The received view of Kripke's Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language is that it fails as an interpretation because, inter alia, it ignores or overlooks what Wittgenstein has to say in the second paragraph of Philosophical Investigations 201. In this paper, I demonstrate that the paragraph in question is in fact fully accommodated within Kripke's reading, and cannot therefore be reasonably utilised to object to it. -/- In part one I characterise the objection; in part two I explain (...) why it fails; in part three I suggest why commentators might have been motivated to offer it; and in part four I claim that two commentators who have offered it also imply otherwise. (shrink)

I argue that Kripke’s construal of the distinction between speaker’s reference and semantic reference, in ‘Speaker’s reference and semantic reference’ (Kripke in Midwest Stud Philos 2:255–276, 1977), in conjunction with an intuitive view of the nature of conventions, implies a theory of semantic reference that is distinct from his causal theory. On this theory, semantic reference is conventionalized speaker’s reference. The argument concerning Kripke has two general implications. First, any theory that features a notion of speaker’s reference (...) will have great difficulty in avoiding the view that semantic reference is conventionalized speaker’s reference. Second, theories that deny that there is a viable notion of speaker’s reference, and thereby deny that semantic reference is conventionalized speaker’s reference, will face an uphill battle in meeting certain general constraints originating in the theory of conventions. (shrink)

Kripke in his famous book on Wittgenstein’s later philosophy argues, on behalf of Wittgenstein, that there can be no fact of the matter as to what a speaker means by her words, that is, no fact that can meet the Constitution Demand and the Normativity Demand. He particularly argues against the dispositional view, according to which meaning facts are constituted by facts about the speaker's dispositions to respond in a certain way on certain occasions. He argues that facts about (...) dispositions are finite and are incapable of constituting facts about what speakers mean by their words; they are also essentially descriptive, not prescriptive and thus, cannot meet the Normativity Demand. Hannah Ginsborg, one of the most important contemporary philosophers of language, has recently attempted to resist Kripke’s Wittgenstein’s arguments against by defending a new sort of reductive dispositionalism which can meet both demands at the same time. In this paper, I will argue that she would not be successful in her project. (shrink)

According to the sceptic Saul Kripke envisages in his celebrated book on Wittgenstein on rules and private language, there are no facts about an individual that determine what she means by any given expression. If there are no such facts, the question then is, what justifies the claim that she does use expressions meaningfully? Kripke’s answer, in a nutshell, is that she by and large uses her expressions in conformity with the linguistic standards of the community she belongs (...) to. While Kripke’s sceptical problem has gripped philosophers for over three decades, few, if any, have been satisfied by his proposed solution, and many have struggled to come up with one of their own. The purpose of this paper is to show that a more satisfactory answer to Kripke’s challenge can be developed on the basis of Donald Davidson’s writings on triangulation, the idea of two individuals interacting simultaneously with each other and the world they share. It follows from the triangulation argument that the facts that can be regarded as determining meaning are irreducible. Yet, contra Kripke, they are not mysterious, for the argument does spell out what is needed for an individual’s expressions to be meaningful. (shrink)

This paper argues that most of the alleged straight solutions to the sceptical paradox which Kripke ascribed to Wittgenstein can be regarded as the first horn of a dilemma whose second horn is the paradox itself. The dilemma is proved to be a by‐product of a foundationalist assumption on the notion of justification, as applied to linguistic behaviour. It is maintained that the assumption is unnecessary and that the dilemma is therefore spurious. To this end, an alternative conception of (...) the justification of linguistic behaviour is outlined, a conception that vindicates some of the insights behind Kripke's Wittgenstein's sceptical solution of the paradox. This alternative conception is defended against two objections (both familiar from McDowell's works): (1) that it would imply that for the linguistic community there is no authority, no standard to meet and, therefore, no possibility of error and (2) that it would lead to a kind of idealism. (shrink)

Kripke (1977) presents an argument designed to show that the considerations in Donnellan (1966) concerning attributive and referential uses of (definite) descriptions do not, by themselves, refute Russell’s (1905) unitary theory of description sentences (RTD), which takes (utterances of) them to express purely general, quantificational, propositions. Against Kripke, Marga Reimer (1998) argues that the two uses do indeed reflect a semantic ambiguity (an ambiguity at the level of literal truth conditions). She maintains a Russellian (quantificational) analysis of utterances (...) involving attributively used descriptions but attempts to defend the following two claims about utterances involving referentially used descriptions (referential utterances) (1998, p. 89). (shrink)

Предлагается виттгенштайновское решение скептического парадокса Крипке, который возникает в результате пренебрежения прагматикой и нормативным измерением производимых операций. Парадокс Крипке указывает на то, что натурализация смысла и проблемы следования правилу в рамках классического (ненормативного) натурализма невозможна. Анализируется и критикуется недавно предложенная Гинзборг интерпретация парадокса. Хотя её натуралистический «срединный путь» между диспозиционализмом и ментализмом и близок к нормативному виттгенштайновскому натурализму, вводимое ею понятие примитивной нормативности неудовлетворительно. Правильнее говорить не о натурализме с минимальным добавлением нормативности, как это делает Гинзборг, а о нормативном натурализме.

In his influential Naming and Necessity lectures, Saul Kripke made new sense of modal statements: “Kant might have been a bachelor”, “Königsberg is necessarily identical with Kaliningrad”. Many took the notions he introduced-metaphysical necessity and rigid designation -- to herald new metaphysical issues and have important consequences. In fact, the Kripkean insight is at bottom semantic, rather than metaphysical: it is part of how proper names work that they purport to refer to individuals to whom modal properties can be (...) ascribed. We can see this by reflecting on analytic truths that ground modal claims like the two examples above. (shrink)

Reading Kripke's "Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language", at first one can easily get confused about his claim that the problem discovered was a sort of ontological skepticism. Contrary to the opinion of a great number of contemporary philosophers who hold that rule-following brings up merely epistemological problems I will argue that the scepticism presented by Kripke really is ontological because it is concerned with the exclusion of certain facts. The first section in this paper is dedicated to (...) a presentation of Kripke's paradox with a clarification of the position of "plus/quus-talk" in the argument. Section two is engaged in one of his classical direct solutions: the dispositional theory which will serve as a preparation for the last section. Section three is concerned with Kripke's solution to the skeptical problem, ending with the question of whether he is giving a real solution. In section four, I will try to give an answer to those questions, distinguishing between two different versions of the problem given by the paradox; a wrong one and a correct one. Readers who are really fed up with the sceptical problem and its sceptical solution can skip section one, two and three, concentrating instead on my own argument for the real nature of the problem. In section five, I will pick up on some ideas from Norwich, who tries to give a "straight solution" to the paradox reanimating some weaker version of a dispositional theory of meaning. I will argue that Horwich's solution is misleading because he aims at the wrong version of the paradox. (shrink)

Kripke’s main argument against descriptivism is rooted in a category error that confuses statements about the world with statements about models of the world. It is only because of the ambiguity introduced by the fact that a single sentence can frame two different propositions, one necessary and the other a posteriori, that one reaches the mistaken conclusion that there can be necessary a posteriori truths. This ambiguity from language was carried over into modal logic by Kripke. However, we (...) must consider the two different propositions (1) and (2) separately. Doing so reveals that a given proposition is either necessary and a priori or contingent and a posteriori. It cannot be both. (shrink)

In this paper we present a solution to Saul Kripke’s Puzzle About Belief Meaning and use, Dordrecht, 1979) based on Kaplan’s metaphysical picture of words. Although it is widely accepted that providing such a solution was one of the main incentives for the development of Kaplan’s theory, it was never presented by Kaplan in a systematic manner and was regarded by many as unsatisfactory. We agree with these critiques, and develop an extension of Kaplan’s theory by introducing the notion (...) of “conservative” word uses, as well as arguing for the restriction of Kripke’s Disquotational Principle only to such uses. This restriction allows us to solve Kripke’s Puzzle by arguing that the assent of the puzzle’s protagonist does not allow disquotation and ascription of corresponding inconsistent belief, as it contains the non-conservative use of a proper name. At the end of the paper, we defend two of Kaplan’s theses that we find essential for our argument to work: that individuation of word tokens involves taking into account the intention of the speaker, and that different uniquely referring proper names of the same shape should be regarded as different homonymous words. (shrink)

In his Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language, Saul Kripke famously raised two sorts of problems for responses to the meaning skeptic that appealed to how we were disposed to use our words in the past. The first related to the fact that our “dispositions extend to only finitely many cases” while the second related to the fact that most of us have “dispositions to make mistakes.” The second of these problems has produced an enormous, and still growing, literature (...) on the purported ‘normativity’ of meaning, but the first has received (at least comparatively) little attention. It will be argued here, however, that (1) the fact that we can be disposed to make mistakes doesn’t present a serious problem for many disposition-based responses to the skeptic, and (2) considerations of the ‘finiteness’ of our dispositions point, on their own, to an important way that the relation between meaning and use must be understood as ‘normative’. In particular, the assumption that words have determinate meanings, more so than the assumption that they have ‘correctness’ conditions, rules out the possibility of understanding the relation between meaning and use in the more descriptive fashion commonly associated with dispositionalism. Nevertheless, if the relation of meaning and use is understood in a more normative key, responding to the meaning-skeptic with facts about one’s dispositions will turn out to be perfectly legitimate, though it will prevent one from being the sort of ‘dispositionalist’ that Kripke gives, without any real argument, a monopoly on disposition-based responses. (shrink)

Kripke’s Wittgenstein is standardly understood as a non-factualist about meaning ascription. Non-factualism about meaning ascription is the idea that sentences like “Joe means addition by ‘plus’” are not used to state facts about the world. Byrne and Kusch have argued that Kripke’s Wittgenstein is not a non-factualist about meaning ascription. They are aware that their interpretation is non-standard, but cite arguments from Boghossian and Wright to support their view. Boghossian argues that non-factualism about meaning ascription is incompatible with (...) a deflationary theory of truth. Wright argues that non-factualism about meaning ascription is incoherent. To support the standard interpretation, I’ll respond to each argument in turn. To the degree that my responses are successful, Byrne and Kusch have an unmotivated interpretation of Kripke’s Wittgenstein. Wilson provides a factualist interpretation that is not based on Boghossian and Wright’s arguments. Miller argues for a non-factualist interpretation against Wilson, but I’ll show that Miller’s interpretation faces a dilemma. Miller’s argument cannot be maintained if a coherent interpretation of the skeptical solution is to be provided. I’ll show how this dilemma can be avoided and provide an independent argument against Wilson so that a non-factualist interpretation of the skeptical solution can be maintained. (shrink)

Frege introduced the distinction between sense and reference to account for the information conveyed by identity statements. We can put the point like this: if the meaning of a term is exhausted by what it stands for, then how can 'a =a' and 'a =b' differ in meaning? Yet it seems they do, for someone who understands all the terms involved would not necessarily judge that a =b even though they judged that a =a. It seems that 'a =b' just (...) says something more than the trivial ’a = a' - it seems to contain more information, in some sense of 'information'. So either we have to add something to explain this extra information, or sever the very plausible links between meaning and understanding. This is what some writers have called 'Frege's Puzzle' It is undeniable that there is a phenomenon here to be explained, and it was Frege's insight to see the need for its explanation. But how should we explain it? Frege's idea was to add another semantic notion - Sinn, or Sense -— to account for the information conveyed. Sense is part of the meaning of an expression: it is the 'cognitive value' of the expression, or that ’wherein the mode of presentation is contained' (Frege 1957 p.57). Sense has a role to play in systematically determining the meanings of complex expressions, and ultimately in fixing the contents of judgements. It is the senses of whole sentences — Gedanken or Thoughts - which are candidates for truth and falsehood, and which are thus the objects of our propositional attitudes. Of course, introducing the notion of sense in this way does not, by itself, tell us what sense is. It only imposes a condition on a theory of meaning (and ultimately) belief: that it must account for distinctions in cognitive value or 'mode of presentation' (this is not a trivial thesis —- some philosophers today would deny that an explanation of Frege's Puzzle must occur within semantics or the theory of meaning: see Salmon 1985). In this paper I want to explore one way of meeting this condition for the theory of names in natural language, by examining Kripke's well-known 'Puzzle about Belief' (Kripke 1979).. (shrink)

In “Naming and Necessity” Saul Kripke describes some cases which, he claims, provide counterexamples both to cluster theories and, more generally, to description theories of proper names. My view of these cases is that while they do not provide counterexamples to cluster theories, they can be used to provide evidence against single-description theories. In this paper I shall defend both of the claims involved in my view.

In his article Evgeny Borisov offers an original solution to Kripke’s sceptical problem of meaning. Its conceptual core is the point of view of the participant of speech acts. He believes that first-person statements of speech act participants like “I know for certain that the expression ‘e’ is used by me in the meaning of m” cannot carry any epistemic fallacies. As a criticism, I propose to point out that non-factual Cartesian semantics have serious epistemic flaws that make it (...) vulnerable to sceptical attacks and accusations of petitio principii. (shrink)

بررسی استدلال و پاسخ شک‌گرایانة کریپکی و برخی از واکنش‌ها به آن .

Recently, two new portrayals of Kripke’s Wittgenstein have emerged. Both understand KW as targeting the Tractarian picture of semantic fact as a speaker’s mental representation of the truth-conditions of the sentences he uses. According to the factualist interpretation, KW holds that meaning ascriptions are legitimate descriptions because semantic facts are not entities that explain people’s linguistic behavior. The second, Alex Miller’s non-standard non-factualist interpretation, sees KW as claiming that because no fact can explain our linguistic behavior, meaning ascriptions express (...) a speaker’s attitudes towards his interlocutors rather than stating what they mean. This paper advances the minimal factualist interpretation by elaborating two points: that Miller’s reading of the skeptical argument contradicts semantic non-factualism; and that KW’s view of meaning is based on a primitivist rendition of the skeptic’s insight that nothing justifies our use of language, which allows him to assert that semantic facts exist simply because we ordinarily say so. (shrink)

In this paper, I present a two-pronged argument devoted to defending the type-identity theory of mind against the argument presented by Kripke in _Naming and Necessity_. In the first part, the interpersonal case, I show that since it is not possible to establish the metaphysical conditions for phenomenal identity, it is not possible to argue that there can be physical differences between two subjects despite their phenomenal identity. In the second part, the intrapersonal case, I consider the possibility of (...) imagining one and the same individual having the same phenomenal state while counterfactually being in very different physical states. I argue that this case should respect Kripke’s implicit theory of personal identity—but this proves to be a very difficult task to accomplish, thus preventing the argument from getting off the ground. Therefore, I maintain, that the type-identity theory is still the better option to solve the mind–body problem. (shrink)

On page 14 of "Reconceptions in Philosophy and Other Arts and Sciences" (section 4 of chapter 1) by Nelson Goodman and Catherine Z. Elgin is written: “Since ‘blue’ and ‘green’ are interdefinable with ‘grue’ and ‘bleen’, the question of which pair is basic and which pair derived is entirely a question of which pair we start with”. This paper points out that an example of interdefinability is also that one about the predicate “grueb”, which is a predicate that applies to (...) an object if the object either is green and examined before time b, or is non-green and not examined before time b. The three predicates “green”, “grueb”, “examined before time b” are interdefinable. According to Goodman, since the predicates “blue” and “green” are interdefinable with the predicates “grue” and “bleen”, “if we can tell which objects are blue and which objects are green, we can tell which ones are grue and which ones are bleen” [pages 12-13 of “Reconceptions in Philosophy and Other Arts and Sciences”]. But , even though the predicates “green” and “examined before time b” are interdefinable, being able to tell if an object is green does not imply being able to tell if an object is examined before time b. The interdefinability among three elements is a type of interdefinability present, for example, also among the logical connectives. Another example of interdefinability is that one about a decidable predicate PD, which is interdefinable with an undecidable predicate PU: therefore even though we can tell whether an object is PD and whether an object is non-PD, we cannot tell whether an object is PU (since PU is an undecidable predicate) and whether an object is non-PU. Although the predicates PD and PU are interdefinable, the possibility to determine whether an object is PD does not imply the possibility to determine whether an object is PU (since PU is an undecidable predicate). Similarly, although the predicates “green” and “grue” are interdefinable, the possibility to determine whether an object is “green” even in absence of temporal information does not imply the possibility to determine whether an object is “grue” even in absence of temporal information. These and other examples about “grue” and “bleen” point out that even in case two predicates are interdefinable, the possibility to apply a predicate P does not imply the possibility to apply a predicate interdefinable with P. And that the possibility to apply the predicate “green” without having temporal information does not imply the possibility to apply the predicate “grue” without having temporal information. According to Goodman, if it is possible to determine if an object is green without needing temporal information, then it is also possible to determine if an object is grue without needing temporal information. But, knowing that an object is both green and grue implies temporal information: in fact, we know by definition that a grue object can only be: 1) either green (in case the object is examined before time t); 2) or blue (in case the object is not examined before time t). Thus, knowing that an object is both grue and green, we know that we are faced with case 1, the case of a grue object that is green and examined before time t. Then the paper points out why the Goodman-Kripke paradox is a paradox about meaning that cannot have repercussions on induction. Finally the paper points out why Hume’s problem is a problem different from Goodman’s paradox and requires a specific treatment. (shrink)

An introduction to Kripke’s semantics for propositional and quantified modal logic (with special reference to its historical development from the original 1959 version to the extended versions of 1963 and 1965) and to his theory of truth.

DOIhttps://doi.org/10.25247/P1982-999X.2019.v19n1.p103-134• Esta obra está licenciada sob uma licençaCreative Commons Atribuição 4.0 InternacionalISSN 1982-999x|Pragmatic ambiguity and Kripke’s dialogue against DonnellanAmbiguidade Pragmática e o diálogo de Kripke contra DonnellanCarlo Penco (Universidade de Genova, Itália)AbstractIn this paper I discuss Donnellan’s claim of the pragmatic ambiguity of the distinction between referential and attributive uses of definite des-criptions. The literature on the topic is huge and full of alternative analysis. I will restrict myself to a very classical topos: the challenge posed by (...) class='Hi'>Kripke to Donnellan’s distinction with the case of a dialogue on an attempt to update a misdescription. I claim that to treat the problem of the referential use of definite descriptions we need not only to take into account the context of utterance, but also the cognitive context with its epistemic restrictions and the possible different contexts of reception of the same utterance. I try to show different aspects of what can be called “pragmatic ambiguity”, which seem not correctly considered by Kripke, and connect them to the basic tenets of Grice Cooperative principle. (shrink)

The essay presents Saul Kripke's argument for mind/body-dualism and makes the suppositions explicit on which it rests. My claim, inspired by Richard Boyd, is that even if one of Kripke’s central suppositions - the principle of necessity of identities using rigid designators - is shared by the non-traditional identity theorist, it is still possible for her to rebut Kripke’s dualism.

In this paper, I want to show that a reasonable thesis on truth in fiction, Fictional Vichianism (FV)—according to which fictional truths are true because they are stipulated to be true—can be positively endorsed if one grounds Kripke’s justification for (FV), that traces back to the idea that names used in fiction never refer to concrete real individuals, into a creationist position on fictional entities that allows for a distinction between the pretending and the characterizing use of fiction-involving sentences. (...) Thus, sticking to (FV) provides a reason for a metaphysically moderate ontological realism on fictional entities. (shrink)

In Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language, Saul Kripke presents a controversial skeptical argument, which he attributes to Wittgenstein’s interlocutor in the Philosophical Investigations [PI]. The argument purports to show that there are no facts that correspond to what we mean by our words. Kripke maintains, moreover, that the conclusion of Wittgenstein’s so-called private language argument is a corollary of results Wittgenstein establishes in §§137-202 of PI concerning the topic of following-a-rule, and not the conclusion of an independently (...) developed argument in §§243ff of PI, as most commentators take it to be. In this work, I assess Kripke’s skeptical argument both in its own right, and as an interpretation of the rule-following sections of PI. In its own right, I try to show that it is critically flawed. However, as an interpretation of the rule-following sections of PI, I try to show that it is essentially correct. I do this by showing that Kripke’s interpretation squares with and supports the meta-philosophical framework developed by Wittgenstein in §§107-136 of PI, which immediately precedes his remarks on following-a-rule. (Oct 16, 2008. Committee: Paul Horwich, Galen Strawson, Stephen Neale, Michael Levin) -/- . (shrink)

El presente trabajo es un estudio del libro de Martin Kusch acerca den las tesis sostenidas en "Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language" (WRPL) por Saul Kripke examinado a la luz de la controversia desatada por la publicación del mismo en 1982, una de las más intensas que han ocurrido en los últimos 25 años en el seno de la filosofía analítica. En nuestro estudio procedemos en tres etapas. En la primera, presentaremos el desafío del Wittgenstein de Kripke (...) de una manera lo más neutral que podemos. En la segunda, presentaremos las características más notables trabajo de Kusch. En la tercera parte rebasamos los límites más estrictos de un comentario crítico para proponer una hipótesis propia acerca de la manera en la que la interpretación de Kusch permite comprender el vínculo de la propuesta de Kripke con la discusión clásica acerca del lenguaje privado como así también la discusión clásica permite realizar algunas observaciones críticas acerca de la propuesta de Kusch. (shrink)

The paradox of rule-following that Saul Kripke finds in Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations purports to show that words and thoughts have no content—that there is no intentionality. This paper refutes the paradox with a dilemma. Intentional states are posited in rational explanations, which use propositional attitudes to explain actions and thoughts. Depending on which of the two plausible views of rational explanation is right, either: the paradox is mistaken about the a priori requirements for content; or, a fatal flaw in (...) content ascription alleged by the paradox is not a flaw at all, but a necessary component of the proper method of propositional-attitude ascription. On either lemma, rational explanation defuses the paradox. (shrink)

This chapter introduces Kripke's work to advanced undergraduates, mainly focussing on his "A Puzzle About Belief" and "Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language".

Robert Kraut has proposed an analogy between valuing a loved one as irreplaceable and the sort of “rigid” attachment that (according to Saul Kripke’s account) occurs with the reference of proper names. We wanted to see if individuals with Kripkean intuitions were indeed more likely to value loved ones (and other persons and things) as irreplaceable. In this empirical study, 162 participants completed an online questionnaire asking them to consider how appropriate it would be to feel the same way (...) about a perfect replica of a loved one, as well as other questions about replaceability. Participants who previously had endorsed Kripkean reference (n = 96) rated loved ones as less replaceable on two different measures than participants who had previously endorsed Descriptivist reference (n = 66, t(160)> 2.27, p <.02, eta2> .03). Additional results suggest that this difference extends to other targets as well and is at least partially dependent on sentimental attachment. (shrink)

In this paper, I will argue against certain criticisms of Kripke’s Wittgenstein’s sceptical argument and sceptical solution, made especially by Baker and Hacker, McGinn, and McDowell. I will show that their interpretation of Kripke’s Wittgenstein’s view is misplaced. According to Kripke’s Wittgenstein’s sceptical argument, there is no fact as to what someone means by her words. For Kripke, this conclusion, combined with Classical Realist view of meaning, leads to the Wittgensteinian paradox, according to which there is (...) no such thing as meaning anything by any word. Wittgenstein presents this paradox in paragraph 201 of the Philosophical Investigations. As Kripke reads Wittgenstein, Wittgenstein is in agreement with his sceptic on the sceptical conclusion of the sceptical argument, that is, that there is no fact about meaning, and builds his sceptical solution on an endorsement of that. McDowell, McGinn, and others have objected that Kripke has failed to properly understand Wittgenstein’s main remarks in 201, that is, that the paradox is the result of a misunderstanding of the ordinary notion of meaning. Wittgenstein does not accept such a sceptical conclusion. I will use the distinction George Wilson draws between two different conclusions of the sceptical argument and show that Kripke has respected all of the remarks that Wittgenstein has put in section 201. (shrink)

Joseph Almog pointed out that Kripkean causal chains not only exist for names, but for all linguistic items (Almog 1984: 482). Based on this, he argues that the role of such chains is the presemantic one of assigning a linguistic meaning to the use of a name (1984: 484). This view is consistent with any number of theories about what such a linguistic meaning could be, and hence with very different views about the semantic reference of names. He concludes that (...) the causal theory is ‘rather trivial’ (1984: 487). In this paper I argue that Almog is correct to hold that the causal theory is trivial, but, contra Almog, argue that the triviality of the existence of causal chains is not a matter of such chains having a presemantic role in assigning linguistic meanings to utterances. Instead, such triviality is due to the fact that the causal theory reflects no more than a truism about the epistemology of convention acquisition. (shrink)

[ES] Esta es una discusión de algunos temas vagamente conectados en los artículos de Saul Kripke «The first person» y «Frege’s theory of sense and reference». [EN] This is a discussion of some loosely connected issues in Saul Kripke’s articles «The first person» and «Frege’s theory of sense and reference».

In this paper, I investigate the prospects for using the distinction between rejection and denial to resolve Saul Kripke’s puzzle about belief. One puzzle Kripke presents in A Puzzle About Belief poses what would have seemed a fairly straightforward question about the beliefs of the bilingual Pierre, who is disposed to sincerely and reflectively assent to the French sentence Londres est jolie, but not to the English sentence London is pretty, both of which he understands perfectly well. The (...) question to be answered is whether Pierre believes that London is pretty, and Kripke argues, of each answer, that it is unacceptable. On my proposal, either answer to the question is to be rejected, but neither answer is to be denied, using the resource of partially-defined predicates. After demonstrating how this serves as a solution to the puzzle, I illustrate some philosophical motivations—independent of Kripke’s puzzle —for adopting a view on which belief is a partially defined predicate. I conclude that there are decent prospects for the proposed response to Kripke’s puzzle. (shrink)

In §201 of Philosophical Investigations, Ludwig Wittgenstein puts forward his famous "rule-following paradox". The paradox is how can one follow in accord with a rule - the applications of which are potentially infinite - when the instances from which one learns the rule and the instances in which one displays that one has learned the rule are only finite? How can one be certain of rule-following at all? In Wittgenstein: On Rules and Private Language, Saul Kripke concedes the skeptical (...) position that there are no facts that we follow a rule but that there are still conditions under which we are warranted in asserting of others that they are following a rule. In this paper, I explain why Kripke's solution to the rule-following paradox fails. I then offer an alternative. (shrink)

In this paper, I try to outline what I take to be Naming and Necessity’s fundamental legacy to my generation and those that follow, and the new perspectives it has opened up for twenty-first century philosophy. The discussion is subdivided into three sections, concerning respectively philosophy of language, metaphysics, and metaphilosophy. The general unifying theme is that Naming and Necessity is helping philosophy to recover a Golden Age, by freeing it from the strictures coming from the empiricist and Kantian traditions (...) and reconnecting it to the world and the objects that populate it. Because of this, in the concluding paragraph I tentatively suggest that Kripke’s philosophy may be seen as a sui generis form of naturalism. (shrink)

The theory of proper names proposed by J.S. Mill in A system of logic (1843), and discussed in S. Kripke’s Naming and necessity (1980), is shown to be predated by A. Rosmini’s Nuovo saggio sull’origine delle idee (1830) and T. Reid’s Essays on the intellectual powers of man (1785). For philological reasons, Rosmini probably did not obtain his view of proper names from Reid. For philosophical reasons, it is unlikely that he got it from Hobbes, Locke, Smith, or Stewart. (...) Although not explicitly indicated by Rosmini himself, he may have been influenced by St. Thomas, who in Summa theologica discusses suppositum and natura in relation to the equivocal functions of the terms ”God” and ”sun” as common and proper names. As previously observed, forerunners of the idea can be found in Antiquity, in Plato’s Theaetetus and Aristotle’s Metaphysics. From a historical point of view, the fully developed ”Millian” opinion that connotation is not a fundamental aspect of proper names, and that their referents are not fixed by description, could more accurately be termed the Reid-Rosmini-Mill theory. (shrink)

A lot has been written on solutions to the semantic paradoxes, but very little on the topic of general theories of paradoxicality. The reason for this, we believe, is that it is not easy to disentangle a solution to the paradoxes from a specific conception of what those paradoxes consist in. This paper goes some way towards remedying this situation. We first address the question of what one should expect from an account of paradoxicality. We then present one conception of (...) paradoxicality that has been offered in the literature: the fixed-point conception. According to this conception, a statement is paradoxical if it cannot obtain a classical truth-value at any fixed-point model. In order to assess this proposal rigorously we provide a non-metalinguistic characterization of paradoxicality and we evaluate whether the resulting account satisfies a number of reasonable desiderata. (shrink)

It is well known that the following features hold of AR + T under the strong Kleene scheme, regardless of the way the language is Gödel numbered: 1. There exist sentences that are neither paradoxical nor grounded. 2. There are 2ℵ0 fixed points. 3. In the minimal fixed point the weakly definable sets (i.e., sets definable as {n∣ A(n) is true in the minimal fixed point where A(x) is a formula of AR + T) are precisely the Π1 1 sets. (...) 4. In the minimal fixed point the totally defined sets (sets weakly defined by formulae all of whose instances are true or false) are precisely the ▵1 1 sets. 5. The closure ordinal for Kripke's construction of the minimal fixed point is ωCK 1. In contrast, we show that under the weak Kleene scheme, depending on the way the Gödel numbering is chosen: 1. There may or may not exist nonparadoxical, ungrounded sentences. 2. The number of fixed points may be any positive finite number, ℵ0, or 2ℵ0 . 3. In the minimal fixed point, the sets that are weakly definable may range from a subclass of the sets 1-1 reducible to the truth set of AR to the Π1 1 sets, including intermediate cases. 4. Similarly, the totally definable sets in the minimal fixed point range from precisely the arithmetical sets up to precisely the ▵1 1 sets. 5. The closure ordinal for the construction of the minimal fixed point may be ω, ωCK 1, or any successor limit ordinal in between. In addition we suggest how one may supplement AR + T with a function symbol interpreted by a certain primitive recursive function so that, irrespective of the choice of the Godel numbering, the resulting language based on the weak Kleene scheme has the five features noted above for the strong Kleene language. (shrink)

Charles Carlini interviews Nathan Salmón about the philosophical work of his mentor and friend, the late Saul Kripke, one of the foremost philosophers of the 20th Century.

This paper considers the significance of the informal publication and circulation in the work of one of the most important analytic philosophers of the late 20th Century, Saul Kripke. I argue that everyday copying technologies such as tape recording and photocopying enabled academic philosophers in the 1970s and 1980s to create and reproduce living documents whose private preservation and circulation offered a way to make and maintain a community of interest, carve out a space for oral discourse and, most (...) significantly for histories of alternative print technologies, that these technologies and techniques of reproduction were essential to the composition of Kripke’s ground-breaking and revolutionary published work. The recording, transcripts and photocopies archived Kripke’s ideas and offered access to them outside of institutional publishing channels. Kripke lectured a great deal, usually without notes, and was known to be reluctant to commit his ideas to print; this ‘szamizdat’ (as he refers to it) also preserved a space for the oral as the preferred mode of communication for philosophical discourse, connecting the modern tradition with the ancients, an oral tradition held together with magnetic tape, typescript, photocopies, and digital text files. This archival study draws attention to the intermediality of Kripke's work through close examination of his acknowledgments, prefaces, and footnotes to work up a history of the everyday media inscriptions (the recordings, typescript transcriptions, photocopies etc.) and practices (the lectures, seminars, and international social networks of distribution) that underpin the production of both his published and unpublished work. This essay brings a media archaeological approach into contact with scholarship on the history of the book and intellectual history. It foregrounds the role of the oral and aural in the history of print and contributes to our understanding of circulation and reproduction as a cultural practices. (shrink)

We argue that, if taken seriously, Kripke's view that a language for science can dispense with a negation operator is to be rejected. Part of the argument is a proof that positive logic, i.e., classical propositional logic without negation, is not categorical.

What was Saul Kripke’s personal stance on the sceptical challenge that he famously attributed to Ludwig Wittgenstein? It will be argued that despite his statements to the contrary, we can, in fact, outline at least a rough sketch of Kripke’s own views on the challenge and its aftermath on the basis of the remarks he left in the text. In summary, Kripke (a) rejected the sceptical solution to the challenge and (b) leaned towards a non-sceptical primitivist solution. (...) If this is correct, it follows that there is a way in which Kripke's view makes his causal-historical picture of reference potentially able to solve the sceptical challenge. (shrink)