Naming and Necessity is a 1980 book with the transcript of three lectures given by the philosopher Saul Kripke at Princeton University in 1970. In them, he deals with the debates over proper names in the philosophy of language and claims to refute Immanuel Kant's classical assumption that all necessary truth is known a priori. The transcript was brought out originally in 1972 in Semantics of Natural Language, edited by Donald Davidson and Gilbert Harman. Among analytic philosophers, Naming and Necessity is widely considered one of the most important philosophical works of the 20th century. The title is a reference to Rudolf Carnap's book Meaning and Necessity, which, like Naming and Necessity, is about semantics and modal logic.
Overview Language is a primary concern of analytic philosophers, particularly the use of language to express concepts and to refer to individuals. In Naming and Necessity, Kripke considers several questions that are important within analytic philosophy:
How do names refer to things in the world? (the problem of intensionality) Are all statements that can be known a priori necessarily true, and are all statements that are known a posteriori contingently true? Do objects (including people) have any essential properties? What is the nature of identity? How do natural kind terms refer and what do they mean? Kripke's three lectures constitute an attack on descriptivist theories of proper names. Kripke attributes variants of descriptivist theories to Gottlob Frege, Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and John Searle, among others. According to descriptivist theories, proper names either are synonymous with descriptions or have their reference determined by virtue of the name's being associated with a description or cluster of descriptions that an object uniquely satisfies. Kripke rejects both these kinds of descriptivism. He gives several examples purporting to render descriptivism implausible as a theory of how names get their reference determined (e.g., surely Aristotle could have died at age two and so not satisfied any of the descriptions we associate with his name, and yet still have been Aristotle). As an alternative, Kripke outlines a causal theory of reference, according to which a name refers to an object by virtue of a causal connection with the object as mediated through communities of speakers. He points out that proper names, in contrast to most descriptions, are rigid designators: a proper name refers to the named object in every possible world in which the object exists, while most descriptions designate different objects in different possible worlds. For example, "Richard Nixon" refers to the same person in every possible world in which Nixon exists, while "the person who won the United States presidential election of 1968" could refer to Nixon, Hubert Humphrey, or others in different possible worlds. Kripke also raises the prospect of a posteriori necessities—facts that are necessarily true, though they can be known only through empirical investigation. Examples include "Hesperus is Phosphorus", "Cicero is Tully", "Water is H2O" and other identity claims where two names refer to the same object. Finally, Kripke gives an argument against identity materialism in the philosophy of mind, the view that every mental fact is identical with some physical fact. He argues that the only way to defend this identity is as an a posteriori necessary identity, but that such an identity—e.g., pain is C-fibers firing—could not be necessary, given the possibility of pain that has nothing to do with C-fibers firing. Similar arguments have been proposed by David Chalmers. Kripke delivered the John Locke Lectures in philosophy at Oxford in 1973. Titled Reference and Existence, they are in many respects a continuation of Naming and Necessity, and deal with the subjects of fictional names and perceptual error. They have recently been published by Oxford University Press. Quentin Smith has claimed that some of the ideas in Naming and Necessity were first presented (at least in part) by Ruth Barcan Marcus. Kripke is alleged to have misunderstood Marcus's ideas during a 1969 lecture he attended (based on the questions he asked), and later arrived at similar conclusions. But Marcus has refused to publish a transcript of the lecture. Smith's view is controversial, and several well-known scholars (for example, Stephen Neale and Scott Soames) have offered detailed arguments that he is mistaken.
A theory of naming In the first lecture, Kripke introduces a schematic semi-formal version of the kind of "theory of naming" he is criticizing (1980:64–65). He begins the second lecture by recapitulating the "theses" of this theory, together with the "noncircularity condition" he discussed in closing the first lecture. Apparently, the theses and condition had been written up on a board for all to see. This text was reproduced, as quoted below, in the "lightly edited" transcript of 1980 (p. 71).
To every name or designating expression 'X', there corresponds a cluster of properties, namely the family of those properties φ such that A believes 'φX'. One of the properties, or some conjointly, are believed by A to pick out some individual uniquely. If most, or a weighted most, of the φ's are satisfied by one unique object y, then y is the referent of 'X'. If the vote yields no unique object, 'X' does not refer. The statement, 'If X exists, then X has most of the φ's' is known a priori by the speaker. The statement, 'If X exists, then X has most of the φ's' expresses a necessary truth (in the idiolect of the speaker). (C) For any successful theory, the account must not be circular. The properties which are used in the vote must not themselves involve the notion of reference in such a way that it is ultimately impossible to eliminate.
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