Kripke’s Naming and Necessity
Some theses of Naming and Necessity
1. Names are rigid designators. If a name refers to an object o, it refers to o
with respect to every possible world (in which oexists).
2. If one expression is a rigid and another is not, they cannot mean the same
thing. Since the descriptions ordinarily associated with names by speakers
are not rigid designators, they cannot give the meanings of those names.
3. There is a distinction between giving the meaning of an expression and saying
how its reference is determined (or fixed).
4. While (in cases of ordinary proper names) descriptions never give the mean-
ings of names, sometimes they play a role in the way that the reference of a
name is fixed.
5. Typically, an account of how the reference of a name is fixed consists of two
parts: an account of how the name was introduced to have a certain reference,
and an account of how the name maintained, or kept, that reference. Names
are usually introduced either by ostension or by description. Typically, their
reference is maintained by a historical chain of people intending to use the
name in the same way as their predecessors.
6. There is a conceptual distinction between necessity and a prioricity. A claim
is necessarily true if and only if the world could not have been such as to
make it false. A claim is knowable a priori just in case someone could know
it to be true without appeal to empirical evidence. We can say that necessity
is a metaphysical property of claims (i.e., propositions), whereas a prioricity
is an epistemological property of them.
7. Some propositions are both contingent and a priori. E.g., the proposition
expressed by ‘Stick S is one meter long’, in the scenario envisaged by Kripke.
8. Some propositions are both necessary and a posteriori. E.g., the proposition
expressed by ‘Hesperus is Phosphorus.’
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