I reject the suggestion on those grounds alone. — creativesoul

It appears our positions are irreconcilable on that particular point.

Well, it's a matter of what such rudimentary thought and belief are capable of actually having as their content... — creativesoul

I can't see grounds for your objection here. The toddler will understand a concept that we would express as 'that thing over there' from the gesture and that's all that's needed. They only need the concept, not the words for it, and my fairly wide experience of toddlers is that they do understand the concept.

I object to the idea that definite descriptions are not existentially dependent upon naming practices. — creativesoul

How do you account for a reference to 'The man next to the window with champagne in his glass', which appears to be a DD that does not use proper names?

Let's assume that, unlike in the example in N&N, I can see the bubbles and colour and so can be confident that the glass contains neither white wine nor sparkling water or other carbonated soft drink.

I don't see why not. The toddler would not have those specific words, but they would have thoughts that roughly equate to those words or to something similar such as 'That to which I am gesturing...' I suspect the understanding of elementary gestures is built-in rather than learned.

Certainly there is a question as to whether a DD has to be verbal. Usually we think of it as verbal, because, courtesy of Russell, we are used to examples such as 'the first chancellor of Germany' or 'the author of Waverley', but I see no need for it to be verbal.

When you select text, where does the 'Quote' button appear?

I ask because I have a new observation. On one of my computers (Linux Mint), on both Firefox and Chromium, the 'Quote' button appears next to the selected text, and it doesn't matter in which direction the text was selected.

On another one (different version of Linux Mint), the same happens for Chromium but, on Firefox, the Quote button appears at top right of the window and the direction of selection matters. It appears that Chrome/Chromium are the most reliable browsers in this regard. But not everybody has or is able to get them on their computer (eg if the use doesn't have admin permissions).

So here is my latest theory:

• For some combinations of browsers and OSs the Quote button appears next to the selected text and for others it appears at top right of window. When it appears next to the selected text, both directions of text selection work. But when it appears at top right, only selection from top to bottom works.

I think on my work computer, where Quote most often fails, the button appears at top right. I'll test that tomorrow.

If the theory is right then the simple rule might be that, whenever the Quote function fails, try it again with the text selected from top to bottom and see if that fixes it.

Descriptive practices are not necessary for all cases of successful reference. Can someone who has never used descriptive practices point and name? Yes! Pointing to an individual thing and saying it's name aloud is more than adequate for successful reference. — creativesoul

This is in accordance with what seems to be the usual way to characterise things, which is that ostension is different from DD. But recently I've been wondering whether ostension is just a subcategory of DD.

Could it be that the act of pointing when naming something is a non-verbal way of communicating the words:

. . 'The first object that is intercepted by the line indicated by my finger is named.....'

That seems reasonable to me, and works for cases where the object is Tarzan, Jane or a dog, in which cases the only verbal output is 'Tarzan', 'Jane' or 'dog'. [my memory suddenly decides to inform me it is 'Me Tarzan' and 'You Jane', but let's ignore the Me and You for now]

If we accept this account, then the speech act contains the DD

'The first object that is intercepted by the line indicated by my finger'

and so it involves use of a descriptive practice and it becomes hard to think of a naming practice that does not rely on a descriptive practice.

Yes, do you know in which lectures he proceeds to talk about empty names and fictional entities like Santa Claus — Wallows

Santa Claus is mentioned on pages 93 and 97. But it's just a hit-and-run reference. Nothing of any depth is said about what connotations 'Santa Claus' has and how it works given its emptiness.

While on p93, I was reminded of this bit, which proponents of the view that Kripke proved descriptivism 'wrong' would do well to read and consider:

Haven't I been very unfair to the description theory? Here I have stated it very precisely - more precisely, perhaps, than it has been stated by any of its advocates. So then it's easy to refute. Maybe if I tried to state mine with sufficient precision in the form of six or seven or eight theses, it would also turn out that when you examine the theses one by one, they will all be false. — N&N p93

Kripke goes on from there to try to justify this unfairness (lack of charity, as I pointed out on about page 1), but all he can offer is that descriptivism 'seems to be wrong' and Kripke's approach 'seems to' be 'better'. Seems to whom? To Kripke of course.

I think he does both. Consider the following:

There is no reason why we cannot stipulate that, in talking about what would have happened to Nixon in a certain counterfactual situation, we are talking about what would have happened to him. — N&N p44

The italics on 'him' show that the additional stipulation to which Kripke is referring is that the protagonist in this alternate world, who loses the election, is Nixon. The stipulation is neither by name nor by DD, as both of those may be different in the alternate world. It is by mental pointing.

I don't find it surprising that we reach different conclusions about passages like this though. I find Kripke's writing alarmingly rambling and unclear, for somebody that is thought of as an analytic philosopher.

What do you mean? What else could we possible use as a standard, as ground, upon which to build our position, if not for how we do it in this world? — creativesoul

My understanding of Kripke's position is that he believes we use stipulation. We mentally point at an individual in the alternate world and stipulate 'this one is Nixon'. See page 44.

That is not my position. But as far as I can tell it appears to be Kripke's.

Whatever he thinks about them, he didn't say in N&N. See footnote on first page of lecture 1 where he specifically says he won't cover them, and also the following:

I expect to elaborate on [the content of these lectures] elsewhere, in a forthcoming work discussing the problems of existential statements, empty names, and fictional entities. — N&N p158

It seems to me that the closest he comes is on p31, where he contemplates what to make of references to Moses, if there never had been a Moses.

We look at this world and see whether X identifies a unique individual in it. But that tells us nothing to do with whether X would pick out a unique individual, no individuals, or multiple individuals, in an alternate world.

That determination of sufficiency for picking out Nixon in an alternate world scenario is always and only established by whether or not the actual language expression being used to refer to Nixon successfully picks Nixon out of this world to the exclusion of all others. If it successfully picks out Nixon to the exclusion of all others in this world, then it most certainly is sufficient for picking Nixon out in a possible world scenario. — creativesoul

Could you elaborate on why you think that?

Consider the following: let us suppose that in this world Nixon was the only Republican politician that was born in California in 1913, was a male second child, and was on the House Un-American Activities Committee. That is a DD that uniquely picks out Nixon in this world.

What is to stop us from considering an alternate world in which two different people satisfy that DD, and we stipulate that one of them is our Nixon?

You might find it a curious case of Jesus exists in all possible worlds, having the definite description of being the Son of God, further being of greater import than the name "Jesus" as a rigid designator in our world. What do you make of an entity that only attains its meaning or import by the definite description that is rigid in all possible worlds?

The name 'Jesus' is not generally regarded as meaning the Son of God. Christians use the name 'Christ' to refer to the (believed to be) Son of God. 'Jesus' is the name of a man that is said to have existed in Palestine during the reign of Augustus. The statement 'Jesus is Christ' could be said to be the core belief of Christianity.

So using the name 'Jesus', even if used in a way that is intended to make it rigidly designate, does not carry with it implicit propositions about the existence and nature of God. It just refers to a historical figure that some people believe was God/Christ.

Some ancient historians suggest that there may have been no single historical Jesus of Nazareth, and that the stories of him may be an amalgam of stories about a number of different holy men of that era. It is a minority view, but even its possibility raises the question of possible worlds in which Jesus of Nazareth did not exist. Kripke touches on this type of possibility on p29 in relation to Aristotle:

Also we may raise the question whether a name has any reference at all when we ask, e.g., whether Aristotle ever existed. It seems natural here to think that what is questioned is not whether this thing (man) existed. Once we've got the thing, we know that it existed. What really is queried is whether anything answers to the properties we associate with the name-in the case of Aristotle, whether any one Greek philosopher produced certain works, or at least a suitable number of them. — N&N p29

I've never really got transcendental arguments. It may be my attention span. They tend to take so long that I just lose track and then at the end it says 'and therefore we have proven X by the transcendental argument', and I just go 'Did we? Oh, damn, I missed it again!'

So, the "male second child of the people that are parents of Nixon in our world" would not necessarily have been the same person we call 'Nixon' even if he had been named the same.

And this raises the point as to whether it could be coherent at all to say that Nixon could have been any entity other than the entity he was. — Janus

For me this is a key difficulty with Kripke - possibly the main one.

I am dubious about whether it makes sense to say that somebody that differs from Nixon in even the slightest way 'is' Nixon in another world. The Nixon of 1971 to whom Kripke referred would have been shaped by his victory in 1968 and the events that followed from that. So to imagine 'him' as not having won in '68 seems questionable. For me it makes more sense to say we are imagining an alternate version of Nixon.

I can live with the discomfort there as long as there is a shared past that is identical up to some point, probably because that is essentially the same framework as the Everett many-worlds hypothesis, with which I have been familiar for much longer than I have with Kripke.

But when we get to differences that do not allow any period of shared past - such as Nixon having a different mother - I think it becomes ridiculous to refer to the alternate as 'the same person'. Rather, I think of it as 'the person in the alternate world that shares a specified set S of uniquely identifying properties with OUR Nixon'.

Kripke appears to me to want to say that the versions in the alternate worlds are 'the same person', and to reject as unintuitive the notion that it is a similar person. He does this by using phrases like 'what if this man had lost the election', always with the 'this' italicised as if those italics somehow cut through the fog of uncertainty surrounding the reference in the possible worlds context (it doesn't, for me at least).

For me the 'similar person' approach is far more intuitive and the statement that it is 'the same person' seems at best meaningless and at worst repellent.

It seems to be a matter of feel rather than of proof. That is certainly the yardstick Kripke takes, as he repeatedly refers to what he finds 'intuitive'. All I can say is that in key cases my intuitions seem to be opposite to his - and he notes that his intuitions are different to those of philosophers that went before him.

Perhaps a counterfactual about Nixon can be characterised in this way:

We focus on what things we wish to consider being different about Nixon, with everything else remaining the same if it does not create a logical contradiction. It will be relevant to consider whether the things that remain the same are sufficient to pick out Nixon in the alternate world.

Counterfactual 1: Would Nixon have retired from politics if he'd lost the 1968 election?

For that, a bunch of necessary properties could be everything that was true of our Nixon up to one week after he received the Republican nomination. It turns out that those properties are also sufficient in this counterfactual, as the only thing we are interested in varying about Nixon is his winning the 1968 election. So it's easy to make a DD that is necessarily true in all possible worlds of the counterfactual. Note that the only way this Nixon could be called something other than 'Nixon' in the alternate worlds would be if he changed his name between receiving the Rep nomination and the date of the presidential election.

This 'splitting time' approach doesn't work if we want to change something that happened before Nixon was conceived. So let's consider:

Counterfactual 2: 'If Nixon's parents had been living in Nevada when he was conceived, would he still have entered politics?'

The thing we want to change is the parents' residence at a point in time. Implicitly, we want to keep as much as possible up to the moment of conception the same as in this world because otherwise we have no basis for determining who represents our Nixon in the alternate world. So for instance we could require the world to match this up to the date of Nixon's older sibling being born. Then we require that the parents moved to Nevada some time between then and the time their second child was born. If that child was a boy, that is the representative of our Nixon, and he is uniquely identified by being the second son of parents that are uniquely picked out by virtue of sharing the same past as OUR Nixon's parents, up to the birth of their first child.

So even though this second counterfactual involves changes before Nixon began, there are DDs that uniquely identify him, and hence are rigid across all possible worlds under consideration in the counterfactual.

Where it gets trickier still is where we change something that extends indefinitely far into the past, for instance changing one of his parents. We consider:

Counterfactual 3: 'I wonder whether Nixon would have become a Republican if his mother had been the daughter of a freed slave.'
[I'm not suggesting that would be unlikely. After all Lincoln was a Republican]

In this case his entire ancestry on his mother's side is different, so the differences from this world go back indefinitely far. However I think we can still uniquely pick him out. We establish a DD that rigidly designates Nixon's father, and then identify Nixon, in all possible worlds under consideration, as the male second child of that man. Worlds where the father does not have a second child that is a boy are not accessible.

Now I don't think we necessarily need to find a DD in order to refer to Nixon in these alternate worlds. We have specified what properties we want to be different and, as long as it seems likely that that leaves enough scope for properties that are the same to uniquely identify him, we can take the existence of such a set of properties (a DD) as assumed and go on to refer to the person in the alternate world as 'Nixon'. What we mean by that is 'the unique individual in the alternate world that satisfies some DD that also uniquely picks out Nixon in our world'.

Now to the extreme:

Counterfactual 4: 'If Nixon had been a golf ball, would he have thought that a rapprochement with China was a good idea?'.
[One of Nixon's great achievements was bringing China back into the community of nations by visiting there]

The alternate world for this is going to have to be very different from ours, because it has to have golf balls that are not only sentient, but sophisticated enough to have opinions on international relations. There is nothing logically impossible about such a thing, however bizarre it might be. The difficulty will be in establishing the connection between the golf ball Nixon and OUR Nixon. What about if pregnant women gave birth either to humans or sentient golf balls? - again bizarre but not logically impossible! Then we can fix Nixon by having him be the second child of the parents of OUR Nixon.

So even in the golf ball example we can, with sufficient imagination, establish an alternate world that is like ours in sufficient respects that a DD exists that picks out a single item in both that world and this. In this world that item is Nixon and, in the alternate worlds under consideration, that second child was a sentient golf ball.

TLDR version: I don't think we need to explicitly identify a DD that is shared by alternate versions of our protagonist. We just need to be reasonably confident that there would be one. I think in most realistic cases it will be very easy to identify one, given the full details of the counterfactual or hypothetical - eg the male second child of the people that are parents of Nixon in our world.

Yes it does or your counterfactual talk will be nonsense. I am saying that the individual must be stipulated, not discovered, (I didn't use the latter term, and how could we discover anything counterfactual or merely possible?) to have some attributes the same across possible worlds, otherwise the counterfactual thinking would be incoherent. — Janus

Kripke agrees that the individual must have some shared attributes:

If we can't imagine a possible world in which Nixon doesn't have a certain property, then it's a necessary condition of someone being Nixon. Or a necessary property of Nixon that he [has] that property. For example, supposing Nixon is in fact a human being, it would seem that we cannot think of a possible counterfactual situation in which he was, say, an inanimate object; perhaps it is not even possible for him not to have been a human being. Then it will be a necessary fact about Nixon that in all possible worlds where he exists at all, he is human or anyway he is not an inanimate object. — N&N p46

These are necessary properties under Kripke's approach. Where he departs from the DD approach is that he says we don't have to have necessary and sufficient properties in order to pick out the individual in the alternative worlds. The picking out from amongst objects that have the necessary properties is done by stipulation. The stipulation is not by attributes but by mental ostension. We point our mental finger towards the group of objects selecting the necessary conditions, select one and say 'this one is Nixon'.

When I first read this a while back I didn't spend much time on it. I thought it just didn't sound like a helpful way to think about things, and moved on. But given the length of this thread and the passion displayed herein, I'm trying to be charitable. It still sounds to me like an odd way to proceed, but I will reflect on it and see if it starts to appear any more appealing.

Well, if you'd read the book, you'd know this weren't true, and that Kripke does address this question precisely! — Snakes Alive

If you had read my post, you would have seen that it was specifically about my experience from reading the book. If you have a different experience, that includes finding a spot where Kripke specifies an accessibility relation, all you need do is point to that spot.

The fact that you chose to hurl insults instead suggests that you have not found such a spot.

The same applies to your claim that it has been discussed in this 52-page long thread.

I think part of the confusion that emanates from N&N is that, so far as I have been able to see, Kripke fails to specify an accessibility relation for the set of possible worlds that are under consideration. Without such a relation, there is no limit to the possible worlds that can be considered, so we end up having to allow silly things like 'if Nixon were a golf ball...'

Specifying an accessibility relation is an indispensable part of any exercise in modal logic, so Kripke's failure to do this is hard to fathom. Talk of possible worlds without a specified accessibility relation is doomed to make no sense.

The accessibility relation I use to make sense of counterfactuals and hypotheticals is that all the worls, including this one, must be identical up to a 'splitting time' T2. That provides a clear, objective means of determining reference and rigidity.

I'd like to consider alternative accessibility relations. Perhaps Kripke does choose one somewhere, and I missed it. If so, I'd be grateful if somebody that has spotted it could point it out. @Wallows did you spot an accessibility relation in the text?

So, we haven't really covered the necessity part of Kripke's book. Or did I sleep through it? — Wallows

Did you have a particular part in mind? The concept of necessity is used in most parts of the book except some passages in lectures 2 and 3. It is used most heavily in the middle part of lecture 1, p34ff in my version, where he discusses the relationship between 'necessary' and a priori. Is that the bit you meant?

Hmm, Quote is not working again. It's so intermittent.

Kripke's view is that there's a set of all possible worlds. That set has as its members every way the world could be. Each member is along the lines of saying "It is possible that..."

Do you have a ref for that? A problem with N&N is that it's very verbose and lacks clear, concise definitions. Which is one of the reasons it is so open to many different interpretations. A bit like Kant's CPR.

The genesis of this sub-thread was a comment by Janus about the use of DDs and when they rigidly designate. The response - I forget by whom - was that that was somehow inconsistent, and a possible counterexample was provided. To say that a response to that is not consistent with the way Kripke likes to do things misses the mark. The accusation was that the statement about DDs fails tout court, not just when playing by Kripke's rules.

If one wants to demolish descriptivism, one has to do it by rules and definitions that are generally accepted, not by rules that are only applicable within Kripke's theory.

That's why it's so important to distinguish between the positive and negative cases. In the positive case, Kripke is proposing a view of the world, and is free to set whatever rules he likes, as long as it is comprehensible and internally consistent. But the negative case - the attack on descriptivism - needs to play by rules and definitions that would be accepted by any philosopher, in phil of language or modal logic generally.

It has been suggested above that the positive and negative cases are inextricably intertwined. I don't agree. The motivation for the direction the positive case takes may lie in the things Kripke doesn't like about descriptivism. But that doesn't mean that the internal consistency or comprehensibility of his causal theory rely in any way on the success of his negative case.

In what way?

If you have a coherent, polite question to ask I will be happy to answer it.

No, because that's how possible worlds work

If you mean the Rep candidate was a different Richard Milhouse Nixon, then that world is not accessible in this counterfactual because the change occurs before the split. If you want to consider a situation where our Nixon was not the 1968 Rep candidate, that's a different counterfactual, hence a different set of possible worlds and a different DD will be needed.

But all modal logic depends on what is the case in this world — Janus

the former is false; not all possible worlds are counterfactual. — unenlightened

I think DDs in hypotheticals are covered by the same method as DDs in counterfactuals, and the splitting time for the possible worlds becomes the present, rather than some date prior to a fact that is being countered.

Consider the hypothetical:

'I wonder whether unenlightened will go to Asda tomorrow'

If I were to think this (although I always thought of you as more of a Waitrose person :razz: ) I would associate the name unenlightened with a DD like:

'The member of TPF that was an admin on the old forum, has a knack for composing pithy, memorable sayings that find their way onto the TPF facebook page, likes Krishnamurti and, despite his enormous literacy and intelligence, has worked as a janitor'.

That fixes the ref to you in this world and is the same across the ensemble of alternative possible worlds that are under consideration when we contemplate if you will go shopping tomorrow.

This doesn't work, because in your example, the description is still not rigid. We might imagine a counterfactual scenario where another man named Nixon won the 1968 election, in which case we'd be referring to him using the counterfactual. — Snakes Alive

No, because the referent of the DD was the Republican candidate. If the Dem candidate was named Peter Nixon, or even Richard Milhouse Nixon, that person would not be the referent of the DD.

if you have to throw up your hands and say that 'they are rigid, except when they aren't,' you don't have a theory. — Snakes Alive

Fair enough. And thank you. I like a stimulating challenge. Perhaps my last post was a little lazy.

Let's see then. How about this:

A DD is a rigid designator in a counterfactual that splits at time T2, iff it picks out a unique object X in the real world, based only on events that have occurred up to T2.

Note that the rigidity can be assessed by looking only at this world and the split time for the counterfactual. It is not necessary to look at the other possible worlds to determine rigidity.

With this definition, in the counterfactual:

'If the South successfully split from the Union, the president of the United States at the end of the 19th century would have governed a smaller territory.'

the DD 'the president of the United States at the end of the 19th century' is not rigid because the split must occur before the end of 1865, and it is not possible to pick out in 1865 the winner of the last POTUS election in the 19th century (unless we assume superdeterminism, in which case a can of worms large enough to derail all existing theories of reference is opened).

But in the counterfactual:

'I wonder whether, if the man called Richard Milhouse Nixon, who contested the 1968 POTUS election as the Republican candidate, had lost that election, he would have given up politics and joined the circus'

the DD 'the man called Richard Milhouse Nixon, who contested the 1968 POTUS election as the Republican candidate' is rigid because the split must occur after Nixon was nominated the Republican candidate, and the DD picks him out uniquely at any time from then on.

That seems to work.

PS Thinking about this and the last few posts has helped me realise that Kripke's notion of rigidity is quite useful. I had previously not seen the point of it. So score one for Kripke.

If we say if the South successfully split from the Union, the president of the United States at the end of the 19th century would have governed a smaller territory. Here the definite description does not depend in any way upon who was the president of the United States at which time in the actual world – only in the counterfactual scenario. — Snakes Alive

Yes, I think that, rather than 'all refs in counterfactuals are fixed in this world' it is 'all refs in counterfactuals that are rigid designators across the set of possible worlds under consideration are fixed in this world'.

The key for a rigid designator is that it picks out a unique individual at the time in which the possible worlds split for the counterfactual, and hence it continues to pick out corresponding versions of that unique individual in each of the possible worlds after the splitting time.

'POTUS at end of 19th C' is not a rigid designator for a counterfactual that splits in 1863, whereas 'The man named Richard Milhouse Nixon who was VPOTUS under Eisenhower' is a rigid designator for a counterfactual that splits in 1967, and 'The country called Albania' is a rigid designator for any counterfactual that splits at any time between when people first started calling it Albania and the present.

I think it would be hard to specify a concise rule for which designators in a counterfactual must be rigid. But I also suspect that in any given counterfactual, it will be easy to point out which designators of interest have to be rigid.

Yes, I would like to move on to that too.

I don't agree. But if that is your view then rebutting assertions of his claim that descriptivism fails are squarely on topic and belong in this thread.

It's up to you. If you want to accentuate the positive and move on to lecture 3 and his positive proposals, great. If you want to accentuate the negative and harp on about why all non-Kripkeans, and especially descriptivists, are wrong, expect rebuttal.

Take what to a different thread? Did you not read my last sentence?

You're straying again from the descriptivist's claims — frank

No, I am straying from the claims that Kripke attributes to descriptivists. Kripke doesn't get to rule on what those claims are. I have said from the start that Kripke misrepresents the descriptivist position.

Shall we drop discussion of the attack on descriptivism and focus only on Kripke's positive program?

I'm getting the impression this discussion isn't valuable to any of us. — frank

I can only speak for myself, but it's been valuable for me.

My prior impression, based only really on the text and secondary sources, was that Kripke's purported demonstration of the failure of descriptivism fails itself, and that his causal theory was of no interest because it is too laden down with arcane metaphysical baggage.

Having the opportunity to discuss it with some real-life Kripke enthusiasts, as well as sceptics, has done two things - on the one hand given me a better sense of just where the attempted demolition of descriptivism fails, and on the other, made me appreciate some of the aims of Kripke's positive program, and the features of his causal theory that some philosophers find attractive.

I think it's essential to make a distinction between the negative and positive parts of N&N. The positive parts set out his causal theory, which is an admirable thing to do. It's a theory with some very nice aspects, and there's room for plenty of different theories of language (as previously stated, my favourite is Wittgenstein's). The negative side essentially says 'and all other theories are wrong'. I have plenty of sympathy for the positive side, and none at all for the negative side. The discussion only keeps getting dragged back to the negative side when people fail to distinguish between the attack on descriptivism and the outlining of the causal theory.

If people only want to focus on the latter, that's great. I probably won't have much to say about it, but will enjoy reading and thinking about it. But every time there's a 'that's why DDs don't work' or 'that's why descriptivism is wrong' comment, that takes the discussion off topic, if the topic is examination of the causal theory.

But it was never a necessary property. — frank

It is necessary in the collection of possible worlds being considered, which is those that split from this at time T2 that is between the naming of the country and the opening of its borders. That's why the question of 'accessibility' of worlds is important. The name 'Albania' is a necessary property of the country in the set of all worlds that are accessible in this particular counterfactual. For a different counterfactual, there would be a different splitting time, and the name may not be a necessary property in the set of accessible worlds for that counterfactual.

To consider a counterfactual and the associated set of possible worlds without taking account of the properties that held at the splitting point can lead only to confusion.

On the other hand, if one wants to argue that the splitting point is irrelevant then those worlds have nothing to do with this one and there is no basis at all for saying that an object in one of those worlds 'is' or "isn't" the 'same' object as in this world. It is only the state at the splitting point that connects the different versions of the object.

The Modal Argument is simple: descriptivism fails because descriptions aren't usually synonymous with names because they're usually contingent properties.

Since Albania didn't have to be called that, it's a contingent property of Albania. — frank

I covered that issue in this post.

I'll expand on it here in the hope of bridging the gap.

A DD is applicable at a point in time. To include 'was POTUS' in a DD of Nixon would be invalid in 1940 but valid in 1980. When we wish to consider counterfactuals in relation to event E at time T3, that concerns object X, we choose time T2 that is before T3 but after the beginning of X (T1).

Next we select a DD that would have been valid at T2 and uniquely identifies X at that time.

We then consider the set of possible worlds that branched from this one at time T2. Those are our counterfactuals concerning X and E.

All properties of the DD that we used for X are necessary in that set of possible worlds because they were valid at T2 and everything that was true at T2 in this world is true in all the other worlds.

In the case of an event in Albania, say the opening of its borders, we backtrack to a time T2 before that event, and find a DD that was valid at that time. If T2 is before the country was named Albania, we cannot use 'The country named Albania' as a DD in this counterfactual exercise. However, if the event is the opening of its borders (eg the counterfactual might be 'If Albania had not opened its borders, would it still be communist?'), that was after adopting the name Albania, so the name is necessary, not contingent. If the event is earlier, we'd need to use a different DD such as 'the region bounded by ... mountains, ... rivers and the Mediterranean sea'.

Summary: arguments against DDs that don't take account of their period of validity are invalid.

There are all sorts of statements that I know are true but cannot be proven by any means. — creativesoul

What would be an example of such a statement?

The reason I post this is that it seems to me that the most honorable profession one can have is being a doctor or surgeon. — Wallows

Really? More honorable than a commercial airline pilot that holds the lives of up to 500 people in her hands as she brings a plane in to land? More honorable than the biologist that develops a new antibiotic for resistant bacteria, that will save millions of lives? More honorable than the politician that puts their career on the line to try to abolish slavery. More honorable than the engineer that ensures that the bridge that has several hundred people crossing it at any point in time will not collapse? More honorable than the the police officer that puts her life on the line to stop a white supremacist that is driving their car into people near a mosque?

Being a doctor is a great job, and a very rewarding profession. It is also very handsomely rewarded. Some doctors are very caring. Some are not at all. And notwithstanding the many TV shows and movies about it, it is not more important than many other professions, nor does it have more lives depending on it.

I was trying to illustrate that we all make some value judgment on another person's actions. — chatterbears

I suspect that may be correct. But judging actions is not the same as judging a person. I don't think we all go on to judge other people and think ourselves superior or inferior.

I look at some actions of other people, and those include eating meat, and think that I hope I would not do such a thing because I consider it wrong. I look at the actions of different other people and think how good they seem to me - much better than I feel I could bring myself to do.

But that doesn't mean I condemn the first person, or worship the second. Nobody is perfect, and even people's notions of 'perfect' vary. Nor is anybody completely flawed.

If you know it's true, should be able to prove that. You cannot, so it makes no sense to say "It's also true" unless you prefix it by "I believe that...". But if you do that, it adds nothing to the previous sentence. So it's best to stop at "Of course I believe that."