Kripke’s second
argument against descriptivism is much simpler than his first.
Schematically it goes as follows:
◊ NN isn't the F.
That means that for any
description we may have for, say, the proper name ‘Tony Blair’,
it always makes sense to state the above – say, ‘It's possible
that Tony Blair wasn't the first leader of New Labour’. We can now
say that ‘the first leader of New Labour’ can't give us the
meaning of the name ‘Tony Blair’ because we can ask ourselves how
do we understand the thought that Tony Blair mightn't have been the
first leader of New Labour? This amounts to the very simple
possibility that in the mid-1990s Tony Blair might never have become
New Labour’s first leader. Clearly this is logically
possible.
Let’s just say that
the only thing that most people know about Tony Blair is that he was
the first leader of New Labour. We can follow this by saying that if
any description constituted the meaning of the name ‘Tony Blair',
the description ‘the first leader of New Labour’ would be the
best option. Let’s summarise this description as ‘the F’.
However, let’s suppose that I'm one of those people who only know
one thing about Tony Blair: that he was the first leader of New
Labour. Thus:
Tony Blair was the F.
It would still be
possible to understand the thought that
◊ Tony Blair wasn't
the F.
If the only thing I
know about Blair is that he was the first leader of New Labour, I
can't say that I don’t understand the above because, in actual
fact, it's another meaning that fixes the name ‘Tony Blair’. I
can't say this because no other description of Tony Blair is known to
me. And neither can I say that the thought that Tony Blair wasn't in
fact the first leader of New labour doesn't make any sense to me. I
may think it false; though I still understand it and understand it
clearly. That's because even if I only know the description ‘Tony
Blair was the first leader of New Labour’, then clearly the statement
Tony Blair was not the
first leader of New Labour.
would make sense. Not
only that: someone could, in principle, convince me that it's a fact
that Tony Blair wasn't the first leader of New Labour. Again, that's
logically possible. For example, say that a political historian tells
me that recent research has conclusively shown that it was Gordon
Brown who was the first leader of New Labour and that Tony Blair was
just a front-man who obeyed Brown’s commands. Because of these
ostensibly new and conclusive facts, I could easily come to believe
that Blair wasn't, in fact, the actual first leader of New Labour.
However, despite this piece of historical revisionism, I may,
instead, have never acquired any new historical facts which refute
the source of my original description of Tony Blair. Now I couldn't
possibly rely on the description ‘the first leader of New Labour’
because it would contradict my new or alternative knowledge of the
Prime Minister. Clearly Blair can't both be and not be the first leader of New Labour.
The example above is
supposed to show us, Kripke argues, that we can’t - or don’t -
actually rely of any descriptive content to fix a proper name.
Following on from that, it follows that something other than a
description (or descriptions) must come into play when we name
someone and also when we later understand and use that name. What all
this means, again, is that even if I knew sod all about Tony Blair (if
that's possible), I can still effectively use the name ‘Tony
Blair’. More relevantly to Kripke’s argument, I successfully
refer to the man. This is a Wittgensteinian point about the communal
nature of meaning. That a reliance on descriptive content would be an
example of private meaning – our private descriptions of Tony Blair
which ‘fix the content’ of the proper name ‘Tony Blair’. It
would therefore be both a Cartesian and therefore an ‘internalist’
take on the semantics of proper names. Alternatively, if we don’t
rely on private or subjective meanings or descriptions, then we must,
instead, commit ourselves to semantic conventionalism in that it's
the community which fixes the meaning of our names and words and thus
makes such things inter-subjective in nature. Thus reference isn't
only (or partly?) de re, according to Kripke, because a name (or
namer) relies not only on the referent or named object itself, but
also on other namers and speakers. This again shows
us that descriptivism isn't only a matter of (partly?) de dicto
expressions: it's also Cartesian and therefore subjectivist.
Kripke, therefore, paints descriptivism as being radically
non-Wittgensteinian in nature. The reference-relation between
name/namer and named object is socially constituted.
Kripke also elaborates
the ostensible fact that descriptions are of little or no relevance
to the reference-relation.
For example, we not
only may not know anything about a named object (like our previous
Tony Blair): we can become adept name-users of names even when we
have little contact with any users of the name or the name itself. This
is another way of saying that we don’t need the name’s content
(if it has any) in such situations of naming scarcity. Whatever we do
need, Kripke argues, it's not name-content of any kind.
For instance, I may be
on a bus and hear the name ‘Reginald Sniff-Peters’ being used by
people on the back of a bus. I have little (or even no) knowledge of
Reginald Sniff Peters and have never even heard the name
‘Sniff-Peters’ before. However, when I get off the bus and go
home, I can quite easily refer to Sniff-Peters and use the name
‘Reginald Sniff-Peters’ in an ordinary conversation despite my
dearth of knowledge of this man and his name. However, by talking to
these ‘Sniff-Peters’ novices I could easily bring on board more
members of the community of ‘Sniff-Peters’ name-users and even
namers.
That is an example of a
Kripkean causal chain.
I first heard
‘Sniff-Peters’ spoken on the bus by a group of strangers. Then I
passed this name on to yet another group of people who've never heard that name
before. And they too could quite easily pass it on and increase the
set of users of the name ‘Sniff-Peters’. Of course the people who
originally used that name (on the back of the bus) would have had it
passed on to them by others. In that case, they too might have been
‘Sniff-Peters’ novices like me.
This causal chain
must end, Kripke argued, with what he calls the initial "naming
baptism" – i.e. when Sniff-Peters was first named.
Importantly, despite
this emphasis on Reginald Sniff-Peters’ name, these new name-users
are now talking about him qua person: they aren't simply playing (as
it were) with his name.
References:
Kripke, S.
(1972/1980) Naming and Necessity, Oxford: Blackwell
Wittgenstein, L . (1953) Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe,
Oxford: Blackwell
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