Tanasije, it would matter only in so far as we want to determine if the chemical compound was completely made up, or if the author had heard about the actual chemical compund and was including it on purpose. Which, if you buy the Kripke line like I (and I think you) do, will determine if the stuff discovered is really Kryptonite…but this gets us into tricky issues about story continuity…

On the other hand though, I have been meaning to ask whether or not this chemical composition was part of the original story or if it was added by this new director of the recent Superman Returns?

Would you say that it would make some kind of difference in relation to the issue?

Sorry about that!!

Someone agrees with me? Cool…

One thing we need to keep in mind is the distinction between natural kind terms and artificial kind terms, so there may be a difference between ‘kryptonite’ and ‘puppy crusher’ on this account, but more importantly here is the answer to Pete’s question (taken from the passage Pete Quotes from the appendix to Naming and necessity

The epistomological theisis is more easily argued. If a stopry is found describing a substance with the physical appearance of gold, one cannot conclude on this basis that it is talking about gold; it may be talking about ‘fools gold’. What substance is being discussed must be determined as in the case of proper names: by historical connection of the story with a certain subtance. When the connection is traced, it may well turn out that that the substance dealt with was gold, ‘fools gold’ or something else. Similarly, the mere discovery of animals with the properties attributed to unicorns in the myth would by no means show that these were the animals the myth was about: perhaps teh myth was spun out of whole cloth, and the fact that animals with the same appearance actually existed was mere coincidence. In that case, we cannot say that the unicorns of the myth really existed; we must also establish a historical connection that shows that the myth is about So, in Pete’s story we would need to determine if by ‘gin’ he meant gin, or vodka, or someother thing that we haven’t heard of and so on. If he did mean gin by ‘gin’ then Tanasije is right. But in the case of kryptonite, I think it safe to assume that they made it up ‘whole cloth’ and that any connection to reality is purely accidental. So to determine if something is necessarily fictional we need to trace the causal/historical chain back to the initial baptisism and find out if it involved a real object or was made up out of the blue. If the latter, then the stuff in question is necessarily fictional.

On the other hand though, I have been meaning to ask whether or not this chemical composition was part of the original story or if it was added by this new director of the recent Superman Returns?