“Kripke, Devitt, Bach” by Richard Brown, CUNY Graduate Center.
ABSTRACT: It is hard to exaggerate the extent to which Kripke’s notion of ridged designation has changed the way we do philosophy. Kripke himself has been reluctant to give a theoretical account of rigid designation, preferring instead to talk in terms of a ‘better picture’ which comports with intuition, but it seems reasonably clear that he intends this to be a semantic property that some words have (like names and natural kind terms) and that others lack (like definite descriptions). This ‘better picture’ has been developed rigorously by Michael Devitt into a theory. Going against this mainstream is a kind of philosophy which has its roots in the Strawson-Russell debate and sees Strawson as making valuable contributions to the philosophy of language. One of these being that reference is something that people do, not words. Philosophers on this side of the fence argue that it is a mistake to think that words have the property of referring to things in the world. People use words to refer; the words themselves do not do any referring. On this view there will be no such semantic property as rigidity. I introduce the pragmatic property of frigidity as a contrast to rigidity. Today this position is defended by Kent Bach. He has attacked Kripke’s notion of rigid designation, calling it an illusion, and more recently Michael Devitt’s defense of a referential meaning for definite descriptions. I examine Bach, Devitt and Kripke’s accounts to show that some of the debate between them is merely terminological, owing to each using a specialized vocabulary that makes the issue seem substantive. I try to separate the merely verbal issues from the substantive one and then try to provide an answer to this substantive question which vindicates frigidity.
I´m only dabbling in this topic but I thought that the debate concerning modal logic and ontological commitments on possible worlds were closed and finished when Quine reject the essentialist view contained in Kripke´s philosophy, is this true?
The philosopher Wylie Breckenridge can be of help in this matters, and is close-up to your views.
Anibal,
I wish you were right about that debate (both that it ended and who ended it). In case you haven’t seen it, below is a link to a nice little history by Fodor on whether and how Quine kills Kripke.
Water’s water everywhere