#namingandnecessity

My critique of this theory is primarily in how Kripke treats certain essential properties. He appears to treat the three properties of composition, internal structure, and origin as having equal bearing on the essence of an object, and therefore the designation of that object. However, I would propose that his theory of naming and essentialism does not in fact place these three kinds of property on equal footing; rather, I think that Kripke’s arguments show that actually some essential properties must be present in order for others to be present. What I mean by this is that there are some essential properties that necessitate further essential properties, or that certain essential properties may in some situations be rendered “unessential,” as it were. This does not necessarily make such properties “more essential” than the properties that they necessitate,[i] but rather might show certain essential properties to be subsidiary to some larger essential property. I argue that origin, as an essential property, uniquely necessitates identity. Things such as composition or internal structure seem to me to not be unique. I beleive that composition and internal structure between two different objects[ii] can, in certain cases, be identical, and therefore, if a rigid designator is said to refer to an object based on a reference fixed by composition or internal structure, then it would be possible for it to not in fact designate rigidly. It is of course not possible for a rigid designator to either refer to two unique objects or individuals, or for a rigid designator to cease to refer, so in such a case, further criteria for essence is needed. This idea involves a few theoretical, but still possible ideas, which do not, as far as I can see, necessitate the formulation of a possible world in which the essentialism of natural kinds or the designation of terms or names be any different than in ours. The first tool I would like to stipulate is some kind of perfect facsimile machine. In this picture, I imagine it would look something very much like a large 3-D printer, and operate in about the same capacity—placing subsequent layers or units of substrate in order to build a three dimensional object to the exact specifications determined by some computer program. However, in this counterfactual, I would stipulate the existence and implementation of certain technological advances which have not yet occurred. The first is that of some kind of scanning device that can determine the physical structure of an object, down to the very atomic arrangement. From this information it should follow that it is within the capacity of such a machine to also determine molecular organization of a given object, such that the complete structural and compositional nature of an object, rather than a common scanner which only determines a digital representation of the topological features of an object, may be observed, and denoted. The second tool I would stipulate would be that of a 3-D printer which could print objects by reconstructing their exact atomic structure and composition. Such a thing is not that far out of our reach: currently 3-D printers have begun to be used to print human tissue, and it is expected in the near future that they will be able to construct complete human organs.[iii] Functions such as the ability to manipulate individual atoms are not used in machines in such a way, but as I understand it, logically possible. Such a combination of devices might be just called a ‘3-D Copier’, in that it analyses and collects information about the properties of an object, and then has the ability to reproduce exact physical copies based on absolutely accurate empirical data.

Now, say that the table that Kripke mentions in his third lecture is placed in the scanner mechanism. The mechanism scans the table such that now it has translated the information gathered, and has produced a digital representation of the exact atomic structure and composition of the table.[iv] In this way, as in Kripke’s causal chain theory of naming, the device has successfully related fixed reference, the atomic structure and composition, of the table into, binary form. Thus, some essential properties of the table, still intact, have just been translated into a series of ones and zeroes. I do not think that if you were to print out the actual binary code version of the table, and handed it to a person, that they would look at it and recognize that it was the specific object, the table, or even that they were looking at something other than a binary code; however, it still seems to me as though that string of code is the table, in that “It matters not at all that different speakers,” here, the scanner/computer, “may fix the reference,” in this case, in binary form, “provided they give it the same referent,” the table. And surely, with enough rigor and understanding of the digitized table information, one could fix the reference of the table to its binary form. According to Kripke, the numbers on the page could not refer to anything but the table, since it fixes the reference in terms of its composition and internal structure.

After the link from Scanner to computer is made, the table, still in binary form, is sent to the printer. Supposing the printer is functioning correctly, it should be able to convert the table from binary form into physical form by following the binary blueprint, so to speak, of the table. This would be akin to making another link in the causal chain, which has allowed for the referent of ‘Table’ to be passed via a sort of ostensive process from the object, the table, to the scanner, to the computer, and finally to the printer. Thus, the printer would construct something that is compositionally and structurally identical to the original object, by the careful arrangement of atoms into molecules, which should form a piece of wood that is exactly identical to the table in every physical way.

            To put this in another way, let us begin by calling the original object, whose reference is fixed by its exact composition and structure, ‘T’. The scanner, we can call, ‘S’; the computer, ‘C’; the printer, ‘P’. If we treat S, C, and P as we would speakers, we can easily begin to form a picture in which the reference of the name ‘T’ follows a causal chain. We begin by ostensively fixing the reference of ‘T’ by allowing S to “see” T, which for S, consists of gathering the atomic composition and molecular structure of T in information form. Then, S, having fixed the reference of T as ‘the object having that specific composition and structure’, passes this information, which is a digitized version of T, to C, via binary language, fixing the reference of T still as ‘the object having that specific composition and structure’. This information is then passed from C to P, translating from binary language back into a schematic of atoms and molecules, which then P fixes as the reference for the object, ‘PT’ which is physically identical to the table in every way, but is actually something like a pseudo-table. Looking at it in this way, it would seem that if we were to allow for the composition and internal structure to satisfy the conditions for what constitutes an essential property of T, then the object which we call, ‘PT’, and the object which we call, ‘T’, are the same object. However, surely it is not correct to say that ‘T is PT’, and to say that the object in the scanner, T, and the object that just came from the printer, PT, are the same because they are made up of the exact same arrangement of atoms, or that you could use T to refer to PT. Neither does it seem correct to say that because the term, ‘T’ no longer identifies a physically unique object that the referent of ‘T’ does not exist, or that ‘T’ does not still rigidly designate the table, T. This may seem obvious, but if you removed the two objects from the setting of the 3-D Copier rig, how might anyone who came upon them, without knowing which object is T and which is PT, be able to tell them apart? No matter the extent of investigation into the physical properties of the two tables, without knowing or being told which is T and which is PT, no empirical investigation into the two objects could distinguish them. It would seem, then, that the only way we could distinguish the two objects, T and PT, in such a situation, would be to identify a property of T that is essential to fix the reference of ‘T’ and not of ‘PT’.

The property that seems obvious would be to say that T and PT can be distinguished by knowledge of the origin of either object. But how, if not empirically, can we independently learn which table is which? One could not bring in a professor who has spent a career teaching in the room with the table to try to identify any descriptive differences, since their would be none—every nick and stain of the two tables would be identical. One could not ask for someone to sample the tables, to test which one has the physical properties of T, since, due to the nature of the creation of PT, it is necessary that they share such previously essential properties. It would seem that the only way would be for someone involved in the process of creating PT, or someone who has become part of one or both of the causal chains that pick out either T or PT,[v] would be able to fix the reference thereafter. Thus, it is only the origins of T and PT that can distinguish them. This statement may look something like ‘T is the object which has the unique physical properties belonging to T-PT, and originated from a tree’[vi], or that ‘PT is the object which has the unique physical properties belonging to T-PT, and originated from a 3-D printer’. According to this, it would be impossible to know the difference between T and PT a postiori without knowing the identity of either T or PT a priori. Therefore, it follows, in such a case, that the essential property of origin necessitates the identity of the two objects, and that what were previously considered to be the essential properties of composition and internal structure are non-essential in that they do not pick out an object uniquely. 

[i] That seems to be a semantic argument, whether or not an essential property is “more” or “less” essential would seem to me to show that it is not in fact essential at all. Essence seems to be a binary system, rather than comparative.

[ii] Once again, this is not talking about natural kinds, but rather objects or individuals which are said to be unique

[iii] This is an example I will come back to

  [v] I say either, because it follows that as soon as one knows which of the objects is T or PT, then one can pick out the other object by saying that the other is ‘the object having the same physical properties of T-PT, which is not T (or PT)’.

    Many philosophers have argued that the identity of an object can be determined by descriptive properties of that object. These descriptivist theories advocate for a system of designation in which descriptions—from a single descriptive property, to a unique single property, to even a cluster of descriptions—can uniquely and necessarily designate a referent. These arguments, which claim that descriptions can act as what Kripke calls “rigid designators,” do not portray a logic that presents a valid argument for either the rigid designation of a referent, or its essential properties. In Naming and Necessity, Kripke presents a theory of designation and essentialism that rejects descriptivist theory.

The foundation of this argument is in Kripke’s definition of a rigid designator. He defines a term as designating rigidly if it is “a term that designates the same object in all possible worlds.”[i] However, as even Kripke himself admits, this definition can be misleading. While the obvious implication is that a term, x, should designate the same object, y, in every “possible world,” this is not the limit of this definition. As well as designating the same referent consistently, there is a second implication that in a “possible world” in which the referent does not exist, the term, x, does not designate any object, y. Kripke says that “when I use the notion of rigid designator, I do not imply that the object referred to necessarily exists. All I mean is that in any possible world where the object in question does exist, in any situation where the object would exist, we use the designator in question to designate that object.”[ii] For instance, to use a common example of Kripke’s, the chemical formula H2O rigidly designates the object with the physical properties of water in our world. In order for H2O to rigidly designate the chemical compound consisting of two hydrogen atoms and an oxygen atom, which we call water, it must do so in all instances in which such a chemical compound exists. He goes on to further say that, “in a situation where the object does not exist, then we should say that the designator has no referent and that the object in question so designated does not exist and cannot designate any other object in any instance or “possible world,”.”[iii] Using the same example, this further clarification would only allow for H2O to designate the molecule, water, rigidly if there were no situations in which H2O could refer to something other than the molecule with two hydrogen atoms and a single oxygen atom, and if in every situation in which water, as a chemical compound, does not exist, the term H2O has no referent. This also does not mean that a designator is not rigid if the native designation in a counterfactual situation is semantically different. This idea can be demonstrated by imagining a counterfactual in which the entire population of the world spoke a different language than the population of the world in reality. In this possible world- let us say a world in which the universal language is phonetically identical to English, but otherwise has no similarities (grammar, definitions, usage) to the English language- everything would be referred to in what would be a different tongue than our own. In this possible world, a statement such as ‘water is made up of two hydrogen atoms and an oxygen atom’, would not suddenly become contingent, even though in this possible world the statement (in their phonetically identical language), ‘water is made up of two hydrogen atoms and an oxygen atom’ had a meaning in English of ‘there are 50 kilometers in a mile’.[iv] This is because “we use English with our meanings and our references,” and therefore while any stipulation of a possible world, formulated in our language, such as the universal use of a different language, may give rise to semantic differences between how they would refer or define objects, these differences are purely hypothetical and do not change the nature of the objects as we refer to them. [v]

The critique that Kripke makes of descriptive theories is that descriptions do not necessitate identity, but rather are contingent truths. The way that he claims to prove this is a matter of analyzing “possible worlds” in a modal fashion. First, a “possible world”, he explains, is not “a distant country that we are coming across, or viewing through a telescope. Generally speaking, another possible world is too far away. Even if we travel faster than light we won’t get to it.”[vi] In this way, Kripke makes it clear that a “possible world” should be treated as a theoretical entity, not as a reality that is tangible in any way. A “possible world,” he clarifies, “is given by the descriptive conditions we associate with it.”[vii] This definition of a possible world is interchangeable with what Kripke calls “counterfactual situations.”[viii] What he means by this definition is that conditions present in a given counterfactual only differ from those in our reality insofar as is necessitated by stipulated differences in description between the counterfactual and real scenario.[ix] Besides the stipulated differences, and the intuitive logical changes that arise from these differences, the counterfactuals should otherwise resemble our reality in every way.

Kripke argues that proper names, in designating unique objects, cannot be identified by a single definite description, or by a cluster of descriptions. The theses that Kripke gives the cluster concept theory of names are as follows:

“(1) To every name or designating expression ‘X’, there corresponds a cluster of properties, namely the family of those properties φ such that A believes ‘φX’.

(2) One of the properties, or some conjointly, are believed by A to pick out some individual uniquely.

(3) If most, or a weighted most, of the φ’s are satisfied by one unique object γ, then γ is the referent of ‘X’.

(4) If the vote yields no unique object, ‘X’ does not refer.

(5) The statement, ‘If X exists, then X has most of the φ’s’ is known a priori by the speaker.

(6)       The statement, ‘If X exists, then X has most of the φ’s’ expresses a necessary truth (in the idiolect of the speaker).

(C) For any successful theory, the account must not be circular. The properties which are used in the vote must not themselves involve the notion of reference in such a way that it is ultimately impossible to eliminate.[x]”

  In order to allow for the rigidity of proper names, Kripke must first find this theory false, and show that descriptive properties, even those unique to an individual, cannot prove identity. Thesis (1), he says, is a definition, and therefore can be true.[xi] Thesis (2), however, seems to be largely falsifiable. One way that Kripke shows that Thesis (2) can fail to be satisfied is by critiquing the practice of using “some famous deeds of the person in question,” as properties which can specify an individual uniquely.[xii] An example of this practice would be to say, “Cicero was the man who denounced Catiline,” which, according to descriptivist theory of identity, means, “the average person…when he refers to Cicero, is saying something like ‘the man who denounced Cataline’.”[xiii] However, while this does uniquely pick out the man, Cicero, it is wrong to think that the average person refers to this when using the name, ‘Cicero’, rather than “just [thinking] of a famous Roman orator.”[xiv] It would not be correct to say that the person is then not using ‘Cicero’ as a name for Cicero, even though the description ‘a famous Roman orator’ may pick out many other individuals.[xv] Thus, Thesis (2) fails to be satisfied, since the referent of a name is still designated despite a lack of the use of a uniquely identifying property. Kripke also shows that Thesis (2) can fail to be satisfied correctly by showing that it violates the noncircularity condition. The example given is that of Einstein and the theory of relativity. Most people know that Einstein discovered the theory of relativity. However, while the average person would say this is a unique property of Einstein—no one else discovered the theory of relativity before he did—they may not be able to independently reference the theory. So then, when asked about what exactly the theory is, they might say that it is ‘Einstein’s Theory’. This then would lead to a circular reference, essentially saying that the name Einstein refers to  ‘the man who discovered Einstein’s theory’.[xvi] Therefore Thesis (2) can be satisfied in a way which picks out an individual uniquely, while at the same time not satisfying the noncircularity condition.[xvii]

            Though showing that Thesis (2) is wrong is enough to discredit the rest of the theory, since the viability of the theory as a whole hinged on “always being able to specify unique conditions which are satisfied,” the falsities of the other theses help to solidify Kripke’s critique of the Cluster Concept theory.[xviii][xix] Thesis (3) states that “if most of the φ’s, suitably weighted, are satisfied by a unique object γ, then γ is the referent of the name for the speaker.”[xx] However, it does not seem necessary that even if all of the φ’s are satisfied by a unique object, that then the object is necessarily the referent of ‘X’ for A. If A uses the name ‘X’ to designate an object γ, which a number of φ’s are satisfied by, is it necessary that γ is the referent of ‘X’? Kripke says that in fact, it is not.

Let us say that there is a misconception concerning the object, γ, and it is discovered that γ does not satisfy the properties attributed to the referent of the term, ‘X’. Then, despite the fact that A believes that ‘X’ refers to the object γ—the object by which most of the φ’s are satisfied uniquely—the object that ‘X’ designates is not in fact γ. However, this should not be interpreted as ‘X’ designating the wrong thing by being used to refer to γ: if ‘X’ rigidly designates anything, its referent is not something that can be changed. Rather, one should say that actually, ‘X’ designates the unique object, z, and, though A believes that the referent of ‘X’ is the unique object γ, A was incorrectly using ‘X’ to refer to γ, whose actual designator is ‘V’, as a result of A falsely attributing a certain set of φ’s to the object z. Otherwise, it seems as though, due to an informational error, that suddenly a rigid designator could designate no object at all, or a completely different object altogether, and this, according to the definition of a rigid designator, cannot be. Therefore, just because A’s belief was incorrect, it cannot hold that when A was using ‘X’ to refer to γ, that A was actually using ‘X’ as synonymous with ‘V’[xxi], or that: A must have been incorrectly attributing properties of γ to z, and not using the name ‘X’ to designate the referent of ‘V’. Therefore, Thesis (3) must be false, and it should not be said that if a unique object satisfies most of φ’s, then that object is the referent of that name.[xxii]

The falsity of Thesis (4), “if the vote yields no unique object the name does not refer,”[xxiii] is evident by virtue of the fallibility of the previous two theses.  According to Kripke, there are two main ways in which this Thesis can fail. The first is that, as in Thesis (2), the vote may not yield a unique object, but the name still refers. The second instance is found in “[supposing] it yields no object, that nothing satisfies most, or even any, substantial number, of the φ’s.”[xxiv] Since yielding no object qualifies as yielding no unique object, the name does not refer, according to Thesis (4). However, Kripke claims that this is also not true, because “in the same way that you may have false beliefs about a person which may actually be true of someone else,”[xxv] and the name still refers, “so you may have false beliefs which are true of absolutely no one.”[xxvi] So long as these beliefs “constitute the totality of your beliefs,” the name still refers—whether or not the conditions are satisfied by a unique object.[xxvii] An example given by Kripke is that of the biblical Jonah. He says, “Biblical scholars…think that Jonah really existed…[not] because they think that someone ever was swallowed by a big fish or even went to Nineveh to preach.”[xxviii] These properties may not be true of Jonah, or of anyone else, for that matter; however, that does not mean that the name ‘Jonah’ does not have a referent.[xxix] [xxx]

The fifth part of the theory claims that “the statement ‘If X exists, then X has most of the φ’s’, is a priori true for A.”[xxxi] This seems to be the easiest to refute, primarily because, even if there was an individual who satisfies the statement ‘if X exists, then X has most of the φ’s’, the facts that are known about that individual are merely contingent truths. These truths are found to be contingent because they could easily be found through empirical means to be false; in addition, it would be easy to imagine a possible world in which any such φ’s were not properties of X at all.

By disproving these theses, Kripke successfully shows the incorrectness of the cluster concept theory of description. At this point Kripke begins to posit his own theory of reference. Having already established that something, such as using “the sound ‘Gödel’ as the name of the man whom I am calling ‘Schmidt’” in a counterfactual scenario where it was unknown that it was in fact a man named ‘Schmidt’ who discovered the incompleteness of arithmetic, and not, as is widely believed, the man called ‘Gödel’, is not correct, Kripke begins to explain why the name ‘Gödel’ still refers to the man, Gödel. Here he introduces the idea of a causal chain of reference. A causal chain of naming, which is most common for proper names, is a familiar idea. For instance, when “a baby is born… his parents call him by a certain name. They talk about him to their friends. Other people meet him,” and through such interactions the name of the child “is spread from link to link as if by a chain.”[xxxii] In this way, “the way the reference of the name is fixed is of little importance,” because, even if “different speakers…fix the reference of the name in different way,” as long as the referent remains the same, the identity of the object will not be separated from the name. [xxxiii] It is not as if, each time the name of the baby is passed on to a further link by a speaker, the speaker must provide an ostensive definition, or even be able to provide such a definition. Knowing the name of the baby, as having been fixed as a reference by the parents in the act of naming him and passed from link to link in a causal chain, is enough to uniquely identify the individual in question. Even if there arises a situation in which there is a confusion concerning the source of the reference, and/or the referent of the name, and therefore how the reference was fixed—perhaps someone believes that they heard a term identifying a certain individual first from a certain speaker, but in fact the reference was fixed by another speaker referring to a different individual, and was unaware that the two referents were different—this would not change how the reference was fixed for that person originally. [xxxiv] In this case, it would be an instance of mistaken identity, and not one in which the referent of the name used by the first speaker changes: it is not the descriptive element of ‘being called X’ that distinguishes either of the two individuals, “but the actual chain of communication,” by which the reference is fixed.[xxxv]

The way in which these references, according to the causal chain theory of naming, are initially fixed or acquire the term that designates their name, is also advanced by Kripke. The phrase that he uses for the case of such an event is an “initial ‘baptism’.”[xxxvi] In the instance of an “initial baptism,” an “object may be named by ostension, or the reference of the name may be fixed by a description.”[xxxvii] Therefore, according to Kripke, a name may be introduced and assigned to an object by physically picking out an object—defining or naming something by the act of pointing to it, say—in a situation in which the name, as a designator, would be meaningless a priori, or via description, insofar as the “description used is not synonymous with the name it introduces but rather fixes its reference.”[xxxviii]The former case, somewhat self-explanatory, is more useful in the common use of ‘names’, in which terms are usually introduced by “a baptizer [who] is acquainted in some sense with the object he names.”[xxxix] The latter type of case, which does not really concern proper names, is usually seen in the baptism of natural kinds or scientific identities, such as ‘0 degrees Kelvin’. Thus initial baptism, as it occurs within a causal chain, presents a name which “the receiver of the name must…intend when he learns it to use it with the same reference as the man from whom he heard it.”[xl] Therefore, a person, by using the same name in reference to the same object as the previous link in the chain, could refer to a unique object without a priori knowledge of the object. 

If a speaker can refer to an object without a priori knowledge, then what, Kripke asks, might happen if a speaker refers to an object that they do not know a priori as a single object, by two different names. A possible scenario he gives of this is of Hesperus and Phosphorus. The names ‘Hesperus’ and ‘Phosphorus’ can be defined through ostension as, respectively, the “star over there in the evening,” and the “star over there in the morning.”[xli] While this was not the case when the names ‘Hesperus’ and ‘Phosphorus’ were first used, we have since discovered that actually, Hesperus is Phosphorus, and are the planet that we now refer to as ‘Venus’. Thus, when ancient astronomers used the names ‘Hesperus’ and ‘Phosphorus’ they were referring to both Hesperus and Phosphorus, despite the fact that they did not know that the ‘star over there in the evening’ was the same ‘star over there in the morning’.  Thus, it would seem that “we do not necessarily know a priori that an identity statement between names is true.”[xlii] While most philosophers might argue that if you cannot know something a priori, then it is a contingent truth, Kripke points out that it does not in fact follow that such an identity, if shown to be true, is contingent.[xliii]

Kripke argues, that, in fact, there are no circumstances in which such an identity as “Hesperus is Phosphorus” is not necessarily true. The main reasoning of this argument is in the fact that such terms, when used as names, are rigid designators, and therefore “refer in every possible world to the planet Venus.”[xliv] As shown previously, the term(s) used to refer to an object in a counterfactual situation has no bearing on whether or not the term that we use rigidly designates that same object. This stipulation of rigid designators allows Kripke to rule out the possibility of Hesperus not being Phosphorus in several counterfactuals in which it may be claimed that there is no shared identity between the referents of the two terms. For these counterfactuals, let ‘A’ refer to an astronomer with a particular affinity for the names ‘Hesperus’ and ‘Phosphorus’. Let us further say that A had picked out Venus via ostension twice, and in the first instance, in the evening, had named it ‘Hesperus’ and again in the morning, but this time called it ‘Phosphorus’.[xlv] This is how the terms came to be in our world, as far as we know, and therefore, in such a situation, ‘Hesperus is Phosphorus’ must be true.  We can also imagine a situation in which A picked out Venus once, and another celestial body, or even in which A had picked out two different bodies—maybe in this possible world the planet Venus does not exist, or cannot be seen in the sky at all due to some kind of visual obstruction—but had called one object ‘Hesperus’ and the other ‘Phosphorus’. In these cases, it is true that the name ‘Phosphorus’ or ‘Hesperus’ or both may not have referred to Venus, or any other body. However, it does not therefore follow that Hesperus is not Phosphorus.[xlvi] We could even imagine a world in which the referents of the names ‘Hesperus’ and ‘Phosphorus’ were determined by “the very identifying descriptions we used.”[xlvii] Even if these terms were applied to different (or the same) bodies, we cannot then say that Hesperus was not Phosphorus, because it is a “given that Hesperus is Phosphorus,” since ‘Hesperus is Phosphorus’ is a necessary identity as we use it.[xlviii]

The confusion concerning the necessity of the statement ‘Hesperus is Phosphorus’ is a confusion of what the statement entails. Kripke points out that confusions may arise in regard to the validity of a statement such as ‘Hesperus is Phosphorus’, regarding the contingency of the physicality implied or the semantic nature of the terms. He says that it would be incorrect to claim that such an identity is contingent because of the epistemic fact that, since we could not have known a priori that Hesperus is Phosphorus before we discovered that Hesperus is Phosphorus, it might have turned out that Hesperus was not Phosphorus, or that they might not have been called ‘Hesperus’ or ‘Phosphorus’; the confusion here lies in not distinguishing between the epistemic possibility and the metaphysical identity presented by the statement.[xlix][l] However, because these terms ‘Hesperus’ and ‘Phosphorus’ are rigid designators as we use them, there is no situation in which the identity ‘Hesperus is Phosphorus’ is not necessarily true. Even when considering a counterfactual in which the same qualitative conditions exist[li], saying that things could have been such that Hesperus was not Phosphorus is true: in such a counterfactual situation the terms ‘Hesperus’ and ‘Phosphorus’ designate not Venus, but two different objects. However, the truth of this statement is only that in that there exists the possibility that ‘Hesperus’ and ‘Phosphorus’ could have been used to refer two different objects rather than the same object, Venus, and could have rigidly designated other objects, which would then lead to the identity ‘Hesperus is Phosphorus’ being false; however, these conditions exist only in the counterfactual world. We, in our real world, using the language as we do, “can say in advance, that if Hesperus and Phosphorus are one and the same, then in no other possible world can they be different,” and, because we use the two terms to pick out a specific bodies, we must “use them as names of those bodies in all possible worlds,”—if we then discover that “in fact, they are the same body, then in any other possible world we have to use them as a name of that object.”[lii] Therefore, in all possible worlds, Hesperus is Phosphorus, and we cannot know this identity a priori or without empirical evidence, since even with identical qualitative evidence and different counterfactual terms present in the possible world, we could still determine the reference of the two names as we fixed them.[liii] [liv] Thus, the baseline for Kripke’s essentialism is established: the reference of a name, as we have fixed it, must be able to be determined in all possible worlds in which it has been or could be discovered that the referent exists.

However, further argumentation must be made in order to show the rigidity of proper names as identifying essence. Essence is the combination of properties that uniquely belong to an object, meaning not something that describes the object, but more like scientific facts which determine the reference of a name, such as the internal structure, origin, and composition of the referent. An example that Kripke uses is that while the metal which we call ‘Gold’ may have natural imitators, such as iron pyrites, which have superficial qualities similar or even identical to gold, if one were to take a sample of the two substances, one would see that the metal we call ‘Gold’ consists of a single element with the atomic number 79, while the iron pyrite would consist of an all together different composition of elements which do not uniformly have an atomic number of 79. [lv] According to the currently dominant theory of atomic structure, it is necessary that if an element has the atomic number 79, then it is the metal which we call ‘gold’. Once again, while the contingent marks which name the object we call ‘gold’ may not pick out gold as we fixed the reference in every possible world, it is necessary that if there does exist an element, or metal, with the essential property of having the atomic number 79, then that object is necessarily gold. Another example, concerning origin, is a discussion of the possibility that the person whom we call, ‘Elizabeth II’ could have been born from another set of parents.[lvi] Superficially, we can of course imagine a possible world in which the history of Great Britain was such that the ancestors of the Queen had never acquired the designation of royalty, and then, somewhere down the line, a woman from this other lineage, also called, ‘Elizabeth II’, inherited the crown. However, this is not an example of the person that we refer to as ‘Elizabeth II’ having been born from different parents, but rather a coincidence in which a change in history produced a lineage from which a woman, who may even be qualitatively and empirically identical to the person we know as ‘Elizabeth II’, also named ‘Elizabeth II’ was born and ascended to the throne; that is to say that this expresses a historical contingency rather than the actuality of the “very woman whom we call ‘Elizabeth II’,” being the other Elizabeth that the divergent history produced. [lvii] Otherwise said, even if the two women were qualitatively the same, the two could not be said to be actually the same person, since an essential property of the woman that we call ‘Elizabeth II’ is that she originated from her parents, but rather that “there was some other woman who had many of the properties that are in fact true of Elizabeth.”[lviii] This idea is also present if we were to imagine a counterfactual in which the Queen had been replaced as a child by a series of very advanced robots, externally identical to the Queen at any given point in Elizabeth’s life, perhaps even controlled by the Queen herself, such that it appears in its mannerisms, movements, speech, etc. to be the Queen. One would not say then that this robot is the woman Elizabeth, solely on the basis that it looks like and appears to behave like the Queen, but rather a very clever facsimile—one which might fool the majority of people who observe it into thinking that it was the Queen, and into referring to the robot as the Queen in a physical sense. Still, it would not be the Queen[lix], but a cleverly designed combination of materials which allow for the existence of a facsimile of the flesh-and-blood Queen.

Thus, a term cannot be said to rigidly designate something that is like the object it refers to,[lx] even if the two objects are qualitatively identical, but if it is essentially identical to the object to which it refers; if an object, γ, displays certain essential properties –origin, composition, structure— which we have empirically shown to be essential properties of some object, referred to by the proper name, ‘X’, then the proper name, ‘X’ rigidly designates the object γ in all possible worlds, and no other object if γ is not present.

  [i] Kripke, Saul A. Naming and necessity. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980. 74.

[ii] Kripke, Saul A. Naming and necessity. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980. 71.

[iii] Kripke, Saul A. Naming and necessity. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980. 74.

[iv] Kripke, Saul A. Naming and necessity. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980. 77.

[v] Kripke, Saul A. Naming and necessity. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980. 72.

[vi] Kripke, Saul A. Naming and necessity. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980. 44.

[vii] Kripke, Saul A. Naming and necessity. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980. 44.

  [viii] Also just “counterfactuals”

[ix] Kripke, Saul A. Naming and necessity. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980. 44-46.

  [x] Kripke clarifies this saying that “© is not a thesis but a condition on the satisfaction of the other theses. In other words, Theses (1)-(6) cannot be satisfied…in a way which does not lead to any independent determination of reference.” Kripke, Saul A. Naming and Necessity. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980.77.

[xi] Kripke, Saul A. Naming and necessity. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980. 64.

[xii] Kripke, Saul A. Naming and necessity. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980. 80.

[xiii] Kripke, Saul A. Naming and necessity. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980. 80-81.

[xiv] Kripke, Saul A. Naming and necessity. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980. 81.

[xv] Kripke, Saul A. Naming and necessity. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980. 81.

[xvi] Kripke, Saul A. Naming and necessity. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980. 81-82.

[xvii] Kripke, Saul A. Naming and necessity. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980. 82.

[xviii] Kripke, Saul A. Naming and necessity. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980. 83.

[xix] I will try to make this part brief, as these arguments are not necessary to show that the theory as a whole is incorrect. However, I feel as though they are necessary for a complete view of Kripke’s overall argument for the rigidity of proper names. 

[xx] Kripke, Saul A. Naming and necessity. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980. 82.

[xxi] This synonmity is of course an impossibility, since an object or individual cannot have more than one rigid designator, and a term can only designate rigidly if it refers to a single object, and no other.

[xxii] Kripke, Saul A. Naming and necessity. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980. 84-85.

[xxiii] Kripke, Saul A. Naming and necessity. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980. 86.

[xxiv] Kripke, Saul A. Naming and necessity. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980. 86.

[xxv] The example I used for Thesis (3) shows this

[xxvi] Kripke, Saul A. Naming and necessity. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980. 86-87.

[xxvii] Kripke, Saul A. Naming and necessity. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980. 86-87.

[xxviii] Kripke, Saul A. Naming and necessity. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980. 87.

[xxix] A question I might have for Kripke is how he might justify this, or any other example of a name that refers to an individual in a work of fiction, especially one which frequently relates events which defy certain physical laws that he claims are necessary truths.

[xxx] Kripke, Saul A. Naming and necessity. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980. 87.

[xxxi] Kripke, Saul A. Naming and necessity. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980. 87.

[xxxii] Kripke, Saul A. Naming and necessity. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980. 91.

[xxxiii] Kripke, Saul A. Naming and necessity. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980. 138-139.

[xxxiv] Kripke, Saul A. Naming and necessity. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980. 92.

[xxxv] Kripke, Saul A. Naming and necessity. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980. 93.

[xxxvi] Kripke, Saul A. Naming and Necessity. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980. 96.

[xxxvii] Kripke, Saul A. Naming and Necessity. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980. 96.

[xxxviii] Kripke, Saul A. Naming and Necessity. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980.96n42

[xxxix] Kripke, Saul A. Naming and Necessity. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980.96n42

[xl] Kripke, Saul A. Naming and Necessity. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980. 96.

[xli] Kripke, Saul A. Naming and Necessity. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980. 102.

[xlii] Kripke, Saul A. Naming and Necessity. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980. 101.

[xliii] Kripke, Saul A. Naming and Necessity. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980. 101.

[xliv] Kripke, Saul A. Naming and Necessity. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980. 102.

[xlv] Kripke, Saul A. Naming and Necessity. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980. 103.

[xlvi] Kripke, Saul A. Naming and Necessity. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980. 103.

[xlvii] Kripke, Saul A. Naming and Necessity. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980. 103.

[xlviii] Kripke, Saul A. Naming and Necessity. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980. 103.

[xlix] Kripke, Saul A. Naming and Necessity. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980. 103.

[l] Kripke says that a view of this sort is epistemic, and that being uncertain of a situation does not necessitate the outcome as contingent

[li] That conditions are such that there appears a celestial body in the same position, in the morning, and in the evening, which is in reality a single object

[lii] Kripke, Saul A. Naming and Necessity. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980. 104.

[liii]Kripke, Saul A. Naming and Necessity. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980. 104.

[liv] footnote 51

[lv] Kripke, Saul A. Naming and Necessity. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980. 124.

[lvi] Kripke, Saul A. Naming and Necessity. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980. 112.

[lvii] Kripke, Saul A. Naming and Necessity. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980. 113.

[lviii] Kripke, Saul A. Naming and Necessity. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980. 113.

[lix] While it would be hard to tell from the external functioning of the automaton, if rigorous enough empirical investigation were to take place, it would be easy enough to discern the difference