Rigid designation is also not dependent on the law of identity...

Really, you're all making this way more complicated than it has to be.

Rigid designation isn't dependent on essential properties.

It's not that hard people, rigid designation means the individual denoted is invariant over worlds of evaluation. That's it.

You're making this into something it's not. Yes, Kripke talks about essential properties. No, that's not going to help you understand what rigid designation is to begin with.

I quit video games cold turkey last summer, but felt the urge to play for the first time again today. Trying not to fall off the wagon. :(

(Interestingly, Barack Obama is used as an example in that article, too. Great minds think alike. ;)) — Michael

The use of the sitting U.S. President as a stock example of a proper name in AP goes back at least to Harry Truman, I think. Kripke's lectures use Nixon, for example. It's a really odd unspoken tradition, and you can tell what year range an article was written in by which president is referenced.

I don't really believe in impasses except where there's some cognitive difference, and it doesn't look like there is. I think your insistence on impasse is itself part of your philosophical position, rooted in a commitment that it's possible to decide what certain things mean for oneself, or commit to personal worldviews that may be incommensurable in philosophical conversation. Since I disagree with that deeper premise, it's not a game I'm inclined to play.

But of course if you just don't want to go on or don't care, I don't mind.

It wouldn't, since the semantic patterns referred to above involving how names versus definite descriptions must be interpreted in modal contexts would stay the same.

First off, there's no what it means 'to you' or 'to me.' There's something the words mean by convention, and you can't arbitrarily decide what that is. There's something you claim it means, but it remains to be seen whether this is right.

Second, the point is that even if to imagine means to visualize, the point is that if we imagine B.O. being able to speak Mandarin, we imagine him ,viz., Barack Obama, viz. the same guy we always use 'Barack Obama' to refer to, speaking Mandarin, not someone else.

Because BO is a process that has a bunch of known properties, one of which is that it doesn't speak Mandarin. Change any one of those known properties, however trivial, and we are talking about a different process (we can talk about alternative unknown properties - such as whether BO will live to 100 - without difficulties, because that is simply a question of what we currently know) . Believers in Aristotelian essences may try to get around that by dividing the properties into essential and non-essential ones. But as I have explained above, I do not accept that approach. — andrewk

What reason is there for this? Why can't we talk about the same person, with alternate properties? Prima facie we do this all the time.

Hence, since one cannot imagine a BO that speaks mandarin (one says one does, but one also says that one laughs one's head off) — andrewk

But this is ridiculous. Clearly we can imagine such a thing, and to say one laughed one's head off is clearly an idiom, whereas the counterfactual language we're speaking of is literal and non-idiomatic.

But that's wrong, because you can say 'Imagine if Barack Obama weren't president,' or 'Imagine if Barack Obama had a different name.' So the meaning you attribute to imagining if Barack Obama is a certain way doesn't work, and at the very least you have to make ad hoc meaning clauses for every use of the name in an if-clause. But it seems the name 'Barack Obama' just means the same thing in each of these cases – it refers to a certian man.

Additionally, you're forced to claim that in imagining if Barack Obama were a certain way, we don't imagine if Barack Obama were a certain way, but some sort of counterpart or duplicate of him in an alternate world. Prima facie this is wrong: to imagine something about Barack Obama is to imagine something about him, the very man we refer to whenever we use the name 'Barack Obama.' Why, in these constructions, would this suddenly change to us referring to someone completely different? Why doesn't the name just refer to who it usually refers to, i.e. Barack Obama?

I know it is the wrong meaning only in the sense that there is an obvious difference between 'Barack Obama could have spoken Mandarin' and 'Someone like Barack Obama in the relevant respects could have spoken Mandarin.' Do you not see a difference, or does this misrepresent your position?

It seems to me that you are committed to saying that in supposing things about Barack Obama, we are not supposing things about him, but someone else who is qualitatively like him. But this seems like an untenable position, or it's not clear to me how to make it coherent.

Let me put it this way. If I am obligated to explain to you what a sentence of English means, why are you allowed to say another, longer sentence of English, and not feel obliged to explain that? So suppose I asked you of your elaborate (English) paraphrase, what does that mean? What are you going to say? If you insist you don't need to say anything, why do I need to say anything about the original case?

Also, I find it hard to believe you don't see the difference between supposing that Obama himself were different, and supposing someone like Obama were. Are you serious?

I don't know, I just don't understand your demand. The idea that I should take a sentence of my native language and provide an elaborate paraphrase for it in other terms strikes me as bizarre, especially since the paraphrases you provide seem to change what the sentence means entirely. When asked what I mean when I say 'Imagine Barack Obama weren't the president...' I certainly don't mean to imagine another person, who is not Barack Obama, i.e. not him, not that very man, but rather someone similar to him and named the same as him, and so on. I could say such a thing, and ask you to imagine such a thing, but presumably then I wouldn't say 'Imagine if B.O. were...' but would rather say something like 'imagine there were a guy similar to B.O. who...' Your desire to conflate the two seems obviously wrong to me, since I can tell the difference between these two sorts of sentences.

This seems to touch on the ship of Theseus paradox. What makes it the case that the ship that left is the same ship that returned (if anything)? I'd say that our conceptual/linguistic imposition (we think about and talk about it as being the same ship) is what makes it the same ship. We model it as being the same ship. As TGW says, we simply stipulate ex hypothesi that it's the same ship. That's all the "essence" there is. — Michael

The question of whether an individual in another world is really the same as one in this world (the 'trans-world identity problem') has its roots in a deep conceptual confusion, that other worlds are like distant countries we view with lenses and try to determine correspondence relations between theirs and ours. This is just wrongheaded. Alternate possibilities are just that – alternate ways things could have been. And there's nothing incoherent about the same individual being supposed to be some other way. It's not like there's some other universe you're 'looking into' and seeing a numerically distinct copy of Barack Obama and asking whether that copy is 'the same' as 'ours.' It's not a sci-fi scenario, it's just a way of modeling how we talk about alternate possibilities involving the same individual.

I really wish people would read about things before criticizing them. IDK, this discussion is pointless if you don't know what a rigid designator is, and it's not even hard to go find out instead of wasting all this ink.

I think it means what it says, which is different from what you seem to think it means. I'm just puzzled as to why.

I don't see why this follows.

I don't really understand your modus operandi, which seems to consist of taking sentences and insist that they mean, or are to be translated into, other sentences.

It's when it is applied to counterfactuals that it seems to become incoherent. The process that I (perhaps rigidly) refer to as 'me' did not win the lottery of date 7 December 2016, so if I wish to talk about a process that wins the lottery of date 7 December 2016, that must be some other process. It can be a process in an imaginary world that is similar to this in almost every respect except those relating to the lottery, but it cannot be this process. — andrewk

This is basically an assertion that nothing could be other than exactly as it actually is, which is not going to be a helpful metaphysical thesis for examining natural language. Rigid designation is a matter of accounting for the behavior of referential expressions more than it is a metaphysical thesis, though Kripke thought it had consequences for the latter.

Where your metaphysical theses require you to make highly implausible claims about language, such as that we can't suppose that something were other than how it is, my inclination would be to abandon that thesis, at least where within a mile of accounting for natural language. But it's up to you.

I just don't see why that's nonsensical. It seems to me the insistence on counterparts comes from thinking individuals are conglomerates of properties rather than just referential pegs to hang properties on. The latter point of view is much less complicated and gels much better with ordinary language, though of course our credulity stretches at its limits – we might ask, okay, then in what sense is it 'the same thing?' The answer is this is a dumb question: we stipulate that it's the same ex hypothesi, and such continuity is all it means for it to be the same thing. This may result in some odd consequences of haecceticism, but these are probably only odd because we have little need to imagine counterfactuals that differ so far from the actual situation and lose our grip on what the consequences of these far-reaching changes would be.

Also, notice it again becomes nonsense to say things like 'If Barack Obama had a different name...'

Where I seem to differ from the views of a number of people in this thread is that I believe that when people say 'Imagine if BO could speak fluent Mandarin', what they mean is 'Imagine if we lived in a different world that was the same as this in almost every respect, and had a POTUS called BO that was almost identical to the one in our world, except that that one could speak fluent Mandarin.'. — andrewk

Why would people mean something so at odds with what they say? That seems like a really bizarre reconstruction. Surely, if I say to imagine something about Barack Obama, I mean to imagine something about Barack Obama, not 'a man almost the same as him in every respect...etc., etc..' If I meant that, presumably I would say that.

I guess what I'm saying is, the fact that you can, or think you do, reinterpret what people say into a highly idiosyncratic metaphysical system has no bearing on what the words actually mean. A far more plausible hypothesis is that in imagining that Barack Obama could speak Mandarin, you are imagining that Barack Obama, not someone else, could. It seems very bizarre to me to say we can't ever actually imagine anyone as different from the way they actually are, that we must instead construct additional creatures similar to them in some respect. Whether you personally are committed to such a picture for whatever reason, I fail to see why anyone should be persuaded by it.

You can't tell the difference between imagining Barack Obama is somehow different from imagining that someone else is named 'Barack Obama?' Really? And you don't see this as lacking a basic cognitive capacity?

I didn't say it amounted to a proof, but if true it'd give me the impression you lack some basic cognitive capacity or linguistic competence, which makes me think you're being disingenuous or are mistaken.

Yeah, per how individuals think about them. — Terrapin Station

No, per how the community uses the term. This is not the same thing: most people don't even think about words much if at all, or understand how they're used, despite using them in a certain way, and competence is distributed across the community. Individuals have little power over this, and intentions of individuals even less.

Not really. Words mean certain things in linguistic communities, and you can use them wrong. You can't just make up whatever meanings you want and have them be correct. That's the philosophy of language of Humpty Dumpty from Alice and Wonderland (whose opinions are supposed to be a joke, not a realistic depiction of language).

Individual intentions don't override conventional practices of the linguistic community, which give a word its meaning.

No, you haven't. You've simply define it unconventionally. It's not wrong or an error to be unconventional. To say that convention makes something correct is to forward an argumentum ad populum. — Terrapin Station

I don't know how to answer this. Words have conventional meanings, and it's possible to use them wrong. If you deny this, I literally don't know what to say, and we may have reached the end of our disagreement. The Humpty Dumpty school of thought on language is a dead end, of course.

n my view, 'Barack Obama' is a name that I use to refer to an element of my model of the world and, when I'm talking to someone else, it refers to what I believe to be a shared element of our two models. — andrewk

'Barack Obama' is a name that refers to Barack Obama (a man, not an element in your model of the world).

There is a difference between imagining Barack Obama was different, and imagining that a different person was named 'Barack Obama.' I have a hard time believing you don't understand this difference, but I could be wrong.

For example, I could imagine that Barack Obama was named something else other than 'Barack.' This would seem to be incoherent on your proposal, but it's clearly not.

Convention is a matter of a lot of individuals having the "same thing" (per behavioral cues) in mind. — Terrapin Station

No it's not. It's a matter of a complex behavioral pattern. An individual having something in mind isn't enough to override this. If I say 'tree' to mean 'turnip,' I've said the wrong thing, made an error, regardless of what I meant. 'Tree' doesn't mean turnip.

I don't see how that's true. A name refers to a certain individual by convention. It doesn't matter what you're thinking about.

And the semantic consequences you get in modal contexts like counterfactual conditionals and their truth conditions are independent of your referential intentions.

If you like, you can think of rigid designation as reference that's not mediated by a property determining what the referent is (whether this is an 'office' or not). A rigid designator simply refers to an individual. The difference between descriptive and singular thoughts or propositions is old in philosophy and seems to be what you're getting at.

I don't think the jury is out on whether rigid designation makes sense, though. There are standard ways of defining it in modal logic and intensional semantics, and many of the empirical consequences are clear. Most of this thread has been misunderstanding of what a rigid designator is, which is not the same as criticism.

Maybe put it quasi-formally would help?

Say that the denotation of a term x relative to a world w is [x](w).

So for example, say x is 'the winner.' Then [x](w1) = the winner in w1, say John, and [x](w2) = the winner in w2, say Michael.

Now say x is 'John.' Then [x](w1) = John, and [x](w2) = John.

Notice that the value of 'the winner' changes with respect to the world of evaluation, because the winner might be different people in different worlds: in w1, the winner is John, while in w2, it is Michael.

But the same isn't true for 'John.' Regardless of the world you pick, 'John' denotes John. This is because, regardless of world, John is John, and not anybody else.

So 'the winner' is a nonrigid designator, while 'John' is a rigid designator.

That's ALL it means. It has nothing to do with change in meanings of a word over time, or intentions of the speaker, or anything like that.

I don't understand why you're hung up on this temporal thing. That has nothing to do with what a rigid designator is.

This hits on the distinction between the value of a word as used at the actual world and evaluated elsewhere, versus used and evaluated both at some non-actual world, but doesn't hit on the rigid/non-rigid distinction. This applies also to definite descriptions, for example.

I don't understand why this matters.

No, one proposition can be sensitive to any number of possibilities. That John might be home just means there's some possibility he is.

But notice if you say 'the winner might be home,' the possibilities that qualify to make this true are not necessarily those that include just one individual being home, viz. John. A possibility in which Michael is home also qualifies, so long as he's the winner.

This is because 'the winner' is a non-rigid designator: it refers to the winner in a world, whoever that is. 'John' just refers to John in every world, whether he's the winner or not.

Any number. Suppose you say 'John might be home.' This means there's a possibility he's home (say, given what we know to be true), not that he actually is. This roughly means that among all the possibilities that we can consider (say, compatible with what we know), among them are at least some in which John is at home (and maybe others in which he's not).

But that makes no sense. If we're talking about real alternate worlds, we have no idea what our counterpart might be actually using a term to refer to in that alternate world. — Terrapin Station

Counterparts aren't necessary for a possible world semantics, and even if they were, I don't see how it's relevant.

You're ignoring the "focusing on how we're using the term in the actual world" part. It's vacuous if we're not talking about real possible worlds to say that "in all possible worlds we're using the term to refer to x" if we're focusing on how we're using the term in the actual world, because with respect to how we're actually using the term, there's only ONE possibility--the actual way we're using the term. I'm not saying there aren't counterfactuals and so on. But if there's only one real world, there's only one actual way we can be using the term. There are no other worlds for usage of the term. There's just usage of the term in talk about counterfactuals and so on (though we're limiting ourselves to a single moment in time, so we can't do too much talking about counterfactuals and so on). — Terrapin Station

Again, the point is not how the word would be used in different possibilities, or what else it might mean. It's what, given what it actually means and how it's actually used, the word can refer to given different worlds of evaluation.

What I'm referring to is the word always. That's a temporal term. — Terrapin Station

This strikes me as a pointless quibble, but no it's not. Here 'always' means 'in any situation,' which is a perfectly ordinary use of the word. If you want to change the wording, fine. The point is that regardless of world of evaluation, the individual referred to is the same.

Of course it does! That's ALL it depends on. That's all there is to it. — Terrapin Station

It depends on the conventions of the linguistic community, which aren't reducible to any single speaker's intentions.

You can't use words incorrectly. — Terrapin Station

Yes you can, as evidenced by the fact that you can use them correctly.

One thing we should probably clear up is the possible world ontology we're using. Are we talking about possible worlds in a "realist" sense--that is in a Lewisian or MWI sense, where there literally are other worlds where counterparts of us exist? Or are we simply talking about counterfactuals and possibilites in our one world? — Terrapin Station

It doesn't matter. The question of rigid designation is an empirical semantic one, independent of these metaphysical claims. Rigid designation can be employed in any ontology of possible worlds.

If the latter, by the way, and we're focusing on how a term is actually used, then it turns out that there's only one possible world--the actual world. — Terrapin Station

This is false, insofar as languages have explicit mechanisms for evaluating relative to non-actual possibilities, including modal adverbs, sentential modals, conditionals and counterfactuals, attitude reports, and so on.

However, as soon as we say something like "'Michael' always denotes the same guy," we're introducing a temporal element — Terrapin Station

No. Again, this is not about the change of meanings over time. It is about which individual is denoted relative to which possible world.

is only the case if we're talking about whoever is uttering the sentence, for all T, having the same guy in mind as a referent. But we don't at all know that that would be the case. — Terrapin Station

What a name refers to doesn't depend on who someone has in mind. It depends on what the word means. If I confuse Michael and Brett, and say 'Brett is the winner,' when Brett lost, and I meant that Michael is the winner, I've literally said something false about Brett, though this was not my intention. I may have meant something true that came out wrong, and my interlocutors may be willing to accommodate me and reconstruct what I meant to say.

Again, the point is not what the word would mean in a different possible world. The point is that given what the word means as it's used now, the referent of the name is the same regardless of world of evaluation. You can see this clearly with structures that shift the world of evaluation, like counterfactual conditionals.

'If the winner were rich, I would be his friend.'

'If Michael were rich, I would be his friend.'

Suppose that in the world of utterance, Michael is the winner. Yet these sentences mean very different things. The first means that if it were the case that the person who won, whoever that might be, were rich, the speaker would be that person's friend in that world. The second says only of a single person, Michael, that this would be the case. So despite the fact that Michael is the winner (these are the same person), 'the winner' is non-rigid and can denote people other than Michael in other possible worlds (namely, whoever won). But 'Michael' always denotes the same guy, Michael, and the truth of the second sentence is not dependent on who won, whether it is Michael or not, but on Michael, whether he won or not.