1 Rigid Designation and Semantic Structure

2007

Rigid designation' is Kripke's name for a concept that has been in the air at least since the development of quantified modal logics: (a token of)  a designator is rigid if and only if it designates the same individual in every possible world in which the individual exists. Two seminal conclusions for which Kripke (, ) argues are that proper names are rigid designators, and that there are some deep semantic anities between proper names and various sorts of general terms. However, even though he does, at places, explicitly attribute rigidity to certain general terms,  Kripke nowhere gives a definition of rigidity that applies to general terms. This presents a challenge: Precisely which general terms ought to be classified as rigid designators? More fundamentally: What should we take the criterion for rigidity to be for general terms? There is a considerable sub-literature, stretching back

Ratio, 2003

Frege's thesis that each singular term has a sense that determines its reference and serves as its cognitive value has come to be widely doubted. Saul Kripke argued that since names are rigid designators, their referents are not determined by senses. David Kaplan has argued that the rigid designation of indexical terms entails that they also lack referent-determining senses. Kripke's argument about names and Kaplan's argument about indexical terms differ, but each contains a false premise. The referents of both names and indexical terms are determined by reflexive senses. It is reflexive sense that makes these terms rigid designators.

2012

Philosophical Studies, 2006

According to Scott Soames' Beyond Rigidity, there are two important pieces of unfinished business left over from Saul Kripke's influential Naming and Necessity. 1 Soames reads Kripke's arguments about names as primarily negative, that is, as proving that names don't have a meaning expressible by definite descriptions or clusters of them. The famous Kripkean doctrine that names are rigid designators is really only part of the negative case. The thesis that names refer to the same object with respect to every possible world is a byproduct of their meaning, not a positive account of what they mean. As well, the hints about causal chains and dubbings are no more than a picture, as Kripke says, and not a positive theory of meaning. Thus one piece of unfinished business, to which Soames devotes the most attention, is to give a positive account of the meanings of names. To do this Soames proposes that the meaning of a singular term is the contribution it makes to the semantic content of the sentences in which it occurs. The semantic content of a sentence is ordinarily a proposition, that proposition expressed by the most commonly intended assertion using the sentence. Soames' proposal for a positive account is that the meaning of a proper name is its contribution to those propositions, simply the object to which it refers. Arguing for this positive account occupies the bulk of the book but I will not discuss it in my contribution to this symposium. The second piece of unfinished business is to give an account of the meaning of kind terms which will explain Kripke's remarks that, like proper names, natural kind terms are ''rigid designators''. Soames argues that unlike the case of proper names, the notion of rigid designation does not readily

Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, 2005

In this paper I argue that questions about the semantics of rigid designation are commonly and illicitly run together with distinct issues, such as questions about the metaphysics of essence and questions about the theoretical legitimacy of the possible-worlds framework. I discuss in depth two case studies of this phenomenon-the first concerns the relation between rigid designation and reference, the second concerns the application of the notion of rigidity to general terms. I end by drawing out some conclusions about the relations between rigid designation, semantic frameworks, reference, and essence.

The fact that natural language proper names are rigid designators is an empirical discovery about natural language. However, unlike other empirical discoveries about language made in the past few decades, it is one which has been taken to have great philosophical significance. One reason for this is that it helped simplify the formal semantical representation of ordinary modal discourse. But the central reason is that the discovery threatens a certain picture of the content of names, the descriptive picture, upon which a great deal of philosophy was premised.

Nous, 2019

Kripke (1980) hypothesizes a link between rigidity and scope: a singular term is rigid over a space S of possibilities just in case it is scopeless with respect to modals that quantify over S. Kripke's hypothesis works well when we consider the interaction of singular terms with metaphysical modals, but runs into trouble when we consider the interaction of singular terms with epistemic modals. After describing the trouble in detail, and considering one non-solution to it, I develop a novel version of dynamic semantics that resolves the problem.

SATS - Northern European Journal of Philosophy, Volume 13, Issue 2: 116–127, 2012

Although it is commonly denied that the semantic principles of rigid designation and direct reference have essentialist implications it is still common to assume that the principles imply the necessity of identity. Previous attempts to combine rigidity and contingent identity have, accordingly, involved several controversial semantic or metaphysical claims. In this article, however, it is argued that rigidity and the necessity of identity are logically independent principles. Both are needed to derive the data usually claimed to be evidence for the idea that names are rigid designators; thus, there may be little motivation for combining rigidity with contingent identity. The fact that rigidity can consistently be combined with contingent identity shows, importantly, that no non-trivial metaphysical implications can be derived from the semantic principles of rigidity and direct reference alone.

Theoria, 2012

This article systematically challenges Kripke's modal argument and Soames's defence of this argument by arguing that, just like descriptions, names can take narrow or wide scopes over modalities, and that there is a big difference between the wide scope reading and the narrow scope reading of a modal sentence with a name. Its final conclusions are that all of Kripke's and Soames's arguments are untenable due to some fallacies or mistakes; names are not "rigid designators"; if there were rigid designators, description(s) could be rigidified to refer fixedly to objects; so names cannot be distinguished in this way from the corresponding descriptions. A descriptivist account of names is still correct; and there is no justification for Kripke's theory of rigid designation and its consequences.

Análisis Filosófico, 2009

In his paper “Rigid Application”, Michael Devitt defends a particular version of the socalled ‘essentialist conception’ of rigidity for general terms, according to which rigid general terms are rigid appliers, namely, terms that if they apply to an object in any possible world then they apply to that object in every possible in which the object exists. Devitt thinks that the thereby defined notion of rigidity makes for an adequate extension to general terms of Kripke’s notion, originally defined for singular ones, inasmuch as it serves to accomplish its same primary task: namely, “to distinguish terms that are not covered by a description theory from ones that are”. He then criticizes the alternative