Work · Analytic Philosophy
Modalities and Intensional Languages
Proper names are mere tags; identity is necessary – a defence of modal logic against Quine’s objections.
Introduction
Marcus published the paper in Synthese and presented it at the Boston Colloquium for the Philosophy of Science, where Quine replied and a discussion with Saul Kripke and Dagfinn Føllesdal followed; the printed exchange is one of the best-known in 20th-century logic. Against Quine’s view that modal logic is confused, she argues that ordinary proper names work as mere “tags”: they refer directly, without describing, so replacing one name of a thing with another causes no trouble in modal contexts, and a true identity between names (a = b) holds necessarily. These ideas anticipate the theory of direct reference associated with Kripke’s Naming and Necessity (1970/1980); in 1994 a paper by Quentin Smith set off a public dispute over priority.
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