the building is a building. It's made of bricks, sure, but it's not identical to them, just like people aren't identical with the cells that make them up. It's just the Ship of Theseus observation.

A building is lots of things. It's a physical object with certain physical constituents, but also a socially delineated area that can survive a change of its material parts (perhaps within reason). Where exactly the boundary is drawn is perhaps not clear, but the fringe cases don't make the obvious ones less intelligible. I submit that we all know what a building is.

Well, andrewk's position seems to be that when we talk about Obama we're not talking about a formal object, but the actual person. — Michael

Well, I agree. Of course when we're talking about Obama we're talking about Obama.

And of course the actual Obama can be supposed to have different properties. We do it all the time.

Agreed. But then I don't see the force of what you're saying. Individuals are just what individuals are according to vulgar opinion, various sorts of things. We can also use the term 'individual' to describe whatever we use to model them. But then it's misleading to claim that individuals are just abstract objects in formal models.

Also, the formal object doesn't need to be a linguistic imposition. It could be an M&M if you want. You could say, let this blue M&M stand in for / model Barack Obama.

So suppose someone hears the word 'Richard Nixon' and asks me what it means, or who it refers to. I respond 'it means whoever you want it to mean.'

Is that a reasonable response? Or is it stupid?

Nope. An individual is whatever it is – a person, a brick, or whatever. Individuals as formal objects in models do just that; they model. It's not as if when I write down how the model works the individuals are somehow in my head or the formal system or the piece of paper. They're wherever they are; the model models their behavior.

Very funny. Of course it matters. That's what extension is--what someone has in mind as the extension of a term. — Terrapin Station

Something's extension is what someone has in mind as its extension? Why is it not just its extension? Clearly I can't give a speech and use 'Richard Nixon' to refer to Dwight Eisenhower. When everyone inevitably tells me I'm using the wrong name, I can't protest and say I wasn't, because I meant to refer to Nixon, making everyone in the audience wrong and not me.

Yes they do. All that "conventional" is is the fact that a lot of people have the "same" thing in mind with a reference. It's a lot of "to mes"--it's to Betty and Joe and Frank and Gina and everyone who happens to have that thing in mind on a particular occasion. — Terrapin Station

'Richard Nixon' refers to Richard Nixon. Not to whoever you want it to refer to. I can't make sense of saying something like, "to me 'Richard Nixon' refers to Dwight Eisenhower." How can something refer to someone 'to me?' It just refers to whatever it refers to by linguistic convention. What you're proposing isn't a convention at all, but individual whim, which is very different.

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I think this is confused as it treats properties like mereological parts of an individual. They're not – a property is just sort of a mapping from individuals to truth values, or a group of individuals if you like,

If when we refer to a building we're referring to its bricks then to suggest that that building might have been constructed from different bricks is to suggest that those bricks might have been different bricks. But then it doesn't make sense to claim that they're the same bricks. — Michael

This doesn't seem right to me. You can suppose a building were made of different bricks just fine without assuming that the bricks themselves were different (perhaps they were used for the construction of yet another building).

What am I revising?

Not at all. My position does not require me to declare an entire category of speech literally senseless or mistakenly used.

(a) it doesn't address that the answer depends on who is using the term in a particular occaasion — Terrapin Station

Because it doesn't matter. It always refers to Richard Nixon.

(b) depending on what the quote-free Richard Nixon refers to to you, your answer could very well be wrong with respect to a particular utterance of "Richard Nixon." — Terrapin Station

Words don't refer to someone 'to me.' They have conventional referents.

My answer to "To whom does the name 'Richard Nixon' refer" is: To whoever (or whatever) the person using the name "Richard Nixon" on a particular occasion has in mind as the extension of the term. — Terrapin Station

A simpler, better answer: "Richard Nixon" refers to Richard Nixon.

Andrewk's primary point appeared to be that an alternate Nixon isn't the actual Nixon and so contingency speech can't be taken literally. — Mongrel

This was just my point. Hence the revisionism, insofar as 'contingency speech' is an ordinary feature of language as revealed through counterfactuals. Andrewk is poised to reject an entire grammatical construction as literally nonsensical.

I think to claim like andrewk does that larges swathes of discourse need to be reinterpreted because they are literally senseless (and we only say these things because we say literally senseless things all the time) is either linguistic revisionism or some sort of elaborate error theory. Am I wrong?

Although it should be noted that it's possible for a name to refer to the set of properties that an individual bears relative to a world, rather than that individual, via an operation called Montague lifting. This preserves rigidity in spirit, since the properties are 'centered' on a single individual across worlds, even though technically relative to different worlds the properties change, and the individual can be recovered by an inverse operation known as Montague lowering. This doesn't make an individual 'equivalent to' a set of properties, though, which strictly speaking sounds like nonsense to me, a category error.

This all depends on what sort of thing the term "I" refers to, i.e. the ontological nature of the self. If the self just is some set of concrete properties then nothing that doesn't have these properties can be coherently supposed to be you, even though you might (erroneously) claim otherwise. For counterfactuals to work it is required that the ontological nature of the self (or whatever thing is referred to by the rigid designator) isn't just as some set of concrete properties (that the counterfactual does away with). — Michael

What I am telling you is that counterfactuals do work, and in this way, Q.E.D. Your other option is massive error theory or linguistic revisionism, or an adoption of an alternate framework like counterpart theory.

I don't see how this can be done without claiming that the ontological nature of the self (or whatever thing is referred to by the rigid designator) is as some abstract thing, and so to argue for either Platonism or for identity as a conceptual/linguistic imposition.

I think I've already explained this, and I'm not sure what you mean. Obviously 'I' refers to the speaker, who is generally a person. A person is concrete, not abstract. Identity isn't a linguistic imposition – someone's self-identical just by being whoever they are. Nor is there any Platonism involved. It's just that a person can be supposed to be other than what they actually are, and this is modeled in modal logic by having the domain of individuals and the set of worlds that assign them properties distinct.

There's some sort of misunderstanding here. An individual is whatever it is. So I'm an individual, and I'm concrete, not abstract – a person, of flesh and blood. But I'm not essentially a person, since I could coherently suppose I weren't one. When I talk about what I am, this means what I actually am. To say that I 'am' some abstract thing underlying all my properties is wrong: it's just that I can suppose myself to be any number of other things.

If by 'individual' you mean what's in the model theory of modal logic, then that's a bit of formal machinery, and this formal object, if you like, is just a sort of peg. But in the 'real world' (the only world that there is), there's no such thing as a free-floating individual without properties – it's just that we model individuals separately from worlds in modal logic to reflect the fact that we cans suppose them to have different properties.

I'm not interested in mass revision of ordinary language or mass error theory. Such talk isn't 'wrong' to the extent that the sorts of counterfactuals we've been discussing can obviously be true.

And it's clearly not incoherent because everyone but andrewk understands it. His idiosyncratic philosophical commitments simply force him to reject it, but that's the worse for him.

In other words, if the logics designed to account for the most ordinary linguistic phenomena are at odds with what you think, there's a problem, insofar as you're interested in those phenomena and not metaphysical theorizing divorced from it.

An individual isn't essentially a person. That individual may be a person in the actual world. So for instance I'm a person, and an individual, but I might have been a frog (maybe even a sentient one). So it makes no sense to say that 'people are just referential pegs.' The individual in modal logic is held in abstraction from its properties – and being a person is such a property.

Well, think of something like "water is H2O". According to Kripke, this is necessarily true. It doesn't make sense to consider a counterfactual world where water has some other chemical composition — Michael

I don't agree with Kripke on this, and his belief seems to stem from scientism that's at odds with ordinary usage. In ordinary usage 'water' likely denotes a qualitative kind not essentially bound to any chemical structure. In a context of chemistry in which we take ourselves to mean by 'water' some specific compound, that's different.

In other words, I don't in ordinary use see anything incoherent about supposing that water had a different chemical structure. But I do see something incoherent about supposing water is, say, qualitatively like zinc. That doesn't seem to make sense, since it would then lack the qualities that water has in virtue of being some qualitative kind.

And I believe andrewk's position is that the logic (or metaphysics) of identity is such that a counterfactual person sharing the identity of an actual person doesn't make sense. — Michael

The error is supposing that there is a such thing as 'an actual person' versus 'a counterfactual person.' This is so in some logics, like Lewis' counterpart logic, but the standard view is that there's simply individuals. There's no actual Obama and other Obama, such that we can ask 'are these two identical?' Rather there's just Obama – and we can ask of him, that one guy, what might have been if such-and-such.

Rid yourself of the notion of a 'counterfactual person.'

We might stipulate that, but the logic (or metaphysics) of identity might be such that such a stipulation is incoherent. I can stipulate that in some possible world triangles have four sides, or that the square root of 2 is a rational number, but then my stipulation is in error. — Michael

It might be, but I don't think it is. In the case of 'triangle,' this is a count noun, not a proper name, so it's different: I agree that properties are (albeit sometimes very loosely) essential for falling beneath the extension of a count noun. For example, I'd be hard pressed to suppose that something were a metal yet had no extension.

As for 2, it's not clear whether this is a sort of proper name or not. Suppose it is a proper name, and suppose it denotes a certain object, say the set {{}, {{}}}. Now, there's something about this set that makes its root irrational, and that'll hold regardless of what properties you assign to individuals in worlds. In other words, what varies from world to world in your model theory may be such that it is not modelable to have this set have a rational root relative to a world: the logic simply won't allow it.

You can do this for a human being too, if you want. But I just think it doesn't reflect ordinary language use – we don't think of people as having many essential properties, even if some properties may be more or less conversationally relevant. It doesn't even sound totally absurd to me to say something like, 'If I were the number 2...' It's a bit mystical, a bit Pythagorean, but OK, so what? That only shows that the only time such a supposition is going to be workable is if we're weird Pythagoreans. But, you say, a person can't be a number! True, but that's not the point, for then I can just say that I am not essentially a person.

The point is that individuals are treated as just being these sorts of pegs in ordinary language, for the non-logical cases. It's an interesting fact that we can do this in spite of metaphysical protestations to the contrary.

Being Barack Obama is what Barack Obama does, presumably. We don't stipulate that. He instantiates that property just by being who he is. That should be obvious.

The point is that in imagining alternate scenarios we stipulate that it is he, not some other person or counterpart, that we are making alternate conjectures about. So it is stipulated that we are talking about him, but it isn't stipulated who he is or what it means to be identical to him.

It might be that if the alternate scenarios get too far afield from an individual's actual properties, we have trouble imagining how this could be the 'same' individual. But that just means we have trouble understanding how this individual could have such-and-such properties. This is easy to encode into the model theory with Kripke's machinery by limiting the possible worlds that exist in the model (which would effectively be a way of introducing essential properties). If you're uncomfortable with that, you could instead just say that modals are context-sensitive, and have changing accessibility relations, depending on how far we're willing to depart from actuality. A world that departs too far (say, by making Napoleon a horse) is logically possible, but for most intents and purposes will never be considered for counterfactual evaluation. That said, I personally don't see anything logically incoherent about any such stipulation, even if it's generally a weird thing to stipulate. 'If I were a horse, I'd be a racehorse,' and so on.