争论中的形而上学

The debate over naming as it is informed by identity, necessity, and theories of knowledge is an important one in metaphysics, evolving from Mill’s proposal that a name is nothing more than what it denotes. Saul Kripke gave a series of lectures at Princeton in 1970 that reinvigorated this debate and elicited a host of responses. In these lectures, he provides an in depth account of the view of Frege and Russell that names are really descriptions; Kripke then proposes an alternate view of names as rigid designators, i.e. they have the same referents in all possible worlds. With this definition, Kripke introduces the concept of modality to the debate (Sainsbury 65). In this paper I will briefly treat the view that names are descriptions, as articulated by Russell and Kripke. I will then address Kripke’s response and his own view of names as rigid designators, focusing in particular on his use of contingent and necessary properties in defining rigid designators. Ultimately I aim to show that Kripke fails to provide an adequate account of the necessary properties of the referents of proper names, and he therefore cannot consistently distinguish contingent properties from necessary properties. This threatens to undermine his account of names as rigid designators.

The view propounded by Russell that names are really descriptions comes in response to the simplistic, if prima facie intuitive, view that names are nothing more than that which they denote, or in Mill’s more technical language, that they have denotation but not connotation (Kripke 26). When placed as the sole alternative to Mill’s view, Russell’s is better, for it accounts for a wider range of identity statements more satisfactorily than Mill’s. In “Knowledge by Acquaintance and by Description,” Russell states — and is frequently cited for stating—“Common words, even proper names, are usually really descriptions” (Russell 114). This is widely taken to mean that he holds names to be synonymous with their descriptions (Kripke 29). Russell admits that the particular descriptions used to refer to something will be different for different speakers, but “so long as this remains constant, the particular description involved usually makes no difference to the truth or falsehood of the proposition in which the name appears” (Russell 114). A strong defense of Russell’s view is actually articulated by Kripke, who presents three cases.