The point is that Jane doesn't "successfully refer to Joe by virtue of false description" she does so by virtue of knowing something true about him, even if that is merely having seen him. — Janus

I don't think it makes much of a difference to the validity of Kripke's argument against descriptivism about de re senses (by means of either proper names or demonstratives) whether a putative reference determining description is allegedly constituted by explicit beliefs or by a mere practical ability to recognize the referent. If all Jane believes about Joe is that he's the man she saw yesterday and who seemed to her to be tall and white, but she actually misperceived a man who is short and black, and forgot that she actually saw him two days ago rather than yesterday, she still is thinking about that man (i.e. Joe, who is actually short and black) under all of those false descriptions. Likewise, in the case where she would not have retained any explicit beliefs about the man, but only think of him as someone she once saw and could recognize on sight, but she can't really do that because she developed a propensity to misidentify a short black man as the tall white man who she actually saw, intuitively, it's still the man who she saw that she's thinking of, just like Kripke's "causal theory of reference" predicts.

Yes, I am a Bernie fan, and agree with what you just said above. I agree that the disenchantment with the establishment was strong, but how does a Bernie voter become a Trump voter?? — Jake

What happened isn't mainly that potential Bernie voters voted for Trump but rather that, after Hillary won the primaries, they didn't bother to vote at all. So, if Warren would win the next primaries, many of those former Bernie or Bust folks who didn't vote at all might vote for her. Also, many anti-establishment right leaning folks who abhor Trump might decline to vote at all if Trump, or another pseudo-anti-establishment Trumpoid, would face Warren in 2020. The combination of those two factors, it seems to me, precisely is what accounted for the 10% advantage of Bernie had over Trump (in the heads up polls) as compared with the even match between Hillary and Trump. It's important not to overlook who it is that doesn't vote when comparing matchup scenarios.

Imho, far too few of such folks to matter. — Jake

Before the primaries were over there frequently were heads up polls between possible nominee matchups. Trump against Hillary were usually evenly matched but Bernie against Trump typically showed Bernie having a 10% lead over Trump. You may be underestimating how much the electorate was fed up with the establishment, and not only the Republican electorate: The Bernie or Bust movement was quite intense too.

In order to win the next election the Dems will probably have to peel off some of those who voted for Trump. Liberal candidates like Elizabeth Warren would seem to have no chance of doing that. — Jake

I'm not so sure about that. One must distinguish two different albeit overlapping populations: those who make up Trump's hardcore base, and those who merely voted for him. Many people who voted for Trump are liberals or centrists, and some even progressives, and they voted for him because they were dissatisfied with establishment politicians and/or neo-liberals and hence couldn't vote for Hillary. Many among them might have voted for Bernie (if he had won the primary) since he also was an anti-establishment candidate and he didn't exhibit Trump's numerous personal flaws. So, many of those people who voted for Trump, but don't necessarily belong to his unmovable hardcore base, might vote for a progressive candidate like Warren.

If we did not try to describe the intrinsic complexity of microscopic states simply, with a few macroscopic variables (e.g. temperature and pressure), the concept of entropy would not arise.

What this means is that entropy, instead of being a pure physical property, is one that depends on how knowing subjects conceptualize physical systems. — Dfpolis

Carlo Rovelli makes a very similar point towards the end of this lecture (starting roughly at the 42:00 time mark).

@apokrisis Thanks! That's likely the paper I remembered.

Here is a reference, in case someone again faces a broken link in the future:
Phillips, Rob & R. Quake, Stephen. (2006). The Biological Frontier of Physics. Physics Today. 59. 10.1063/1.2216960.

A similar empirical revolution is now unfolding in the biophysics of life and mind. In just the past 10 years, we have learnt how the quasi-classical nanoscale is a special convergence zone - analogous to the Planck scale - where the kind of semiotics that underpins biology can get its foothold. — apokrisis

Maybe one or two years ago you had provided a reference to a quite accessible paper (or two such papers), possibly published in a popular journal such as Science, about those nanoscale phenomena in biology/physiology. Maybe that was in the old Philosophy Forum. I'm unsure where I filed it. Might you be able to provide this reference again?

On edit: Maybe it's the paper that you mentioned in this post, but the link that you provided is now broken.

Actually I don’t see how anything could be ‘neurologically encoded’. DNA is a code but I can’t see how neurons could encode anything. — Wayfarer

Actually, Denis Noble recently made a fairly convincing case that the genetic code isn't very much of a code for anything either. See the 'code' section in his paper Evolution beyond neo-Darwinism: a new conceptual framework.

Yes, but only because that's commonly the case and the question of false beliefs had not yet (to my notice) been raised. I don't think I said that the DD has to be true and if I implied that anywhere it was a mistake. — andrewk

On the contrary, I was puzzled by your suggestion that the DD associated with a proper name does not need to be true, so long as the speaker believes it to be true. So, I'm asking, if it's false, how do you account for the speaker being able to pick up the correct referent when she uses the name? If the definite description does not describe the named-individual, what good is it for? It would seem like the proper name makes all the necessary job of picking up its reference irrespective of the content of the associated definite description.

My approach is that, in order not to be an insane rambling, a DD only has to be believed by the speaker, because the speech act only needs to make sense to the speaker in the first instance. Whether the speech act is intelligible to anybody else and the proper name used causes the listener to pick out the same individual as the speaker intended depends on a whole raft of other factors including context, language, elocution, volume, idiom and commonality of experience and knowledge.

We were talking about a definite description associated with a proper name. If the proper name is "Gödel", and the associated description is "the author of the incompleteness theorems", and this description is false of Gödel because it's in fact some guy named Schmidt who authored the two theorems, Kripke has a good account for the fact that one can believe falsely that Gödel is the author of the incompleteness theorems and express this false belief about Gödel (as opposed to a true belief about Schmidt) when she says: "Gödel is the author of the incompleteness theorems". And that's because the use of the proper name "Gödel" to refer to Gödel, unlike the use of a definite description to refer to him, is information insensitive.

I have no opinion about whether I have 'successfully' referred to Nixon or not in that sentence. But I do know that I have asked a clear question, which is all that matters. — andrewk

Aren't all the earlier examples that you gave examples where the speaker not only believes the definite description that she is making use of but the definite description also happens to be true of the individual that she is thinking about? In the post I had responded to, you had said, puzzlingly, that the speaker only needs to believe in the truth of the DD in order to refer.

In the last (quoted) example, you have indeed asked a clear question. You are requesting some help because talk of "Nixon" doesn't enable you to know who is being talked about until you will have been initiated into the relevant "Nixon"-naming practice (that refers to the former U.S. President, say). A definite description might fulfill that job, provided it is either true or expresses a widespread belief about Nixon.

I think all that is required is that the speaker believes the DD to be true. The speaker uses a proper name P that she associates with an object that she believes to be part of the world and to satisfy the description D and to be the only object in the world that satisfies that description. If that is the case then the speaker has 'successfully referred to' the object. That is so even if P=Godel and D includes that Godel developed the Incompleteness Theorems and in fact those theorems were developed by Schmidt and only copied by Godel. — andrewk

I can't make sense of this. You are saying that in order that a speaker be able to refer to an individual when she uses this individual's proper name, she must believe this individual to satisfy some definite description regardless of this description being true or false. Why is there any need for the definite description, then? How does believing falsely that Gödel proved some theorem (supposing that this belief is in fact false) helps a speaker refer to Gödel when she uses the proper name "Gödel"? If the truth of the description is irrelevant, why it is needed at all?

Notice that Kripke does allow that the definite description can play a role in reference fixing for the benefit of new initiates in the (already up and running) name using practice. But this works because some participants in the practice are acquainted with the named individual (and thus don't need to know about the definite description) and the definite description only serves to to hook up the new participants to the naming practice associated with the right individual when belief in the truth of the definite description is widespread in the community. The definite description thereby allows for disambiguation when other people have the same name (and/or the famous people convention isn't in play).

I recall Aquinas saying that whatever we choose, we choose under the aspect (appearance?) of good. I would not be surprised to find that he derived this claim form Aristotle, but I do not recall the text. Do you? — Dfpolis

Maybe the most relevant place is De Anima 433a27-28 (Translated by J. A. Smith, in The Complete Work of Aristotle - The Revised Oxford Translation Vol 1):

Now thought is always right, but appetite and imagination may be either right or wrong. That is why, though in any case it is the object of appetite which originates movement, this object may be either the real or the apparent good. -- 433a27-28

Here is the broader context:

That which moves therefore is a single faculty and the faculty of appetite; for if there had been two sources of movement—thought and appetite—they would have produced movement in virtue of some common character. As it is, thought is never found producing movement without appetite (for wish is a form of appetite; and when movement is produced according to calculation it is also according to wish), but appetite can originate movement contrary to calculation, for desire is a form of appetite. Now thought is always right, but appetite and imagination may be either right or wrong. That is why, though in any case it is the object of appetite which originates movement, this object may be either the real or the apparent good. To produce movement the object must be more than this: it must be good that can be brought into being by action; and only what can be otherwise than as it is can thus be brought into being. That then such a power in the soul as has been described, i.e. that called appetite, originates movement is clear. Those who distinguish parts in the soul, if they distinguish and divide in accordance with differences of power, find themselves with a very large number of parts, a nutritive, a sensitive, an intellective, a deliberative, and now an appetitive part; for these are more different from one another than the faculties of desire and passion. -- 433a21-433b4

I'll respond later to the rest of your challenging post.

Yes, I understand. But it is still a strain to say that 'all possible worlds' of yesterday excludes the actual world of today. — unenlightened

I don't know what you mean by that. Who is saying or implying that? Can you make the thesis that you believe to be strained a little more explicit?

No, desires are generally physiological needs, accompanied by mental awareness of the need. — Dfpolis

I don't think that's quite right. According to Aristotle, desires are appearances of the good. They thus are directed outwardly to what appears good. If something is good because it fulfills a need, then desiring it betrays awareness that it indeed fulfills that need; if an agent is rational and self-conscious, she can self-ascribe the need that is being fulfilled by the desired object. But the intentional content of the desire is the proposition (true or false) that the desired object is good.

Or kidnapped and held in an ugly part of London. — frank

You're right. I had forgotten about this scary possible world.

Banno suggested waiting till after the third lecture to discuss A Puzzle of Belief. I hope youre still around to help clarify. — frank

Hopefully I will not have been run over by a bus or hit by lightning.

Prima facie, this looks to be plain false, given that 'we' (scare quotes because I was not consulted) have changed the designation. Presumably, the new designation is more rigid than the rigidity of the lump of stuff that was previously designated. We can now measure what was immeasurable. — unenlightened

Just to supplement what @Banno already said, remember that the claim that a name is a rigid designator doesn't mean that there are no possible worlds at which the name has a different use, neither does it mean that the use of the name can't evolve in the actual world (or vary across different linguistic communities). It rather means that this name, as used by us, today, in the actual world, refers to the same object in (our talk of) all possible worlds.

I'm trying to grasp the challenge to Kripke's necessary a posteriori brought by Kripke himself in A Problem of Belief:

If Hesperus=Phosphorus is necessary a posteriori, then these two proper names can't be de jure rigid designators, which one can grasp without any descriptive content.

If they are such rigid designators, then the identity statement can't be necessarily true. — frank

It logically follows from them being rigid designators that the identity statement is necessary. Per definition, a statement is necessary if and only if it's true in all possible worlds. But if the statement is true in the actual world, and a proper name refer to the same object in all possible worlds, then, since both names refer to the same object in the actual world, they also refer to the same object in all possible worlds.

[/quote]This is because in order to be both (rigid designators and a posteriori necessary) the names have to be substitutable in epistemic contexts, and they weren't prior to the discovery that they're co-referential.[/quote]

If they were substituable in epistemic contexts, then, the identity statements would be known a priori, and not a posteriori. If I don't already know that Hesperus is Phosphorus, then, one can't substitute salva veritate Hesperus for Phosphorus in the epistemic context: "I believe that (Phosphorus) is yellow".

None of the above are known as philosophers, except maybe Pirsig? — Pattern-chaser

George Lakoff is a cognitive linguist and philosopher. His co-author, Mark Johnson (Metaphors We Live By) is a philosopher.

Well, again, that's epistemically possible, and still not metaphysically possible. That's the relevant distinction, it seems to me. — Pierre-Normand

Sorry, I take that back. What you said in your last paragraph was correct even as a statement of metaphysical possibility.

strikes me as strictly incorrect, because Hesperus is Phosphorus in all possible words. — Banno

Yes, there is no metaphysically possible world in which Hesperus isn't Phosphorus, provided only that they are numerically identical in the actual world. But there are epistemically possible worlds in which what we believe to be the referents of 'Hesperus' and 'Phosphorus' aren't the same object (provided only we don't already know them to be identical). This merely amounts to saying that such a proposition isn't logically inconsistent with what we already know.

Instead, what might have happened is that we named Hesperus and Phosphorus "Hesperus", while naming something else "Phosphorus".

Well, again, that's epistemically possible, and still not metaphysically possible. That's the relevant distinction, it seems to me.

So Hesperus turns out to be Phosphorus. Yet "Hesperus", being a rigid designator, refers to Hesperus in all possible worlds.

But Hesperus is Phosphorus.

Hence, "Hesperus" refers to Phosphorus in all possible worlds.

Puzzling. — Banno

I think the reason why this might appear puzzling is because when we are thinking about what might possibly, for all we know, be the case, we are thinking about epistemic possibility and we may fail to properly distinguish this from metaphysical possibility. So, before we knew that Hesperus is Phosphorus (i.e. that they are one and the same planet) it was epistemically possible (consistently with all we knew) that they might not have been the same planet (or that they might not have been planets at all, or might not have existed). However, given the fact that they actually exist and are numerically identical, then, it's not metaphysically possible that they might not have been numerically identical.

That sounds interesting! Unfortunately i know little about Frege, so I am not clear as to how he might have thought that information (in the human social and semantic context) could differ from story telling or description. — Janus

The Fregean account is externalist rather than internalist. Oftentimes, when the cases of Hesperus and Phosphorus are being discussed, the (quasi-)descriptive phrases 'the Evening Star' and 'the Morning Star' are being used to express the senses of the proper names 'Hesperus' and 'Phosphorus'. This is misleading. The case of Afla and Ateb is more revealing of Frege's 'pragmatic-informational externalism' (as I might call it to distinguish it from Kripke's 'causal-chain externalism'). What distinguishes the users of both names isn't how they might describe the mountain that it refers to but how they practically are able to handle the referent -- how they are able to get to the mountain. But those abilities are enabled by the mountain actually existing, and the information required to get there is embodied in the naming-practice as a form of 'knowledge-how' (or acquaintance with the referent) rather than a descriptive 'knowledge-that'.

Yes, I would agree that that is certainly possible, and again, in this discussion I have allowed that definite descriptions may not be accurate. I have only been arguing that it is on account of them that we have any idea about who we are referring to (unless we have met the person, of course). — Janus

Kripke purports to distinguish his account from descriptivist theories of proper names and also from Frege's account of the sense ('Sinn') of a proper name. He therefore sets up the contrast between his account and the accounts that he criticizes in terms of a distinction between causal and informational links. The trouble with this is that he is running onto the problem of deviant causal chains. His account of the complementary functions of (informational and normative) reference fixing and (causal and non-normative) reference determination seeks to deal with the problem of deviant causal chains.

Kripke fails to see that Frege's account, although informational and normative, isn't descriptive. It doesn't run into the problem of deviant causal chains, neither does it constitute a decriptivist theory of proper names. It doesn't, therefore, is a target for Kripke's arguments against descriptivism. I think Frege's account is the account Kripke would have needed to develop. Gareth Evans and Hillary Putnam have developed such a pragmatized neo-Fregean account, taking Kripke's main insights about externalism, rigidity, and the social character of meaning, into account.

Actually I would kind of agree with this. Say there have been causal chains of events that have determined reference in relation to historical figures; the question then would seem to be as to what those causal chains of events have consisted in. I would say they would have consisted in people telling stories to others about those historical figures (oral and written histories). But what are stories if they are not descriptions, both definite and otherwise? — Janus

Yes, they are. But even in the case where an individual who gets initiated into the practice of naming a historical figure NN only is being told false stories about NN, she can still successfully refer to NN and have entirely false beliefs about NN when she thinks about her as NN.

When we refer to historical figures we don't do so in a vacuum do we? — Janus

Indeed. Kripke would agree since it's a core feature of his externalist account of proper names that many (and oftentimes most) individuals who participate in a specific naming practice only are able to do so because the social practice is already up and running thanks to some of the earlier participants being acquainted with the named individual.

Sure we can just talk about the person 'What if Joan (of Arc) had not been burned alive'? How do know i am referring to Joan of Arc, if I don't say the 'of Arc'? The 'of Arc' is a definite description. You might guess without the 'of Arc', because of the question about not being burned alive; but the implication is that she was burend alive. Now this may not be a strictly definite description (other Joans may have been burned alive) but it is certainly a definite description if you add the date 14th May 1431 (since that is the 'official' date even if that date is not correct).

Kripke doesn't discount the function of definite descriptions for fixing the reference of a proper name, either initially while instituting the naming practice, or subsequently for the purpose of initiating new member into the already instituted naming practice. He insists on distinguishing reference fixing from reference determination. The latter is that in virtue of which the proper name has (or comes to acquire) its actual referent, while the former only is a means by which participants are enabled to hook up into the practice.

All this is not theory but phenomenological description of how we know, and come to know things about people and events; if you can't provide any alternative account, why should I take you seriously? — Janus

Kripke does provide an alternative account of the referential function of proper names. Their being rigid designators isn't a theory but rather a feature (a phenomenological datum, if you will) of the way we ordinarily use them. Kripke's "causal theory of reference", together with his remarks about the famous people convention, and the social character of meaning, accounts (purportedly, at least) for the way in which we can use the proper name "Hitler" to refer to Hitler in a information insensitive way (and thus without relying on a definite descriptions to fix the reference of the name), and therefore accounts for the empirical fact of "Hitler" and other proper names being rigid designators.

No satisfactory definite description can be devised because there is no Lady Mondegreen. The mistaken belief that there is such a name and a person bearing that name stems from the eavesdropper misunderstanding what she has heard. — andrewk

Sorry, I hadn't read your post carefully enough. I agree. I am unsure how this case bears on the issue of descriptivism about proper names that refer to real individuals.

Russell's theory is probably not right. It makes a number of wrong predictions as to the behavior of definite descriptions in embedded environments. — Snakes Alive

OK, I see. Thanks for the reference. It looks very interesting.

I say that question is the wrong question, and writing dissertations about it misses the point. The right question is 'what does the eavesdropper want?' The answer is that she wants to understand the story that was being told. — andrewk

That may be the case, but then the eavesdropper could understand the story (well enough) without knowing who the person talked about is. So, the fact that supplying her with a definite description of the peson holding the name is sufficient for that purpose (i.e. understanding the story well enough) isn't sufficient for showing that the description determines the meaning of the proper name.

Furthermore, Kripke would readily grant that providing a definite description often is sufficient for fixing the reference of the name (as used thereafter by the eavesdropper), even though the description doesn't determine this reference all by itself (and hence isn't semantically equivalent to it). That's possible because of the social character of meaning. Supplying a definite description can be a means of co-opting a new user into an already existing name-using practice. This new user, when she has had the meaning of the proper name conveyed to her by means of a definite description, is thereafter enabled to think (and talk) about this named individual thanks to there already being other participants in this practice who are directly acquainted (or 'causally linked', Kripke would say) with the named individual.

Isn't that the principle or knowledge by/of acquaintance stated another way? — Wallows

Quite right. As I said, Russell thought we could only be acquainted with sense data and with our own thinking 'selves'. Everything else, including the referents of most ordinary language proper names (of cities, human beings, etc.) only are knows by description. Evans agrees with Russell that descriptive content isn't a form of singular reference (but rather must be analysed into existentially quantified statements), but he argued that proper names and demonstratives can refer to much more than just sense data.

BTW you asked above if I was seeking to defend descriptivism. I think I probably am, but that doesn't mean I think it's the best theory. I see Wittgenstein's language game approach as the best explanation of language, including proper names. But despite its faults (which I think are different from those that Kripke claims) I think there's a lot of valuable insight in Russell's theory of descriptions, and I am unable to find any such value in Kripke's theory. — andrewk

Myself, I think Russell's theory of definite descriptions is basically right. But the correctness of this analysis doesn't entail descriptivism, unless one also holds that proper names can be analysed as definite descriptions. That's not something Russell himself believed, regarding "logical proper manes", which he took to only refer to direct object of acquaintance such as sense data and the referent of "I". Gareth Evans developed an account of proper names that is quite indebted to Kripke, to Wittgenstein, to Putnam, and to Russell, although he ditched Russell's antiquated Cartesian epistemological restrictions on direct objects of acquaintance. But he maintained a relaxed version of what he called Russell's Principle: that a person cannot be thinking about an object unless he knows, in some non-trivial way, which object he is thinking about.

My view on these issues is set out in somewhat more detail in an essay I wrote a couple of years ago: Hypotheticals, Counterfactuals and Probability. Those are still my views. — andrewk

Thanks, I'll put this as high up in my reading list as feasible.

I'm interested in what you said in the first para that 'this is the sort of counterfactual consideration that we rely on when planning future actions or when we are gathering evidence for the existence of causal relations'. I would exclude considering future actions from that because that is usually a case not of imagining the past being different, but rather imagining more than one different possible future, neither of which contradicts current knowledge. — andrewk

It's true that in the course of practical reasoning one usually restricts the consideration of options to those that one has the power and opportunity to realize. However, the subjunctive conditional "If I will do X then Y will occur" could be true even if, unbeknownst to me, I lack the power or opportunity to do X. In that case, the antecedent is necessarily false conditionally on the actual present state of the world being what it is. But so long as we don't equate the actual with the necessary, the subjunctive conditional proposition might be still be true.

Those are not counterfactuals but rather considerations of future possibilities - I call them 'Hypotheticals'. By 'gathering evidence of causal relations' I assume you are referring to the attempt to develop scientific theories. I agree that counterfactuals can play a key role in that but it seems to me that they work perfectly well with my interpretation of counterfactual, and don't require a Kripkean interpretation.

Kripke's conception of counterfactual conditionals and of possible worlds is very deflationary, in Naming and Necessity. If I remember, he proposes to construe phrases such as "there is a possible world at which P" to be meaning no more and no less than we would ordinarily mean when we say "It is possible that P might have happened".

This misses the point. Indeed, all of those particular items cannot exist without their elemental constituents. — creativesoul

I am usure what it is that you mean with the phrase "elemental constituent". Also, could you explain in which way knowledge of the elemental constituents of an individual can be made use of in order to refer uniquely to this individual?

If asked to tell somebody what the book is about I think I would say 'It imagines a world in which the Axis powers won WW2'. Based on recent posts above, it appears that Kripke might say 'It supposes that the Axis powers rather than the Allies won WW2'. — andrewk

If one imagines a possible world at which the Axis powers won WW2, then one can imagine it such that Hitler lived to be 72. But when one evaluates the counterfactual conditional statement "If the Axis powers had won WW2, then, Hitler would have lived to be 72", the truth value of this counterfactual conditional proposition doesn't appear to be tied to what it is that we can imagine. It rather depends on what we are entitled to believe would necessarily have happened if the counterfactual antecedent had been true. There are difficult issues regarding what it is, besides what is stated in the conditional antecedent, that is taken to remain the same, or vary, with respect to the actual course of history, while evaluating the necessity of the consequent. (Can we allow for backtracking?) In my view, those issues are settled by pragmatic considerations. In any case, the truth conditions of a counterfactual conditional proposition aren't dependent on what one might imagine, but rather on what one is entitled to expect would necessarily have occurred or would necessarily have been the case if the antecedent had been true.

This is not to object to what you have said, but to widen its breadth. — Banno

Yes. That was a follow up on a tangential line of inquiry that had been initiated by @fdrake. Of course, I agree that what is actually true at all times of Gödel (and hence might figure in a definite description of him) isn't necessarily true of him.

That works for me. It avoids using ill-specified notions like 'referent' or asking (IMHO) meaningless questions such as 'was Aristotle-2 Aristotle?' — andrewk

But I didn't ask any meaningless question, neither did I postulate any imaginary worlds. Counterfactual conditionals are judgement forms that we routinely make use of when we reason practically. If I let the cat outdoors and it gets run over by a car, then it isn't nonsensical to judge that it (the very same cat) would not have been run over if (counterfactually) I hadn't let it out. And this is the sort of counterfactual consideration that we rely on when planning future actions or when we are gathering evidence for the existence of causal relations.

Kripke is very insistent in Naming and Necessity, while arguing against the 'telescope conception' of possible world identifications of particulars (ascribed to Lewis), that he isn't talking about counterpart 'worlds' populated with doppelgangers who only share our past histories (or our histories prior to a specified moment in time). When he's talking about 'possible worlds', he's only talking about the our world (i.e. the real world) as it could possibly have been if something or other had been different; just like I was talking about the cat (likely) not having died if, counterfactually, it had not been let outdoors.

Back to Aristotle, the question simply is: what is it that would entitles you to speculate about what would follow from Aristotle counterfactually having had a different career (while referring to him by his name) if his having had his actual carrer (i.e. a philosopher) makes up part of the definite description by means of which the name "Aristotle" refers to him? Surely, you're not saying that it is impossible or nonsensical to suppose that he might have had a different career. But if "Aristotle", by definition, refers to someone who has been a philosopher, then, by definition, Aristotle (where I am using this name descriptively) couldn't possibly not have been a philosopher. This seems not to match how we use proper names in the context of making ordinary and meaningful counterfactual conditional statements.

Then it would only follow that the retention of that particular property is not necessary for us to pick it out at other times. Those particular properties are not elemental constituents. — creativesoul

Are what you call "elemental constituents" something akin to essential properties? In that case, the item being descriptively referred to could not persist through the loss of those properties, but they may still not guarantee that the item is uniquely being described by them since other items of the same essential kind also would have those properties. The purpose of a definite description is to uniquely pick up an individual, not just to pick it up under a description that it will never (and could never) cease to satisfy.

Examples:

1. Aristotle tutored Alexander the Great.

The DD implied by the Proper Name Aristotle must relate to properties that held around the time of Alexander the Great, whenever that was. — andrewk

Are you purporting to defend a form of descriptivism, then? What if the individual who we name "Aristotle" had not become a philosopher, and had become a carpenter instead (and he hadn't been Alexander's teacher, etc.) Are we talking about someone who isn't Aristotle, in that counterfactual scenario? And if we're still talking about Aristotle having had a different career, how it is that "Aristotle" picks up its referent in the couterfactual scenario?