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Kripke and Putnam on natural kind terms

In Carl Ginet & Sydney Shoemaker (eds.), Knowledge and Mind: Essays Presented to Norman Malcolm. New York: Oxford Univresity Press. pp. 84-104 (1983)

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  1. Free acts and robot cats.Russell Daw & Torin Alter - 2001 - Philosophical Studies 102 (3):345-57.
    ‘Free action’ is subject to the causal theory of reference and thus that The essential nature of free actions can be discovered only by empirical investigation, not by conceptual analysis. Heller ’s proposal, if true, would have significant philosophical implications. Consider the enduring issue we will call the Compatibility Issue : whether the thesis of determinism is logically compatible with the claim that.
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  • Intuitions and semantic theory.Henry Jackman - 2005 - Metaphilosophy 36 (3):363-380.
    While engaged in the analysis of topics such as the nature of knowledge, meaning, or justice, analytic philosophers have traditionally relied extensively on their own intuitions about when the relevant terms can, and can't, be correctly applied. Consequently, if intuitions about possible cases turned out not to be a reliable tool for the proper analysis of philosophically central concepts, then a radical reworking of philosophy's (or at least analytic philosophy's) methodology would seem to be in order. It is thus not (...)
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  • (1 other version)Temporal externalism and epistemic theories of vagueness.Henry Jackman - 2004 - Philosophical Studies 117 (1-2):79-94.
    'Epistemic' theories of vagueness notoriously claim that (despite the appearances to the contrary) all of our vague terms have sharp boundaries, it's just that we can't know what they are. Epistemic theories are typically criticized for failing to explain (1) the source of the ignorance postulated, and (2) how our terms could come to have such precise boundaries. Both of these objections will, however, be shown to rest on certain 'presentist' assumptions about the relation between use and meaning, and if (...)
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  • (1 other version)Temporal externalism, constitutive norms, and theories of vagueness.Henry Jackman - 2006 - In Tomáš Marvan (ed.), What determines content?: the internalism/externalism dispute. Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholars Press.
    Another paper exploring the relation between Temporal externalism and Epistemicism about Vagueness, but with slightly more emphasis on the role of constitutive norms relating to our concept of truth.
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  • Temporal externalism and our ordinary linguistic practices.Henry Jackman - 2005 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 86 (3):365-380.
    Temporal externalists argue that ascriptions of thought and utterance content can legitimately reflect contingent conceptual developments that are only settled after the time of utterance. While the view has been criticized for failing to accord with our “ordinary linguistic practices”, such criticisms (1) conflate our ordinary ascriptional practices with our more general beliefs about meaning, and (2) fail to distinguish epistemically from pragmatically motivated linguistic changes. Temporal externalism relates only to the former sort of changes, and the future usage relevant (...)
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  • Temporal externalism.Tom Stoneham - 2003 - Philosophical Papers 32 (1):97-107.
    Abstract Temporal Externalism is the view that future events can contribute to determining the present content of our thoughts and utterances. Two objections to Temporal Externalism are discussed and rejected. The first is that Temporal Externalism has implausible consequences for the epistemology of biology and other taxonomic sciences (Brown, 2000). The second is that it is committed to implausible claims about dispositions.
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  • The semantics of common nouns and the nature of semantics.Joseph Almog & Andrea Bianchi - 2023 - In Panu Raatikainen (ed.), _Essays in the Philosophy of Language._ Acta Philosophica Fennica Vol. 100. Helsinki: Societas Philosophica Fennica. pp. 115-135.
    In “Is semantics possible?” Putnam connected two themes: the very possibility of semantics (as opposed to formal model theory) for natural languages and the proper semantic treatment of common nouns. Putnam observed that abstract semantic accounts are modeled on formal languages model theory: the substantial contribution is rules for logical connectives (given outside the models), whereas the lexicon (individual constants and predicates) is treated merely schematically by the models. This schematic treatment may be all that is needed for an account (...)
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  • (1 other version)Rigidity and Necessary Application.Mario Gomez-Torrente - manuscript
    The question whether the notion of rigidity can be extended in a fruitful way beyond singular terms has received a standard answer in the literature, according to which non-singular terms designate kinds, properties or other abstract singular objects and generalized rigidity is the same thing as singular term rigidity, but for terms designating such objects. I offer some new criticisms of this view and go on to defend an alternative view, on which non-singular terms designate extensions in general, and generalized (...)
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  • Two approaches to natural kinds.Judith K. Crane - 2021 - Synthese 199 (5-6):12177-12198.
    Philosophical treatments of natural kinds are embedded in two distinct projects. I call these the philosophy of science approach and the philosophy of language approach. Each is characterized by its own set of philosophical questions, concerns, and assumptions. The kinds studied in the philosophy of science approach are projectible categories that can ground inductive inferences and scientific explanation. The kinds studied in the philosophy of language approach are the referential objects of a special linguistic category—natural kind terms—thought to refer directly. (...)
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  • Construction and continuity: conceptual engineering without conceptual change.Henry Jackman - 2020 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 63 (9):909-918.
    The papers in this volume originated in a workshop on externalism and conceptual change held at the University of St. Andrews in June 2018. The discussion of conceptual change was driven largely by...
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  • Temporal externalism, conceptual continuity, meaning, and use.Henry Jackman - 2020 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 63 (9-10):959-973.
    ABSTRACT Our ascriptions of content to past utterances assign to them a level of conceptual continuity and determinacy that extends beyond what could be grounded in the usage up to their time of utterance. If one accepts such ascriptions, one can argue either that future use must be added to the grounding base, or that such cases show that meaning is not, ultimately, grounded in use. The following will defend the first option as the more promising of the two, though (...)
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  • Enciclopédia de Termos Lógico-Filosóficos.João Miguel Biscaia Branquinho, Desidério Murcho & Nelson Gonçalves Gomes (eds.) - 2006 - São Paulo, SP, Brasil: Martins Fontes.
    Esta enciclopédia abrange, de uma forma introdutória mas desejavelmente rigorosa, uma diversidade de conceitos, temas, problemas, argumentos e teorias localizados numa área relativamente recente de estudos, os quais tem sido habitual qualificar como «estudos lógico-filosóficos». De uma forma apropriadamente genérica, e apesar de o território teórico abrangido ser extenso e de contornos por vezes difusos, podemos dizer que na área se investiga um conjunto de questões fundamentais acerca da natureza da linguagem, da mente, da cognição e do raciocínio humanos, bem (...)
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  • No purely epistemic theory can account for the naturalness of kinds.Olivier Lemeire - 2018 - Synthese 198 (Suppl 12):2907-2925.
    Several philosophers have recently tried to define natural kinds in epistemic terms only. Given the persistent problems with finding a successful metaphysical theory, these philosophers argue that we would do better to describe natural kinds solely in terms of their epistemic usefulness, such as their role in supporting inductive inferences. In this paper, I argue against these epistemology-only theories of natural kinds and in favor of, at least partly, metaphysical theories. I do so in three steps. In the first section (...)
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  • Decision and Discovery in Defining “Disease”.Peter H. Schwartz - 2007 - In Harold Kincaid & Jennifer McKitrick (eds.), Establishing medical reality: Methodological and metaphysical issues in philosophy of medicine. Springer Publishing Company. pp. 47-63.
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  • How Scientific Is Scientific Essentialism?Muhammad Ali Khalidi - 2009 - Journal for General Philosophy of Science / Zeitschrift für Allgemeine Wissenschaftstheorie 40 (1):85-101.
    Scientific essentialism holds that: (1) each scientific kind is associated with the same set of properties in every possible world; and (2) every individual member of a scientific kind belongs to that kind in every possible world in which it exists. Recently, Ellis (Scientific essentialism, 2001 ; The philosophy of nature 2002 ) has provided the most sustained defense of scientific essentialism, though he does not clearly distinguish these two claims. In this paper, I argue that both claims face a (...)
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  • Robustness, Diversity of Evidence, and Probabilistic Independence.Jonah N. Schupbach - 2015 - In Uskali Mäki, Stéphanie Ruphy, Gerhard Schurz & Ioannis Votsis (eds.), Recent Developments in the Philosophy of Science. Cham: Springer. pp. 305-316.
    In robustness analysis, hypotheses are supported to the extent that a result proves robust, and a result is robust to the extent that we detect it in diverse ways. But what precise sense of diversity is at work here? In this paper, I show that the formal explications of evidential diversity most often appealed to in work on robustness – which all draw in one way or another on probabilistic independence – fail to shed light on the notion of diversity (...)
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  • Immanent philosophy of X.Robin Hendry - unknown
    In this paper I examine the relationship between historians, philosophers and sociologists of science, and indeed scientists themselves. I argue that they co-habit a shared intellectual territory ; and they should be able to do so peacefully, and with mutual respect, even if they disagree radically about how to describe the methods and results of science. I then go on to explore some of the challenges to mutually respectful cohabitation between history, philosophy and sociology of science. I conclude by identifying (...)
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  • Temporal Externalism and the Normativity of Linguistic Practice.Joseph Rouse - 2014 - Journal of the Philosophy of History 8 (1):20–38.
    Temporal externalists expand Putnam’s and Burge’s semantic externalisms to argue that later uses of words transform the semantic significance of earlier uses. Conflicting intuitions about temporal externalism often turn on different conceptions of linguistic practice, which have mostly not been thematically explicated. I defend a version of temporal externalism that replaces the familiar regularist and normative-regulist conceptions of linguistic practice or use. This alternative identifies practices neither by regularities of use, nor by determinate norms governing their constituent performances, but by (...)
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  • Temporal Externalism: A Taxonomy, an Articulation, and a Defence.Alessandra Tanesini - 2014 - Journal of the Philosophy of History 8 (1):1–19.
    I argue that the semantic content of thoughts and the linguistic meaning of expressions are things with a history in the sense that they can be made fully intelligible only from the point of view of the future. I defend this position by articulating a version of a view known in the philosophy of language as temporal externalism. Temporal externalism about content is the view that the content of a subject’s thoughts and utterances at a time t depends on features (...)
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  • Essentialism, word use, and concepts.Nick Braisby, Bradley Franks & James Hampton - 1996 - Cognition 59 (3):247-274.
    The essentialist approach to word meaning has been used to undermine the fundamental assumptions of the cognitive psychology of concepts. Essentialism assumes that a word refers to a natural kind category in virtue of category members possessing essential properties. In support of this thesis, Kripke and Putnam deploy various intuitions concerning word use under circumstances in which discoveries about natural kinds are made. Although some studies employing counterfactual discoveries and related transformations appear to vindicate essentialism, we argue that the intuitions (...)
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  • Does" rabbit" refer to rabbits?Michael Liston & Michael List - 2005 - European Journal of Analytic Philosophy 1 (1):39-56.
    It is commonly presupposed that all instances of the deflationary reference schema ‘F’ applies to x if and only if x is ‘are correct. This paper argues, mainly on the basis of concrete example, that we have little reason to be confident about this presupposition: our tendency to believe the instances is based on local successes that may not be globally extendible. There is a problem of semantic projection, Ii argue, and standard accounts that would resolve or dissolve the problem (...)
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  • Rigidity, natural kind terms and metasemantics.Corine Besson - 2010 - In Helen Beebee & Nigel Sabbarton-Leary (eds.), The Semantics and Metaphysics of Natural Kinds. New York: Routledge. pp. 25--44.
    A paradigmatic case of rigidity for singular terms is that of proper names. And it would seem that a paradigmatic case of rigidity for general terms is that of natural kind terms. However, many philosophers think that rigidity cannot be extended from singular terms to general terms. The reason for this is that rigidity appears to become trivial when such terms are considered: natural kind terms come out as rigid, but so do all other general terms, and in particular all (...)
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  • Temporal externalism, Normativity and Use.Henry Jackman - manuscript
    Our ascriptions of content to utterances in the past attribute to them a level of determinacy that extends beyond what could supervene upon the usage up to the time of those utterances. If one accepts the truth of such ascriptions, one can either (1) argue that subsequent use must be added to the supervenience base that determines the meaning of a term at a time, or (2) argue that such cases show that meaning does not supervene upon use at all. (...)
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  • Sentence-relativity and the necessary a posteriori.Kai-Yee Wong - 1996 - Philosophical Studies 83 (1):53 - 91.
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  • Names and natural kind terms.David Braun - 2005 - In Ernie Lepore & Barry C. Smith (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Language. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press. pp. 490--515.
    Names and natural kind terms have long been a major focus of debates about meaning and reference. This article discusses some of the theories and arguments that have appeared in those debates. It is remarkably difficult to say what names are without making controversial theoretical assumptions. This article does not attempt to do so here. It instead relies on paradigm examples that nearly all theorists would agree are proper names, for instance, ‘Aristotle’, ‘Mark Twain’, ‘London’, ‘Venus’, and ‘Pegasus’. All of (...)
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  • Minimalism, Psychological Reality, Meaning and Use.Henry Jackman - 2007 - In G. Preyer (ed.), Context-Sensitivity and Semantic Minimalism: New Essays on Semantics and Pragmatics. New York: Oxford University Press.
    A growing number of philosophers and linguists have argued that many, if not most, terms in our language should be understood as semantically context sensitive. In opposition to this trend, Herman Cappelen and Ernie Lepore defend a view they call "Semantic Minimalism", which holds that there are virtually no semantically context sensitive expressions in English once you get past the standard list of indexicals and demonstratives such as "I", "you", "this", and "that". While minimalism strikes many as obviously false, it (...)
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  • Locke's theory of classification.Judith Crane - 2003 - British Journal for the History of Philosophy 11 (2):249 – 259.
    Locke is often cited as a precursor to contemporary natural kind realism. However, careful attention to Locke’s arguments show that he was unequivocally a conventionalist about natural kinds. To the extent that contemporary natural kind realists see themselves as following Locke, they misunderstand what he was trying to do. Locke argues that natural kinds require either dubious metaphysical commitments (e.g., to substantial forms or universals), or a question-begging version of essentialism. Contemporary natural kind realists face a similar dilemma, and should (...)
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  • On the metaphysics of species.Judith K. Crane - 2004 - Philosophy of Science 71 (2):156-173.
    This paper explains the metaphysical implications of the view that species are individuals (SAI). I first clarify SAI in light of the separate distinctions between individuals and classes, particulars and universals, and abstract and concrete things. I then show why the standard arguments given in defense of SAI are not compelling. Nonetheless, the ontological status of species is linked to the traditional "species problem," in that certain species concepts do entail that species are individuals. I develop the idea that species (...)
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  • (1 other version)Intentionality and naturalism.Stephen P. Stich & Stephen Laurence - 1994 - Midwest Studies in Philosophy 19 (1):159-82.
    ...the deepest motivation for intentional irrealism derives not from such relatively technical worries about individualism and holism as we.
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  • Wittgenstein on necessity: ‘Are you not really an idealist in disguise?’.Sam W. A. Couldrick - 2024 - Analytic Philosophy 65 (2):162-186.
    Wittgenstein characterises ‘necessary truths’ as rules of representation that do not answer to reality. The invocation of rules of representation has led many to compare his work with Kant's. This comparison is illuminating, but it can also be misleading. Some go as far as casting Wittgenstein's later philosophy as a specie of transcendental idealism, an interpretation that continues to gather support despite scholars pointing to its limitations. To understand the temptation of this interpretation, attention must be paid to a distinction (...)
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  • Enduring Senses.Graeme A. Forbes & Nathan Wildman - 2022 - Synthese 200 (291):1-21.
    The meanings of words seem to change over time. But while there is a growing body of literature in linguistics and philosophy about meaning change, there has been little discussion about the metaphysical underpinnings of meaning change. The central aim of this paper is to push this discussion forward by surveying the terrain and advocating for a particular metaphysical picture. In so doing, we hope to clarify various aspects of the nature of meaning change, as well as prompt future philosophical (...)
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  • Global expressivism as global subjectivism.Lionel Shapiro - 2021 - Philosophical Studies 179 (3):777-799.
    Huw Price holds that a recognizable version of expressivism about normative and modal language can be “globalized” so as to apply to all areas of discourse. He focuses on globalizing the anti-representationalism of expressivist theories. By contrast, this paper’s topic is the seldom-discussed way Price seeks to globalize the expressivist view that “non-descriptive” discourse exhibits subjectivity. I argue that Price’s own argument against the possibility of a purely objective domain conflicts with his anti-representationalism and is self-undermining. I then defend a (...)
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  • Thought, Language, and Reasoning. Perspectives on the Relation Between Mind and Language.Hannes Fraissler - 2021 - Dissertation, University of Luxembourg
    This dissertation is an investigation into the relation between mind and language from different perspectives, split up into three interrelated but still, for the most part, self-standing parts. Parts I and II are concerned with the question how thought is affected by language while Part III investigates the scope covered by mind and language respectively. Part I provides a reconstruction of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s famous Private Language Argument in order to apply the rationale behind this line of argument to the relation (...)
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  • Against rigidity for natural kind terms.Stephen P. Schwartz - 2018 - Synthese 198 (Suppl 12):2957-2971.
    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 (...)
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  • Natural-Kind Term Reference and the Discovery of Essence.Joseph Francis Laporte - 1998 - Dissertation, University of Massachusetts Amherst
    According to a doctrine that has been popularized by Kripke and Putnam, a natural kind term like 'bird' rigidly designates the kind with the microstructure of sample birds. This microstructure is the essence of birdhood, so our learning what the relevant microstructure is our discovery of the kind's essence. We have discovered that some statement like 'The bird is the taxon with such and such DNA structure' is true. Further, it is commonly added, the discovered microstructure is essential to each (...)
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  • Constructing Concessive Conditionals: In Case of Japanese.Ai Matsui - 2009 - In Arndt Riester & Torgrim Solstad (eds.), Proceedings of Sinn Und Bedeutung 13.
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  • Les troubles psychiatriques et le modèle des espèces pratiques.Peter Zachar - 2006 - Philosophiques 33 (1):81-97.
    Cet article explore la classification des troubles psychiatriques dans la perspective du modèle des espèces pratiques. En nous basant sur certains travaux en philosophie des sciences qui soutiennent que les éléments chimiques et les espèces biologiques ne possèdent pas de véritables essences, nous affirmons que les troubles psychiatriques ne devraient pas être compris, eux non plus, de façon essentialiste. Les troubles psychiatriques sont des « espèces pratiques », non des « espèces naturelles ». Ce modèle représente une approche pragmatiste de (...)
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  • Natural kinds and natural kind terms.Kathrin Koslicki - 2008 - Philosophy Compass 3 (4):789-802.
    The aim of this article is to illustrate how a belief in the existence of kinds may be justified for the particular case of natural kinds: particularly noteworthy in this respect is the weight borne by scientific natural kinds (e.g., physical, chemical, and biological kinds) in (i) inductive arguments; (ii) the laws of nature; and (iii) causal explanations. It is argued that biological taxa are properly viewed as kinds as well, despite the fact that they have been by some alleged (...)
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  • Kinds, general terms, and rigidity: A reply to LaPorte.Stephen P. Schwartz - 2002 - Philosophical Studies 109 (3):265 - 277.
    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 (...)
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  • Natural kind terms: A neo-Lockean theory.A. D. Smith - 2005 - European Journal of Philosophy 13 (1):70–88.
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  • Rigidity and general terms.Genoveva Marti - 2004 - Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 104 (1):131-148.
    In this paper I examine two ways of defining the rigidity of general terms. First I discuss the view that rigid general terms express essential properties. I argue that the view is ultimately unsatisfactory, although not on the basis of the standard objections raised against it. I then discuss the characterisation in terms of sameness of designation in every possible world. I defend that view from two objections but I argue that the approach, although basically right, should be interpreted cautiously.
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  • General Terms and Relational Modality.Kathrin Glüer & Peter Pagin - 2012 - Noûs 46 (1):159-199.
    Natural kind terms have exercised philosophical fancy ever since Kripke, in Naming and Necessity, claimed them to be rigid designators. He there drew attention to the peculiar, name-like behavior of a family of prima facie loosely related general terms of ordinary English: terms such as ‘water’, ‘tiger’, ‘heat’, and ‘red’. Just as for ordinary proper names, Kripke argued that such terms cannot be synonymous with any of the definite descriptions ordinary speakers associate with them. Rather, the name-like behavior of these (...)
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  • Rigid designation, direct reference, and modal metaphysics.Arthur Sullivan - 2005 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 86 (4):577–599.
    In this paper I argue that questions about the semantics of rigid designation are commonly and illicitly run together with distinct issues, such as questions about the metaphysics of essence and questions about the theoretical legitimacy of the possible-worlds framework. I discuss in depth two case studies of this phenomenon – the first concerns the relation between rigid designation and reference, the second concerns the application of the notion of rigidity to general terms. I end by drawing out some conclusions (...)
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  • There are Kinds and Kinds of Kinds: Ben-Yami on the Semantics of Kind Terms.G. Contessa - 2007 - Philosophical Studies 136 (2):217-248.
    Hanoch Ben-Yami has argued that the theory of the semantics of natural kind terms proposed by Kripke and Putnam is false and has proposed an allegedly novel account of the semantics of kind terms. In this article, I critically examine Ben-Yami’s arguments. I will argue that Ben-Yami’s objections do not show that Kripke and Putnam’s theory is false, but at most that the specific versions of it held by Kripke and Putnam have some weaknesses. Moreover, I will argue that Ben-Yami’s (...)
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  • What is an Empirical Analysis of Causation?Thomas D. Bontly - 2006 - Synthese 151 (2):177-200.
    Philosophical accounts of causation have traditionally been framed as attempts to analyze the concept of a cause. In recent years, however, a number of philosophers have proposed instead that causation be empirically reduced to some relation uncovered by the natural sciences: e.g., a relation of energy transfer. This paper argues that the project of empirical analysis lacks a clearly defined methodology, leaving it uncertain how such views are to be evaluated. It proposes several possible accounts of empirical analysis and argues (...)
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  • Is Water Necessarily Identical to H2O?Barnett David - 2000 - Philosophical Studies 98 (1):95-108.
    The “scientific essentialist” doctrine asserts that the following are examples of a posteriori necessary identities: water is H2O; gold is the element with atomic number 79; and heat is the motion of molecules. Evidence in support of this assertion, however, is difficult to find. Both Hilary Putnam and Saul Kripke have argued convincingly for the existence of a posteriori necessities. Furthermore, Kripke has argued for the existence of a posteriori necessary identities in regard to a particular class of statements involving (...)
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  • Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung 9.Emar Maier, Corien Bary & Janneke Huitink (eds.) - 2005 - Nijmegen Centre for Semantics.
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  • Rigid designation and semantic structure.Arthur Sullivan - 2007 - Philosophers' Imprint 7:1-22.
    There is a considerable sub-literature, stretching back over 35 years, addressed to the question: Precisely which general terms ought to be classified as rigid designators? More fundamentally: What should we take the criterion for rigidity to be, for general terms? The aim of this paper is to give new grounds for the old view that if a general term designates the same kind in all possible worlds, then it should be classified as a rigid designator. The new grounds in question (...)
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  • The Metasyntactic Interpretation of Two-Dimensionalism.Gregory Bochner - 2013 - Philosophical Studies 163 (3):611-626.
    Robert Stalnaker contrasts two interpretations, semantic and metasemantic, of the two-dimensionalist framework. On the semantic interpretation, the primary intension or diagonal proposition associated with an utterance is a semantic value that the utterance has in virtue of the actual linguistic meaning of the corresponding sentence, and that primary intension is both what a competent speaker grasps and what determines different secondary intensions or horizontal propositions relative to different possible worlds considered as actual. The metasemantic interpretation reverses the order of explanation: (...)
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  • Language and metaphysics: the case of theoretical identities.Luis Fernández Moreno - 2017 - Synthese 198 (Suppl 3):831-848.
    Kripke holds the thesis that identity statements containing natural kind terms are if true, necessarily true; these statements can be denominated theoretical identities. Kripke alleges that the necessity of theoretical identities grounds on the linguistic feature that natural kind terms are rigid designators. Nevertheless, I argue that the conception of natural kind terms as rigid designators, in one of their most natural views, hinders the establishment of the truth of theoretical identities and thus of their necessity. However, in Kripke’s works (...)
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