Blackwell Reference Online

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Saul Kripke remarked, at the beginning of his lectures, Naming and Necessity (1972), that he hoped his audience would see some connection between the two topics mentioned in his title. In those lectures Kripke defended some bold theses, some about naming that belong to semantics and the philosophy of language, others about necessity that belong to metaphysics. It is clear that the arguments for the different theses were interrelated, but it remains a matter of debate just what the connections are, both in Kripke's argumentative strategy, and in the issues themselves. Kripke and Hilary Putnam were criticized for attempting to derive metaphysical conclusions — about the essential properties of things — from premises in the philosophy of language about the nature of reference and the semantics of proper names. One might instead think that the direction of Kripke's arguments go the other way: that conclusions about reference and proper names were derived in part from controversial metaphysical assumptions about possible worlds and essential properties. Either way, there is reason to be puzzled: on the one hand, one might be skeptical (to borrow the metaphor that Nathan Salmon used to express his puzzlement about this) that one could, without sleight of hand, pull a metaphysical rabbit out of a linguistic hat (see Salmon, 1981). On the other hand, one might wonder why a proper understanding ... log in or subscribe to read full text