Topics Language

Question In your response to the question on Twin-Earth, you said that descriptions can be used to fix reference. (E.g.: This colourless, odourless, thirst-quenching object is water.) But if I'm not wrong, Kripke in <i>Naming and Necessity</i> said that definite descriptions can't be used to fix the reference. He said reference fixing proceeds by an initial baptism. Where did I go wrong? My second question is about Kripke's and Putnam's essentialism. Is their essentialism limited to proper names and natural kind terms or does it include non-natural kind terms too? For example, in post-Kripke philosophy, do philosophers believe that terms like "game", "beauty", "chair" have essences? If these terms have essences, what are they?

Accepted:
October 25, 2005

Comments

Kripke argues in Naming and Necessity that it isn't, in general, true that every proper name is associated with some description that is used to fix its reference. He is prepared to allow that some names might, for some speakers, have their references fixed in that way. Perhaps "pi" is an example. Others, mentioned by Michael Dummett are, "Saint Anne", which was stipulatively introduced as a name for Christ's maternal grandmother, and "Deutero-Isaiah", introduced as a name for whoever wrote the second part of the book of Isaiah. (It's well-established that it wasn't the same person who wrote the first part.) And, as Gareth Evans pointed out, if there weren't any such names already, we could introduce one, which he proceeds to do: Let "Julius" denote the inventor of the zipper, whoever that may be. It's then a priori that, if some one person invented the zip, Julius did.

Regarding the second question, the answer depends upon what you mean by an essence. One might reasonably suppose that there are some essential properties of chairs: For example, chairs are physical objects. Of course, that is hardly enough to individuate chairs, so it's another question whether there essential properties that all and only chairs have (other than being a chair, presumably). I doubt there are, but it's not obvious that natural kinds have essences in that strong sense.