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This chapter defends the theory proffered in the author's Frege's Puzzle against criticisms made by Saul Kripke and Stephen Schiffer. The assumption that invariably one would be justified in inferring logically valid consequences is challenged. A weakened variant is proposed. A complex example of Schiffer's concerning iterated belief attribution is analyzed.

This chapter discusses Saul Kripke’s treatment of the necessary a posteriori and concomitant distinction between epistemic and metaphysical possibility. It extracts the enduring lessons of his treatment of these matters and disentangles them from errors and confusions that mar some of his most important discussions. It argues that there are two Kripkean routes to the necessary a posteriori—one correct and philosophically far-reaching; the other incorrect, philosophically misleading, and the source of damaging errors that persist to this day. It connects two false principles involved in the second, unsuccessful, route to the necessary a posteriori with the plausible and potentially correct idea that believing a singular proposition that o is F always involves also believing a richer more descriptively informative proposition in which some further property plays a role in the agent’s thoughts about o. It explains why this idea will not save the failed second route to the necessary a posteriori and suggests that it may help reconcile Kripke’s insights with the lessons of Frege’s puzzle.

The distinction between natural necessity and metaphysical necessity is examined. An account is advanced of the logical form of statements of natural law, contrasting with that of D. M. Armstrong. The relationship between law-statements and counterfactual conditionals is discussed. The claim of scientific essentialists that natural laws are metaphysically necessary is challenged as resting on a questionable account of the identity conditions of properties. It is argued that Saul Kripke’s model of a posteriori knowledge of necessary truths does not enable us to understand how knowledge of natural laws is possible on the scientific essentialist view of them.

This chapter discusses the contributions of Saul Kripke and David Kaplan, which are leading elements of a body of work that changed the course of analytic philosophy. It first deals with the views of Kripke. The necessity featured in Naming and Necessity is the nonlinguistic notion needed for quantified modal logic and the modal de re. Kripke's articulation of this notion is linked to his discussion of rigid designation, and metaphysical essentialism. The remainder of the chapter deals with Kaplan, focusing on the tension between logic and semantics; the basic structure of the logic of demonstratives; direct reference and rigid designation; and English demonstratives vs. “dthat”-rigidified descriptions.

This chapter examines Saul Kripke's mathematically rigorous, paradox-free treatment of truth for certain formal languages. Kripke adds hints about how his formal construction might model some features of natural language, but his hints steer a path between an inconsistency view and a vindicationist one. The chapter first compares Kripke's notion of truth with that of Alfred Tarski before discussing what Kripke calls the minimum fixed point, the first level where no new sentences get classified as true that were not already so classified at some earlier level. It also considers the ungroundedness of a sentence, along with the concepts of transfinite construction, revision theories, and axiomatic theories of truth.

This paper explores the relationship between theses and questions about reference, necessity, and possibility. The analysis focuses on the theses Saul Kripke defends about individuals and their names. It is argued that Kripke’s contribution was to separate metaphysical and semantic issues. Kripke’s theses on proper names and reference do not presuppose any controversial metaphysical theories. No metaphysical conclusions are derived from theses about reference and names, although clarifications on the nature of reference helps in rebuttals to arguments against metaphysical theses that Kripke defends.

Natural theologians often claim that God exists necessarily, so that his (alleged) existence does not need an explanation. Various notions of necessity are analysed in order to determine in which sense God’s existence can be called ‘necessary’. Richard Swinburne’s claim that God exists necessarily in the ontological sense boils down to admitting that God’s existence, if he exists, is radically contingent. Furthermore, Swinburne’s use of Kripke’s notion of de re necessity in order to explain in which sense God’s defining properties are ne cessary properties is unconvincing for various reasons. Finally, Swinburne’s introduction of analogy into his use of the term ‘person’ for God in order to resolve a contradiction concerning God’s necessary properties implies that no proof of the coherence of theism is possible. In particular, there is no conceivable indirect proof of the coherence of theism by adducing evidence to the effect that theism is probably true. It follows on the usual criteria for theory choice that theism is not eligible as an existential hypothesis open to empirical confirmation.

This chapter considers demonstratives and proper names. It begins by arguing for a semantically unified treatment of demonstratives on which they are specific existentials (like specific indefinites and definite descriptions) but have their own distinctive presuppositional profile. Next, the chapter turns to the category of proper names and their various uses. The authors acknowledge that there are shortcomings to semantic orthodoxy, which treats proper names as paradigmatically referential tags, and that standard Kripkean modal arguments are ineffectual against the view that all proper names are semantically predicative. However, the authors finally reject the predicative view in favor of a new alternative to semantic orthodoxy—one that fits well with their preferred accounts of various other noun phrases.

The discovery of the twin categories of reference and singular thought is widely felt to be one of the landmark achievements of twentieth-century analytic philosophy. On the one hand there is the distinction between bona fide referential expressions of natural language and those that are about objects only in some looser sense. On the other hand there is a corresponding distinction between a thought that is loosely about an object, and one whose bond with an object is robust enough for it to count as genuinely ‘singular’ or ‘de re’. This chapter tries to shed light on these two ideas by focusing on semantic ideas connected with Russell’s category of logically proper names that have been widely brought to bear on their successors.

Previous chapters have described liberalism’s relationship to descriptivist understandings of language and postliberalism’s relationship to Wittgenstein. This chapter describes serious problems with descriptivism, on the one hand, and Wittgensteinian understandings of meaning, on the other. The chapter argues that the most influential descriptivist theory of meaning, that of Donald Davidson, is fatally flawed. The chapter then argues that satisfaction of descriptive senses cannot be either universally necessary or sufficient for successful reference. Thus, descriptivism is an inadequate account of either meaning or reference. The chapter then provides an analysis and critique of the later Wittgenstein’s understanding of meaning as use. The chapter discusses prominent criticisms of Wittgenstein’s understanding of meaning and concludes that at best it is too vague to be either defended or conclusively refuted. At worst, its problems can be resolved only by abandoning Wittgenstein’s central commitments. Postliberal appropriations of Wittgenstein raise additional serious problems. These center around the failure to distinguish semantics from speech acts and the refusal to allow reference any role in determining meaning. These postliberal moves deprive Frei and Lindbeck of the ability to argue for the truth of theological claims and leave them vulnerable to charges of fideism.

This chapter traces the development of analytic philosophy in the United States, starting with the pragmatism of Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, and (later) Clarence Irving Lewis, and continuing through the great immigration of philosophers of science, philosophical logicians, and logical positivists from the turn of the twentieth century to the outbreak of World War II. It also provides broad-brush overviews of some of the most important philosophical debates that occupied American analytic philosophers during the last half of the twentieth century, including the Quine–Carnap debate about meaning and analyticity, the struggle over modality, the rise of philosophical logic and its application to the study of natural language, the Davidsonian program, Saul Kripke and the end of the linguistic turn, John Rawls and the resuscitation of normative theory, and a smattering of other, more specialized topics.

This chapter discusses the framework within philosophy of language that is helpful in illuminating issues in the theory of legal interpretation. It argues that the application of concepts is sensitive to theory. This overall claim is supported by arguments in the philosophy of language. The chapter examines Saul Kripke's arguments on the semantics of names, Hilary Putnam's generalisation of the argument to the domain of natural kinds, Tyler Burge's generalisation of the argument to cases of virtually any common noun, the arguments of John McDowell and Donald Davidson against the possibility of deriving content from intrinsic mental materials, the possibility of distinguishing between ascription of wrong beliefs about the same concept and ascription of a different concept, legal concepts analogous to the account of natural kinds, and a possible objection to the effect that conceiving legal questions as questions of classification of events or states of affairs, under legal concepts, distorts the nature of legal reasoning.

Modality and Meaning (1994) defended the minority position that nonfactual entities have haecceities (plus whatever other essential properties might be); the descriptions used to introduce them do not produce or determine substantive essences. In light of Kripke’s John Locke Lectures and some more recent work on fictional characters, it appears that position needs further defending. This chapter rebuts Kripke’s odd view that fictional persons are not possible beings; instead it contends that the author’s original stipulatory model saves Haecceitism about fictional characters from Kripke’s plurality objections. His case against Haecceitism must therefore rest entirely on his pretence view of fictional discourse. But the pretence view does not work either; so Haecceitism survives.

This is (fairly) uncontroversial: a is possibly-Φ when a counterpart of a is Φ in some world. It becomes (more) controversial only once the italicized relations are constrained in some way. For Saul Kripke, the counterpart relation was identity while objects could exist in more than one world. For David Lewis, the counterpart relation was a similarity relation while objects could not exist in more than one world. Further controversy: identity is an equivalence relation but similarity is not. Different constraints are developed here. The counterpart relation is sortal-relative sameness. Individuals may exist in more than one world but can be sortal-relatively the same as something other than themselves in some different possible world. Sortal-relative sameness is a weak equivalence relation. This intermediate version of counterpart theory is put to use in solving a puzzle of material constitution.

In Naming and Necessity, Saul Kripke presented examples that convinced many philosophers that there are truths that are both necessary and a posteriori, and both contingent and a priori. This paper examines the contrast between the different lessons that philosophers think should be learned from Kripke’s story. It is argued that the account of the phenomena, and the apparatus used to describe them are a variation on, and development of, the sceptical lesson about a priori knowledge and truth taught by Quine.