This chapter sets out the unfinished semantic agenda of Kripke's Naming and Necessity, the first item of which is a positive theory of the meaning of proper names, and the propositions semantically expressed by sentences containing them. Although much of Kripke's discussion supports the Millian view that the meaning of a name is its referent and that the proposition expressed by a sentence containing the name is a singular Russellian proposition, these conclusions conflict with his contention that the propositions expressed by true identity sentences like Hesperus is Phosphorus or Cicero is Tully are knowable only a posteriori. It is shown that Kripke's argument for this contention is flawed, and that, because of this, the Millian conception of meaning remains a viable option – provided that the Millian can explain how speakers are able to use sentences that differ only in the substitution of one coreferential name for another to assert different things, to convey different information, and to express different beliefs. The second item on the unfinished semantic agenda of Naming and Necessity is showing how to extend the nondescriptive, Millian account of proper names to simple predicates involving natural kind terms. It is shown that many of Kripke's examples of true theoretical identity sentences contain such predicates, and that his explanation of the necessity of these sentences faces a serious challenge.
Understanding Truth aims to illuminate the notion of truth, and the role it plays in our ordinary thought, as well as in our logical, philosophical, and scientific theories. Part 1 is concerned with substantive background issues: the identification of the bearers of truth, the basis for distinguishing truth from other notions, like certainty, with which it is often confused, and the formulation of positive responses to well‐known forms of philosophical skepticism about truth. Having cleared away the grounds for truth skepticism, the discussion turns in Part 2 to an explication of the formal theories of Alfred Tarski and Saul Kripke, including their treatments of the Liar paradox (illustrated by sentences like This sentence is not true). The success of Tarski's definition of truth in avoiding the Liar, and his ingenious use of the paradox in proving the arithmetical indefinability of arithmetical truth, are explained, and the fruitfulness of his definition in laying the foundations for the characterization of logical consequence in terms of truth in a model is defended against objections. Nevertheless, it is argued that the notion of truth defined by Tarski does not provide an adequate analysis of our ordinary notion because there are intellectual tasks for which we need a notion of truth other than Tarski's. There are also problems with applying his hierarchical approach to the Liar as it arises in natural language – problems that are avoided by Kripke's more sophisticated model. Part 2 concludes with an explanation of Kripke's theory of truth, which is used to motivate a philosophical conception of partially defined predicates – i.e., predicates that are governed by sufficient conditions for them to apply to an object, and sufficient conditions for them to fail to apply, but no conditions that are both individually sufficient and jointly necessary for the predicates to apply, or for them to fail to apply. While the advantages of understanding are true, to be a predicate of this sort are stressed at the end of Part 2, a theory of vague predicates according to which they are both partially defined and context sensitive is presented in Part 3. This theory is used to illuminate and resolve certain important puzzles posed by the Sorites paradox: a newborn baby is young, if someone is young at a certain moment, then that person is still young one second later, so everyone is young. The book closes with an attempt to incorporate important insights of Tarski and Kripke into a broadly deflationary conception of truth, as we ordinarily understand it in natural language and use it in philosophy.
In Naming and Necessity Saul Kripke undermined descriptive analyses of names by showing that names are rigid designators; thereby telling us what their meanings are not, but not what they are. In Beyond Rigidity, Scott Soames strengthens Kripke's attack, while also providing a positive theory of the semantics and pragmatics of names. Using a new conception of how the meaning of a sentence relates to the information asserted and conveyed by utterances, Soames argues that the meaning of a linguistically simple name is its referent, and that the meaning of a linguistically complex, partially descriptive, name is a compound that includes both its referent and a partial description. After illustrating these analyses with simple sentences containing names, Soames extends them to sentences that report the assertions and beliefs of agents. Appealing again to his new understanding of the relationship between meaning and information asserted and conveyed, Soames attempts to reconcile the central semantic doctrines of Millianism and Russellianism with Fregean intuitions about the information carried by belief and other propositional attitude ascriptions. Finally, Soames investigates the relationship between proper names and natural kind terms, including mass nouns, count nouns, and adjectives functioning as predicates. After showing that natural kind predicates do not fit reasonable definitions of rigidity, he argues that there is no notion of rigid designation for predicates that (1) is a natural extension of the notion of rigidity for singular terms, (2) is such that simple natural kind predicates are standardly rigid whereas many other predicates are not, and (3) plays the role imagined by Kripke in explaining the necessary a posteriori status of theoretical identities like Water is H2O and An object x is hotter than an object y iff x has a higher mean molecular kinetic energy than y. Finally, Soames uses key elements of Kripke's discussion to construct an alternative explanation of the necessary a posteriori character of these sentences that is based on the nondescriptionality of simple natural kind predicates, and the manner in which their meaning and reference is determined.
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