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“A Better Picture ….”
Abstract
Saul Kripke states in Naming and Necessity that he presents a better picture of the reference of names than the traditional description theory. I answer the question why his picture is better than the traditional description theory.
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Rigid expressionism is the view that all natural kind terms and many other kind terms are rigid designators. Rigid expressionists embrace the ‘overgeneralization’ of rigidity, since they hold that not just natural kind terms but all unstructured kind terms are rigid designators. Unfortunately overgeneralization remains a defeating problem for rigid expressionism. It runs together natural kind terms and nominal kind terms in a way that enforces a false semantic uniformity. The Kripke/Putnam view of natural kind terms minus the claim of rigidity is correct, but a traditional descriptivist theory is appropriate for nominal kind terms. None of them should be thought of as either rigid or non-rigid, however.
The difficulties with extending Kripke’s notion of rigidity from singular terms to general terms are well-known. The most serious are overgeneralization and the related problem of trivialization. Proposed solutions fall into two camps. One proposes restricting rigidity to terms that apply essentially. The most detailed version of this is rigid application as elaborated and defended by Michael Devitt. The other solution is to happily accept that all common nouns and unstructured general terms as well as some structured ones are rigid, thus embracing the overgeneralization charge. This approach has been defended by Genoveva Martí and José Martínez-Fernández, Joseph LaPorte, Nathan Salmon, Arthur Sullivan, and Michael Johnson, among others. Neither of the proposed solutions is satisfactory. The one view offers no systematic way of classifying general terms as rigid, the other includes too many terms as rigid. Overgeneralization remains a significant problem. The notion of rigidity cannot be satisfactorily extended to general terms, and there is no reason why we should regret this.
Around 1970, both Keith Donnellan and Saul Kripke produced powerful arguments against description theories of proper names. They also offered sketches of positive accounts of proper name reference, highlighting the crucial role played by historical facts that might be unknown to the speaker. Building on these sketches, in the following years Michael Devitt elaborated his well-known causal theory of proper names. As I have argued elsewhere, however, contrary to what is commonly assumed, Donnellan’s and Kripke’s sketches point in two rather different directions, by appealing to historical or causal facts of different sorts. In this paper, I shall discuss and criticize Devitt’s causal theory, which confuses things, I shall argue, by mixing, so to speak, Donnellan’s and Kripke’s sketches.
I hope that some people see some connection between the two topics in the title. If not, anyway, such connections will be developed in the course of these talks. Furthermore, because of the use of tools involving reference and necessity in analytic philosophy today, our views on these topics really have wide-ranging implications for other problems in philosophy that traditionally might be thought far-removed, like arguments over the mind-body problem or the so-called ‘identity thesis’. Materialism, in this form, often now gets involved in very intricate ways in questions about what is necessary or contingent in identity of properties — questions like that. So, it is really very important to philosophers who may want to work in many domains to get clear about these concepts. Maybe I will say something about the mind-body problem in the course of these talks. I want to talk also at some point (I don’t know if I can get it in) about substances and natural kinds.
Joseph LaPorte in an article on `Kind and Rigidity'(Philosophical Studies, Volume 97) resurrects an oldsolution to the problem of how to understand the rigidityof kind terms and other general terms. Despite LaPorte'sarguments to the contrary, his solution trivializes thenotion of rigidity when applied to general terms. Hisarguments do lead to an important insight however. Thenotions of rigidity and non-rigidity do not usefullyapply at all to kind or other general terms. Extendingthe notion of rigidity from singular terms such as propernames to general terms such as natural kind terms is amistake.
Naming, Necessity, and Natural Kinds
- S. P. Schwartz