Influential American philosopher whose 1980 book Naming and Necessity challenged ideas about the identity of mind and brain
Photograph: Peter SusanszkyPhotograph: Peter SusanszkyIn 1970, the philosopher Saul Kripke, who has died aged 81, gave three lectures at Princeton University that shook up Anglo-American philosophy. Speaking without notes, he interwove topics in the separate fields of modal logic , philosophy of language and philosophy of mind, transformed each, and resuscitated metaphysics.
The resulting book, Naming and Necessity , is one of the major philosophical works of the 20th century. It opens with an apparently abstruse question: what connects a name to the individual – whether present, distant or dead – who is named? According to then standard views, a name such as Aristotle is really a matter of “disguised descriptions”: shorthand for what the name-bearer is known to have done. If so, said Kripke, then “Aristotle was a philosopher in ancient Greece” would be a mere tautology, like “a bachelor is an unmarried man”; while to say that Aristotle could have taken up politics instead of philosophy, or that perhaps someone other than Aristotle wrote the works attributed to him, would be meaningless. But it certainly makes sense to say either, and to imagine that Richard Nixon did not win the 1968 US presidential election, or might have been called Robert. Names could hardly be fixed by description at the outset, Kripke reminds us. “[A] baby is born; his parents call him by a certain name. They talk about him to their friends. Other people meet him. Through various sorts of talk the name is spread from link to link as if by a chain” across time and space. Thus we can correctly refer to Richard Nixon purely “in virtue of our connection with other speakers in the community, going back to the referent himself”, and irrespective of whether we know much about him. “[I]t is not how the speaker thinks he got the reference” that determines what he is referring to, any more than it is his knowledge of how electricity works that enables him to switch on a light, but a causal-historical chain quite external to him that reaches back to the originally named individual. Kripke proposed that we “call something a ‘rigid designator’ if in every possible world it designates the same object”. And that applies not only to individual entities but to “natural kinds” such as water, gold, lion. “If we imagine a hypothetical baptism” of the general term “gold”, “we must imagine it picked out as by some such ‘definition’ as, ‘Gold is the substance instantiated by the items over there, or at any rate by almost all of them’”. The discovery that it had atomic number 79 served properly to distinguish it from gold-resembling substances such as iron pyrites ., had influentially argued that whether an entity has the same property in assorted possible worlds depends on how it is described in each; that it has no essential properties in itself. But, said Kripke, “possible worlds” are not distant planets on which we can glimpse varied alternatives of what Richard Nixon, for instance, did in the actual world, thus making it a moot point “which one of these people, if any, is Nixon”. Rather, they are simply “counterfactual situations” that can be differently “stipulated” as wished. In some of them we imagine Nixon being a garbage collector, or dying aged 10, or not existing at all. In all of them, though, “Richard Nixon” names the person who was engendered from a particular sperm and egg, and who, whatever he in fact ended up doing, has “transworld identity” across possible worlds. How could he not be himself? Reference to an entity after its “initial ‘baptism’” encompasses its essential properties by default, whether they are known or not. Initially, and for centuries, “heat” applied merely to “that which is sensed by sensation S”, but nonetheless, in using the term, we were inadvertently referring to heat’s imperceptible chemical constitution – otherwise we would not have been referring to heat at all. Knowledge that heat is molecular motion is a posteriori – acquired through experience. Certainly the fact that we know this is contingent – we might never have discovered it. But what we have come to know is as much a necessary truth as 2 + 2=4. So is the identity of water with HO because that is what water essentially is and always has been. “This in and of itself has nothing to do with anyone’s knowledge of anything.” Thus necessity is not, as immemorially assumed, exclusive to what is known a priori – independent of experience; there are also propositions the necessary truth of which is revealed only thanks to empirical research. Why it has seemed otherwise is because epistemology – the way we know about things – has been confused with metaphysics – the way things are. Kripke deployed this revolutionary notion of “a posteriori necessity” to combat Identity Theories in philosophy of mind. These claim that, just as heat has been discovered to be molecular motion, so mental states will be revealed to be brain states. He showed that this is a false analogy. For God to create heat, he said, was for God to create molecular motion , but molecular motion could have existed without being felt as hot. With pain, however, “the element of contingency … cannot lie… in the relation between the phenomenon … and the way it is felt or appears ”, for “there is no ‘appearance’ beyond the mental phenomenon itself”. What “pain” rigidly designates cannot come apart from being felt: it precisely is such a feeling. Ludwig Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language , his second book, was not intended to express Kripke’s own views but to expound “perhaps the central problem” in Wittgenstein’s main work: that we profess to follow rules in maths and language, but there can be no rule for interpreting a rule – if there were, we would need another rule to dictate what counts as following it, and so on. And since nothing can properly determine the next step in applying a rule, our practices have no proper grounding. “There can be no such thing as meaning anything by any word”, or any correct result in mathematical calculations. “Kripkenstein” both stimulated and enraged Wittgenstein scholars. Despite his enormous contribution to philosophy – including philosophy of mathematics, personal identity, the liar’s paradox and the nature of truth –Kripke produced only those two books , plus a transcription of the John Locke Lectures he gave at Oxford in 1973 entitled
Australia Latest News, Australia Headlines
Similar News:You can also read news stories similar to this one that we have collected from other news sources.
Car blast kills daughter of influential Russian known as 'Putin's brain'The vivid and violent incident, unusual for Moscow, is likely to aggravate Russia-Ukraine animosity.
Read more »
German publisher pulls Winnetou books amid racial stereotyping rowRavensburger Verlag reacts as debate rages over depiction of Native American character in children’s books
Read more »
Texas school district pulls the Bible, The Bluest Eye and other books from librarySchool board in Dallas-Fort Worth area requires reviewing books facing challenges from parents
Read more »
The Australian cyber-spy agency's 50 cent coin was actually solved weeks ago — here's how to do itThe awe-inspiring abilities of a 14-year-old code-cracker from Tasmania boggled many minds last week, but it turns out he wasn't the only one to conquer the coin challenge.
Read more »