It may be that this is the only possible world and nothing could be otherwise than it is. In that case there is only one, perhaps infinite, true proposition and nothing which can be deduced from it- i.e. logic is useless. Modal logic is its own collapse.
Even if this is not the case, questions of modality—necessity, possibility, contingency- are vitiated by the 'intensional' or 'masked man' fallacy. We can see a masked man. We can make a good guess as to who the masked man is. But anyone who wears that mask is that masked man. There is no necessary connection between a particular mask and a particular man who may habitually wear it. After all, Alfred the Butler may be wearing Bruce Wayne's costume. Still, it is useful to speak of a particular masked man as having certain qualities. The same can be said of necessity. At one moment, to our current knowledge, x may be seem to be a necessary condition for y. Kant gives the example of a wise- i.e. misogynistic statement- made by a Black man. But, Kant points out, since the fellow was a darkie it must necessarily be the case that he was as stupid as shit. The same is true of possibility and contingency. What we think is possible and what we think is contingent depends on our knowledge base or on our own wishes or preferences or other subjective factors. Thus talk of 'modality' or, indeed, modal logic in its entirety, is nothing but a cascade of intensional fallacies. 'Necessity' is a name for a thing not known to us. It is as foolish to think that it is identical to the thing it names. No doubt, some crazy or superstitious people think that knowing the name of a demon gives you power over that demon. After all, Solomon got to live large because he knew those secret names- right?
Saul Kripke was smart, but not King Solomon level smart and thus didn't get to live large. Why make him the target of a cult? I suppose the answer is that just as some wizards made a little money by claiming to know something of Solomon's magic, even so a few academics make a living pretending that Saul wasn't a silly billy who wrote puerile nonsense. Vide-
The ideas in Naming and Necessity evolved in the early sixties
i.e. before it became clear that there were massive problems of concurrency, complexity and computability. Category theoretical 'naturality' or what Kuhn called neutrality were far to seek. Forget about Godel type 'absolute' proofs, 'natural' proofs too are beyond us. The same hubris displayed by McNamara in Vietnam, or Chomsky in his nonsensical field, fired Kripke. Sadly, because academic availability cascades are a Ponzi scheme which don't collapse but rather become more and more adversely selective of imbecility.
-most of the views were formulated in about 1963-64.
Around the time I was born. Much idiocy came into the world in that year.
Of course the work grew out of earlier formal work in the model theory of modal logic.
Nothing wrong with either if they stay in their lane- i.e. only make claims about things as artificial as themselves.
Already when I worked on modal logic it had seemed to me, as Wiggins has said, that the Leibnitzian principle of the indiscernibility of identicals was as self-evident as the law of contradiction.
The problem is that things are treated as identical only for a particular purpose. If things were other than they are, who is to say any given purpose would still pick out the same objects as indiscernibly identical?
That some philosophers could have doubted it always seemed to me bizarre. The model theoretic study of modal logic (possible worlds' semantics)
in other words a fantasy about a fantasy
could only confirm this conviction- the alleged counterexamples involving modal properties always turned out to turn on some confusion:
because fantasies about fantasies can get very confused
the contexts involved did not express genuine properties,
that's the problem with fantasies
scopes were confused, or coincidence between individual concepts was confused with identity between individuals.
It must be said, that type of confusion is what make fantasies fun.
The model theory made this completely clear, though it should have been clear enough on the intuitive level. Waiving fussy considerations deriving from the fact that x need not have necessary existence, it was clear from (x) □ (x = x) and Leibnitz's law that identity is an 'internal' relation :
Who is to say what is necessary for a thing to be possible? It might be multiply realizable or else the effect of different concatenations of circumstances.
(What pairs (x, y) could be counterexamples?
Any thing in ZFC.
Not pairs of distinct objects, for then the antecedent is false;
In which case the Banach Tarski paradox is bad math.
nor any pair of an object and itself, for then the consequent is true.)
It isn't. There is a difference between Iyer, the carefree bachelor and Iyer the sad fuck who has to marry himself after being his own date at the prom and losing his virginity to himself.
If 'a' and 'b' are rigid designators, it follows that 'a = b', if true, is a necessary truth.
The President of the Institute of Socioproctology is a rigid designator for me as is my name. But 'Vivek Iyer is the President of the Institute of Socioproctology' is not a necessary theory. It is a joke displayed on my visiting cards.
If 'a' and 'b' are not rigid designators, no such conclusion follows about the statement 'a = b' (though the objects designated by 'a' and 'b' will be necessarily identical).
They may be. They may not. We may think that some things are necessary for a particular purpose of ours. We may be wrong.
Logically, we as yet are committed to no thesis about the status of what we ordinarily call 'names' in natural language.
Logic does not entail any commitments. Claims about logic aren't themselves logic.
We must distinguish three distinct theses: (i) that identical objects are necessarily identical;
They aren't. Necessarily identical objects which fart melodiously are necessarily identical objects which fart melodiously. That's as far as logic can get us. Why commit to any such shite?
(ii) that true identity statements between rigid designators are necessary;
They aren't either necessary or even necessarily true, even if they are true. It is not necessary to say Vivek Iyer is the President of the Socioproctology Institute and though it is true, it isn't necessarily true because, arguably, I have been suspended from that post on the basis of allegations of sexual self-abuse.
(iii) that identity statements between what we call 'names' in actual language are necessary.
or what this guy calls 'necessary' but which we are welcome to call a melodious fart from an imaginary cat.
(i) and (ii) are (self-evident) theses of philosophical logic independent of natural language.
They are nonsense of a type which serves no natural, that is useful, purpose. That's why they are 'independent' of language and reason and not being a complete fucking waste of time.
They are related to each other, though (i) is about objects
No. It is about things referred to as objects but which may have no objective features whatsoever. They are like the invisible cat to whose melodious farts all meta-linguistics makes silent mention.
and (ii) is metalinguistic.
like farting. Anything at all can be metalinguistic in the view of anyone at all.
((ii) roughly 'follows' from (i), using substitution of rigid designators for universal quantifiers-I say 'roughly' because delicate distinctions about rigidity are relevant, see page 21 n. 21; the analogous deduction for nonrigid designators is fallacious.)
It is also fallacious if a designator is doing the designation. In that case, the 'rigidity' is an akribeia which, sadly, might be fallible when it is not foolish. But this means that 'rigid designation' doesn't necessarily mean what it may claim to mean just as a very funny joke I decide to tell may not actually be funny at all.
From (ii) all that strictly follows about so-called 'names' in natural language is that either they are not rigid or true identities between them are necessary.
Nothing 'strictly' follows. We are welcome to make claims about our logic just as we are welcome to make claims about our jokes or our farts. But why should we believe such self-serving claims?
Our intuitive idea of naming suggests that names are rigid,
No. Our intuitive idea is that names are Schelling focal solutions to coordination or discoordination problems. They change as circumstances or fashions change. There may be a way of keeping track of such changes. There may not.
but I suppose that at one time I vaguely supposed, influenced by prevailing presuppositions, that since obviously there are contingent identities between ordinary so-called names, such ordinary names must not be rigid.
One could say that there are 'essential' names which have a magic property just a one could say there is joke everybody finds funny or a fart which can fulminate the universe. But these are mere arbitrary claims. There is no rhyme or reason to them.
However, it was already clear from (i)-without any investigation of natural language-that the supposition, common to philosophical discussions of materialism at that time, that objects can be 'contingently identical', is false.
Anything can be identical to anything else under some contingency of for some purpose.
Identity would be an internal relation
if a Joke's capacity to provoke laughter were internal to it and did not depend on other circumstances. Of course, one might say 'the joke was intrinsically funny'. The reason nobody laughed was because they were distracted by the fire in which they were burning to death.
even if natural language had contained no rigid designators.
If it did then all languages would have some words in common. Also, Saussure was wrong. If the word 'water' means the stuff that flows in rivers, then there must be some intrinsic quality to the phonemes composing the word which relate it to water.
The confused reference to objects as 'contingently identical' served illegitimately as a philosophical crutch:
Why bother with a crutch when you can strap on a rocket-pack to your back and go explore possible worlds? This is more particularly the case if you have just shat the Chair in Philosophy from which you haven't stirred for decades.
It enabled philosophers simultaneously to think of certain designators as if they were non-rigid (and hence found in 'contingent identities') and as if they were rigid, the conflict being muddled over by thinking of the corresponding objects as 'contingently identical'. Even before I clearly realized the true situation regarding proper namcs, I fclt little sympathy for the dark doctrine of a relation of 'contingcnt identity'. Uniquely udentifying properties can coincide contingently, but objects cannot be 'contingently identical'.
from one perspective, or under one contingency. But this doesn't mean this is the case from different perspective or under a diffferent contingency.
Eventually I came to realize-this realization inaugurated the aforementioned work of I963-64- that the received presuppositions against the necessity of identities between ordinary names were incorrect, that the natural intuition that the names of ordinary language are rigid designators can in fact be upheld.
Because anything at all can be upheld for some particular purpose or the other.
Part of the effort to make this clear involved the distinction between using a description to give a meaning
meanings are necessary for a description, but a description may have no meaning in itself. Thus I may be described well enough in the language used by Police detectives but I would be wrong to say that the fact that such a description could exist has any meaning in particular. True, if someone wants to suggest that I am a dangerous criminal, they may use terms used by Law Enforcement to describe me. I would easily understand the hidden meaning behind this supposedly neutral description of me.
and using it to fix a reference. Thus at this stage I rejected the conventional description theory as an account of meaning, though its validity as an account of the fixing of a reference was left untouched. Probably I let myself be content with this position momentarily, but the natural next step was to question whether the description theory gave a correct account even of how the references of names were fixed.
Descriptions aren't meanings. The references of names aren't fixed though anybody at all is welcome to arbitrarily make such associations. But they can change them just as arbitrarily.
The result appears in the second of these lectures. It was a short step to realize that similar remarks applied to terms for natural kinds.
Which are arbitrary but useful enough for a particular purpose- or prejudice.
The other leading ideas came naturally as things 'fit into place'. Let me not pay inadequate tribute to the power of the then prevailing complex of ideas, emanating from Frege and from Russell, that I then abandoned.
They had to be adopted because of impredicativity which is itself a reason for the intensional fallacy. At that stage, the smart thing would have been to just embrace pragmatism and go work on cybernetics or operations research or other such useful stuff.
When smart peeps fail to do useful things, they babble greater nonsense than even a Socioproctologist would be capable of.
It also became clear that a symbol of any actual or hypothetical language that is not a rigid designator is so unlike the names of ordinary language that it ought not to be called a 'name'.
Saul Kripke is a name in ordinary and actual language as well as the hypothetical language spoken by pan-dimensional pussycats who appear in our Solar System as the rings of Uranus. But it isn't a rigid designator. Many have had and will have that name. It isn't necessary at all that any of them study, teach and write worthless shite.
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