As a result of the speaker knowing how to use language to draw an other's attention to the 'object'. — creativesoul

Yes, that's sketchy but basically right. It also takes us out of the realm of Kripke's descritivist targets, and dovetails with his own account.

That isnt true either. Black communities love to make fun of white people by talking about, for example, invented people who dont exist, when actually talking about the white person. And Ive heard them do it many times without the white person realizing it and some black teenager sniggering out of sight. There's alot more forms of communication than are obvious from the blithe statements of simple truths and falsehoods that people for whom English is not a first language figure out, and then deliberately connive to humiliate native English speakers together without the native English speakers realizing it. — ernestm

That's interesting, but what I meant to say is that for reference to be successful, on Kripke's account, it's not a requirement that the descriptive content associated with the speaker's 'idea' (i.e. the de re sense of a demonstrative or proper name) of her intended reference be mostly true. I did not mean to imply that making use of misleading descriptions can't possibly, indeed, mislead outsiders to a conniving community.

hence belief is removable by occam's razor. Its irrelevant to the theory. You too. — ernestm

That's not an argument against Kripke, neither does it help @andrewk who does appeal to the content the speaker's belief in his account of reference.

Again, it is a common technique in black communities to deliberately lie about descriptions which is known to others. As an overly simple example, they will say 'don't insult my brother like that.' The person who is not his brother then nods in agreement and raises a fist. — ernestm

That the descriptive content can represent false beliefs about the intended target is common ground. What we're inquiring about is the positive account for the reference of the thought (or of the speech act expressing this thought) being what it is in spite of the fact that the definite description by means of which the speaker thinks of the individual is false or mostly false.

I've tried to help understand the issue but I do have to rest.

Rest in peace :wink:

Well I regret I must agree with andrewk. As you are interested in externals only, the belief doesnt matter. All that matters is that the two identify a sufficient part of the descriptive properties as referring to the same person. Thats the point of the theory. It doesnt matter how many of the descriptive properties are true or false, or if some of them could truthfully apply to others too. — ernestm

In order to establish that the speaker and his intended audience share (a sufficient part of their) beliefs about the same individual, to whom they are thinking about, one must first be able to say who it is that their beliefs are about. However, even if we leave this circularity problem aside, Kripke made a good case that shared beliefs aren't necessary. The audience would normally know who the speaker is thinking about even if the audience knew most or all of the descriptive content used by the speaker not to be true of her intended target. @andrewk got at least that right.

If one believes that the person is drinking champagne, then the description represents the belief. The belief refers to the person the speaker believes to be drinking champagne. — creativesoul

This is common ground. The issue is to explain how the speaker's belief comes to be about the speaker's intended referent in the world. @andrewk's account of the reference of the speech act relies on the assumption that the mental act thereby expressed is about the very same object she is thinking about. What accounts for the reference of the belief in the first place?

'Sabrina! Don't look, but did you see how the man over there with champagne in his glass just winked at me?' — andrewk

On your view, the person you are making reference to is person-1 on account of the fact that, between all four people who are perceptually present, only person-1 is such that your belief about that person satisfies the DD you are thinking of (and expressing). This account presupposes that your belief about that person indeed is about that person and not about someone else who might actually be, unbeknownst to you, drinking champagne, (or about nobody, if nobody is having champagne). What is this account of the reference of your belief on the basis of which the truth of the predicative content of the DD can be evaluated as matching up with this belief?

Unfortunately my tutor at oxford has retired and she was too polite ever to write down the criticism. What she pointed out, which I think was a good observation, is that when people talk about 'the man holding the glass of vodka' they are not talking about a cluster of properties viz, male, with arms, holding a glass containing liquid, etc.' even if that is how the reference breaks down for the purposes of logic. They are saying 'that person', in a Wittgensteinian manner, pointing as it were, to enable an assertion about them without befuddling other detail once the reference is defined. — ernestm

Well, strangely enough, this rough account of demonstrative reference seems to me closer in spirit to Kripke's causal/externalist account that it is to Davidson't internalist/interpretivist account.

(I think Gareth Evans's account of demonstrative reference combines the best of both Kripke's 'world-involving' pragmatism and of Davidson's interpretivism. It also somewhat breaks the false dichotomy between externalism and internalism; what is internal to the rational order of linguistic practice in the world isn't internal to the brain.

Specifically, kripke initiated the idea of dubbing. The problem with it from Davidson's point of view was that purely referential theories of naming have trouble with defining meaningful knowledge, for which he provided new ideas on meaningfulness that allow for indeterminacy, in case there are mistakes in the act of assigning a label to a reference. — ernestm

I think I can imagine how Davidson's coherentist and somewhat internalist account of meaning would raise problems for Kripke's externalist (or "purely referential") account of reference. However, do you have a source where Davidson explicitly adresses Kripke along such lines?

One simply lists the people she can see and her beliefs about each one, then compares them to the DD and picks out the one for which the beliefs match the DD. — andrewk

(I have completely rewritten this post because my initial reply was misguided and based on a misreading of your position.)

OK. I see what you mean now. However, in order to carry through this procedure you need, in a first step, to survey the potential references (e.g. the people who are perceptually present) and assign to them what it is that the speaker believes about each one of them specifically in order to, in a second step, compare those beliefs with the content of the DD. So, you need to first rely on an account of the reference of the speakers mental act of demonstrative reference. The speaker must be able to pick out in though who it is that she believes the predicative content of DD to be uniquely true of. But she can't do this by means of the very same DD, on pain of circularity. (That was basically my earlier objection).

What I wrote was, not that the facts about the person match the DD, but that the speaker's beliefs about the person match the DD. — andrewk

However you also said: "It seems to me that, if the DD picks out a unique individual based on the speaker's beliefs, then that explains how it is precisely that person, and not someone else, to whom she is referring."

In this sentence, what did you intend to be the anaphoric antecedent of "that person"? It is "the unique individual based on the speaker's beliefs", right? How it this individual singled out by the speaker's belief, on your view, if not as the individual that satisfies the predicative content of DD?

I totally agree, but I reach the conclusion this is a good argument for Davidson's 'dubbing.' In your example, the person is dubbed with the properties which may or may not be true, resulting in ideas about the person which are unprovable. That does seem to be the normal state of affairs in human interactions. — ernestm

I'd like to know a bit more about Davidson's 'dubbing'. Would you happen to have a reference?

It seems to me that, if the DD picks out a unique individual based on the speaker's beliefs, then that explains how it is precisely that person, and not someone else, to whom she is referring.

One simply lists the people she can see and her beliefs about each one, then compares them to the DD and picks out the one for which the beliefs match the DD. — andrewk

In that case, the person who the speaker is looking at does not match the DD (since the DD expresses a false belief about that person), and hence, by your own account, isn't the person who the speaker is talking about.

It looks like you may have made the slide from (1) "X is the person that the speaker falsely believes phi(...) about" to (2) "X is the person who satisfies the predicative content of the speaker's false belief phi(Y)". But (2) doesn't follow from (1). The negation of (2) rather follows from (1).

The quantity of CO2 that would be required to account for the young climate would have left a mineral behind that is absent from the young rocks. — frank

Those are empirical estimates that have huge margins of uncertainties associated with them. The atmospheric CO2 concentrations several million years ago are estimated roughly by a few different proxy methods that give somewhat discrepant results give or take one or two orders of magnitude. Those remaining uncertainties and open scientific questions regarding the state of the climate in the very distant past can't be used to cast doubt on our understanding of the physics of the current climate system (for the last million years or so) where the data is known much more precisely.

A descriptivist position with less straw in it would be one in which the reference (if it makes sense to talk about one - see my earlier comments about the folly of always dissecting speech acts) made by the speaker is to the individual that she believes satisfies her description. That reference will be correctly interpreted by the listener if that description also uniquely picks out the same individual in the context of the listener's beliefs. — andrewk

I have no idea what Russell would have said since he was mainly interested in the logical reconstruction of a scientifically rigorous language (just like Frege and the logical empiricists were) and wasn't very sensitive to the pragmatic features of ordinary language.

However, it seems to me to be common ground among most contemporary parties that, in Donnellan's champagne case, the speaker is making reference to the person that she merely believes satisfies her description. The problem is to account for it. If the individual being referred to doesn't actually satisfy the description then what makes it the case that it is this individual to whom she herself intends to be referring to? It is not enough to say that he is being referred to in virtue of the fact that the speaker (merely) believes him to satisfy the description. That's because, by saying that, we haven't explained how it is precisely him (and not someone else) who is being referred to. In other words: we are trying to account for who it is who is believed by the speaker to be satisfying her definite description. If we merely appeal to the speaker's belief regarding who it is that she is thinking about, we still have to provide an account of the reference of her belief.

Of course. And about the faint young sun paradox? — frank

The problem in the OP stemmed from only considering CO2 variation and ignoring solar variations. The faint young sun paradox stemmed from only considering solar variations and ignoring CO2 variation. Taking into account both solar and CO2 forcing solves both problems.

thats actually the entire problem of averages in one sentence, because before man-generated co2 since the atmosphere was first cooled down by plants consuming co2 and generating oxygen, sun radiation has been a larger varying factor, as well as, of course, cloud cover, which is almost entrely unkowable. — ernestm

In recent times solar variations have provided very small forcing variation compared with the enhanced greenhouse gas forcing. See the second and third graphs in this web page.

The magnitude of the cloud feedback is the main source of uncertainty regarding climate sensitivity to radiative forcing. But it's a feedback, so it merely amplifies or mitigates climate change, whatever its cause.

It would have to actually oscillate to track large scale ice ages. — frank

The total forcing (solar + greenhouse) and the continental mass distribution effect on albedo feedback and ocean circulation tack large scale ice ages; and not any one single factor in isolation.

It's hard to see how solar forcing would be a significant factor in large scale ice ages, which come and go. We're in one now, obviously. — frank

One mustn't confuse the glacial/interglacial periods that are occurring within the current ice age with major ice ages. The former is governed by the Milankovitch cycles and is modulated by the ice albedo and carbon cycle feedbacks.

Does solar luminosity vary significantly over time?

Indeed it does. As I pointed out above, the variation over the last 300 million years is equivalent to a fourfold decrease in CO2 concentration.

Are you sure you're thinking of the Carboniferous? That was only 300 million years ago. — frank

The Sun is only four and a half billion years old. 300 million years ago is about 7% of its age. One estimate that I've seen is that the total solar irradiance increased by about 4% over the lase 400 million years ago. That would translate into a forcing change of 6.75 W/'m^2 over the last 300 million years. This is just about the same as the effect from a fourfold increase of atmospheric CO2 concentration. Hence, other things being equal (e.g. same continental mass distribution), an atmospheric concentration of 1200ppm, 300 million years ago, would have yielded the same surface temperature as the recent pre-industrial era (300ppm).

Would you say this is a more significant factor than the impact of glaciation? — frank

Over large timescales, glaciation is an effect rather than a cause. Snow and ice albedo functions as a feedback. It's the sum of the forcings (mainly greenhouse gas forcing and solar forcing) that is the independent variable and that determines whether or not glaciation is supported. When glaciation is supported by a low enough total forcing, glaciation ensues and the snow/ice albedo feedback lowers the temperature even further.

I'm all fascinated by the emergence of mammals these days, so I came across this odd piece of information about the Carboniferous period: atmospheric CO2 concentration was around 800 ppm (twice the present level, but down from 7000 ppm earlier in the evolution of life). Yet the mean surface temperature was 14C. It's now 14C.

Anybody know why this is? — frank

The Sun is a yellow dwarf main sequence star. Main sequence stars grow brighter over time. The Sun was thus several percents dimmer several hundreds of years ago. This explains why the main surface temperature wasn't much higher, it at all, during the Carboniferous in spite of the higher CO2 concentration. (Also, CO2 forcing is a logarithmic function of concentration rather than a linear function).

OK, I would agree with all of that as well. I have said from the start that I think reference relies either on observation or ostention (which would be the case with those who witnessed the 'baptism' or description (which would be the means by which those who have never met or seen the baptized person, and so must rely upon being told about him or her would fix their reference to the person in question). — Janus

Well, that's cool. That means Kripke and you are pretty much on the same page, after all.

His text and his footnotes both clearly set out his notion of the 'referent of the description' as the object uniquely satisfying the conditions of the description. I'm showing how that notion leads to a reductio when it comes to explaining the referent of false description. — creativesoul

Yes, he sets out this notion as the notion being used by descriptivists in order to show descriptivism's shorcomings. Immediately following the passage that you quoted (N&N. p.25), he explained: "This is the sense in which it's been used in the logical tradition. So, if you have a description of the form 'the x such that phi(x)', and there is exactly one x such that phi(x), that is the referent of the description."

Could you point me to "the case Kripke describes". I'd like to see him put his own notion to use as a means for clearing up the charges I'm levying against his notion of the 'referent of the description'.

This is just the case that you quoted from p.25. It's not his notion of the 'referent of the description' that he's making use of. It's the traditional notion -- as used by descriptivists -- that he is explaining (and which correspond to the first item in Donnellan's pragmatic distinction between (1) the "proper referent" and (2) the intended referent of the definite description being enunciated by a speaker in a specific context shared by the targeted audience.) He is explaining this notion used by descriptivists in their account of proper names in order to argues against its use as a satisfactory account of the way proper names refer.

...Kripke's doctrine doesn't seem capable of properly accounting for false belief. In fact, some cases of false belief are quite problematic for it.

So you may say,
'The man over there with the champagne in his glass is happy',
though he actually only has water in his glass. Now, even
though there is no champagne in his glass, and there may be
another man in the room who does have champagne in his
glass, the speaker intended to refer, or maybe, in some sense of
'refer', did refer, to the man he thought had the champagne in
his glass. Nevertheless, I'm just going to use the term 'referent
of the description' to mean the object uniquely satisfying the
conditions in the definite description.

Nevertheless??? — creativesoul

Kripke is saying "Nevertheless..." because although we would, in ordinary cases, understand the speaker to be referring (and indeed, to intend to be referring) to the man who unbeknownst to the speaker doesn't have champagne in his glass, the way Kripke intends to use the phrase 'referent of the description' is to refer to the object uniquely satisfying the conditions in the definite description exactly as descriptivists about proper names understand definite descriptions to refer. So, he's not begging the question against descriptivists.

In the case Kripke describes, the way the reference actually works is grounded on the demonstrative perceptual acquaintance that the speaker and members of his audience have with the drinker. Here also, the definite description can be understood to fix the reference (in the mind of the hearers who merely believe the man to be drinking champagne, or who understand the speaker's mistake), and not determine it. It calls everyone's attention towards the intended individual, who is perceptually present to everyone involved, while also carrying false information about this individual owing to a false presupposition (or misperception).

What's at issue is whether or not false description can be used to successfully refer. Kripke's account does not seem to be able to provide an acceptable account of these cases when they happen. — creativesoul

I would have thought that it was, on the contrary, one of the main strengths of Kripke's "causal" account of de re reference (by means of proper names or demonstratives) that it enables people to successfully refer to individuals which they have (mainly or entirely) false beliefs about, whereas this is not possible to do by means of standalone definite descriptions.

I would say she must at least remember having seen him, even if not what he looks like, in order to refer to him. This memory must be under some form of description, or at least be capable of being rendered as such. For example, if I say to you: "Remember that woman we saw yesterday who was nearly hit by a car" neither of us may remember what she looks like, we might not even be able to pick her out in a line-up, so we can only refer to her by virtue of that true description: that we saw her being almost run over. — Janus

The issue was: must this (minimal) description be true in order that the referent of the thought be determined by that thought? What if both you and I saw a woman whom we believed was almost hit by a car, but the car only appeared to us to drive close to her owing to a misleading perspective? In that case, wouldn't you agree that we are still referring to that woman (or to that man whom we falsely thought was a woman!) in spite of the fact that she (or he!) wasn't nearly hit by a car?

We touched earlier on a distinction between fixing and determining reference. You acknowledged that fixing reference relies on description, but you did not acknowledge this for determining reference. I imagined that you were alluding to Kripke's "causal chain" of rigid designation. As I understand it this involves an event (or events in the case of multiple names designating the same person or entity) of baptism, followed by the historical series of uses of the name to refer to the individual; the designating references that cement the rigid designation.

Right. That's how Kripke suggests his causal account might elucidate how proper names determine their referents.

So, those who are present at the baptismal event(s) know who the baptizing name refers to by virtue of having been there and seeing the baptized person with their own eyes. how does anyone who was not present, who has never seen the person or any representation (painting, photograph or whatever) of the person come to know who is being referred to at subsequent times? I would say it is obviously by virtue of descriptions of what the person looks like, where she lives, what she has done and so on.

Yes, new people can be initiated into the already existing naming practice by means of reference fixing descriptions. The important points to remember, though, is that, firstly, a necessary requirement for their successful initiation into the practice is that the practice already exists and is founded on direct "causal" acquaintance by some of the earlier participants into (or founders of) the practice. And secondly, the content of the reference fixing description by means of which new participants are initiated can be entirely false without this impeding the initiate's ability to refer to the named individual.

So Kripke's "causal series" would itself seem to consist predominately in representations and descriptions. That begins to make it look like the only distinction between fixing and determining reference may be that the latter is thought to consist in a whole chain of isolated 'fixing reference' events, and that description plays a large part in the "causal' process of rigid designation.

Again, it doesn't matter at all if the sorts of contents that are made use of in the deployment, use and transmission or proper name using practices are predominantly consisting of (1) descriptions or (2) de re senses (information insensitive "causal links"). That's an empirical question which Kripke doesn't take any stand on. What he's arguing is that (2) is indispensable and that (2) can't be reduced entirely to (1). (And hence, proper names can't be translated into definite descriptions). Also, it's the essential involvement of (2) in the constitution of naming practices that accounts for proper names behaving as (information insensitive) rigid designators.

To say that she is referring to a man she saw yesterday, even allowing that she totally mis-remembers his appearance (which is itself highly implausible I would say) is to say that she has seen the man, and that she refers to him by virtue of having seen him. Usually one would take having seen someone as entailing knowing what they look like, or at least being able to recognize them if one sees them again. So, I can't see how this challenges what I have been saying. — Janus

The issue isn't whether or not it's frequent or plausible that one might encounter something and totally mis-remember its appearance. That's not a philosophical question; that's an empirical question. Both can intelligibly occur, with whatever frequencies. The issue rather is whether or not it's in virtue of the predicative content of such an ability to recognize an individual's appearance, as a result of an initial perceptual encounter with it, than one is thereafter able to refer to this individual by means of a memory-invoking demonstrative. When you are saying that she is referring to the man by virtue of having seen him, what do you mean exactly? Can you specify some more what this "... by virtue of ..." relation consists in? If it's merely an ability to recognize the man she once saw, who (i.e. under what mode of presentation) does she recognize him to be? Recognitional abilities are abilities to re-cognize; that is: to think of an individual under two distinct modes of presentation and to judge the two references to be numerically identical. I would argue that, in the case under discussion, both of those modes are de re senses: one of them is a memory-invoking demonstrative and the second one is a (present) perceptual demonstrative.

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.