If Schmidt wrote the theorems and the speaker doesn't know that and the only thing she knows about Godel is that (she believes) he wrote the theorems, then it makes no sense to me to suggest that the speaker is referring to the man named Kurt Godel rather than to the creator of the theorems. I'm sure if we outlined the situation in full to the speaker and asked her which she meant, she'd say it was the creator of the theorems. — andrewk

You do have a point, here, but that is a point that Kripke, and others who follow him (such as Soames, Sperry, Donnellan, Recanati, etc.) would readily acknowledge. There are many cases where (1) what the speaker intends to communicate and (2) what it is that the form of words that she is making use of (in context) is conventionally taken to convey, come appart. In view of that fact, one could dogmatically insist that the speaker's communicative intention always trumps what the conventional meaning of her claims are in determining the content of her speech act. Or one could dogmatically hold that it is always the conventional meaning that determines what it is that she said, regardless of her intentions. The later thesis isn't something that Kripke holds. The former thesis is equally implausible and it would do great injustice to Wittgenstein to ascribe it to him. @Snakes Alive rightfully called that thesis Humpty-Dumptyism.

Wittgensteinian pragmatism would rather recommend that one be more sensitive to the point of the communication in order to assess, for a given speech act, which of two 'meanings' (i.e. speaker's intention, or conventional meaning), if any, trumps the other one in assessing whether what the speaker said is true or not.

For instance, suppose Sue, for whatever reason, wrongly believes Kurt Gödel to be the father of her friend Joe. It's actually Schmidt who is the father of her friend Joe. Sue, Joe and Schmidt are having a beer at a bar. Sue knows that the man accompanying Joe is his father; she thus wrongly believes this man to be Kurt Gödel. At some point Schmidt stands up and goes to the restroom while Joe is ordering more beer. Joe then realizes that his father is gone and looks around to find him. Sue says: "Kurt Gödel has gone to the bathroom". Surely, what she said is rather infelicitous. Did she say something true about Schmidt while mistakenly referring to him with the wrong name, or did she say something false about Kurt Gödel? Given the pragmatic point of the communication, the former interpretation might be more apposite. Surely, there is a truth in the vicinity -- that Joe's father went to the bathroom -- and this is the truth Sue meant to express regardless of who the real bearer of the name "Kurt Gödel" is.

However, as a result of this confusion, (let us suppose that Joe took her to be joking and didn't correct her), Sue is now straddled with the belief that she has witnessed Kurt Gödel go to the bathroom. The following day, Sue meets her friend Anna who tells her that Kurt Gödel suffered from paruresis and hence never visited public restrooms once in his whole life. Sue tells her that this is false since she met Kurt Gödel the day before and witnessed him visit a restroom. Anna tells Sue that this is impossible since Kurt Gödel has been dead for years. After they eventually clear up the misunderstanding regarding the identity (and name) of Joe's father, might Sue be entitled to say that her belief about Gödel was corrects since she meant to be referring to Joe's father? That would mean that she never had a false belief about Gödel and that she never had any real disagreement with Anna. They were just talking past one another. That would be Humpty-Dumptyism.

@Snakes Alive :up:

I read the SEP page that was linked above about Causal Theories, Madagascar and Marco Polo and it just seemed to be so many words about a non-issue. From a Wittgensteinian perspective, the varying uses of the word 'Madagascar' by Polo and others is completely sensible and explicable, in a very simple way. — andrewk

Kripke was reasonably well acquainted with the late Wittgenstein. The only real book that Kripke wrote is titled Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language. (Naming and Necessity is the transcript of a series of public lectures that he gave without making use of any notes). The works of Kripke, Putnam and Evans on reference and on semantic externalism are very much Wittgensteinian in spirit, it seems to me, since they emphasize public embodied and situated practices (i.e. language games), and their pragmatic point, rather than focus on alleged semantic connections between the mind and the world where the former is conceived in crypto-Cartesian fashion as a realm of privately and transparently accessible mental items.

Either a proper name can be assigned to an imagined object in light of some well-defined criteria, or it is assigned by a purely subjective fiat. If it is on the basis of well-defined criteria, the sense of the name is that set of criteria -- a description in your terms. If it is by subjective fiat, then any conclusion that follows from the assignment (such as the necessity of certain propositions) inherits that subjectivity and has no claim to being objective.

Either way, Kripke's analysis does not work. — Dfpolis

I am unsure why you would straddle Kripke with this binary choice. Kripke doesn't view proper names as devices that primarily elicit mental states, with or without objective purport, and with or without associated "well-defined criteria". Kripke rather views proper names as public handles into social practices. A proper name comes into being as an element of a social practice when some members of a community assign it, in an act of baptism, for instance, to an individual. The other members of this linguistic community, who aren't directly acquainted with the baptized individual, then are able to make use if this proper name to refer to the individual to whom it was initially assigned just by dint of sharing into this pre-existing practice. (Kripke fleshes out this account (in Naming and Necessity) by means of his so called "causal theory of reference"; but it has been elaborated by Garth Evans (in The Varieties of Reference) in terms of 'consumers' and 'producers' of the naming practice in a way that dispenses with contentious theses about causation).

In Kripke's account, whatever mental image you may have of the named individual, or whatever belief you may have about him or her, doesn't have any bearing on who it is that the proper name that you are using refer to. It is rather a matter of shared public practice who this individual is. It's not a matter of intersubjectivity either since all the members of the community may come to share the same false belief about the bearer of the proper name and even regarding who that individual is (Evans's discussion of the case of Madagascar notwithstanding).

I think I am attacking Kripke's claim directly.

Two things can be can be dependent on the same, singular object, but still depend on different aspects of that object. If so, then what they depend on may be physically inseparable, but logically distinct. We can't physically separate Clark Kent from Superman, or Hesperus from Phosphorus, but we can see that being a reporter is not being a man of steel, and that appearing in the evening is not appearing in the morning.

So being dependent on the same singular object is insufficient to establish conceptual identity. — Dfpolis

You are thus treating "Clark Kent" and "Superman" roughly as definite descriptions: as singular referring expressions that express, roughly, the general concepts under which "Clark Kent" and "Superman" are generally understood to describe their references as the objects that uniquely fall under them (or, as you say, describe "different aspects of their objects"). In that case, "Clark Kent" and "Superman" do not function in the way Kripke understands proper names to function and hence they aren't rigid designators. You have not criticized Kripke's account of proper names. You have rather changed the subject and you are making claims that Kripke would not disagree with.

Yes. My point is that judging is not an attitude. It intends a real state in a way that the attitudes you enumerate need not. — Dfpolis

I'm unsure what work the word "intends" does here. If I judge that it is raining outside (because I looked though the window and saw that it is raining) then I am holding the proposition that it is raining outside to be true. That's one possible attitude that I can have towards that proposition. Other attitudes would be to judge it to be false, or to hope that it is true (in case I don't know it to be true). In any case, my attitude is intentionally directed towards the proposition that it is raining outside, and so the proposition is being "intended" in that sense. It's the intentional content of the attitude.

To judge <A is B> is to think that the source of concept <A> is identically the source of concept <B>, so the cupola(sic) in the proposition expressing a judgement expresses identity, not between A and B, but in the source of A and B. Similarly, to judge <A is not B> is to think that the source of concept <A> is not identically the source of concept <B>. — Dfpolis

Here I would only object to your use of the term 'copula'. The 'is' of identity isn't the copula. The 'is' in the sentence "The apples is green" is the copula since its function isn't to signify the numerical identity between the references of "the apple" and of "green" but rather to predicate the general concept signified by "green" of the apple.

Regarding the main point, I can grant you that the proper names "A" and "B" can be construed as concepts of their objects and hence that when one asserts the identity of their objects by means of the expression "A is B" one is thereby identifying the "sources" (better: the references) of those concepts. The main issue is this: are the concepts A and B essentially dependent on the identity of their objects or aren't they? If they aren't, then they are better construed as something like definite descriptions and hence aren't rigid designators. But if they are object dependent, as Kripke argue is the case for proper names, then they are rigid designators and the identity expressed by "A is B" is necessary. So, you haven't even begun to argue against Kripke's thesis if you are construing the concepts A and B to be object independent. Kripke agrees that identity propositions of the form "A is B", where "A" and B" are general concepts (such as definite descriptions), are contingently true when true.

In this account p, the hope that p, the fear that P, etc. are all equally in the category of attitudes. Have I misunderstood, or have you changed your position? — Dfpolis

The proposition P is the content of those various propositional attitudes (here expressed by means of a subordinate "that"-clause), so it's not in the same category as the attitudes themselves. If Sue hopes that P, Bob fears that P, and Joe believes that P, then what it is that Sue hopes, that Bob fears, and that Joe believes is that P. P is the content of those attitudes. Those three attitudes share the same content, but they have difference "forces", as Frege would say. Fearing something isn't the same as hoping for it, and both are different from judging it to be true. But it can be the very same thing (that P) that is being feared, hoped or judged.

Putting, "the hope that p" in the same category as p is surely an error. Why? Because <the hope that p> is a concept, while <p> is a judgement. Judgements make assertions about states of affairs and so can be true or false, but concepts make no assertions and can be neither true nor false, only instantiated or not. Thus, the judgement <p> has a very different logical status than the concept <the hope that p>. — Dfpolis

I am not subsuming the hope that P under the same category as P. The hope that P is an intentional attitude, as is the belief that P. P is the proposition that is the shared content of those two distinct intentional attitudes. For instance, if I hope that it will rain tomorrow and you believe, or, equivalently, judge, that it will rain tomorrow, then what it is that I am hoping for, and what it is that you believe will happen, are the very same thing: namely that it will rain tomorrow. That it will rain tomorrow is a proposition that I am hoping to be true and that you believe (or judge) to be true. Judgements don't make assertions. People make judgements and assertions, and they can assert the contents of the judgements that they are making. They can also assert the negation of a judgement that they are making, in which case they are lying.

I have no doubt that the two readings express different judgements (intentional existents). Still I have several questions/

Can one distinguish two identically written propositions without reference to the intentional states they express? If one can't, isn't linguistic analysis (formal or informal) derivative on intentional analysis?

Alternately, to what does "proposition" refer, if not to judgements? — Dfpolis

I was thinking of propositions as Fregean propositions: or as ways the world (or aspects of the world) might conceivably be thought to be. Judgements are intentional attitudes that can have as their intentional contents the very same contents being expressed by sentences. Those contents are (Fregean) propositions. Of course, the very same proposition P can be the content of different sorts attitudes other than judgements, such as the hope that P, the fear that P, the conjecture that P, the antecedent of the conditional judgement that if P then Q, etc.

I think that the underlying problem here is the assumption that proper names refer to things, rather than to intelligible aspects of reality. "Clark Kent" refers to Jorel's son in his guise of newspaper reporter, not to Jorel's son simpliciter. "Superman" refers to Jorel's son in his guise of the man of steel. By ignoring the aspect under which Jorel's son is designated, the notion of rigid designator distorts the intent of the designating agents.

It seems to me that proper names (and every other sort of singular referring expression or device, such as demonstratives, indexicals, definite descriptions, etc.) can be construed both as referring to particulars and to intelligible aspects of reality. There is no way, on my view, to refer to any empirical object other than referring to it as an intelligible aspect of reality. So, when we "carve up" reality, as it were, into distinct persisting individuals (e.g. the substances of traditional metaphysics), it is always to intelligible aspect of reality that we are referring to. As I suggested in an earlier post, we can't refer to (or think of) a determinate object without subsuming it under some determinate sortal concept that expresses this object's specific criteria of persistence and individuation.

It is not even true that Jorel's son in the guise of newspaper reporter is Jorel's son in the guise of the man of steel -- even though both designate Jorel's son. In other words, when one learns that Clark Kent is superman, the conditions of designation of each term change. What "Clark Kent" means to the speaker after leaning that Clark Kent is superman is more than what it meant before.

That's true, but we could say, following Frege, that although the references of both names don't change (and still remain numerically identical to each other), the user of those names, who previously was using them with distinct senses, now comes to be able to (and indeed becomes rationally obligated) to use them both with the same Fregean sense since she can no longer rationally judge something to be truly predicated of one without her also judging it to be truly predicated of the other.

So, while "Clark Kent" is materially the same before and after the revelation, it is formally different. This is seen by examining its scope of application. Before the revelation, the speaker would not apply "Clark Kent" to Jorel's son in the guise of the man of steel, but would after the revelation.

It seems to me that you are using "materially the same" and "formally the same" roughly in the same way in which a Fregean would use "having the same reference" and "having the same sense", respectively.

I conclude that the analysis of rigid designation is defective because it it mischaracterizes what proper names refer to. They do not refer to objects, but to intelligible aspects of objects.

I am unsure how this follows since I don't hold the world (or objects) to be something other than the intelligible world (or intelligible objects). We don't have empirical or cognitive access to pure noumena.

It seems to me that this analysis is incomplete. It's surely true that Donald Trump is Donald Trump, no matter what you call him. So, if you read the terms in "Donald is Mr. Trump" formally (as referring to the person), this is simply an instance of the Principle of Identity and so necessarily true. The problem is that is not the only reading. One could read it as "The name 'Donald' refers to the same person as the name 'Mr. Trump.'" In that case, it speaks of a contingent reality, for naming conventions are contingent -- this person could well have another name, like "John Smith" -- or even "David Dennison." — Dfpolis

That's right, but the two readings of the sentence correspond to two distinct propositions. Let us suppose that Superman exists. In the office where he works, he is known as Clark Kent; and only a few people know that Superman is Clark Kent. Someone, such a Lois Lane, who knows to whom the names "Superman" and "Clark Kent" refer to, may still ignore that Superman is Clark Kent. When she is being informed (or personally figures out) that Clark Kent is Superman, she thereby comes to know that both of the sentences (1) "Clark Kent is Superman" and (2) '"Superman" and "Clark Kent" are proper names for the same person' express true propositions. However, those two sentences still express two different propositions.

One easy way to see why the two propositions are distinct is to consider the range of counterfactual conditions in which those propositions would be false. Those ranges aren't the same. (One of them is empty, if Kripke is right, but I need not even assume this here). Clearly, it might have been the case that the proper names "Superman" and "Clark Kent" conventionally refer to two different people while the person who we actually know as "Superman" would still be the person who we actually know as "Clark Kent". In other words, it might have been that Superman would have been known by different proper names, in both his public and private personae (e.g. "The Man of Steel" and "John Doe", respectively), and that "Superman" and "Clark Kent" would have been the names of two different individuals, while the person called "The Man of Steel" still would have been the same person whom many people also know, in the actual world, either as Clark Kent or as Superman (or both).

Best I can tell, a particular member is appearing under multiple screen names? Is that possible? — Jake

Only if it's true in some possible world.

Is it allowed?

Only if they share both sense and reference.

Yes, but that much is obvious from the fact that words mean things, and what they mean might be opaque to their users. Invoking a dubious notion like Fregean senses is probably not a good idea, unless this obvious fact is all one means by it. — Snakes Alive

I am unsure why you think that the notion of Fregean sense is dubious. For one thing, it appears to solve the problem that you raised for Kripke regarding the possibility that one may fully understand the meaning of "Water is H2O" and not know a priori that it is true.

What I've never seen, and it's not for want of looking, is what that field of inquiry achieves. It doesn't explain ordinary language, because people don't think in terms of possible worlds. — andrewk

It's just a modeling tool. It has a potential to mislead or confuse, especially when the processes of model construction are misconceived, or the models are abusively reified (David Lewis, I'm looking at you!) But when used properly, talk of possible worlds can help make arguments regarding modal claims explicit. As such, it can be revealing of confusions that were already in play in philosophical discourses about necessity and possibility.

One area of philosophy that I am especially interested in is the debate on free will, responsibility and determinism. Issues of necessity and possibility abound, and confusions about them are endemic. Possible worlds are being used a lot in this literature, and although the arguments that they convey can be made without reference to possible worlds, their use by the proponents of various theories about the scope of the powers of rational agents often allows one to pinpoint what the specific flaws are in their conceptions of free (or unfree) agency.

I suppose it is possible, but he would have to take the senses not to be the sort of descriptive entities that interact with the compositional semantics that they're often taken to be. — Snakes Alive

For sure. Singular senses aren't shorthands for definite descriptions. But they are quite useful in accounting for the fact that co-referential names (or co-referential natural kind terms) can be used competently by a rational thinker who can wrongly believe them not to be co-referential (or be agnostic regarding that) without being deservedly charged with irrationality.

I understand what you are saying, but it is not how I'd define "metaphysically necessary." There is no metaphysical reason a chess bishop can't move like a knight, rook or in any other way. It is merely a convention. — Dfpolis

The rules of chess indeed are arbitrary conventions but it is only thanks to those arbitrary conventions being what they are that the chess phenomena, and the chess pieces, likewise, are what they are. Chess games, and the objects that are involved in chess games, are socially constituted. There indeed are no metaphysical reasons why the rules of chess ought to be what they are, but given that they are what they are, (as they are agreed to be within some determinate community of chess players,) then, necessarily, the pieces that are being called bishops must be subjected to the normative rule that they ought to be moved along diagonals on the chess board. If they weren't thus governed, then, they might still be called "bishops", but in that case, "bishops" would designate the pieces of a different game. The sort of necessity involved can be called metaphysical since it refers to a necessary condition for the bishops of the conventional game of chess being what they are.

I don't think myself that this is the right way to put it, since if Kripke is right, 'water is H20' just means 'water is water,' and we already knew this trivial proposition a priori. What we learned, if you like, and which is genuinely contingent and a posteriori, is that all along we referred to the same thing with both these words. This is just a fact about linguistic usage (which of course may be a substantive discovery with huge implications, since we resolve what we thought were two things into the true one just by learning this). — Snakes Alive

It seems to me that Kripke can avoid this problem since although "water" and "H2O", construed as co-referential natural kind terms, have the same reference, they can still be taken to have distinct Fregean senses. Hence someone may grasp (as Frege would say) the senses of both terms and not know that "water is H2O" is true, and a fortiori not know either that it's necessarily true. It's true that Kripke thought that he was improving on Frege with his conception of proper names and of natural kind terms; but that's because he though (wrongly in my view), as many other philosophers have thought, that Frege was committed to a descriptive theory of senses. Gareth Evans and John McDowell, among others, have argued that the Fregean senses of proper names and of natural kind terms are better construed as object dependent senses or, as they're also called, singular senses.

Well that's what I'm calling into question. I might counter by saying that the term "water" refers to whatever liquid makes up the Earth's oceans and falls from the clouds as rain and that in some possible world the chemical composition of that liquid is H2O2. That water is H2O is just a contingent fact about the actual world, much like Earth being the third rock from the Sun. — Michael

In that case you are using the term "water" to refer to a general definition and hence what you are saying about water, and possibles worlds in which water had alternative chemical constitutions, doesn't really have any bearing on what Kripke (and Putnam) have said about the the semantic properties of natural kind terms, or the metaphysics of natural kinds. It is natural kind terms, and not general descriptive concepts, that are deemed by Kripke to function as rigid designators. (Putnam has further shown how this thesis dovetails with semantic externalism).

It depends on how you define "metaphysically necessary." Can you define it without invoking possible worlds semantics? If not, how can this claim be relevant to reality? — Dfpolis

Saying that something is metaphysically possible just is to say that it isn't inconsistent with the way things can be in accordance with the constitutive rules that govern how those things fall under concepts. (For instance, it is a constitutive rule of bishops, in chess, that such pieces only moves legally along diagonals; and it is a constitutive rule of the concept of a human being that it is an animal). A state of affairs is metaphysically necessary if its non-obtaining (or the negation of the statement that it obtains) isn't metaphysically possible. Under that definition, I think it can be shown that if "A" and "B" are meant to function in the way ordinary proper names are used, and they both actually name the same individual, then it is metaphysically necessary that A and B are numerically identical.

Then perhaps if we use a simpler example of an inanimate object. In another possible world the Taj Mahal was built using different materials, or at a different location, or with a different architecture. Does that make sense? Is it just a matter of stipulation that we consider them the same thing (or different things) in each possible world? — Michael

There is an interesting issue that arises here. When we talk about ways the world might have been (or possibly could have been), some features of the world as it might have been are foregrounded, while others are backgrounded, in accordance with the pragmatic point of the counterfactual albeit possible scenario being considered. It may be that possible world models for the semantics of modal statements obscure this pragmatic feature of talk of possibilities when possible worlds are reified with excessive determinacy. (This may be a reason why Lewis runs into problems that he seeks to eliminate through getting rid of backtracking conterfactuals when he analyses statements of causal dependence between events).

Consider the statement that an aircraft that has actually (and accidentally) collided with the Taj Mahal might possibly have avoided destruction if the Taj Mahal had been built 50 meter further to the West, or had been made out of a gaseous material rather than being made out of stone. We have no trouble evaluating those statements as true. While the historical location and/or material constitution of the Taj Mahal are being foregrounded, the issue of its identity are being backgrounded. This backgrounding of irrelevant features (i.e. irrelevant with respect to the pragmatic context of the consideration of the counterfactual scenarios) also allows for so called counterlegal counterfactual statements. (Counterlegal counterfactual statements are being discussed by Marc Lange in Natural Laws in Scientific Practice.)

In another context, we may inquire whether or not the Taj Mahal could, in the first place, have been built in the different location and still count (in accordance with our actual linguistic practices for naming functional artifacts of this sort) as the Taj Mahal. In that case, we may be picturing an alternate history where the builders of the actual Taj Mahal have settled for a different location, 50 meters to the West of the actual location, and inquire whether it's still numerically the same artifact that would have been built. In that case, it's the issued of the identity of the artifact that is being foregrounded. So, it may be senseless to ask the bare question whether a specification of a "world" in which the Taj Mahal has been built 50 meter further to the West than its actual location is or isn't a specification of a metaphysically possible world. Whether or not it is might be felicitously(*) taken to be a metaphysically possible world might depend on the pragmatic point of the question and hence on whether or not the issue of the identity of the Taj Mahal is meant to be foregrounded or backgrounded.

(*) I am using "felicitously" rather in the way @StreetlightX recommended in his recent thread.

What makes it the case that one thing in one possible world and one thing in another possible world are the same thing? — Michael

It's the exact same sort of thing that makes it the case that "A" and "B" are numerically the same in the actual world: criteria of identity and individuation. Those criteria vary as a function of the sorts of things that are at issue. Planets, persons, sports teams, cell lineages, ocean waves, etc., have different principles of individuation. Sometimes those principles mainly are matters of social convention but they can also be, in part, objects of scientific inquiry.

So, what makes it the case that, in the possible world where you catch the flu tomorrow, say, you are the very same individual human being than you are in the actual world (in which you don't catch the flu), is the very same principle of individuation in accordance with which we judge that, in the actual world, people don't cease to exist and their persisting bodies come to materially constitute numerically distinct human being at a later time just because they catch a bug. (Maybe there is some alien race, somewhere in the universe, where personhood conventions are different and individual organisms who catch a bug are deemed to be turned into a numerically different person or animal).

Let’s say that I’m the eldest of two brothers in the actual world and that there’s a possible world where my parents have two daughters and a possible world where my parents have two sons. Which child, if either, am I in each world? Is it simply a matter of stipulation?

There are possible worlds where your parents have two sons neither of which is you. This is equivalent to saying that it is possible that you would not have been born but that your parents would nevertheless have had two sons.

Do we simply say that I’m one or the other (or neither)?

Perhaps in the first possible world it’s me and my brother if we were female? Perhaps in the fourth possible world it’s two different children who happen to look and behave like my brother and I do in the actual world?

Your puzzle stems from the question: what it is that distinguish a possible world where a son is born to your parents that looks and behaves just like you, but isn't you, from a world in which this son is you? Those two scenarios are indeed metaphysically distinct and, what distinguished them precisely, are our ordinary criteria of identity of persons as they are meant to apply in the actual world. It's possible, though, that our criteria of identity of persons aren't fine grained enough to determine whether or not your would have been the same person if the sperm and ovum that your are issued from had combined at a different time, or if the sperm itself, say, has been a different one that accidentally shared the very same sequence of nucleotides with the actual one, etc. That just means that our ordinary concept of a person, and its associated criteria of identity and individuation, isn't meant to deal with such unlikely possibilities since there is little pragmatic point in dealing with them.

This is awesome. Please, keep going ;-)

That part of my objection is that words express concepts, so if you want to know what they mean, you have to examine the concepts in terms of the experiences that elicit them. The reason that an empirical discovery is required for the identification is that the concepts are anything but identical. — Dfpolis

As Frege pointed out, names have a sense and a reference. For a time, it has been contentious whether the Fregean senses of proper names are equivalent to definite descriptions or if they rather are object dependent (i.e. "singular senses"). Kripke has argued for the latter thesis (as have Hilary Putnam, Gareth Evans, David Wiggins, John McDowell and several others). If we accept that the senses of proper names are object dependent, that doesn't preclude them having conceptual contents as well. The objects that we name typically fall under sortal concepts that express their conditions of persistence, identity and individuation. This is all consistent with Kripke's claim that proper names function as rigid designators, and also with his claim that statements of identity of the form "A is B", where "A" and "B" are proper names, are metaphysically necessary.

If you read the full objection, you'd see that this is a rhetorical step, not the full objection. — Dfpolis

I don't understand what your full objection purports to be either. Your objection seems to rely on analyzing "Hesperus" and "Phosphorus" as definite descriptions rather than proper names. If they are thus analysed, then Kripke's remark about the metaphysical necessity of numerical identity don't apply. Kripke would readily agree that the statement "Hesperus is Phosphorus" expresses a contingent identity in the case where "Hesperus" and "Phosphorus" are shorthand expressions for definite descriptions that merely happen to have the same reference in the actual world.

Read up on it. — Snakes Alive

Yes. The SEP has a good entry on rigid designators. Another good place where to start is Gregory McCulloch's book The Game of the Name: Introducing Logic, Language, and Mind, Clarendon Press, 1994.

I am pretty confident that, given the choice between my interpretation and one involving all the metaphysical baggage of the possible worlds paradigm, that average person would say that mine is the closest to what they meant. — andrewk

That may be so but if you ask ordinary people what they mean when they say that something is possible or impossible (and not provide determinate contexts of use of those words) they aren't likely to disambiguate between different senses of 'possibility', which a somewhat more careful conceptual analysis would. The specific paradigm of use that will first come to their mind likely will orient their initial responses in a way that wouldn't match the way in which they actually use and understand those modal operators in accordance with several other paradigms of use. If you look at the arguments that Kripke adduces in Naming and Necessity -- for instance, arguments in favor of the thesis that proper names are rigid designators or that numerical identity is a metaphysically necessary relation -- most of them aren't grounded into contentious metaphysical theses but rather into ordinary intuitions and ordinary linguistic practices.

I don't agree with the notion that news reporting should not strive for objectivity. You ditch that, and then you get propaganda like Fox News in it's place. — Marchesk

I'm not sure you are disagreeing with the OP. I don't see what @hypericin is proposing as undercutting norms of trying to avoid political bias or of refraining from lying for the benefit of a hidden agenda. I rather hear him/her as arguing that the process of public news reporting can't, even in principle, be culled from the narratives that motivates the selection of the news items that are being reported as well as the gloss that is put on them.

If news media are going to report on a typhoon hitting Japan (as they often should) isn't this precisely because typhoons hitting densely populated areas fit within significant sorts of narratives on account of their destructive potential? Should news media report all, and only, "events" that result in x+ deaths (for some x)? How are they to individuate discrete events objectively and assess whether or not some events are significant enough to merit reporting merely on the basis of objective factors that don't speak to their relevance for widespread human concerns, and hence relate back to significant narratives?

A :: A is true IFF A<->A is a tautology. So if ~(A :: A) then ~(A<->A) which is a contradiction. But I wonder how one would express the contradiction so obtained? A &~A? You seem to disagree. — TheMadFool

I appreciate your separating the case of particulars from the case of propositions.

What I am unsure of is what it might mean to be denying that a proposition A is (numerically?) identical with itself. It is unclear to me that it is equivalent to denying that "A<->A" is a tautology. Maybe you are glossing "A=A" as equivalent to "A :: A", but I also am also unclear about the rationale for that. The relation of numerical identity just makes more sense to me as applied to particulars, or Fregean objects, and maybe also to Fregean functions (or properties). The issue of the individuation of propositions (either Fregean or Russellian propositions) is trickier.

My response is that it is impossible to interpret the 'est' to mean 'equals', because the equals relation is transitive and the est relation in the diagram is non-transitive. — andrewk

Either that or, as I suggested earlier, following Peter Geach, one endorses a relative conception of the relation of numerical identity between substances. I don't endorse that, myself, but I am not committed either to defend the Christian doctrine of the Trinity.

Trinities are everywhere.
The following one looks perfectly logical to me. — andrewk

Your comment may be tongue in cheek but you remark relies on interpreting "non est" as the negation of numerical identity and "est" as the copula rather than the affirmation of numerical identity.

The law of identity (A=A) is a logical necessity.

Imagine A is not A. We would then have the logical contradiction A & ~A, violating the law of non-contradiction. — TheMadFool

You seem to be using "A" as the name of a proposition rather than the name of a particular. The "=" usually names the numerical identity relation, which obtains between a particular and itself. If you use "A" as the name of a proposition, and thereby "A=A" to express the claim that the proposition A is identical with itself, then, the negation of this claim isn't expressed as "A & ~A" but rather as "~(A=A)".

What about the second part of the question. Has there been an equivalent of noneuclidean geometry in Aristotelian logic? Is the law of identity kin to euclidean axioms? Thanks for the help though, this is a complex field and its easy to think you've got a handle on things when you dont. — jlrinc

As I mentioned in another thread recently, Peter Geach has been an advocate of the thesis of relative identity. According to this thesis, two objects A and B can both be, and fail to be, identical depending on what sortal concept they are made to fall under. For instance, as applied to the Christian doctrine of Trinity; the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit can be deemed to be the same unique God but three different persons. To take a less contentious example (albeit still contentious) the original ship of Theseus might be the same functional artifact as the later ship that has been maintained thought replacing the old planks, although both of those ships aren't the same historical artifact. Under that interpretation, the ships A and B are the same functional artifacts but not the same historical artifact.

The thesis of relative identity still is very contentious. I much prefer Wiggins' thesis of the sortal dependence of identity, which, unlike Geach's thesis, remains consistent with Leibnitz' Law (of indiscernibility of identicals). Under that new thesis, while it's still true that what it is that determines whether the referents of A and B are identical is the individuation criteria associated with the sortal concept that they both fall under, objects that fall under different sortal concepts always are distinct objects. Hence, for instance, the original functional artifact and the original historical artifacts that we may both call ambiguously "the Ship of Theseus" are two different objects even though they may, at an early time in history, have occupied the same spatial location and have had the exact same material constitution. They have, though, separate later histories and aren't individuated according to the same criteria.

This I think would be an example of an effort to explain a text which seems inconsistent or unreasonable but assumed to be relating a truth. It's a kind of salvage operation. — Ciceronianus the White

That might be a fair characterization of Geach's motivation for coming up with the thesis of the relativity of identity. But that would be a bad mischaracterization of Wiggins' thesis of the sortal dependency of identity since the purpose of the latter was to disentangle the philosophical insight embodied in Geach's flawed thesis from Geach's own motivation to salvage a particular Christian doctrine.

Peter Geach, who was Elizabeth Anscombe's husband and a very fine logician-philosopher, developed his thesis of relative identity in order to account for the seeming contradiction pictured in the OP. I don't think the thesis is correct, or that the inherent contradiction pictured in the OP can be rationally resolved, but there nevertheless is an insight embodied into Geach's thesis of relative identity. This insight is salvaged by Wiggins' thesis of the sortal dependency of identity, as expounded in his brilliant Sameness and Substance (and its most recent edition: Sameness and Substance: Renewed)

Solo Voice (male) - Russell Oberlin, Bach's Canatata "Wiederstehe Doch der Sunde"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SFgxED6eIWE — gloaming

Great! I discovered this aria a couple years ago, through watching the very same YouTube video, and was blown away by the richness and boldness of the harmonies. Bach is quite the master, but this aria is remarkable even by his own standards. Few composers would dare opening a piece with such a chord for a century to come. And Gould is my favorite pianist...

Russell Oberlin's performance is quite good but I like Andreas Scholl's rendition even better.

Everything is what it is. — Michael

Wittgenstein was reportedly fond of Bishop Butler's aphorism: "Everything is what it is and not another thing".

Arguably, this isn't so much an anti-metaphysical attitude as it is a repudiation of reductive analysis. Arguably, also, Wittgenstein's own philosophical quietism can be construed as being consistent with the practices of connective analysis, and of descriptive metaphysics, in the sense Peter Strawson used those phrases.

Connected with taking methodological naturalism as a metaphysical principle, which it isn't. — Wayfarer

I concur with @StreetlightX and yourself. In line with this modern alteration of the meaning of "objective", and together with the rise of metaphysical realism (Putnam's phrase for the thesis that what exists objectively must exist entirely separately from human concerns and/or concepts), another main culprit, it seems to me, is representationalism in the philosophy of mind and in contemporary cognitive science. This is an inheritance from Descartes methodological skepticism; stemming from its underlying assumption that what it is that we really are in cognitive contact with in the world can only be the highest common factor between the way it affects us in the case where we really perceive it and the case were we are subjected to some illusion. Such common factors or cognition or perception, allegedly produced "in" the mind, taint all cognition of the world with subjectivity and problematize both the concepts of objectivity and of subjectivity. It makes it hard to conceive how the very same cognitive act could be unproblematically objective and, at the same time, necessarily imbued with human subjectivity.

Why not do it in audio? — The Great Whatever

Maybe it could be done in video with no audio. The participants would need to mime their philosophical arguments as best as they can.

The general problem would be something like this: can you improve your performance even in situations where you are unable to evaluate your past performance? — Srap Tasmaner

I don't quite understand what you mean. What are you referring to as one's "past performance"? Is that the amount of money in one's envelope before one has been offered the opportunity to switch?

What I'm saying is that there is no real-world component present in the OP. You can use real-world examples to illustrate some properties, but that is all you can do. Illustrate. The OP itself is purely theoretical. — JeffJo

That's what I'm saying too.