Kripke on Substitutional Quantification
fcs$...@altair.selu.edu
Problem About Substitutional Quantification? (in _Truth and Meaning_,
edited by Gareth Evans and John McDowell, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1976)
In the article, Kripke lacerates Wallace and Tharp for multiple
technical and philosophical faults, while making passing criticisms (of
a tamer nature) of Dunn and Belnap, Davidson, Quine, and others. (He
ends his marathon 95-page paper with a "methodological sermon" to the
effect that it is often a bad idea to try to resolve philosophical
problems by the use of technical machinery ("We should not ignore the
conceptual woods through excessive attention to the technical trees.") I
have three questions: (1) Has Wallace and/or Tharp has dared to respond
in print to any of Kripke's criticisms; (2) Have any other interesting
articles appeared on substitutional quantification since Kripke's; and
(3) does anyone have references to *any* articles on *any* topic by
Kripke, since this last paper (I am under the impression that he does a
lot of work, but is not inclined often to publish his ideas.).
Thank you in advance for any assistance,
Charles Silver
csi...@selu.edu
fcs$...@altair.selu.edu
> . I just finished an article by Saul Kripke called "Is There A
> Problem About Substitutional Quantification?" (in _Truth and Meaning_,
> edited by Gareth Evans and John McDowell, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1976)
> In the article, Kripke lacerates Wallace and Tharp for multiple
> technical and philosophical faults, while making passing criticisms (of
> ..."We should not ignore the conceptual woods through excessive
> in print to any of Kripke's criticisms; (2) Have any other interesting
> articles appeared on substitutional quantification since Kripke's; and
> (3) does anyone have references to *any* articles on *any* topic by
>
Thank you for several citations of papers by Kripke. I was aware
of some of them, but forgot that they appeared *after* 1976, I guess
because they all seem so old now. May I revise question (3) above: has
anyone seen *anything* by Kripke *after* his book on Wittgenstein?
(Also, I would really appreciate references to any interesting articles
on subst. quant. that have appeared *after* Kripke's paper -- supposing
he didn't just blow everyone out of the water [as he did with his early
modal logic papers].) It is disconcerting that someone of his immense
talent does not put his ideas into print. (It is also a bit annoying to
read footnotes like the following, from Boolos & Jeffrey, third edition,
p. 291, where Chaitin's Theorem is used in the text to prove Godel's
Theorem: "Saul Kripke tells us tht in the early 1960s he noticed a proof
somewhat similar to the one given here." [Chaitin's Theorem appeared in
1965, I believe.])
Thanks again for references,
Charles Silver
csi...@selu.edu
Brad Owen
: (3) does anyone have references to *any* articles on *any* topic by
: Kripke, since this last paper (I am under the impression that he does a
: lot of work, but is not inclined often to publish his ideas.).
This is only tangentially related to your post, but you may find it
interesting. Quentin Smith is giving a paper at the eastern division
meeting of the APA the end of month in which he will argue that all of
the essential points of Kripke's theory of reference in his _Naming and
Necessity_ were consciously taken by him from a seminar given by Ruth
Barcan Marcus in 1962 which Kripke attended: Kripke plagiarized Marcus.
This could be a very interesting paper.
--
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Bradley Owen bo...@orion.it.luc.edu
Dept. of Philosophy Loyola Chicago
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Richard Heck
>This is only tangentially related to your post, but you may find it
>interesting. Quentin Smith is giving a paper at the eastern division
>meeting of the APA the end of month in which he will argue that all of
>the essential points of Kripke's theory of reference in his _Naming and
>Necessity_ were consciously taken by him from a seminar given by Ruth
>Barcan Marcus in 1962 which Kripke attended: Kripke plagiarized Marcus.
>This could be a very interesting paper.
I was wondering how long it would take until someone posted about this.
This accusation on the part of Smith is unbelievable. I don't think anyone
who has ever read "Modalities and Intensional Languages" with any level of
understanding at all could think, for ONE MINUTE, that the notion of a
rigid designator could have been taken from that paper. I do not mean to
slight Marcus here, but the very idea is crazy. Even the modal logic
deployed in that paper is deeply confused as compared with the beautiful,
and infinitely simpler, languages developed in "A Completeness Theorem for
Modal Logic". I for one do not see how, without the background developed
in that paper--which Marcus had not yet adopted in "Modalities and
Intensional Languages", one could so much as clearly formulate the notion
of a rigid designator.
It is one thing to have the idea that names satisfy
a=b --> []a=b
and Marcus deserves credit for proving the necessity of identity in normal
QMLs. No one doubts that. And she clearly had some dim idea that names are
"mere tags" and such. (For that matter, Quine had the idea, which he often
expressed in print, that variables were a kind of 'mere tag', which merely
have a value and nothing else, and one might well think that Kripke's
views about names come from conceiving of them more on the model of free
variables--as Quine would have taught him.) But the semantical idea
expressed in the doctrine of rigid designation is different from either of
these. Marcus is there COMPLETELY CONFUSED about what her doctrine that
names are 'mere tags' is supposed to come to: She does not construe it at
all as a claim about the semantics of names in modal contexts, about the
modal behavior of names, but draws such conclusions as that statements
such as "Hesperus is Phosphorus" are not empirical statements.
And it is pretty darn clear, from reading the discussion which followed
Marcus's paper, that Kripke already had something like the idea of rigid
designation at that time. Not fully developed, of course, but nor was
Marcus's idea very well developed, either. It was just an idea, one Mill
had had, too. It was Kripke, and not Marcus, who made the idea precise and
developed the sorts of views about necessity and the like required if the
doctrine of rigid designation was to be defended against the obvious
objections--one of which is precisely that, on Marcus's version of the
view, plainly empirical statements turn out not to be empirical statements
at all (but, at best, meta-linguistic claims, e.g., that "Hesperus"
denotes the same object as "Phosphorus").
Sadly, this circus show is going to distract attention from an event,
scheduled at the same time, truly deserving of the attention of logicians
and philosophers with an interest in the subject: A colloquium on the
philosophical significance of what is these days called "Frege's Theorem",
that axioms for arithmetic are second-order consequences of a single
non-logical axiom which gets called "Hume's Principle", informally: The
number of Fs is the same as the number of Gs just in case there is a one-
one correspondence between the Fs and the Gs. Or, formally:
#F=#G <--> (ER)[(x)(y)(z)(w)(Rxy & Rzw --> (x=z <--> y=w)) &
(x)(Fx --> (Ey)(Gy & Rxy)) &
(x)(Gx --> (Ey)(Fy & Ryx))]
Crispin Wright will be defending his view that Frege's Theorem serves to
establish a form of Logicism; George Boolos will be arguing against this
view, and proving some results on the relative (proof-theoretic) strength
of second-order logic + HP and various systems of arithmetic; and Charles
Parsons will be commenting on all of it. Should be fun.
Yours,
rh
Aldo Antonelli
(Brad Owen) writes:
Quentin Smith is giving a paper at the eastern division
>meeting of the APA the end of month in which he will argue that all of
>the essential points of Kripke's theory of reference in his _Naming and
>Necessity_ were consciously taken by him from a seminar given by Ruth
>Barcan Marcus in 1962 which Kripke attended: Kripke plagiarized Marcus.
>This could be a very interesting paper.
Especially since Ruth Marcus is planning to attend. I don't know if
Kripke will be there, but I certainly hope he will.
Cheers,
- Aldo
--
-------------------------------------------------------------------
G. Aldo Antonelli noc...@minerva.cis.yale.edu
Dept. of Philosophy antonel...@cs.yale.edu
Yale University New Haven, Connecticut
Ron Hardin <9289-11216> 0112110
>anyone seen *anything* by Kripke *after* his book on Wittgenstein?
Not directly to the question, but there's an extended and very good criticism
of Kripke on Wittgenstein in Cavell's ``Considtions Handsome
and Unhandsome: The Constitution of Emersonian Perfectionism''
U Chicago Press 1990
Jamie Andrews
In article <3d0i7i$m...@decaxp.harvard.edu>,
Richard Heck <he...@fas.harvard.edu> wrote:
> I don't think anyone
>who has ever read "Modalities and Intensional Languages" with any level of
>understanding at all could think, for ONE MINUTE, that the notion of a
>rigid designator could have been taken from that paper.
But what Owen said that Smith said was:
>bo...@orion.it.luc.edu (Brad Owen) writes:
>> Quentin Smith is giving a paper at the eastern division
>>meeting of the APA the end of month in which he will argue that all of
>>the essential points of Kripke's theory of reference in his _Naming and
>>Necessity_ were consciously taken by him from a seminar given by Ruth
>>Barcan Marcus in 1962 which Kripke attended: Kripke plagiarized Marcus.
The contention is that Kripke plagiarized a *talk* by
Marcus, not a paper.
--J.
Richard Heck
Well, we'll see. Though I won't, 'cause I'm not going to the circus, but
to the actual logic talk. Anyway, surprising that Marcus never published
this stuff, if it was so darned interesting. If I'm not mistaken, the
paper to which I referred was presented at about this time, anyway, and
I'd be pretty darned surprised to hear that her seminars contained all
this interesting stuff about names-as-mere-tags which was NEITHER there in
the paper NOR mentioned in the following discussion--which is reprinted
for all to read in the relevant volume of _Boston Studies_--during which
this very idea was discussed at some length. It is clear from that
discussion that Kripke himself was already playing around with this idea.
As a friend of mine recently said, what makes Kripke so interesting is his
ability to fix upon THE central idea and not let it go. Even if Marcus did
once have the idea that names were rigid designators, well, maybe lots of
other people did, too. It was Kripke who fastened upon it, realized its
importance, how it could be understood in the context of the possible
worlds semantics for modal logic he developed, and made something of it.
Actually, I don't think the idea that names are rigid designators had
half the interest its usually taken to have. Interesting fact about modal
contexts, but--IMHO--quite irrelevant to the questions about meaning to
which Kripke takes it to be relevant. But that's another matter. The
idea's not having half the interest it's taken to have doesn't make it
uninteresting--given how much interest it is usually taken to have!!
Besides, the really interesting stuff in _Naming_ is not the idea that
names are rigid, but the Godel-Schmidt cases, and those are not to be
found in Marcus. Donnellan would be a more likely predecessor for those.
If one were obsessed with finding such things.
Yours,
rh
Paul Martin
: ja...@cs.sfu.ca (Jamie Andrews) writes:
: >In article <3d0i7i$m...@decaxp.harvard.edu>,
: >Richard Heck <he...@fas.harvard.edu> wrote:
: > [snip]
: >
: > The contention is that Kripke plagiarized a *talk* by
: >Marcus, not a paper.
: Well, we'll see. Though I won't, 'cause I'm not going to the circus, but
: to the actual logic talk. Anyway, surprising that Marcus never published
: this stuff, if it was so darned interesting. If I'm not mistaken, the
: paper to which I referred was presented at about this time, anyway, and
Right: Marcus presented the text of "Modalities and intensional
languages" (so sayeth the editor for _Boston Studies_ for 1961/62) on
February 8, 1962.
: I'd be pretty darned surprised to hear that her seminars contained all
: this interesting stuff about names-as-mere-tags which was NEITHER there in
: the paper NOR mentioned in the following discussion--which is reprinted
: for all to read in the relevant volume of _Boston Studies_--during which
: this very idea was discussed at some length. It is clear from that
: discussion that Kripke himself was already playing around with this idea.
: As a friend of mine recently said, what makes Kripke so interesting is his
: ability to fix upon THE central idea and not let it go. Even if Marcus did
: once have the idea that names were rigid designators, well, maybe lots of
: other people did, too. It was Kripke who fastened upon it, realized its
: importance, how it could be understood in the context of the possible
: worlds semantics for modal logic he developed, and made something of it.
I want not at all to dignify this sort of priority claim as worthy of
serious attention, but maybe Marcus herself anticipated this sort of
resolution in the following tidbit from her review article ("Modal logic,
modal semantics, and their applications") in volume i of Flostad's
_Contemporary Philosophy_ (Nijhoff, 1981). She writes that in "Modalities
and intensional languages" (e.g., at 82ff. in the _Boston Studies_ volume)
she
suggested that ordinary proper names 'tag' objects and function
differently from singular descriptions. No THEORY was given or
AVAILABLE to account for the difference. In ["Identity and
necessity" and "Naming and necessity"] Kripke proposed a theory of
how it is that proper names might link up with objects independent
of mediating descriptions.... (288, emphasis added)
Cheers!
***********************************************************************
Paul Martin <pma...@csulb.edu> | ...it is always most rash to
Philosophy, California State University | condemn what is not quite in
Long Beach, CA 90840 | the fashion of the moment.
(310) 985-4330 | --Bertrand Russell
***********************************************************************