Naming and Necessity Revisited - Prof. Saul Kripke

‘In this lecture, Professor Saul Kripke takes the opportunity to revisit some of the more controversial points in his seminal work ‘Naming and Necessity’.

30.05.2019

[moshejun]

It's good to see Kripke himself summarizes his legendary book by his own speaking- but microphone problem when he talked about transmission problems is funny-

[渭北春天樹]

I'm a student from China and I have an Introductory course of Philosophy of Language this term. I've read the Lecture II of and really impressed by Kripke and his theory. I chose "the response to Casual Theory of Proper Names" as the subject of my semi-term reading report. I listed a lot of Proper Names in Mandarin like ”司母戊方鼎“(the name for the biggest ancient tripod in China), but my teacher said all of those are just abbreviated Definite Descriptions😂😂😂

[patrickdereyck]

Legend, really. I'm also a physicist, and it's like Einstein sitting there.

[arnebovarne]

In every possible world, Saul Kripke's conclusions must be valid

[RenRealism]

Saul trying to pronounce the foreign names.... :)

[MyRobertallen]

As President of Wayne State University's Graduate Philosophy Club in the late 80s, I had the distinct honor and pleasure of hosting a post-lecture dinner at Carl's Chop House in Detroit for Prof. Kripke.

[sirisaacalbertmravinszky]

During the introduction, "Saul Kripke's" is always transcribed in the subtitles by "Socrates".

[NlHILIST]

Kripke’s contingent a priori seems to rely on an unexamined notion of truth and turns out to be overly complicated. Someone tells you to say ‘xia yu’ (Chinese for ‘it is raining’) and you say it when it happens to be raining. Have you said something true or haven’t you? Obviously you cannot be fully credited with having said something true since you didn’t understand what you were saying in the first place. And there is the connection between meaning and truth. Anselm resolved this problem convincingly in the De veritate with his definition of truth as a rightness of assertion. This also means that truth should be viewed ultimately as a scalar concept, not a discrete one.

[byronfoodjikla]

Ok, so I have a question to anyone out there who knows and understands Kripke well.
I had read Naming and Necessity about a year and a half ago, as part of my Language and Mind course at university. As part of our written assignments, I chose to write a critical paper on Kripke's work.
My main thesis, and criticism, was that Kripke's theory of a rigid designator [which as I understood it was a 'name' which refers to the same object in all possible worlds, regardless of their description] relied heavily on a descriptivist understanding of 'the world'. What I mean by this is the following:
If by 'Aristotle', according to descriptivist theorists, we refer to that object who was the teacher of Alexander the Great, then in a counterfactual world in which Aristotle was not the teacher of AtG, but instead, was the cousin of Napoleon (or whatever), then 'Aristotle' would not refer to that same object as it did in the factual world. Kripke argues that this is false, and that in fact, 'Aristotle' would refer in all possible worlds to the same thing. So here's my criticism.
Isn't it true that a counterfactual world, on which Kripke's argument rests heavily on, requires a factual world in order to be conceived as somehting counter- to that? In other words, don't we need something factual, something 'which is in a certain way', in order to claim that it could be otherwise? And if this true, then don't we need a particular set of descriptions on which to rely on for our separation of factual and counterfactual? Isn't the factual world descriptively different from the factual world, and as such, only on that basis of description the distinction between them is to be made possible?
Finally, if my line of questioning is valid, then isn't the theory of rigid designators reliant on a particular kind of descriptivist theory as it pertains to factuality, and consequently, counterfactuality?
(I could also send a link of my paper to anyone who is interested, which is also more clear than what I've written above)


I hope I make sense:)
Thanks

[Alkis]

I'm glad we have this lecture. But hear to his voice is like hearing someone scratch a blackboard.

[firstal]

So much time waste on unnecessary and obvious nonsense.

[firstal]

If you have trouble sleeping please put on this video.

[brandgardner]

I do not understand this guy's reputation at all. It seems absurdly inflated. I don't think he even really knows much philosophy, and, like so many of his colleagues, he understands nothing about Chomsky's linguistics. Fraud. Puffed up logic dweeb. Is it not obvious that logic simply broke away from philosophy and became a discipline unto itself, as did psychology, at around the same time? And thus, one can be an expert in it, but not all that knowledgeable in philosophy per se.