Naming and Necessity

Introduction

Three lectures that Kripke gave without a written text at Princeton in January 1970; transcribed, they appeared in 1972 in the anthology Semantics of Natural Language and in 1980 as a book with a new preface. Kripke argues against the description theory of Frege and Russell: a name is not an abbreviated description but refers directly, its reference fixed by an initial “baptism” and passed on through a causal chain of use. He separates necessity, a metaphysical notion, from a priori knowledge, an epistemological one: “Hesperus is Phosphorus” is necessary but was discovered empirically. The same reasoning applies to natural kinds such as water or gold. The lectures helped restore metaphysics to a central place in analytic philosophy.

Connections

Criticizes

• On Sense and Reference1892 · Gottlob Frege
• On Denoting1905 · Bertrand Russell

Taken up in

• The Conscious Mind1996 · David Chalmers

Criticized in

• On the Plurality of Worlds1986 · David Lewis

More works by Saul Kripke

• 1982Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language