Kripke's Naming and Necessity: a Second Look
joseph agassi
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Abstract
Saul Kripke's study of the truth conditions for modal and for subjunctive conditional statements is meant to validate essentialism. To this end he develops his rigid theory of rigid designators, and he enlists the service of normal intuition. Even were his argument valid, his conclusion is unacceptable since language and intuition are flexible and open-ended, and since essentialist expressions ordinarily serve as mere metaphors.
Key takeaways
- Still, we have only excluded one move in the study of the possible rigidity of a rigid designator; more is needed if we are to be clear about the matter: how are we to decide the meanings of subjunctive conditional and modal statements in ordinary parlance?
- Were the constraint on permissible substitution lax, then all permissible statements of the possibility of a state of affair, and all such subjunctive conditionals would be true as a matter of course, since there will always be a substitute that renders their (consistent) declarative associates true.
- These last two labels are indeed synonymous: they were introduced in the classical text Symbolic Logic of Lewis and Langford to designate conditional statements whose antecedents are false, and which are thus obviously true; Kripke's problem concerns the meanings and the truth-conditions of subjunctive conditionals.
- The merit of Kripke's work is that by entering a marginal area of language, that of the truth conditions of subjunctive conditionals, he manages to raise quite a number of traditional questions, and he also succeeds to throw new light on them.
- Kripke's study shows that we may view these axiom systems as open-ended, so that Lakatos was in error in thinking that axiomatization is of necessity closure.
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