Some readers may have noticed that the past few posts have all been relatively safe, moderately boring and all having to do with the philosophy of language. There is a reason for this, namely that I am now in finals week at school and I am using each post to address the study questions which my philosophy of language professor gave to us. This will be the last one for a while, I promise. (more…)
March 23, 2006
The Godel/Schmidt Case: Kripke
Saul A. Kripke’s causal theory of names along with his theory of descriptions as non-rigid designators in meant as a criticism, and a brutal one at that, of description theory of names which can primarily be sourced back to Frege. In his Lecture II of Naming and Necessity he uses the example of Gödel and Schmidt to illustrate how the description theory of names is wrong. It will be the purpose of this post to demonstrate how this example manifests the shortcomings of the description theory of names. (more…)
The Chain of Communication: Kripke
According to Kripke’s causal theory of names, as presented in his Lecture II of Naming and Necessity, objects are originally baptized with a name which is from then on causally linked to that object. Kripke sees this account of naming as predicting the rigidity of names as designators as opposed to the non-rigidity of descriptions. This post will attempt to explain why this is so. (more…)
Kripke and the Queen
Consider the two sentences “The queen of England is wise” and “Elizabeth Windsor is wise”. Do these two sentences have the same truth conditions as each other or not? In this post we will see that Strawson and Kripke do not agree with each other in answering this question. In this post I will attempt to describe what each has to say about these two sentences and why they answer the question the way they do. (more…)
What Other Table is There?: Strawson
Strawson holds his theory of descriptions to be better than the theory offered by Russell for a number of reasons. While I have already discussed his theory of presuppositions, which Strawson takes to be superior to Russell’s account, in this post I will consider his use of ‘incomplete definite descriptions.’ I will also consider some possible responses which the Russellian could offer to such claims. (more…)
