Naming and Necessity

Three lectures given without notes at the age of twenty-nine, which restored necessity to respectability in analytic philosophy and changed how a whole generation thought about names, natural kinds and the mind. They were published from a tape.

Date: 1980
Attributed to: Saul Kripke
Region: Princeton, United States
Language: English

Where it stands in the argument

Position: Reply — Answers a named earlier work
Form: Lectures
Method: Analytic — Clarification of language and logical form
Transmission: Continuous — Copied and read without a break in its own language
Standing: Live — Still argued in current philosophical work
Years back to what it answers: 96 years

Delivered extempore, transcribed from a tape recording, and generally regarded as the most influential work of analytic philosophy since the Second World War.

What the book says

Three lectures, delivered without notes, overturning the accepted account of how names work and separating three distinctions everyone had run together. The accepted view held that a name is shorthand for a description: Aristotle means something like the teacher of Alexander who wrote the Nicomachean Ethics, and the name picks out whoever fits. Kripke objects that we can perfectly well say Aristotle might never have taught Alexander, which we could not if the name meant that - so the name refers to the man in every possible situation in which he exists, however different his life. He calls such terms rigid designators, and gives an alternative account of how reference is secured: a name is introduced by some initial act, and passes from speaker to speaker in a chain, so that a speaker can refer to someone about whom they know nothing accurate at all. The larger achievement is to prise apart necessary and a priori. That water is H2O is necessary if true, and was discovered empirically; that the standard metre is one metre long is knowable a priori and is not necessary.

What it argues

That necessity is a metaphysical notion, a priority an epistemic one, and analyticity a semantic one, and that treating them as a single distinction had concealed almost everything interesting. Once separated, the necessary a posteriori appears: identity statements between rigid designators, if true, are true in every possible situation, and many of them - water is H2O, gold has atomic number 79, heat is molecular motion - were established by investigation rather than by reflection. The contingent a priori appears too, from cases where a description is used to fix a reference rather than give a meaning. The last lecture applies the machinery to the mind: if pain and a brain state were identical they would be necessarily identical, but the apparent possibility of one without the other cannot be explained away as it can for water and H2O, which Kripke offers as an argument against the identity theory.

What it answered

The description theory of reference, and behind it the positivist settlement in which all necessity was linguistic and metaphysics had no subject matter. Kripke's revival of essentialism - the claim that things have properties they could not have lacked, independent of how we describe them - was the single most consequential reversal in postwar analytic philosophy, and it reopened a field the previous generation had closed.

How it argues

By intuitions about cases, marshalled with great precision and stated in the register of ordinary speech. The method is to construct a scenario, ask what we would say about it, and hold the answer against the theory - and the arguments work by accumulating such cases rather than by formal derivation, although the formal work stands behind them. The spoken origin is audible throughout: Kripke qualifies, doubles back, jokes, and leaves loose ends visible, and the effect is unusually inviting for a book with this much technical weight behind it.

The moment

Princeton in January 1970. Kripke was twenty-nine and had been a prodigy - he published a completeness proof for modal logic as a teenager - and the lectures were given from no notes to an audience that recognised immediately what was happening. Modal logic had supplied the formal apparatus of possible worlds a decade earlier; what these lectures did was show what it was for.

How it travelled

Instantly and completely. The vocabulary - rigid designator, necessary a posteriori, causal theory of reference, natural kind term - became standard within a decade, and the lectures are cited across metaphysics, philosophy of language, philosophy of mind and philosophy of science. Putnam had arrived at a similar account of natural kind terms independently, and the position is often named for both. The revival of serious metaphysics in analytic philosophy from the 1970s onward is largely traceable here.

The strongest objection

That the whole edifice rests on intuitions about imagined cases, with no account of why those intuitions are evidence. Kripke asks what we would say about a possible situation and treats the answer as data about necessity - but the reliability of such judgements is exactly what a sceptic doubts, and experimental work since the 2000s has reported that the intuitions in some of the central cases are not shared across cultures or across groups of respondents, which if sustained undermines the method rather than any particular conclusion. Defenders reply that philosophical intuition is a trained response to a described case rather than a survey answer. The dispute about whether that reply works is one of the main methodological arguments in analytic philosophy now.

Why read it

Because it is the most readable technically important book in this section - three lectures, no notation, and a conversational voice - and because the first lecture on names can be read by anyone. It repays reading straight through in an afternoon, which is unusual for anything this consequential.

Where to read it

First printed: 1972
First in English: 1972
Digitised: No

The text preserves the spoken lectures, including asides and self-interruptions, which Kripke declined to smooth out. The 1980 preface responds to a decade of discussion.

Written in English and translated widely. In copyright.

Where it stands

Live and central. Essentialism, rigid designation and the necessary a posteriori are working parts of contemporary metaphysics, and the argument against mind-brain identity is still one of the standard problems in philosophy of mind.

On quoting this book

In copyright. Nothing is quoted.

Contested

Whether the causal-chain account is a theory of reference or, as Kripke insists, only a better picture than the one it replaces, is disputed and he declines to formalise it. How much Putnam contributed independently is a question of attribution rather than substance. Whether the argument against the identity theory works depends on whether the apparent contingency of the mind-brain link can be explained away, and philosophers of mind divide sharply. And the reliability of the modal intuitions the arguments rest on is now itself a research question rather than an assumption.