Episode 126: Saul Kripke on Possibilities, Language & Science

0:07 Mark: You're listening to the Partially Examined Life, a philosophy podcast by some guys who at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Among the many questions we'll address in episode 126 is something like if in some possible world all the cats were actually demons, would it be really that instead of all the cats actually being demons, there were no cats, just demons that look like what in our world are cats? And we read Saul Kripke's Naming and Necessity, which is a 1980 publication of some lectures given in 1970. You can join the discussion, get the text, lots of More information@PartiallyExaminedLife.com this is Mark Linsenmayer, necessarily in Madison, Wisconsin.

0:43 Wes: This is Wes Alwan, rigidly designated in Boston, Massachusetts.

0:48 Dylan: This is Dylan Casey referring in Middleton, Wisconsin.

0:51 Seth: And this is McMahon. Wes stole mine. This is Matt Teichman referring to the same object at all Possible Worlds in Chicago.

1:00 Wes: Yeah, I took the low hanging, which I thought Mark would probably take, but I just.

1:06 Mark: I thought you were just going to say rigid in.

1:08 Wes: Why. Yeah, well, I. Yeah. Do you have to spell it out, Mark? Is that the. I guess that's a definite description of the joke. I just.

1:17 Mark: So as my little question indicated, it's a little hard to describe what this reading is about because it's kind of in the middle of the history of an ongoing dispute. So people can listen back to our Frege episode to kind of get the background of where he's coming from about proper names. So it's naming and necessity. So it's a theory, proper names, why do they refer to the stuff that they refer to? And then his answer to that is going to have something to do with metaphysical necessity.

1:45 Wes: So there's this question of how names refer to individual entities in the world. And maybe we should start out by trying to say, why is that even a concern? Is it just because I want to understand a mechanism of how the name Mark in this context actually doesn't somehow have a little line going out to Dylan or. So maybe Matt has a good way of putting this. But what this concern about reference is, why does it require an explanation?

2:09 Seth: Yeah, so I guess there are kind of two questions sort of in the background here. One which is maybe a little bit more of the question that I'm interested in, which is just. Is like, what does a name mean? That's pretty not clear. Like, what does Matt mean? Like, if you had to translate Matt into something. The question's a little weird, isn't it? It's not like if you had to translate to the left of into something you could sort of explain. Well, it's like the opp. To the right of. But like, how would you explain what mat means? And then people are always drawn to.

Well, it's just, you know, it's like this guy over here. It's just directly pointing at this guy right off the bat. I think the question of what a name is different from the question of what an adjective is or what a verb is or what a preposition is. What other kinds of words are. That's one question I think that's sort of interesting here. And then one of the things he's concerned to argue is that, you know, a name isn't a shorthand for a description. So whatever we do want to say about what a name means, that's going to be complicated. But one thing can at least say is that it's not just an abbreviation of the guy who lives in Chicago and is on the Partially Examined Life podcast.

Blah, blah, blah, blah.

3:00 Wes: So there's meaning and there's reference. And those two things are related, perhaps, but certainly not necessarily the same thing. I think we should describe what this theory of definite descriptions is and what motivates it before you really launch, because I don't think we're going to be able to make sense of this unless we do that.

3:15 Seth: This other question, which you sort of opened with, which is the one, I think that's a little harder to motivate, actually. What is it for a name to refer, or what fact of the matter determines what a name stands for? That one is a little bit more recherche or kind of esoteric. Where does that question come from?

3:29 Wes: What motivates this? Because I think for an average listener, they're going to be like, well, what do you mean? What's the problem of reference? I'm using the word mark, and that refers to mark. What's the problem? So that's what I'm trying to get at.

3:42 Dylan: To me, it becomes a little more clear when you get in these middle grounds. Like, you want to say, well, that's a tree. And somebody says, well, no, it's a bush. And you say, well, what makes it a bush and what makes it a tree? I think pretty quickly it's easy to see how you would go down an idea of a descriptive notion of what every noun means. And I was going to ask Matt if when he was saying about names and he picked mat, did he also mean to include all nouns?

4:11 Wes: So we're going to get to natural kinds in this and then mass terms. But initially we really are thinking about proper names, right?

4:16 Mark: We have to give some clue of what metaphysical fruit this is ultimately supposed to yield, or else people will just simply turn this. Because it's so far we got a theory of proper names. Dylan just referred to getting to general categories.

4:28 Wes: Let's give the theory of definite descriptions and what problems it's supposed to solve. I don't see how we can say what he's saying without saying definite descriptions

4:35 Mark: can't even hint at what the fruit will be.

4:37 Wes: What is the hint? If you have a concise.

4:39 Seth: So hint at what the fruit will be. I mean, the pulling apart of a priori and the necessary is a very new idea at the time.

4:45 Dylan: So everybody just turned it off right now. They just turned it off.

4:48 Mark: Give some jargon. The fruit is supposed to be that. It says something about the mind body problem and it says something scientific identity. So we discover that water is equal to H2O. That's something that we didn't know from the beginning of time. So it seems like that that can't be an a priori truth. It's not something you could just figure out using pure reason. Science had to figure it out. So traditionally that was the kind of thing that it kind of went in the category of, well, a priori means those are the truths, like mathematical truths or maybe truths about God or whatever, depending on what philosopher you're talking to. Those are the ones that are going to be true in all circumstances, true

5:29 Dylan: in all possible worlds and necessary. And that's what you mean by necessary.

5:32 Mark: Necessary.

5:33 Wes: Metaphysically necessary a priori and necessary are the same thing as this idea. And by the way, when we're using possible worlds, it's not like we have a multiverse theory of the universe and we're saying all these possibilities really exist in some extent. We talk about possibility all the time and we call this counterfactuals. In some cases they're counterfactual. So what if I hadn't gone to the store this morning and instead had gone to the gym or something like that? That's a particular state of affairs or a circumstance that I'm thinking about with regard to possibility. When I talk about a possible world, I'm thinking about all the states of affairs of which the world consists. So I take all the different things together. So I'm supposing that I went to the store in this alternate possibility and perhaps everything else the same or other things are also different.

6:20 Mark: Thinking about this is supposed to give you an Idea of if there are some things that would be ruled out of any possibility, then you've stumbled on something that's metaphysically necessary, that's a metaphysical fact. If you want to say, I could have gone to the store today, I could have not gone to the store today. Could two plus two have equaled five? It seems like not. It seems like there's no possibility in which something could have happened to make that possible. So the question that Kripke's concerned with, one of them is could scientists have discovered that water was in fact not H2O, that it was something else?

Could there be a possible world in which, once you put it that way, it gets more complicated, even though it's not supposed to be? Because you can imagine a possible world where scientists are evaluating this thing that they think is water, but they actually find out that it has something other compound than H2O. And so some philosophers would say that's a situation in which, yeah, water turned out in that situation not to be H2O. Kripke's going to have to say that, well, actually in that world it wasn't water at all. And so that we'll have to get to why that's the case.

7:20 Wes: It'll all make a lot more sense once we.

7:23 Dylan: But I think those examples as the kinds of. I mean, Mark, you called them fruits. But they are the kinds of questions that are really on the long lens for Kripke at the end of the book. A lot of them have to do with understanding the way scientific discovery works and whether or not the discoveries themselves made conclusions that are contingent, that are just one set of conclusions among any other set of conclusions. So, for instance, it was in the past few hundred years that it's claimed, well, what is light? Light is electromagnetic radiation. Kripke wants to say that it's necessarily so that light is electromagnetic radiation. It's not a contingent fact. It's not something that it could have been any other way.

8:07 Mark: Rather, if it's true at all, then it's necessarily true. You might not even be sure ever that it's actually true.

8:13 Dylan: That's a very good qualification that we'll have to talk more about. But that's exactly right.

8:17 Wes: I see these things as actually side arguments. I see the main fruit as a new theory of reference which we now call the causal theory of reference, which I think we should wait to describe. So I think all those other things is really. But I didn't see it was the main motivation for this.

8:33 Dylan: Is that the new tree, Wes, or is it the fruit? Because I think that what Mark was describing was the fruit. And what you're talking about is the tree that yields the fruit.

8:40 Wes: Are you being serious?

8:41 Dylan: I actually. I wasn't at first, but now I am. Yeah, at first I was just making

8:45 Seth: a joke, but now we're all the best philosophers.

8:47 Dylan: Actually, that's a pretty good analogy.

8:48 Seth: It starts off as a joke and it turns into.

8:51 Wes: Yes, it's a. It's a problem of identity over time.

8:54 Dylan: That would be another piece that Mark mentioned, briefly thinking about what identity is and calling things the same or saying that this is that. His discussion has a lot to say about questions of identity.

9:07 Wes: And that's actually a good segue into definite descriptions, because one of the motivations for definite descriptions is statements of identity.

9:14 Dylan: I'm sorry, but can you remind me? He's reacting to definite descriptions.

9:17 Wes: Yeah. I'm going to try and say what they are here.

9:19 Dylan: They're from Frege and Russell. Is that the deal?

9:21 Mark: Russell in particular, yeah.

9:22 Dylan: Russell in particular, yeah.

9:24 Seth: You can just think of a definite description as a noun phrase, starting with the word the.

9:27 Wes: So I was going to say give you the motivation. One of the motivations first, because then it makes it easier. So there's this planet Venus. And you might not have known that what looks like a star in the morning sky is the same Venus that is the star in the evening sky. So you might think that this thing, the morning star, is different than the evening star. And you could discover conceivably that the morning star is the evening star, or Hesperus is phosphorus. That's another way to put it. And then the question is, for those statements of identity, what makes them informative?

Because we know they're informative. There's new information there. I've learned something in this case, and under a kind of simple theory of names, which is associated with John Stuart Mill, if you think that these proper names simply refer to some reference, and then what's going on there is that Hesperus is phosphorus is just a way of saying A equals A. Then there's nothing informative about that. We know A equals A. We know a thing is identical to itself. Frege came up with this distinction between sense and reference that helps us out with that.

You can have the same referent under two different senses, which will become, for Russell, under two different descriptions. The innovation for Russell is this idea that even a proper name, in a way, is a kind of description. Matt, do you want to take it from there and give it more precisely with what a definite Description is.

10:43 Seth: So you can think of a definite description as a phrase beginning with the word the. The host of the Partially Examined Life or the President of the United States. So Russell was trying to address the question you just mentioned, which is, if you tell somebody Spielberg was the director of Et cetera, what exactly are you telling them? If each noun phrase on either side of that is there, Spielberg and the director of ET Stand for the same thing, does that mean they mean the same thing? And if they mean the same thing, how is that different from just saying Spielberg is Spielberg, which is not informative?

And what is it that makes the statement Spielberg is the director of ET Informative? And especially when you have two names, right? Samuel Clemens as Mark Twain. What's going on there? That clearly could tell you something you might not know that Samuel Clemens is the same person as Mark Twain. And somebody could inform you by telling you that they wouldn't be saying anything at all interesting if they told you Samuel Clemens is Samuel Clemens or Mark Twain is Mark Twain. Russell's way of addressing this problem, among many others, was to say, you know what, these names of people and names of places like Samuel Clemens, Mark Twain, what these really are is they're just abbreviated, definite descriptions, definite noun phrases, like the person who such and such and such.

When you say Samuel Clemens is Mark Twain, you're saying something like the author of Huckleberry Finn is the guy that

11:57 Mark: was born in this state and was called had Samuel Clemens on his driver's license.

12:01 Seth: Exactly. Something like that.

12:02 Wes: Or when you're saying Hesperus, you could be saying that this particular star that's in the morning sky right now. Something like that.

12:09 Seth: Right? Exactly. The star I saw in the morning is the same star as the star I saw in the evening. If it is the case that those names Hesperus and Phosphorus are just shorthand for saying the star I saw in the morning for Hesperus and the star I saw in the evening, I probably got it mixed up, but whatever. If those are just shorthand for the descriptions, that at least explains how you can be saying something informative when you say Hesperus is phosphorus. Of course, there's a big question here as to, well, which descriptions are associated with the name?

And how do we know when we hear the name? Do we just, by telepathy, magically guess the description that the name is an abbreviation of, and so on? So there are a lot of difficulties there. But if somehow we could get around those difficulties, we would at least address this question of what does it mean when you say stuff like Samuel Clemens is Mark Twain or Hesperus as phosphorus.

12:55 Wes: And by the way, when we say definite, we just mean the description itself can't be so generic that it picks out more than one referent, so it couldn't be writers.

13:04 Seth: So an indefinite noun phrase would be one with an indefinite article like a or an. And the definite one would be paradigmatically with the word the.

13:11 Dylan: Even if you use the, it doesn't seem completely clear that you would. Well, your definite description, you know, you're stringing along a whole bunch of different descriptors. There's going to be a question of what is the minimum set? Is there one that ends up definitely describing the thing, or is it. Are they all together a cluster of properties?

13:35 Mark: Exactly. You might have in your mind that Aristotle, you might think of him as the guy that wrote this set of books, or you might think of him as the person who taught Alexander the Great. Well, aren't those both equally good as definite descriptions if they both individually pick him out? But yet those are different senses. Where Kripke's coming to this is he thinks that this whole point of view doesn't adequately take into account what he calls modal possibilities. In other words, things that might have happened. So. Well, what if Aristotle hadn't actually taught Alexander the Great?

He wrote all these books, but he hadn't taught Alexander the Great. If we made a statement about Aristotle, would we still be talking about Aristotle? Because if the definite description of it is the guy who taught Alexander the Great, then it seems like in that possible world, in that counterfactual situation where he didn't do that, we. We would no longer be referring to Aristotle. So that's clearly wrong. So the people who advocate this view, this descriptive view said, okay, well, look, there's a lot of properties like that that go into being Aristotle, and you're correctly referring to Aristotle.

If the majority of those are true, if there's a cluster of properties, and if the majority of them apply, then, yeah, you're referring to Aristotle. So maybe actually there's a historical mistake in there. And Aristotle didn't teach Alexander the Great, but he did write these books. But you still know enough about him that you're correctly referring to Aristotle as opposed to referring to somebody, whoever the actual author of these books was.

14:55 Wes: The cluster thing can be more complex than that, right? You could say a weighted majority or that some properties are more important than others and things like that. So it's this idea of, you take the disjunction of all these Actual properties of Aristotle that definitely describe him this or that, and so on and so forth. The idea is that must somehow correspond to the meaning of the name Aristotle. So we're talking about meaning here.

15:17 Dylan: But don't you still run into this problem? The one that would come to mind as a good example would be Shakespeare. Who's Shakespeare? This guy that wrote all of these plays. If you say that and you mean the guy that you usually see with the half bald head, that's a picture of him. And then it turns out that actually the guy who wrote those plays was Francis Bacon, not this guy who you have the picture of with the half bald head. Then when you talk about Shakespeare and you mean by Shakespeare the descriptor that the person who wrote all these plays, what you mean actually you're referring to Francis Bacon because that's the guy who actually wrote all those plays, not the guy with the bald head.

15:55 Seth: Yeah. What did you guys think of that thought experiment, by the way?

15:57 Dylan: You run into this problem where you could be wrong about your descriptors. And so then it ends up, when you use those descriptors as the way to refer to Shakespeare or to Aristotle or whatever, is that they end up pointing to something completely different than what actually you intended to. And you would have been wrong in a different way, but it's not what you actually intended to refer to. Right. You didn't intend to refer to the guy who actually wrote the plays in the sense of being wrong about it. You're referring to the guy with the bald head. That's what you meant by Shakespeare.

16:30 Mark: Kripke's gonna say for sure you actually meant Shakespeare. That man. I mean, our intuitions, I think, are conflicted on this. Because if you're discussing Shakespeare and saying, well, Shakespeare in Hamlet wrote this and this and this and meant this and this and this. Obviously you're just referring to whoever it is that wrote Hamlet. You think it's Shakespeare. And so maybe you're saying it wrong if it was in fact not Shakespeare and somebody could correct you. And you know, actually fans are big into that, but still your sentence would make sense and serve the purpose that it's supposed to serve this literary analysis.

16:59 Dylan: That's right. And I guess what you're pointing out is the terms in which I was wrong about the reference.

17:05 Wes: That's a case that's almost like the Jack the Ripper case, though, in which we hit. That's actually a complex exception to this. There are cases in which, for instance, the individual is sort of unknown. We don't know much about Shakespeare except that he wrote those plays. Right.

17:17 Dylan: So doesn't it apply to anything in which you were wrong in your description? It's easy to pick historical cases where there's little information. But wouldn't it be true in the most trivial way about anything for which you were wrong about it? Mark's point seems to be that there's still a way that the scripter is still referring, even if you are wrong about what it's pointing to. The descriptor is still unique in its reference, even if you are wrong about what it's referring to.

17:42 Seth: So Mark, were you saying that, let's say it was suddenly discovered that tomorrow it's suddenly unearthed, historians discover that Shakespeare never wrote Hamlet, Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet, any of those plays. That was all misinformation. Some other person, Shakespeare's mom, really wrote them. Were you saying that just now when we talk about, ah, look at what Shakespeare does at this passage in Hamlet, when we said that after this discovery, we'd actually be talking about Shakespeare's mom?

18:04 Dylan: Yes.

18:05 Wes: No, that's epistemological possibility. Right? That's distinct from the possibility that he's talking about. So if we find out, for instance, that it's the case in the actual world that Shakespeare's mom wrote the plays, that's just a case of our lack of knowledge.

18:20 Seth: So we'd be saying something false, but we'd be saying it about Shakespeare and we wouldn't suddenly now be talking about Shakespeare's mom. That's the prediction that Kripke's sort of thought experiment would have to make. That's the prediction he wants it to make.

18:31 Mark: And I think that contrast gets at what the dispute is about here is. So you've just had a whole literary discussion about Shakespeare and what he wrote in Hamlet. And we write down all those sentences I say on page one, Shakespeare said this. On page two, Shakespeare says this. We find out the next day that actually Shakespeare didn't write any of these, his mom wrote them. Do we now think that this whole page of things that I've written out, that all of these sentences are now false? Because in fact, actually Shakespeare didn't write any of those things. But really the point of us having this literary discussion was to discuss what was in the document.

19:05 Wes: They are in a sense false. We know something else about Shakespeare, that he's this guy born at this particular time in Stratford and they've under these particular parents and married this particular woman. Then yeah, that's false because Shakespeare refers to that guy and it Turns out that guy did not write those plays. So Shakespeare isn't just simply the guy who wrote those plays. We can do a counterfactual on that. We can say, what if Shakespeare hadn't written those plays and still be referring to the guy who was born of those parents at that particular time and so on and so on.

19:33 Mark: Right. So that's. You're stating Kripke's position in the same

19:36 Wes: way that when we say that Nixon won the presidential election in 1968 and then we do a counterfactual in which Humphrey won it, it doesn't mean that we were never referring to Nixon. We were always referring to Humphrey.

19:48 Dylan: Are you talking about the definite descriptor version of this or are you talking about Kripke's response to it?

19:53 Mark: Wes is giving Kripke's response. Yeah, I mean, I was trying to lay out that what the two responses are. And you seem to find the Russell response so vile and unintuitive that it cannot even be spoken all the way.

20:06 Wes: What do you mean in the Russell response?

20:08 Mark: The idea that names are in fact definite descriptions. So when we're having this literary discussion, we. What I meant by Shakespeare is, well, whoever it was that wrote this play, I don't really care that it's the guy with the bald head that's like a thing that's on the back cover that's not relevant to discussion. Relevant to discussion is the author discovering that that guy Shakespeare with the bald head didn't write stuff. Okay, yeah, it demands an appendix be made at the end of the book. But everything that we said in our literary discussion is, you know, if it was good literary analysis is still right on.

It's sort of beside the point. This is the definite description view that's associated with Russell, strangely enough, historically, then gets tied back to the pragmatists and really everybody who pays attention to, well, why are we actually bothering to make this point in the first place? And thinks that if we discovered something like this then maybe it just shouldn't be clear who we were talking about. If we discover, you know, I thought the bald headed guy was the guy who wrote these plays when I was having this discussion with you. When we discover it was not.

It's not that, oh, now you know, we were simply wrong in this whole discussion. It's that our intuitions should fall apart. That what we had in mind in this whole discussion ended up not being true. You might say, well, what were you referring to when you meant Shakespeare? Well, I meant the guy who wrote the plays. And I meant this. This guy who has the bald head. And it turns out, actually, since no individual satisfies both of those descriptions, you're

21:30 Wes: just relying on this particular case in which we don't know that much about Shakespeare. You know, it's not the case that when we find out that something that we thought was true isn't true about an individual, that all our references to those individual become suddenly bogus. Right.

21:44 Mark: If it's a single thing that we found out or that we're considering a counterfactual case where this didn't actually happen, then you're correct. But if we are expanding the descriptivist view to include the cluster of descriptions, which is really everything you know about the guy. So imagine if everything you know about Nixon, not just that he was the president at this time and blah, blah, blah, but all the stuff about his appearance about he said the I am not a crook, whatever, and then you found out that actually Nixon was killed at birth and replaced with another baby or a robot or whatever that in fact did all that stuff, would you then say, oh, I guess Nixon didn't do any of that, or would it

22:23 Wes: be in that case? But that's a different case. Kripke's point is that you could have a case in which Nixon didn't do any of the things that we've done. According to Kripke, he didn't go into politics, he didn't do that. So there's nothing about. Now you can't go so far as to say he didn't have the same parents and we'll get into why, or that he was replaced by demons like the cats. You can't go that far and still say you're referring to the same Nixon because they're going to turn out to be these essential things which will ruin what he calls this rigid designation, which we'll explain in a second. I think the way to sum up his objection to the cluster thing is that you could deny all of those properties and still be talking about Nixon.

22:57 Seth: Why are you resistant to that conclusion? Mark, I'm curious about. Why wouldn't we just say in that scenario that, well, everything we thought we knew about Nixon was false? That's precisely why my mind is blown. Yeah, this Nixon guy is not at all who I thought he was, but that whole time I'm still referring to the same guy. It seems like you want to resist that.

23:11 Mark: I'm trying to represent the descriptivist position in that.

23:14 Seth: Yeah, exactly.

23:15 Mark: If all of these things turned out to be wrong, Then I think our intuitions are not designed to cover that case.

23:21 Seth: I see.

23:22 Mark: Kripke's position was, no, actually Nixon was killed at birth, blah, blah, blah. So everything we thought about this individual is wrong. Or the other option would be, oh, well, I guess the robot or the replacement, the clone, whatever, since that's who we've been calling Nixon this whole time. Let's say Nixon actually was that thing. It's just that Nixon we thought was a person or, you know, we thought was born of this and this parents, but actually wasn't or wasn't actually a person or whatever. But the name actually does refer to. Well, it's hard to say.

It's just a description because this is somebody like we've seen on tv. So if we say Nixon is that guy, it would be hard to. If it turned out that it was a hologram or something, it's hard to say we were wrong about our pointing when you're not considering somebody like, you know, a historical figure that we have no direct witness of. I think Kripke is exactly right in those cases.

24:13 Seth: I see. So it sounds like what you're saying then is that maybe our common sense beliefs about really crux historical figures are so tied into our knowledge about everything else that maybe we just want to say that if all that was upended, that would just lead us into skepticism because all of our knowledge is tied into all of our other knowledge in really deep ways. You know, but that's just an extreme case or something like that.

24:31 Mark: Kripke presents himself as the champion of common sense here. The other question you ask, why does Matt refer to you instead of me? Well, because your parents named you Matt and you grew up there and everybody called you Matt and you call yourself Matt, et cetera, et cetera. Yeah. And if you explain that to somebody, they're going to be like, why the hell did you need a philosopher to say that? That's stupidly obvious. We've tried, I guess, to motivate what he was reacting against, which is the idea that, well, if you think that names always just refer to the person, then what about names of things, for instance, that don't actually exist?

If we say Santa Claus did this and this and this, it seems like that you can't just point to, oh, that's Santa Claus, you know, in the same way you can point to Matt. So there has to be some other way of analyzing that sentence to. So that it doesn't come up meaningless or absurd or every sentence about or of indeterminate truth value. That he wants to say that Santa Claus is actually a description. Santa Claus is the guy that delivers presents, blah blah, blah, lives at the North Pole. And so the correct analysis of Santa came to my house last night is there is some being that brings present, you know, gives the whole description.

And that being came to my house last night or has a beard or whatever the thing you want to say about Santa Claus. And since you analyze it that way,

25:53 Wes: the correct is that there does not exist in X such that X did all that.

25:56 Mark: Exactly. So you can just say no, that's simply false. It's not meaningless because Santa Claus doesn't refer to anyone or something.

26:04 Wes: That's one of the other cases in which definite descriptions are meant to help us out. That's another counter example that he addresses near the end. Yeah, yeah.

26:11 Mark: Because you can't actually point for him. It's the Santa in the story.

26:14 Wes: Kripke thinks he's championing intuition in the sense that what we're doing when we do these counterfactuals, he uses this metaphor. It's not that we are looking at this other world through a telescope and we're not going to be able to make anything out if we don't have these necessary and sufficient conditions of identity. And it's not even intuitively the mind works that way. When we refer to things like, oh, I know this is a computer or something, I know this is the individual. Because of these criteria, what he's saying is that we actually stipulate identity. We don't need to discover it, we just stipulate it. When we're doing the thought experiment, it's part of the description of the possible world, that this is identical to this.

26:54 Seth: I'm glad you mentioned that passage. I think that's a real kind of crux passage here. It gets at this big debate between him and the philosopher David Lewis about what the nature of a possible world is. And you see here that Kripke is really taking the position that if I say there's a possible world in which I have a sister, so I don't actually have a sister. So if I say there is a possible world in which I have a sister, that's just shorthand for saying I might have had a sister. That's just another matter of speaking as it were. Whereas some other philosophers, most famously David Lewis, wanted to really take this talk of possible worlds literally and say that there are things that are possible worlds.

They're just like our world. The only difference is they're not actual. Blah, blah, blah, Blah. So Kripke is really trying to sort of push back against that and say that this idea of a possible world, it's basically just a matter of speaking. And these possible worlds that we talk about sometimes when we're doing logic are really just these sort of theoretical projections of the actual world. And that's connected to the identity thing. Because if the alternate world, so to speak, in which I had a sister is just an extrapolation from the actual world, it's like, well, we imaginatively just sort of project the actual world and change a little bit of it.

Then it's, I think, clearer how Matt in this world can be the same person as Matt in that other world. Because Matt in that other world, we just got to that other world by, like, futzing with this world in our minds.

28:03 Wes: I think another way to put that is when I do these counterfactuals, when I do these thought experiments and say, what if I'm already stipulating? So why can't I stipulate the identity of the thing that I'm talking about, right? Why do I have to get fancy in figuring out how those two things are going to be identical that doesn't have a sister in Matt? So, for instance, when I do a thought experiment where I say, what if Nixon hadn't won the United states election in 1968? Why do I have to rediscover Nixon, the individual, the referent, through some other definite description in the possible world?

Why can't I just stipulate that I'm talking about Nixon, the same individual in both possible worlds, except with the difference that Nixon didn't win the election in the possible world that I'm talking about? Again, I stipulate. This is the language Kripke used. I stipulate the identity of as part of my description of the possible world. I don't have to first stipulate the possible world and then to do all this work to retrieve the individual in it. It's a natural part of the counterfactual to stipulate identity.

29:01 Mark: And supposedly that works for not just the one property, but the extreme view that I just gave that if I say, well, suppose that Nixon had been killed at birth.

29:10 Wes: No, it doesn't work for that and

29:11 Mark: that somebody else did all these other things. So then, if you ask in this alternate world, which would be Nixon, would it have been the one who was killed at birth or would it have been the one who replaced Nixon and did all these things? Well, the way I set it up, I just said Nixon was killed at birth, so.

29:24 Seth: Yeah, right, exactly.

29:25 Wes: There is no Nixon in that world.

29:27 Seth: Yeah, exactly.

29:28 Mark: There's a Nixon like thing. There's something with the phenomenal properties of Nixon.

29:32 Wes: You could have someone who's exactly like Nixon in that world.

29:34 Mark: But.

29:34 Seth: Yeah, yeah, but I think it's really interesting how he brings out these two things are connected. Like whether you think of a possible world as a theoretical sort of tool that we, you know, we use for reasoning, or whether you think of it as literally like another world. That issue is tied into whether the same person can be in different worlds. And if you think that these possible worlds are literally other worlds, then you're kind of pushed to say that there is no such thing as the same person in multiple worlds. Because, look, they're totally different worlds.

How could they be the same person in different worlds? And then you have to come up with this elaborate theory about, well, okay, somebody who's a lot like me in another world. That's who I'm reasoning about. When I think about, what if I had a sister? It's not really me. What if Matt, strictly speaking, had a sister? It's like, what if Matt, somebody really similar to Matt, had a sister? And so on and so forth.

30:14 Dylan: Can I ask a question about that way of viewing possible worlds or actual possible worlds? Why isn't it just patently absurd? Because the multiplicity of possible worlds is outrageous.

30:29 Seth: Well, it was. It was very controversial. So a lot of people felt that way. Yeah.

30:32 Mark: Okay, so maybe we'll read some. Lewis. I think we're mostly not going to be able to answer this question, but I think one of the answers that I. That there's something troubling to logic about modality, about could, about might, about must. I think coming up with the notion of possible worlds is supposed to somehow. This is not the way Kripke uses it, but the way at least Lewis uses it is to reduce that. They all become just is statements, declarative statements that happen to be about some other world.

30:57 Dylan: Yeah. The reason to me that you would do that in this modal issue is that you sort of establish that much larger universe contains all the denominators. And so then you could even talk about how possible is it.

31:10 Mark: Yep. Count up the worlds.

31:11 Dylan: Yes. Yeah.

31:12 Wes: I'm reminded of this. Have you guys ever seen Rick and Morty? It's like a cartoon on. What's the network?

31:17 Mark: Adult Swim.

31:18 Wes: Adult Swim. Have you seen it, Mark? No, but they play around with these. With this question of there are a bunch of universes and every Possibility or combination of possibilities are articulated in one of them and they do a lot of clever stuff with it. I think we should reiterate that's not really what's going on here.

31:33 Dylan: Can I just ask a question? Because you guys, I've been kind of blown away by your. How fast you guys are going on this in the following sense. Is that. I guess maybe because I wasn't on the Russell and Frege episode.

31:46 Seth: Oh, yeah, that was a pre Dylan era, wasn't it?

31:47 Dylan: Yeah, yeah. So we've been talking about how Kripke is reacting against the definite description model of naming presented by Russell and Frege. And as Mark said, predominantly Russell, I

32:02 Mark: guess, just to clarify. So Frege came up with the idea that we have to distinguish reference from sense. Looking at stuff like the morning star and the evening star. So phosphorus and Hesperus is the same reference. They have different sense, but he kind of left sense like, well, what is sense? A psychological thing. It wasn't really clear. And so Russell is trying to make that much more specific that like it is a sentence. It is the star that we see, the body that we see in the sky in the morning. And that's not something that's like in anybody in particular's head or it seemed less problematic.

32:34 Wes: Another important thing here is that in Russell's picture there is an intimate relating between meaning and reference. Meaning helps us refer. Kripke is going to break that. He's going to say that no, meaning is not the mechanism by which we refer.

32:47 Mark: Well, it's a mechanism maybe by which we fix the reference in the first place.

32:52 Wes: We'll get into reference fixing, but we should talk about rigid designators first since that's the thesis of this book, that proper names, or as he calls them just he's going to call them names, are rigid designators in the sense that in every possible world they designate the same object. So go ahead, Dylan.

33:07 Dylan: Sorry. Okay, just to make it really clear what this definite descriptor model is, I.e. frege and Russell that Kripke is reacting against. Can we say something like what it is in five sentences that Russell and Frege are reacting against or what the problem that they're solving is. I heard you say, Mark, you know about the sense and meaning and stuff like that.

33:32 Wes: But, well, that was the whole Hesperus phosphorus identity thing. That's one of the problems. There's actually a few of them.

33:38 Mark: There's the problem of things that don't exist. How do you refer to something that doesn't exist?

33:42 Dylan: Okay.

33:42 Mark: That was one of them.

33:43 Dylan: So I think having these things in mind makes the conversation a lot clearer. Right. Why would you even care about trying to worry about this kind of stuff?

33:52 Mark: Yeah. So if you're doing logic, you want to be able to say that every sentence is either true or false or just malformed. That's not even a sentence at all. And it looked like if you were talking about an imaginary object, if you're talking about unicorns, then it's neither true nor false. If you say unicorns live in Australia,

34:13 Wes: instead of just being false, the unicorn fails to refer to anything and we have a meaningless sentence. Yes.

34:19 Mark: Yeah. And it seems weird that an obviously meaningful sentence should be meaningless according to this pre-Fregean picture.

34:26 Wes: And the same thing applies to negative existentials. So even if you wanted to say unicorns do not exist, you have a problem. The same sort of problem. So you're stuck. Even if you're trying to say something,

34:37 Mark: are you going to say, well, it's really my idea. Well, you don't have unicorns, but we have ideas of unicorns. But you don't want to say, what's my idea of a unicorn that doesn't exist? That's obviously what you're saying.

34:47 Wes: Yeah.

34:47 Seth: Whereas if you replace, well, the unicorn is maybe trickier, but we switch it to Santa Claus. Right. He also doesn't exist.

34:52 Mark: Well, just do unicorn. Unicorns, horses with the horns on the, on, you know, the single horn.

34:57 Dylan: It's not obvious how unicorns are harder than Santa Claus, but because it's a predicate. But a unicorn is a predicate.

35:04 Wes: It's not a proper, it's not a proper name.

35:06 Mark: It's not a proper name. That's true.

35:07 Wes: So yeah, do Santa Claus.

35:08 Unknown speaker: Yeah.

35:09 Seth: So I say there is no Santa Claus. And you might think that's a little bit self contradictory because I'm like, there is no this. What? What is there none of. Oh, this guy. I'm like. But now I'm like pointing at nothing or something that's maybe a little bit intuitively odd. But then if you take Santa Claus and you're like, alright, let's erase that and replace it with the dude who rides a sleigh and climbs chimneys and gives people presents, then there's no mysterious reference to this non existent thing that's not in our world. Because from a certain point of view you can say that all you're saying is give me anything in the actual world, any actual thing that's not going to be a chimney climbing sleigh rider. That Gives people presents. This desk in front of me is not a chimney climbing sleigh rider. Who gives people presents. Barack Obama.

35:47 Wes: So in other words, what seems like a name isn't actually a name. It includes predication within it. So the way Russell parses this out is that not the case, that there exists an X such that X is this unique individual thing and X is Santa Claus. Right. Or fits these properties.

36:06 Seth: Yeah, yeah.

36:06 Dylan: So the big goal here is a question of logic, of language and being able to talk. Precisely.

36:11 Mark: Yep.

36:12 Dylan: Okay.

36:13 Seth: What are the things that you're, you know, that you state, what are they about? And that question gets weird when you're talking about something that doesn't exist from a certain point of view.

36:21 Mark: And that's way back in Plato. Right? I mean, that's. He's. He asks that same question.

36:25 Seth: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Exactly.

36:25 Wes: Yeah, yeah. Or about talking about circumstances in which we don't know of some identity. So that Cicero and Tully were the

36:34 Dylan: same, for instance, or that Hesperus and Phosphorus are the same. Right. That's actually a discovery.

36:39 Seth: Yeah. How can we do justice to the fact that that's a discovery?

36:41 Wes: There's the other case of, you know, I believe that Hesperus, the typical example is that Cicero, but not Tully, was a Roman when Cicero is Tully. So I could believe in this case of indirect reference, I can believe things based on my lack of knowledge that they're actually identical. And this whole definite descriptions thing comes in handy here too, because I'm just believing that two different descriptions don't refer to the same object. I'm not believing that X doesn't actually equal X, which is absurd, which I couldn't rationally believe.

37:17 Mark: I do want to request that we try to choose examples throughout the rest of this podcast that will be meaningful to our audience instead of some of the ones that are in the book, like Cicero and Tully, which I've never heard about Tully, other than in this context.

37:30 Wes: Tully is what the English to give a definite description, what the English call Cicero. Is that a definition?

37:36 Seth: Has anybody heard of Hesperus and Phosphorus before? Frege, Like, I'm pretty sure he invented those names.

37:41 Wes: Yeah, he thought the Evening Star and the Morning Star already looked too descriptive. Right. So we want to get them to be as proper name ish as possible.

37:49 Seth: I mean, the thing I heard of is Venus. That's the one that I always heard of, but apparently has these other names too.

37:55 Wes: Well, there's a time when people didn't know that they were the same. But is there really a Time, actually, that's a good question.

38:00 Mark: Yeah.

38:00 Seth: I don't know. According to Frege, the Babylonians discovered it or something. I don't know.

38:03 Wes: Okay, so we know what motivates definite descriptions now and then I think we. Dylan, are we clear on what motivates Kripke's kind of rebellion against that?

38:13 Dylan: Just having been listening the whole time, I think this would be a good point to sum up that as well. So we just summed up what Russell and Frege were trying to do, being able to articulate what it is we mean when we say things.

38:28 Wes: So the summary of why Kripke doesn't like it is because this theory of reference seems to break down when we start talking about possibility and counterfactuals. And because I could say that what if Aristotle hadn't been the greatest philosopher, who's Plato's student or something like that? And I need to be able to make sense of that counterfactual. And if I think the definite description is somehow by definition is the meaning of Aristotle, it doesn't seem how I can talk about those possibilities in which Aristotle didn't do those things. And then the cluster theory tries to remedy that by saying, okay, we're not going to just talk about one definite description.

We'll just chunk together all these different ones that say either this or this or this or this. And then the meaning is some concatenation of those properties. You know, we can do a lot of different things there, or at least one of them or however you want to say it. And that seems to break down because then we could say nothing we think we know about Aristotle is true and yet still be referring to Aristotle despite the evaporation of all those definite descriptions

39:33 Dylan: is one way of characterizing Kripke's agenda, is that the definite descriptor or even the cluster description model is essentially too rigid and it doesn't allow for dealing with counterfactuals.

39:49 Wes: And it's not rigid enough, actually.

39:51 Seth: Yeah, it's the other way around.

39:52 Wes: So it's what, it's not rigid enough.

39:54 Seth: It's not rigid enough. So definite descriptions, we're a little bit half joking on that, but yeah, exactly. Definite descriptions change depending on what world you're in, as it were, what world you're looking at. Whereas the idea is a name keeps referring to the same thing, no matter which imaginary different possible world you're looking at. Whereas a different description is going to change with each world because in different worlds, different things are going to satisfy the description. And so thinking that Names are just the same thing as descriptions. Is going to get the meaning of names when you're doing this. What if type stuff wrong?

40:23 Mark: We have to give one of the qualifications though that he gives about this by saying the name doesn't change across possible worlds. That's not saying that in all possible worlds people would call this person Aristotle. It's the fact that I, right now, as I am referring to these people in these other possible worlds, my name Aristotle, as I use it as an English speaker in this, blah, blah, blah, is always going to refer to that person regardless of what he ended up doing.

40:49 Wes: Or he might have been given a different name in that world. Yeah.

40:53 Mark: You would then say in that world Aristotle was given a different name. He wouldn't say there was no Aristotle, there was somebody else.

40:59 Seth: Yeah. And it's really confusing at first because when he says a rigid designator refers to the same thing in all possible worlds, that just sounds like it's necessarily true that my name is Matt, which is obviously false. My parents could have named me whatever, you know. And then he clears this up a couple places in the lectures. I mean, one way I like to think of it is to say that Matt is a rigid designator. Is to say that whichever other alternate circumstance we're considering, we're still considering that about Matt, the same guy we're talking about. When we consider what's actually the case, Matt is constant.

41:27 Wes: We're still talking about the guy who is Matt in this world.

41:30 Seth: We're still. Exactly. We're still talking about the guy who is Matt in our world. Even if we're thinking about different, other things that could have happened, it's always things that could have happened with that same guy, Matt.

41:38 Dylan: So the problem that Kripke is reacting against is that Russell and Frege, the definite descriptors is not fixed enough. So it doesn't allow you to actually pin down and have clarity about what you're speaking of. It's not actually solving the problem that Russell and Frege were trying to solve. They were trying to solve the problem of being able to be precise about what you say and Kripke's saying. In fact, they've made it so you're utterly imprecise about what you say because you allow all of these counterfactual situations and you don't actually refer to anything. So you don't.

42:12 Wes: Well, you're not imprecise in the actual world. It gets shaky when you. Yeah. Start talking about these counterfactual.

42:17 Mark: So you could imagine Frege responding and Saying like, well, we shouldn't talk modally. We shouldn't talk about counterfactuals at all.

42:24 Seth: Yeah, and that's the Quine line, you know.

42:26 Dylan: But it seems to me that the reason why you want to talk about things that way is because you want to figure things out, is that you're acknowledging that you go through the world, and it's not that the world presents it to you as. This is why I was thinking Kripke was reacting to them because it was too rigid, because it seemed that everything that you would say would be a kind of mathematical statement, that one thing would lead to another in a very direct way. And the reason you would be concerned about modality is that you acknowledge that in the world you spend a lot of your time figuring things out and you're making judgments.

43:00 Wes: It seems like they have to be meaningful.

43:02 Dylan: I'm asking the question that, as I'm understanding this correctly, that Kripke is making an account for how we can be speaking and figuring things out and therefore allowing for this modal talk.

43:13 Wes: Yeah. Because we obviously do this. We engage in this kind of talk, and it's actually very important. You know, if you're planning and figuring out one possibility or another, or you're thinking about what you could have done differently, then the question is, are those statements meaningless? I don't know what is. Or they somehow undo. What would Quine say about modal statements? Does he think they're meaningless?

43:38 Mark: I think pretty obviously that they're epistemic. Kripke's insisting that, at least as far as our language is concerned, you know, ultimately he's kind of following in the steps of Wittgenstein in being a natural language philosopher. So he's trying to say, what is the way we talk about things? We talk about things as if they could have happened some other way. I could have gone to the store yesterday, or I could have stayed home. You know, is that an ultimate metaphysical fact or is that a fact about language? I guess he's maybe not so interested in making that distinction.

But in any case, there seems no reason to think, given the way we talk about things, that that would not have been possible, you know, even if you argued for some strong metaphysical determinism that actually, in fact, everything is caused. And so, yeah, there's physical necessity. So it could not have been the case that if I didn't, in fact, go to the store today, that I could have gone to the store yesterday because anything that didn't happen couldn't have actually happened. I Don't think that he would be worried by that.

44:31 Wes: We could have a possible world in which the laws of physics and everything else are different or different initial conditions, things like that. So physical possibility depends upon the actual scientific laws in this possible world, but it still allows for metaphysical deviations. It doesn't imply logical necessity.

44:49 Seth: You know, modal skepticism, I think that's accurately attributed to Quine. That's a very radical position. And there's a real question, since we're constantly in conversation with each other talking about what if blah, blah, blah had happened instead of what actually did happen. There's a lot to explain away if you want to really dig in your heels and be a modal skeptic.

45:05 Mark: But it's still unclear to me that it actually helps you find things out. I think I see why you're saying that, Dylan. Because of course, when you're making experimental predictions, then you're like, well, it could turn out this way and it could turn out this way. But that's not the same as saying there is some possible world in which it does turn out this way and there is a possible world in which it doesn't. Like that's actually something that Kripke specifically argues against. That kind of possibility that actually helps us discover things, I think really is just a matter of epistemic, a matter of our knowledge, a matter of saying, well, as far as we know, it could be this way or that way.

45:36 Wes: I don't see how that can be true. Because then you're denying that it could be possible. It can't just be that it only seems possible. It has to also be possible. I don't know, Matt. Can you explain that better?

45:47 Mark: I mean, can we make this more concrete in terms of a scientific experiment? And this is not the kind of thing he talks about. We're trying to figure out what the ultimate implications here are. For instance, what he does talk about is we're doing an experiment to find out if the atomic number of gold is going to be whatever.

46:01 Wes: This is a more complicated.

46:03 Mark: Okay, well, what's a simpler example?

46:04 Seth: How about, like, all bodies fall at the same speed?

46:07 Mark: Is that a scientific. I was trying to get what Dylan was getting at. And maybe you can explain Dylan, and why you think modality is supposed to help us find things out. Dylan, do you have a response to that, or.

46:18 Dylan: Well, I guess I just had in mind things at the end of the book that when you're trying to figure things out and sussing things out in experiment is a perfectly good way to talk about It. But you could talk about trying to figure out anything involves a lot of coulds. And if you want to get a little bit highfalutin, and using the examples that he uses, you would want to say, well, heat could be the motion of molecules, or heat could be a substance that permeates all materials, that adds and subtracts heat. You know, this is the phlogiston model. Right. And that it's measured in a certain amount of caloric that everything has. And if it has enough caloric, then it has more heat.

47:01 Wes: He's going to say the opposite, though, that it's not the case, that heat could have been that.

47:05 Dylan: No, I know, I know.

47:06 Wes: This is why I think the scientific examples actually lead us in the wrong direction.

47:10 Seth: But I mean, I think scientific laws are inescapably modal because they contain an implicit must. So which is the dual, you might say, of could.

47:18 Wes: Right, yeah, Right. Okay.

47:20 Mark: But couldn't science also discover some contingent truths? I mean, any observation is scientific. If we were trying to discover, did Nixon actually win the election? Well, you go and do research, you look it up in the same way a scientist of a certain sort would. So in that case, you as the scientist, as the researcher are discovering something that is a contingent truth. Whereas if you are discovering a natural law, I think, according to Kripke, then you're discovering a necessary truth. So that both of these are involved with science.

47:50 Wes: If you discover that heat is the motion of molecules, or however he puts it, you're discovering something necessary. If you're discovering that Nixon was elected in 1968, you're discovering something that is contingent. And my point about the problem with modal skepticism is you can't say. When I say it's possible that Nixon might have lost the election in 1968, I'm not saying something about what's in my head or something about my knowledge. I'm saying something about the world. And so I'm sure Quine has some very fancy, inventive ways of getting around that. I'm just saying it's not trivial to jump into this modal skeptic thing.

48:25 Seth: Yeah, and that's a big debate, I think, in the philosophy of science, are scientific laws describing the way things actually must be in the actual universe from a person independent point of view, or are they just describing what we're most confident about? Probably most people gravitate towards the former option, but there are definitely people who defend a more subjectivist option, especially if you're looking at the philosophy of probability. So in philosophy of Probability solitudes about our confidence option is a lot more popular.

48:51 Wes: Interesting.

48:51 Mark: Well, it seems just to. I don't want to leave the paradigm case of a contingent scientific discovery as Nixon won the election or something, but it seems even every individual experiment that you run, right, as we know, you don't directly prove a scientific law through an experiment. No, like every individual outcome is something that it could have gone either way because even if the underlying principle that you're trying to support or refute to falsify whatever is a necessary truth, you know, whatever it ends up being, it's going to be necessary according to this.

49:21 Wes: So yeah, that is the epistemic case.

49:24 Mark: But it could be that something went wrong in the experiment or you know, there could be a lot of things that affect the outcome of some particular experiment. And so that'll always be a matter of could have been either way.

49:33 Seth: Yeah. So I think another way to say that is the observation and experiment part of science where you go out and you gather data, the data gathering part that's not modal, that's not looking at other possible worlds, that's looking at the actual world. Then when you extrapolate from that inductively and try to figure out what law are these observations, what's really underlying that. That's the modal part, that's the part that goes into other possible worlds.

49:53 Wes: Another way to put this is we might have discovered that gold had an atomic number of ad. So that actually is the case. But that's epistemic in the sense that initially that's just a matter of our knowledge. So once we discover that it's 79, then it is necessarily 79 across all possible worlds. It's not like the fact of the matter is is not necessary, it's just the possibility part is actually has to do with our lack of knowledge. So.

50:17 Mark: And again, it doesn't matter if people in these other worlds didn't use a base 10 numbering system or something like that or had totally different ways of describing it, because it's us here describing those possible worlds.

50:26 Seth: Just to clarify, should we talk about his examples to motivate the difference between what we know and what actually is the case in the world? So the standard meter example, or maybe the computer proving a math theorem example.

50:39 Wes: Yes, let's get to this whole fixing thing.

50:41 Mark: Yeah, you should read some quotes.

50:43 Seth: Yeah, some quotes.

50:44 Wes: Yeah, we get to fixing on page 53.

50:47 Seth: It's interesting. I mean this is a really a big break from stuff that came before because it was assumed that anything, you know, a Priori, that is to say without observing the world, is something that's necessarily true. And anything that's contingent, that seems accidental, that could have been otherwise, is something you have to learn by observing the world that is a posteriori. So Kripke was really kind of pulling these two notions apart and arguing that they're totally independent. They went over pretty big at the time.

51:12 Wes: So fixing is a case of a priori, but contingent, Interestingly enough, yes.

51:18 Mark: Say more about that.

51:19 Seth: Yeah. So there's the standard meter in Paris, which is we figured out what length exactly was a meter by just sort of pointing at this concrete object and saying, let that be a meter.

51:27 Dylan: It's steel, right?

51:29 Seth: Yes. Oh, did I.

51:30 Mark: Concrete would have freeze thaw variations in length.

51:33 Wes: Oh, yeah, I think he meant concrete in the fill sub.

51:35 Seth: Yeah, right.

51:36 Dylan: I'm being an ass.

51:37 Seth: I'm sorry, I see, yes. No, concrete as in. Right, as in physically realist.

51:40 Wes: Yeah.

51:41 Unknown speaker: So,

51:44 Seth: right, so we pointed at this thing and we stipulated, all right, let a meter be whatever length this thing is. So it's true by definition that a meter is this length of this physical thing. So it's something you can know without observation, because that's just the definition of what a meter is. It's this length. Just by stipulation, we didn't have to go do an experiment to figure out that that was how long a meter was. So it's something that you can know a priori, but it's contingent because we could have chosen a different thing to stipulate that that length was going to be a meter. We could have chosen, I don't know, a Big Mac and decided what the width of this Big Mac will be a meter henceforth. So it's a priori, but it's not necessary. So it's something, you know a priori, but it's not necessarily true.

52:21 Wes: So Wittgenstein thought, for instance, that you couldn't predicate of that bar in France that it was a meter long. Yeah, because it was the standard of being the meter. And I think he thought that the fact of its being the standard somehow is a necessary truth. I don't know if it's for Wittgenstein or some imaginary opponent of Kripke, but of course that's really not the case. Right, because the bar could be heated in another world and expand. And that doesn't mean that suddenly, oh, the meter changes, meter gets rigidly designated, you fix it in this world. And even if that fixing thing varies in another possible world, that doesn't mean the concept that you've fixed changes. So the bar can expand if you apply heat to it in another world. But that doesn't mean that the meaning of 1 meter has changed.

53:09 Mark: So the meaning of it is. Even though we're saying that we're pointing it out by a concrete object, it is an abstraction. It is that length.

53:16 Seth: Yeah, yeah.

53:17 Wes: And it's not synonymous. So it's. It isn't a meaning in the traditional sense. The. The whole point of using this word fixing is to say that the length of that bar in Paris there is not synonymous with one meter. It's fixed by it in this world at this particular time. And then once it gets fixed, it's rigidly designated. And the standard can change, but the meaning doesn't.

53:38 Mark: Let's just consider its alternate case. So Matt is born. His parents name him Matt. And we say that is this baptism is the fixing of, you know, now that they've named Matt, that is Matt in all possible worlds, even ones where he was not named Matt, you know, as long as he exists in that world, maybe he wasn't born at all, but that will be Matt no matter how different he is. But he wants to say, still, that's not part of the definition of mat. The definition of mat. The meaning of mat is not according to this. If we carry the analogy for it, just like the meaning of meter is not this stick. The meaning of mat is not the person who was born to these parents and called this.

54:14 Wes: Right. That's the reference.

54:16 Mark: But the thing that you referred to a couple times is that being born to particular parents at a particular time, you know, of a particular sperm and egg, does seem to be both necessary and sufficient for being Matt.

54:28 Wes: Yeah. So now we're jumping ahead to essential properties. Are we ready to do that?

54:33 Seth: Yeah. It sounds like this is going to turn into potentially an objection then. Right. Because if those conditions are enough to fix the reference of Matt, maybe that's the definite description associated with Matt. Right. It seems like that's where you're going, Mark.

54:43 Wes: So it seemed like we could vary any property we wanted at first. Right. And still have a rigid designator anchor, all that. But it turns out there are going to be things which break our stipulation of identity. And one of these things is essential properties, which includes, by the way, origins of things and the kind of stuff it's made of. So we can't really have a counterfactual in which we say, what if Matt had been born to different parents? Because in that case, the stipulation of identity is in direct contradiction to something which obviously breaks identity.

55:17 Mark: But I stipulated, I just said it's Matt who was born to those other parents. Can't I just stipulate it?

55:22 Wes: No.

55:24 Seth: His game, his rules. One thing about these examples, I think is that he's not trying to argue that a person necessarily has the parents they have. He's just sort of like taking that for granted. Just so he has an easy example of a necessary feature. He's taking it for granted that you, the audience will think, oh yeah, that's a necessary feature of a person. But he doesn't give any argument for that. Likewise with water being H20, he's supposed to be sort of ready to hand examples that he can use to illustrate the points about necessity. But then of course we can have a big debate about, well, maybe I could have had different parents or maybe

55:53 Mark: not, or, you know, how many of your chromosomes could have changed and you still be Matt.

55:58 Seth: Yeah. Ship of Theseus with people. Exactly.

56:00 Mark: What if Matt was a girl?

56:02 Dylan: Yeah, but also, I mean, I think the H2O example ends up being pretty interesting. Right. You say that water is H2O. That's not necessarily going to give you all the features that you mean by water.

56:14 Seth: No, but it will, according to him, be true in all possible worlds. It couldn't have been false that water was H2O. But there's certainly more stuff we can learn about water.

56:22 Mark: So the difference, I think you're pointing out between essential properties here and an actual full blown essence of something. You know, in the old. If you're Aristotle and you're talking about essences, well, this is supposed to explain. If you talk about water and you don't explain why it's wet. Exactly, you haven't given the essence, you're not. You need some teleology in there. And so these are supposed to be things that are essential properties. They would be part of the essence if there is an essence. But he's not actually committing himself to saying that everything has a full blown essence.

56:49 Dylan: Yeah. The problem there is the conjunctive saying that water is H2O. It's an equality and an identity that seems to fail if you think about it a little bit. But if you say that an essential property of water is that it is

57:02 Seth: made up of H2O, it's the same thing as H2O. Here's some water, here's some H2O. They're the same. I think that's the thing that's necessarily true.

57:10 Dylan: Well, how does that jive with what Mark just said is the distinction between essential properties and essence.

57:15 Mark: An essence would have to be a definition, right? Essence would have to give you necessary and sufficient. Well, I want to say necessary and sufficient conditions for anything because if they're identical, then yes, being H2O is necessary and sufficient for being water. So that's not what a definition is.

57:28 Dylan: The way you just described it, it sounded like that I could easily have an essence that would require a number of essential properties and I could be talking about something having the number of essential properties that are required of something or object or entity and that even if I enumerated them, I might not have a complete necessary and sufficient description of the essence of the thing because I wouldn't have enumerated all the essential properties.

57:52 Seth: Yeah, I mean, it's an interesting question. What's the difference between essence in Aristotle and essence in Kripke? So Mark and perhaps several others suggested that Aristotle's essences are definitions. I think I like that. It's sort of like a definition tells you kind of everything you really need to know about the thing in question, about what it is, what it is to be that thing. It's kind of like the last word. Whereas an essential property on Kripke's view,

58:12 Wes: they're not semantic definitions, they're real definitions. We should say that they're not dictionary definitions. They are the, you know, what is this thing?

58:19 Seth: And yeah, yeah, they're right. It's more like scientific laws. It's like the deep facts about the thing in the world or something like that.

58:24 Mark: And it does seem that that's what science is supposed to explore. It's just that discovering that it's H2O is sort of only the first step.

58:29 Seth: Right.

58:30 Mark: And you'd have to like, well, why does water flow and feel liquidy to us? Well, because of the interactions molecules and you can say differences between liquids and solids and all that kind of stuff.

58:39 Seth: Yeah. So pointing out an essential property of something on Kripke's picture I think is a lot more modest than it's more like here's a thing that has to be true of the thing because of the kind of thing it is. It's not the last word on that thing. And there are other such facts about it that we could uncover. But nonetheless, this is something that could not fail to be the case of this thing because of its nature. That's an essential property.

58:56 Dylan: We can leave this aside, but just admitting that there would be multiple essential properties seems to make statements of equivalence. Like water is H2O not make any Sense. That's a blithe shorthand for something that is not, strictly speaking, the case, unless you want to make a stronger argument that they are identical. But what we were just talking about are all the reasons why you would not say that they were identical, that they were essential, and that is a different characteristic. And so it's a kind of accident of our language that we use that shorthand. An imprecision of the way we speak when we say that water is H2O or light is electromagnetic radiation or stuff like that.

59:36 Wes: What's an accident of language when we

59:38 Dylan: say water is H2O? Based upon what we were discussing just a second ago about the notion of essential properties. And we said, well, H2O is an essential property of water, but it is not the essence of water. And that implies that entities can have multiple characteristics that are essential properties. And that when I identify one of them and I say that, that the entity is that essential property, that. That is a imprecise shorthand. That's all I meant by it.

1:00:06 Wes: But Kripke is really asserting that identity, right?

1:00:10 Mark: Yeah. I think the identity, though, is not between the terms water and the term.

1:00:14 Wes: Being H2O is an essential property. Okay? But H2O is water. So H2O is identical to water. Being H2O is an Essential property of water.

1:00:24 Dylan: But that means that H2O is water, but water is not H2O or is not simply H2O or whatever.

1:00:31 Seth: Well, H2O is also H2O also has the property.

1:00:35 Dylan: So I'm completely confused about it now, because they're identical.

1:00:38 Wes: I think this properties thing might be confusing us.

1:00:41 Mark: What I think might clear this up is that it's not the terms H2O and water that are identical. It is the thing that they refer to, remember? Which we could get at a lot of different things. So maybe one of the ways that I could refer to it is just what was in my glass this morning. That is a way of referring to it happened to be water. Now, that's a contingent way. It's just that if it was that proper name, if it rigidly referred to it, which what I happen to have in my glass this morning is not. But if it rigidly refers to it. So water rigidly refers to that stuff. H2O rigidly refers to that stuff. If they are equal, then they are necessarily equal, then it's a scientific law that they are equal. So it's not the terms that are equal, it's the thing that is equal to itself.

1:01:21 Wes: Right. And we should say here that there's only a subset of these general terms which turn out to be rigid in this way. For the most part, it's only proper names that are rigid, and then it's natural kinds and these mass terms like water and gold and things like that that turn out to be rigid in the same way that proper names are rigid.

1:01:39 Seth: And it's also worth mentioning, I think too, that there are essential properties that you can have besides being identical to yourself. So other example that he gives a lot is a table was composed of molecules. So being composed of molecules, that's just a property. That's not an identity statement. You know, the table has the property of being composed of molecules, and that's something that it necessarily has.

1:01:55 Dylan: But why isn't that an essential property? In the same way that is.

1:01:58 Seth: Okay, yeah, but it's not an identity statement. It's not saying this thing is equal to that thing. It's predicating a property of.

1:02:04 Mark: So were we wrong by saying that being equal to water is an essential property of H2? I mean, I don't think Kripke makes that distinction.

1:02:11 Wes: No, he doesn't make the distinction until we get to the mind brain identity thing.

1:02:14 Seth: No, I was just thinking the other way around. So there are essential properties of something that can hold up something besides it being identical to itself.

1:02:20 Wes: Right.

1:02:21 Mark: That assumes being identical is a property. Okay, I guess we don't need to

1:02:24 Wes: talk about properties for this. We just need to talk about the identity of water in H2O.

1:02:29 Mark: Well, but he does, actually, now that I'm thinking of it, he does stress that, hey, some people deny that there are reflexive properties, that being identical to yourself actually is a property. And he says it obviously is. Yeah, like that's the most basic property.

1:02:41 Wes: There's the whole mind brain thing where. Yeah, you can do some work with that. Yeah, but in this whole natural. The way he initially introduces it, he doesn't try to confuse us that way in the way we've tried to confuse ourselves.

1:02:52 Seth: If you look at the table example, that's another straightforward case where something can have multiple essential properties. It can be an essential property of the table that it's made of molecules. It can also be an essential property of the table that it, like, occupies space or something. It wouldn't be what it was anymore if suddenly it ceased to occupy space. That's impossible.

1:03:07 Wes: So let's say what his argument is for this idea that natural kinds and these mass terms are necessarily identical to some underlying things. So, for instance, the tiger example, it's

1:03:18 Mark: on page 119 is where it starts.

1:03:20 Wes: All right, go ahead, beat some of it.

1:03:23 Mark: Okay, I say the word tiger has meaning in English. If I am then asked, what is a tiger? I might reply, a tiger is a large, carnivorous, quadrupedal feline, tawny yellow in color, with blackish transverse stripes and white belly, which is something derived from the dictionary. Now suppose someone says, you have just said what the word tiger means in English and Ziff asks. Some other author asks me, is that so? And he says, correctly, I think not. His example, suppose in a jungle clearing, one says, look, a three legged tiger. Must one be confused? The phrase a three legged tiger is not a contradictio in adjecto. In other words, it's not a contradiction in terms. But if a tiger in English meant, among other things, either quadruped or quadrupedal, the phrase a three legged tiger could only be a contradiction in terms.

1:04:06 Wes: So this is where the idea of fixing comes to our rescue. Because it turns out these sorts of things seem to be meanings or not meanings. They're just ways we fix the referent, which is in this case a kind. It's not a particular individual, but it's the way we fix the referent in this world. And then even if lots of those qualities change, we're still referring to tigers. So even if they turn out not to have three legs and to look a lot different, is that right?

1:04:32 Seth: There are kind of two things I think happening simultaneously here which is potentially confusing. So there's one point which is tiger is a rigidly designated term, just like the name Wes, which means that any property that I think of tigers as having, I can imagine tigers not having. And in those other circumstances in which the tigers lack those properties, I'm thinking about the same thing that I'm talking about in this world. I'm thinking about tigers in this world, except what if they were different? What if they lack this in that property?

So it's a rigid designator. That's one sort of set of issues that's floating around here. But then it's complicated by the fact that he also wants to say that tigers can have certain essential properties, which is to say that there are some properties that they have in all possible worlds. So then things get really sort of funky when, well, can I imagine tigers lacking a property that they have in all possible worlds? And then there he says, this is just sort of loose talk, what you're doing. You're not really imagining tigers lacking a property that tigers have in all possible worlds.

You're imagining something that looks to you a lot like tigers. Look, having this other property because tiger, tigers, actual tigers, couldn't like that property in other possible worlds because they have it in every possible world.

1:05:33 Wes: Yeah. So it's the same thing as, you know, me saying, what if Matt had had different parents? You're no longer talking about Matt.

1:05:39 Seth: Yeah, yeah. You're talking about somebody who seems like Matt, but it's not really Matt.

1:05:42 Wes: Right. And for him, the essence for tiger, it'll be related to some internal structure or to. It's unclear what these necessary properties will turn out to be. And we don't even have to know them. We just know that this is a kind of thing and that's the thing we stipulate. And we don't have to know the details of what makes it a kind. It may turn out not to be a natural kind. But if it is a natural kind, then once we've rigidly designated it, we're referring to that same thing. It is that thing in all possible worlds. Even if all of those properties that we've used to fix the referent, the kind, the number of legs, for instance, or it's having stripes, all those things could go away, could turn out not to be the case because of an illusion, you know, maybe they were an illusion or whatever. And it still would be a tiger because it got. The referent got fixed. So.

1:06:26 Unknown speaker: Yep.

1:06:27 Mark: It's interesting that he's resistant to the idea that I find very attractive that you have an unscientific definition of something and then you learn more about it and it kind of gets replaced. Bottom of the tiger thing. He's talking about just things you could discover about tigers. Maybe you discover in a different part of the world there are things that look like tigers but are actually reptiles or I think true. The concept of tiger before the internal structure of tigers has been investigated. In other words, that it's a rigid designator. Even though we don't know the internal structure of tigers, let us suppose that we are right.

The tigers form a certain species or natural kind. We can then imagine that there should be a creature which, though having all the external appear of tigers, differs from them internally enough that we should say that is not the same kind of thing. We can imagine it without knowing anything about what this internal structure is. We can say in advance that we use the term tiger to designate a species and that anything not of this species, even though it looks like a tiger, is not in fact a tiger.

1:07:16 Seth: Yeah. So he's borrowing a lot from these other Papers by Putnam. It ain't necessarily so. And then Putnam wrote some further follow ups in response to these lectures in the mid-70s. But it's this picture of scientific inquiry where we start off by just like pointing at some stuff we observe in nature. And then we sort of defer to future generations of scientific experts this specialized knowledge about what they are. But we assume that there is some such specialized knowledge that future people will uncover. And for now, we just sort of point at them.

1:07:41 Mark: Now is that just because we have the notion of species. And so for animals it kind of makes sense that we can pick out natural kinds, whereas maybe for natural phenomena it's not so clear.

1:07:52 Seth: Yeah, I think it's something like that. I think it's like, even if we're scientifically not that advanced, we still notice that when a tiger mates with a tiger, other tigers come out. But when a tiger mates with a baboon, nothing comes out. I don't know, you know, whatever. We have some notion that there are different kinds of animals and there's got to be some explanation for that. And we leave it for future generations to discover what the explanation is.

1:08:11 Wes: Yeah, or there may not be. Those natural kinds may not actually exist, by the way. But if there are natural kinds, then it rigidly designates.

1:08:19 Seth: Yeah, so we might be wrong.

1:08:20 Dylan: But things other than natural kinds have rigid designators. Right, Like Wes has a rigid designator.

1:08:26 Wes: Yeah, yeah. So it's proper names and natural kinds. And then he's going to get to natural phenomena, which is. Is a really interesting case as well.

1:08:33 Dylan: What about like artifacts or any other things and entities in the world? Like, you know, he had a long discussion about tables and ice tables versus wood tables and stuff like that.

1:08:41 Wes: So that's the example of substance. So if in this world, you know, a table is composed of mahogany, it turns out not to be the case that this table could have been composed of cedar. That's a counterfactual that actually breaks the rigid designation. So it's no longer this table in the alternate world. It's something else that looks like this table. So the idea there is that just its substance or what it's made of, its particular material is part of its essence, is an essential property. I think that term is just convenient. So I'm going to keep using it.

1:09:11 Dylan: And part of what makes it a

1:09:12 Wes: rigid designator, in other words, we can vary any property we like and have that rigid designator thing work, have it remain rigid, but as soon as we vary an essential property, we break it. We are talking about a different individual.

1:09:26 Mark: And that's a place where I think my intuitions don't match with Kripke's. I'm not completely on the other side either. I just don't think our intuitions tell us anything either way on this. In other words, the question is, if I'm imagining I've got this table that's in front of me right now, I'm considering it. I'm considering, well, what if in an alternate universe this table was actually made of ice? Or let's not say ice, which is his example, but let's say it's just a slightly different kind of wood or it came from a different tree. That's another one of the examples that he gave.

He says, in that other alternate world, I'm not imagining this table being made of something else. I'm imagining another table that resembles this in every respect, but that is another table because it's made of other stuff. Whereas I think why I would be concerned with this table in front of me is the function it serves, the appearance it has. Everything that actually makes it a table makes it my table in my house. And so if I'm imagining another situation in which there's another thing that's serving that exact same purpose, let's say it looks exactly the same, it's the same color, the fact that it came from a different tree, why say that I'm imagining a different table?

Like, he's just committed to that.

1:10:28 Wes: He thinks that the constituents of things are somehow more tied up in it

1:10:33 Dylan: than it's not going to be this table if you change its substance.

1:10:36 Wes: So he thinks it's a more difficult case. When you talk about constituents, I think he gives the example of England or Germany. What if there had been different people? I can't remember any, but. So just the general description I've given there is that he doesn't have any problem with varying most properties, but he gets very cautious about the variation of the constituents. He thinks it's a harder case.

1:10:56 Seth: Note with those examples, there are kind of two ways to disagree with them. So one way you could disagree with the table example is you could disagree that it's an essential feature of a table, what molecules it's made of. But then still Grant Kripke's main point, which is that when you say things like, what if this table, you know, xyz, where XYZ lacks one of its essential properties, you're not talking about this table anymore. You could grant him that point and still think, oh, no, I believe the laws of tables are such that changing the molecules doesn't change the thing.

But the other way to object to the example is to say, I agree with you that it's an essential feature of a table, which molecules it's made of. And yet I want to resist this conclusion you're drawing about logic, reasoning, and language, which is that when you say, what if the table. And then something where it lacks one of its essential features, we're not really talking about this table anymore. I'm talking about something different. I want to resist that. So I'm actually not sure which of those two criticisms Mark was pushing. It sounded like maybe the latter, which is actually the more adventurous.

I think that's really sticking it to Kripke. If you push that objection.

1:11:51 Mark: Yeah, I mean, he's just. He's committed in advance.

1:11:53 Seth: He's committed.

1:11:53 Mark: Well, I guess. Right. As we were saying that he uses these essential properties as examples that he thinks are going to jibe with our intuitions. And he doesn't really argue for any of that.

1:12:02 Seth: Right.

1:12:03 Mark: Do the thought experiment yourself. And if you really think that you can imagine a mat in another world that was born of different parents or a mat that is a girl because he had different chromosomes or something, some different genes.

1:12:15 Seth: Yeah.

1:12:15 Mark: Then more power to you. I. I think those are things that clearly are meant to break our intuitions. I don't think we have clear intuitions about them at all, and there's no reason we should.

1:12:24 Seth: Yeah. Do you think there are other examples of essential properties that we have clear intuitions about? Or is essential properties just something where our intuitions generally break down?

1:12:30 Mark: Okay, so this is just speculation, but, yeah, it seems like that why we would consider something an essential property or not, you know, you got to think that it has something to do with our psychological makeup, with the history of ideas, with the society that we're in in particular. So maybe in some places, see, if this works, is there a possible world. Is there a possible country even in this world in which they might not have the same intuitions that we do about, oh, if you had a different parent, you're a different person. Like, for instance, if you strongly feel that. And I think Kripke actually brings this up, that what's important about the person is the soul, so you could have different parents, and as long as the same soul gets in there, then it's the same person. Well, if you've got that picture, your intuitions are not going to tell you the same thing about the biology.

1:13:11 Seth: Yeah, yeah. So if you really want to hold to a distinction between a soul in the body. I think that's a way to resist the idea that you essentially have the parents. Yeah. So, but what about like, what about essentially being an animal? So, you know, let's say I have a pet rat. Can I speculate? Ah, what if my pet rat were in fact a plant? Like that seems a little weird, doesn't it?

1:13:26 Mark: Or what if my pet rat were a robot that I could, well, that means I wouldn't have to feed it anymore. I could run it all day and I could turn it off when I was irritated by it. And what you're really asking in that situation. Yeah. You're really not asking if this pet rat where, where had those situations. You're asking what if I had a pet rat that was very much like this pet rat and had all the good qualities I like about this pet rat but didn't have any of the downsides?

1:13:50 Seth: Yeah.

1:13:50 Mark: So I think the way I just described it actually Kripke would be.

1:13:53 Seth: Yeah, no, that's. You were just making his argument.

1:13:54 Mark: Yeah, you just have to admit that you're not actually talking about your pet rat anymore. But so this, I mean we've talked about before about, you know, in our sci fi context. So if your mind was uploaded into a computer according to every sci fi book, so your mind that is in the computer now and has now been living there, this is in David Brin's existence that we discussed. So your, your mind is in the computer, thinks of it as you, it thinks that it's you, but it gets to live for, you know, however many thousands of years or whatever until the computer breaks down and you could even just migrate to a new computer. It has all these, it has personal identity, it has, whatever the criteria, the Lockean, it has your memories.

1:14:29 Dylan: Right.

1:14:29 Mark: But yet we obviously want to say, well, the original you actually died. This is a copy of you.

1:14:35 Wes: But this is actually a good case in favor of Kripke. Right? Because we could simply clone your brain as many times as we like. And it doesn't mean all those different individuals are now the same person, Mark, although they may all be, you know, Mark. Mark 1 Mark 2 But you understand what I'm saying, you would have a bunch of different individuals, even though qualitatively all those individuals are exactly the same. So just their numerical distinctness is enough. And that's part of the intuition that, that Kripke is getting at, I think,

1:15:03 Mark: and it's interesting though that he doesn't think that breaks down again when you're considering possible worlds that he still thinks that you might think that the me in this world is numerically distinct from the me in any other possible situation. It's not the same me. But that's slipping back into the David Lewis wrong view of possible worlds. According to that, you're stipulating that it's you, right?

1:15:23 Seth: Yeah, right.

1:15:23 Wes: But the point is the stipulation is just a. There's something analogous between that stipulation and just the what I say talked about as being. Obviously the case of personal identity is we're talking about something that's only analogous here. It's not the same sort of identity as across possible worlds. But the reason why it was interesting was because it also goes against this idea that what determines an identity, something's identity in the possible world is its description. Because when I clone you Mark, then I have a bunch of things and then the arguments get ornate because then there's the spatiotemporal location and so on and so forth and you can can count those in the description. But you get the general idea. I could have a bunch of different qualitatively identical to Mark, but their mere numerical distinctness makes them different.

1:16:05 Mark: Right. Well, and that's what is supposed to direct you. So if we're approaching the sci fi problem, am I the same person after I've teleported or after I've been uploaded to the machine or whatever having multiple copies of you having. Well, I teleported but my old body stayed there. So actually there are two of me. That's supposed to clarify your intuitions and say oh, oh, actually those are different. If you don't have the clone issue, then I think our intuitions really are indeterminate. If I were to tell you, you know, I'm going to upload you to a computer, you're going to remember everything you remember.

It's just you're going to have a lot of advantages you don't now have. Well, you'll be in a computer, so maybe that's a disadvantage. So it'll be very different for you, but you'll still feel like you. And you might buy that, especially if you're about to die anyway and somebody says I'm going to offer you immortality, it's not clear that you just say, well, that won't be me.

1:16:49 Wes: Fuck that. What if someone puts you into seven different computers? Which one is you?

1:16:53 Mark: Yes, I acknowledge that. That breaks it down.

1:16:55 Wes: That's such a thorny topic, which we should eventually do someday.

1:16:59 Mark: Personal identity. Doesn't it seem Relevant here for this?

1:17:02 Unknown speaker: Yeah.

1:17:03 Wes: Did we not milk all of its relevance yet?

1:17:07 Dylan: Well, I'm wondering if you avoid those thorny issues by just asking. It's the same person that walks behind a wall and you see them go on one side of the wall and they exit out the other side of the wall. Is it the same person or am I the same person spatio temporally as I was yesterday or when I walk across the room, any of those things? I mean, do they become any genuinely more complicated by talking about multiple uploadings of ourselves into multiple computers?

1:17:32 Wes: I think identity over time is just as thorny and it's also relevant actually to the question of personal identity.

1:17:39 Mark: He wants to bypass all that, I think, in this discussion. He thinks it's not relevant somehow we're

1:17:45 Wes: not thinking about the same thing. We are just this kind of identity is different. This trans world identity is a whole different can of worms.

1:17:51 Mark: Can we have a possible world in which time runs slower? So in this possible world, at the time corresponding to today, it's actually yesterday. So is it me? Is there any way to set up this kind of example without violating Kripke's rule stipulating how you stipulate possible worlds? It sounds like I'm doing another Lewis thing. I'm trying to describe another situation. I'm asking, is this actually me or not? In the way that Dylan was just bringing up.

1:18:17 Seth: And we're assuming, for the sake of argument, we have some way of comparing times between two worlds.

1:18:21 Dylan: You're trying to come up with a possible world scenario to evaluate what the essential properties are.

1:18:26 Wes: Or another way to put this is whether certain temporal properties are essential to you.

1:18:30 Mark: That I be here.

1:18:31 Wes: That I being here now, man, probably not.

1:18:34 Mark: When pressed, it seems like he wants to say, okay, just assume like for the meter. He says this specifically, the meter stick. Fine. The meter stick itself might change over time. So let's just define the meter as the meter at time P. So really, if we're going to say, well, what if compare me to what might have happened in other possible worlds, it's me at time P he seems to be trying to avoid in the same way, right? Yeah.

1:18:58 Wes: If Nixon didn't win the election, then obviously any counterfactual is going to produce a lot of differences at any given time. But is that maybe that's not what you're talking about?

1:19:05 Mark: Actually now I think that the thing I was positing isn't going to work because when you say, you know, well, what if Nixon hadn't won the election? You're obviously consider sort of Nixon in his whole life. You're not saying, compare Nixon as of, you know, the moment before his death.

1:19:17 Wes: Right.

1:19:18 Mark: And then think about what if that guy in, you know, another possible world hadn't gone into politics in the first place? Well then clearly you're not concerned exactly with the moment of his death anymore, either in the possible world you're looking at or in the source. In the actual world, you're considering Nixon as a person who has to then be rigidly picked out across his life. You're assuming that there is an identity. Just because this is what we do

1:19:40 Wes: in language already, assuming trans temporal identity. We need that or else we can't do this.

1:19:45 Seth: Like, what if Martin Luther King hadn't been killed? He would have made great changes. What if Jimi Hendrix had lived through the end of the 70s, he would have done some awesome disco. We, you know, we say stuff like that a lot. Right. That particular case we say all the time, you know, especially blown my mind.

1:19:59 Dylan: How did this identity discussion in Kripke deal with the notion of something staying the same but evolving in time? Maybe it's as simple as something getting older, just a biological thing. But it would also be true of any kind of change what counts as something. That means that it's not identical to what it was before. And there would be complicated things like saying, well, I'm not the same person that I was five years ago before I underwent this, this trauma, or I am a different person now that I've served time in prison. Or maybe less complicated things like you have some kind of artifact that this hammer that my grandfather had that I replaced the handle on five times, is it the same hammer?

1:20:42 Wes: He avoids all of those questions. So he assumes we sort of take for granted that there is transtemporal identity. And yes, it's a mystery of how that happens, but it's not one that he's going to address. So he's going to assume for the sake of argument that we can have the same individual existing across time within this actual world.

1:21:00 Dylan: So it's really, it's a different dimension of the problem of identity that he's focusing on.

1:21:05 Wes: Yeah, but I think one relies on the other. Actually, we have to stipulate transtemporal identity before we talk about trans world identity. Okay, go ahead, Matt.

1:21:12 Seth: Well, I think you actually, I mean, it all depends on what exactly a world is and whatnot. And there will be all different views on that, but I think there's a very close connection. So if you think of the future turning into the present as the coalescing of a possibility into actuality, then you could see the persistence over time is just a special case of this more general issue of trans world identity. I mean, in part it depends on how you think of time, but I think there are actually pretty closely connected.

1:21:34 Mark: Yeah. Kripke's view of possible worlds, I think, is not going to be like that. A possible world has nothing in common with actual changes of, you know, this world at time t and at time T1. That that's going to be a fundamentally different relation than what if, than anything with a modality.

1:21:51 Seth: Well, when we talk about the future, though, I think there's at least a case to be made that we're talking about possibilities and what if they happen, you know? Yeah, what, you know, what if it rains tomorrow? Well, we're talking about a possible world in which it rains tomorrow. And we're asking is that possible world the actual world? And you know, it's not raining right now, but it's the possibility of its raining going to be one that comes to pass.

1:22:09 Mark: I don't know, it just sounds like that's epistemic. He seems to want to rule that out as relevant across the board. The important distinction that he's trying to make in here is that you might have thought that what is possible is a factor of what is unknown. You know, if we don't know it yet, then it's still possible. But that he wants to say that the epistemic and the metaphysical are just totally different realms. And the fact that we don't know what's going to happen later today doesn't mean that there are actually, in a metaphysical real way, two different possibilities or many different possibilities. I think he's just not committing either way. Maybe that rigid metaphysical determination is in fact true. And so the actual world, there really is only one future. It's already mapped out, but we could still talk about possibilities.

1:22:51 Seth: This issue bears out. So in philosophy of language and tense logic, there are sort of two theories of the future. One theory of the future is there's basically just a timeline. There's a line from the past up to the present, and then it just extends forward. And this goes along with a deterministic world picture. That is to say, the events of the future are exhaustively determined by what happened in the past. There's no randomness. But then there's another model of branching times, which is basically every moment from the present, it branches out in possible futures.

And then every point and every one of those futures branches out into infinitely many more futures and you get this ridiculous fractal looking tree of opening splitting futures extending past the present. But there's always this debate that you just mentioned of are laws about what's going to happen in the future? Are those just laws about what we're confident about or are they laws about what in fact is going to happen in the future? So that's always a. And Kripke's definitely not weighing in on that question.

1:23:42 Mark: So we've established quite a few things that Kripke's not weighing in on.

1:23:45 Wes: Yeah, we have been off the beaten path for a while. I mean I think there's like three things we should talk about before the end of this. I mean one is his actual, his causal theory of reference.

1:23:54 Seth: Yeah, we should definitely talk about the baptism stuff.

1:23:56 Wes: Yeah, we should talk about mind brain identity. But before to set that up we'll have to talk about the natural phenomena stuff, you know, heat feeling versus heat and stuff like that.

1:24:05 Dylan: But I think that's a good way to wrap up.

1:24:07 Mark: All right, so what's the first? His actual positive view which he says I'm not even going to give details on it, I'm just, I'm sketching it out and it sounds more plausible than these things I've argue against. He's admitting that this whole book, at least the first two lectures are a critique of the Frege Russell view and he's only going to hint at his own view which I guess he developed later or other folks developed later.

1:24:27 Wes: It's become pretty much, I think it's the most popular either it or a modification or hybrid sorts of theories. There are some hybrid theories which mix him up with definite descriptions. But it is a popular theory of reference now and it's been developed in different directions by a lot of different people. But Matt.

1:24:43 Seth: Yeah, here he says I'm not going to give a theory because theories are all wrong, which is delightful by definition. If it's a theory, it's wrong. You know, he's kind of joking but. So he calls it a causal picture of reference rather than a causal theory of reference. And then other people who are various times students of his, like Michael Devitt have tried to make this what we get in this book, which is a picture, whatever exactly that means into a theory which presumably means it's worked out in more detail and it's trying to count for all possible counterexamples and that

1:25:08 Wes: kind of of thing.

1:25:08 Mark: It's on 96.

1:25:11 Seth: Yeah, yeah.

1:25:12 Wes: So that's where, yeah, he gives his nice summary of it.

1:25:14 Seth: And the question that this is trying to answer is the one that I think Wes opened by asking, and which I didn't really address. I instead started talking about the meaning of a name. But this question, what fact of the matter determines that the name Mark refers to that dude over there?

1:25:28 Wes: And if it's not definite descriptions, he needs some sort of replacement picture.

1:25:33 Seth: Yeah. So if the answer to that question isn't whatever is uniquely identified by this description, then you got to have some other answer to what fact of the matter determines that this name refers to this person.

1:25:42 Wes: So in this case, he talks about. Again, the fixing idea here. So when he talks about this, there's an initial baptism, which is someone's encounter with the referent. The thing in the world, the baptism could take the form of ostension. Just pointing at it. It might be some sort of description. Could even be like, if I meet Mark, the description might be the guy who I'm meeting right now, and then the name is Mark, but then after that. So then the reference is passed on from person to person in a sort of linguistic community. And it's not necessary that later users of the reference Mark know much about him at all.

Everything they know about him can in fact be wrong. And that's where the, you know, you get the contradiction with the definite description theory. So they don't need this unique way of picking Mark out. Everything they know could be wrong. It's just. It's just that there's this chain, this linkage between speakers that goes all the way back to this initial baptism, and

1:26:33 Mark: that each link in the chain at least intends to use it correctly.

1:26:36 Wes: Or intends to use it. Yeah, in the way the previous speaker used.

1:26:39 Seth: Yeah, they intend to borrow it from the previous person the previous time they heard the name used. They tend to kind of piggyback on that.

1:26:45 Wes: So if they name their dogmark, then that's not. Obviously, the dog doesn't somehow become the referent. It's just that they're now they're using it in a different way.

1:26:53 Seth: All right, the pet aardvark example.

1:26:55 Wes: Yeah.

1:26:56 Mark: So that's another thing that sounds really obvious once you spell it out.

1:26:59 Seth: But.

1:26:59 Mark: But he does get into different possible exceptions of that. Like that Santa Claus probably was connected with some actual person, some saint, but the way that the referent flowed didn't obey that, you know, that every speaker intended to use it correctly the way the previous one did. As legends grow about it, then people start talking about the guy in the story rather than the initial saint. So people talking about Santa Claus now are not just referring to this original saint that died a long time ago and are just saying false things about him.

They're saying true things about a literary figure who's grown up itself so that you could have, you know, it kind of. It changed its reference at some point. And he gives Madagascar as another example that the only reason, you know, apparently the natives of this is in the preface that when he's giving other examples that he wrote after he gave these initial lectures that the natives of the. That area of Africa called Madagascar, actually some part of the mainland, but it was Marco Polo that screwed up and thought it was referred to the island.

And so everybody followed him on that, and eventually everybody, even people locally call the island Madagascar. So that is a case in which it's not that everybody is, you know, if the historical chain actually goes back to referring to the mainland, that everybody right now, when they say Madagascar are in fact referring to the mainland and they're just saying false things about it. No, no, they're actually referring to the island. They know what they're referring to. So these are just fringe cases where something goes wrong in the chain of reference.

Or he gives another one about. I know my neighbor, George Smith, but I bring up him as an example in a philosophy lecture, and I just kind of whimsically refer to, you know, I really just kind of picked the name of a hat. I'm really not. And so my students learn all this stuff about George Smith. Are they learning stuff about my neighbor? Well, no, they're really learning about this literary figure that I've created for the purposes of a philosophical example and maybe are having correct views, beliefs about him. They're not having erroneous beliefs about.

About my neighbor. They're not thinking about my neighbor at all, even though I use the same name.

1:28:57 Seth: Yeah. And these are exactly all the kinds of problem cases that if Kripke were giving a causal theory of reference, perhaps he would have to have something to say about. But since he's just sketching out a picture as he says, he leaves, you know, he leaves it to later people to worry about those cases.

1:29:11 Dylan: Can I ask a question about how this would be different for Russell and Frege? Because the way in which it's talked about it, just as Mark mentioned, it just seems sort of obvious. Like, what kind of tortured way were you speaking about this problem before?

1:29:25 Wes: Yeah, this is the feeling I had reading this book. Yeah.

1:29:28 Dylan: Such that now you're going, duh. Why would we be so stupid before. And what I don't know is what we were being stupid about. Like what was the way in which you would analyze this problem that would have before? Or is it that these cases Kripke needs to address because they simply were danglers in the previous theory, they just weren't addressed or. I don't know, I mean, I'm just asking to be filled in on it.

1:29:53 Mark: Okay, those three exceptions that I gave were not, as Matt just says, things that he doesn't feel he needs to address by spelling them out. He is addressing them. He's saying in this case something went wrong. He's trying to be more precise, actually, not just leave something out, more precise about the chain of causality, that there's something. You're right, he's not completely filling in. There's more to say if he wants to sort of put each of these exceptions into a general class and say exactly what's going wrong in the chain of causation. But at this point he's just saying, you know, there's a chain of causation that has to work in a certain way. And you'll get the idea if I give you these examples of where it goes wrong.

1:30:28 Dylan: But is this something, a new feature that he's developing within this causal theory of reference? Is that just not part of previous theories or.

1:30:39 Mark: I think for a descriptivist you have to have something. It's not just the fact that you picked up this usage from someone else. It's that your understanding, an idea that you have in your head when you use the term is the meaning of the term is the description of the term and that is the thing that fixes the referent. And that's what he's arguing against.

1:30:58 Wes: But we have to remember that those definite descriptions were motivated. Right? We gave all those cases in which they were very helpful and they established a certain relationship between meaning and reference. I'm not sure how well a causal theory deals with all of that, and it certainly raises new puzzles that even Kripke doesn't mention here. That'll have to be addressed. But I had the same reaction as Dylan, which is that to me it's intuitively much more satisfying and it makes the definite description approach seem almost absurdly scholastic. Right.

1:31:30 Seth: But notice how one of the main problems that motivated the Russell theory was this problem of negative existentials. And Russell's theory, I mean, at least does a passable job of addressing that. Notice how that comes right back once you adopt the causal theory of reference. Because how would you Baptize somebody who doesn't exist. How would you baptize Santa Claus? Santa Claus. So he is creating some additional work for himself, which he does actually, in a different book which only recently came out, which is a transcription of his Locke lectures. But that whole book is about fictional names. He's going to have to really figure out some fancy footwork, because it's not at all clear from what we read what he would say about names that don't refer, like Santa Claus.

1:32:08 Mark: I thought he brought up that and he brought up Sherlock Holmes. And they both sounded satisfying to me by saying the person in the story, like that's the baptism, is that I wrote a story about this guy, Sherlock Holmes, and then from then on, everybody that refers to it is just referring to this character I set up. That seems not problematic at all.

1:32:25 Seth: That's maybe a good first step of Sherlock Holmes, though. What about Santa Claus, though? I'm not sure you can. It's a character.

1:32:29 Dylan: Yeah.

1:32:30 Seth: Then the character doesn't exist. You're saying. When you say Santa Claus doesn't exist. I don't think that's what you're saying. This character isn't an actual person.

1:32:37 Mark: It's a fictional story. Just. I was gonna say, just like, God, let's not go there.

1:32:42 Dylan: Like Don Quixote or Frankenstein or 20,000 leagues under the Sea. Right.

1:32:48 Mark: But I guess the difference is that it's not one story that it's referring to. It's not like Sherlock Holmes that was invented by a particular author at a particular time, that it's a legend that's evolved over time. And. Okay, so let's say Zeus, I think we can safely agree, is fictional. Where did that come from? Where was the initial baptism? People looked at lightning in the sky and they said, there's Zeus doing things like, you know, somebody at some point came up with that idea. And so there was something like an initial baptism in the creation of the legend, and then we can understand how legends grow and all that. Anyway, it is interesting, and it does seem like it would be interesting to read his further book. Yes. But I'm satisfied with what he gave.

1:33:25 Seth: But Santa Claus doesn't exist. Can't be saying that the legend of Santa Claus doesn't exist.

1:33:30 Dylan: That's not what it's saying at all.

1:33:32 Seth: Yeah, exactly.

1:33:33 Mark: That character, as depicted in the legend, does not actually exist in the real world.

1:33:37 Seth: Okay.

1:33:38 Dylan: Yeah.

1:33:39 Mark: But if I say, hey, I wrote a whole bunch of books on this character, Dark Shadow, then you discover actually, I'm lying. I never wrote any books. On that at all. There is no such character as Dark Shadow. Then in that case it would be correct to say that even the legend does not exist.

1:33:57 Seth: Yeah, and that seems like that's different from what people normally are saying when they say Santa Claus doesn't exist. They're saying the person doesn't rather than there was never a legend.

1:34:03 Mark: Yes.

1:34:04 Seth: So this is a potential problem, I think, for, I mean this is a bunch of extra work that Russell didn't have to do that Kripke now has to do to like sort through those cases.

1:34:13 Mark: Is there a corresponding problem with general terms with unicorns?

1:34:17 Seth: No, because there's no reference to otherworldly entities in the Russell reanalysis of Santa Claus doesn't exist. It's only about the actual world. It's not about anything.

1:34:25 Mark: I mean, for Kripke you say he has to do some work to deal with Santa Claus. Does he also have to deal with unicorn?

1:34:29 Seth: Ordinarily no, except that there's a lot of open endedness about what exactly is the relation between a natural kind term and a proper name. Kripke says that natural kind terms are rigid designators as well. But there's a lot of questions he leaves unanswered about what it is for a predicate to rigidly designate because presumably. So let's say Matt denotes the same person in all possible worlds. That's what it means for Matt to rigidly designate. But the predicate unicorn, that's going to have a different extension, different possible worlds. There are going to be different things that are unicorns in different possible worlds.

1:34:59 Mark: Is that right? No, because he says, actually I think he talks specifically about unicorns, that he says that there are no unicorns because there are no unicorns in this world. There are no unicorns in any world. If there was another possible world in which something like a unicorn existed, it would actually not be a unicorn.

1:35:16 Seth: That's true. So that's an additional. Okay, so what I just said applies to tigers.

1:35:19 Mark: It rigidly designates the null set. That's what.

1:35:22 Dylan: Yep.

1:35:22 Wes: But Matt, you were thinking of a non fictional thing, right?

1:35:25 Seth: So I said yeah, like tigers for example. Right. There's the additional layer with unicorns that he thinks that they're necessarily non existent. Right. So then take tiger or something. It's not super clear what it would be for a predicate to refer to the same thing in all possible worlds because even Kripke would agree that which things are tigers is going to vary. There's going to be different tiger population in different possible worlds. So Once you have a predicate that refers to, who knows what predicates refer to. But let's say the things that are tigers, the different things are gonna be tigers in different worlds. So there's a lot of like kind of unanswered questions about what exactly. How strong is this parallel between names and these?

1:35:58 Wes: I think in the case of tigers, what's fixed is not the extension though.

1:36:01 Mark: Yeah.

1:36:01 Wes: It can't be the intention.

1:36:03 Seth: Yeah, right, exactly, yeah.

1:36:04 Wes: It's the concept or the kind or whatever you want to call it. The kind itself.

1:36:07 Seth: Something.

1:36:08 Mark: Yeah, yeah.

1:36:09 Wes: But in the case of Red, I'm not sure what you do with those non natural kinds of, type of predicates.

1:36:16 Mark: But the same questions that we're just trying to consider and shove into Kripke about personal identity over time, you know, evolutionary identity of the species over time, it seems like that would make it worse. You know, if different things had happened and different populations had, then obviously the species of tiger might not have evolved in that way. And so if there was something very close to a species of tiger such that in the actual world, if we found something like this, we might call it a new type of tiger, then in that possible world would it be

1:36:47 Seth: a T. So you have to fancy up your notion of denoting basically, or designating, because the normal notion of what predicates designate is a set of things that fall under the predicate. So you have to mess with that a little bit perhaps in a way that Wes suggested talking about the intention, whatever exactly that is, or the kinds, or whatever kinds are.

1:37:03 Mark: I think we have to say that for the audience. So extension is just what we've been talking about as the referent. Except that an individual term has a referent, whereas a general term would have as its referent multiple things. And so we say that is the extension of the term. Whereas the intention is supposed to be a way of picking it out by a definite description or something, or a Fregean sense, one of these kind of things. So I'm not sure why, how Kripke could even use intentions given that he's been against, you know, using descriptions.

1:37:34 Seth: Yeah, you're right on that. Notion of intention. It wouldn't work. It'd have to be. Oh boy, we're going to get really jargony here for a second. Hyperintention.

1:37:39 Wes: Oh really?

1:37:41 Mark: All right, what is a hyper intention?

1:37:43 Wes: So we have to bail out of the hot air balloon at this point.

1:37:48 Seth: So that's supposed to be something even more fine grained than intention. So you can Actually get an example of this in proper names. So if you think that a proper name has a really specific sense, even more fine grained than a description, so it makes even more distinctions than a description does. So the problem that motivates hyperintentions is sometimes referred to as the problem of logical omniscience.

1:38:08 Mark: What authors is this associated with?

1:38:10 Seth: Robert Stalnaker and David Lewis and I believe it comes up in some of Kripke's stuff as well. Basically anybody who does possible world semantics, this comes up for. So if you want to understand a proposition as all the worlds in which it's true, which is a thing that a lot of people want to do. So the claim that the cat is on the mat is just the set of all possible worlds in which the cat is on the mat. That gets weird when you look at necessary statements because the statement two plus two equals four will just be the set of all possible worlds because it's necessarily true.

But then you get this thing where all arithmetical statements look synonymous. If the meaning of an arithmetical statement is just a set of worlds and every true arithmetical statement is the set of all the worlds, then it seems like they all mean the same thing and that we're not making distinctions between different meanings. So some people have tried to argue that Frege's original notion of sense is actually something even finer than what became an intention. And I think you were actually sort of going there just now a little bit in your remark that intentions aren't going to do the trick.

1:39:05 Mark: All right, but now we move on to the second of the three things that Wes wanted us to wrap up with, which is talking more about scientific identities in order to set up this mind body thing that we're going to conclude with.

1:39:17 Wes: Yeah, so in the same way that water is identical to H2O, we're going to say that heat is identical to the motion of molecules. And this is interesting because we kind of use heat in this equivocal way where we talk about the subjective sensation of the phenomena. But that's just for Kripke is the way that we fix the thing we're designating in the same way that being clear and in the ocean. Right. Or any other property that we might use to fix the reference for water. We use this feeling of heat to fix the phenomenon of heat. But it's not the case that that that feeling itself is a necessary part of it because there could be creatures in other possible worlds. We might not even have had the nerve endings to sense heat. But that wouldn't mean that there's no such thing as heat.

1:40:02 Mark: So we're ruled out as existing in other possible worlds with different parents, but we are not ruled out as potentially being creatures that don't feel heat.

1:40:10 Wes: Right, right.

1:40:11 Dylan: I thought we were ruled out as creatures that don't feel heat. But that doesn't mean that heat doesn't exist.

1:40:17 Wes: Right.

1:40:17 Mark: Or there could be creatures, just not in the other possible world.

1:40:21 Wes: So there's also. He talks about this interesting case of light. We can't think of light simply as our perceptions of light or sound, those particular perceptions. And he even talks about this hypothetical case in which we might see via sounds. Dylan and I are actually talking about this at some point. It's not even hypothetical, because some blind people naturally start using clicking sounds as sonar, and then you can look at their brain and the brain activity they're having. They'll insist that they're seeing this way, by the way, that it's not just something that helps them get around, but they actually see things.

1:40:53 Seth: It was an episode of invisibilia, wasn't it? About that?

1:40:55 Wes: Yes, yes, exactly. And if you look at their brain activity, they actually are seeing. And you could do the same thing with a tongue, by the way, or you could use the skin actually to see. So you put something on the skin and it translates light into certain taps or stimuli, and eventually your brain will start to read that data as visual data.

1:41:15 Mark: So Daredevil is actually a scientific treatise.

1:41:19 Seth: Scientifically valid, that comic.

1:41:21 Wes: What's Daredevil?

1:41:22 Mark: Daredevil is a marvel who sees with sonar and becomes a. Is a gymnast ninja.

1:41:30 Dylan: Though, strangely in the TV version of it, he doesn't do the sensible thing whenever he fights people of just turning out all the light lights. He's constantly fighting, constantly fighting in the. In the daylight and in the street lights and stuff like that. And if he had a brain in his head, he'd turn out all the lights and leverage his advantage.

1:41:49 Mark: It's probably just like you think, just because I'm blind, I'm going to turn out all.

1:41:54 Seth: So sick of that party trick, guys. Come on. Yeah, that's right. It's ableist. Yeah, people are ableist.

1:42:03 Dylan: Okay, so are we going to get to the third one?

1:42:05 Mark: But I guess just think of Kripke's intuitions here. Contrast them with Bishop Berkeley's intuitions who thought that, of course, heat, the essential property of heat, is the thing that we feel. And in fact, there's nothing else to it than that. It doesn't even make sense to talk about anything beyond that.

1:42:23 Seth: Yeah. Kripke is totally parting company with classical empiricists with this heat example.

1:42:26 Mark: Yeah. Saying that how we feel is the reference fixing. We're fixing the reference and it's a

1:42:32 Wes: priori contingent, whereas the motion of molecules, part of it is a posteriori necessary. So they're both kind of against the tradition.

1:42:41 Mark: Well, this seems a clear case to me of one where our definition of heat maybe changed or enlarged as we did some science that we all thought that it was just the thing that we feel and then we discovered more.

1:42:53 Wes: And so you're talking about the definition changing, but the question is whether the referent changes.

1:42:58 Mark: I thought he had opinions about both, but maybe since it's not a central point, I should not. No, I'm pick on him.

1:43:03 Wes: I'm just saying for him the meaning and the reference are two different.

1:43:05 Seth: Yeah, it's tricky. So for. Yeah, he's a little open about it and some of his followers think that they're the same, but they're not. There's lots of different schools of thought on that.

1:43:13 Mark: Supposedly we were always, even when we had no scientific knowledge, we were always referring to the motion of molecules.

1:43:20 Wes: What we're referring to is we're saying whatever thing this is that causes me to have. Have these feelings. And it. It's not like we know it's the motion of molecules. We could have discovered it was something else. But if it does turn out when we discover what it is that it's the motion of molecules, then necessarily it is so across all possible worlds. Yeah.

1:43:39 Seth: Yeah. So we fix the reference via our feeling, but we're just fixing the reference. It's not part of the definitional features of.

1:43:45 Mark: You know, in the same way that there could be a qualitatively identical table in another world, but according to Kripke's intuitions, if it was made of different stuff, it's actually not the same table as the table in our world. If in some possible world there were creatures that had a sensation that's exactly like our sensation of heat and it was triggered by something else, by photons, then that is a situation in which they're not actually feeling heat. They're having a sensation, but heat is not the thing causing it.

1:44:14 Wes: They're having a heat feeling, but the heat feeling is not caused by heat.

1:44:18 Mark: And that's not counterintuitive at all.

1:44:20 Wes: So this is important because this is where you can distinguish the subjective feeling from the thing that's. That's causing it.

1:44:27 Seth: Exactly. Yeah. It's like if you were hypothesizing, what if Matt were a plant or something. You're not really talking about Matt. You're talking about something that's somehow Matt. Like, even though it's a plant, you can't be talking about Matt because it's an essential feature of Matt, that he's an animal or, you know. But it's the same argument now applied to this heat case.

1:44:45 Mark: All right, so the thing you've been building Ford. Pain. What is pain like heat? Make the same argument. Say the pain is identical with a brain state. Maybe we don't even know what brain state it is. But there is a particular brain state. Whatever one we discover is associated with it. When we do our neural scans. Let's say we do find something then now we know that. Let's just call it brain state. Pull that. That always happens whenever pain happens, and it only happens when pain happens. So can't we say, just like water is H2O, that that brain state is in fact pain, Just like we say that heat is, well, the thing that causes.

1:45:24 Wes: So it's worth saying here that we could be talking about token, token identity here, where a particular individual brain state in the world is identical to a particular subjective feeling of pain. But I think it's easier for us actually just to do the type type example because it's more analogous to the heat and movement of molecules. So where we would say pain is the stimulation of C fibers in the same way that heat is the motion of molecules. Some philosophers want to use this to explain the mind body problem where this brain state is just identical to pain. And it seems like the contingency in the case of the heat example might help us because we said that that while it's necessarily the case that heat is the motion of molecules, it's not necessarily the case that heat corresponds to a heat feeling, this phenomenal feeling of having heat.

1:46:15 Dylan: Whereas that's different for pain and C fibers.

1:46:18 Wes: Yeah, yeah.

1:46:18 Dylan: It's necessarily the case in that theory that pain is C fiber stimulation.

1:46:25 Mark: But the difference is supposed to be that some other creature in another possible world could have the phenomenal experience of heat without there actually being heat in that world. Or like, that's not what's stimulating him. But yet if you are having pain, then there's no correspondence. I mean, the analogy would have to be the thing that's causing the pain, not the brain state.

1:46:45 Wes: The thing that's pain just is the feeling of pain. Whereas it's not the case with heat. The thing that's heat is not just the feeling of heat. So we can't. We're not going to be able to get away from it. In the same way, if the thing pain just is the feeling of pain. We can't attribute identity between pain and the brain state because it'll end up being necessary in all possible worlds, when in fact we can imagine a case in which there's a brain state without the pain or pain without the brain state. So the reason why the whole heat motion of molecules came in is to save the identity theorist from it being a necessary identity.

Because if it's a necessary identity between c fibers and pain, then it screws up our intuition that the two aren't necessarily related. Now we know there's a physical necessity between them. Right. We know that in this world, in the actual world, if there's a certain brain state, there's pain, or if there's pain, there must be a brain state, given our laws of the universe. But we can imagine a.

1:47:45 Mark: Well, you don't want to say physical. You don't want to say necessity. Right. Because that implies something modal.

1:47:49 Wes: No, it's physical necessity as distinguished from this modal necessity, which I'm not. Which I'm not sure the relation. I want to call it metaphysical necessity because I think logical necessity might be something different. But yeah, I think that's a good

1:48:02 Seth: term for what he's after.

1:48:04 Wes: Yeah. So even though it's physically necessary, given the laws of this universe, it's the case that in some other universe there are different law in the same way that the inverse square law for the gravitational relationship might have differed. It might have been inverse cube. In fact, Newton goes into that. It's conceivably the case that there were other laws of the universe such that a given brain state that in this world causes pain doesn't cause pain in that other world, and vice versa. So there can't be metaphysical necessity to this identity. So then that's where the brain identity theorist must have some sort of contingent property that intervene. And they usually think of the causal function of the brain state as being that contingent property. And Kripke is saying no, because when we say pain, we just mean the subjective feeling. That might not be entirely clear, but

1:48:54 Seth: yeah, it's a tricky one, this part. It's a tricky one. I mean, it's especially tricky to see why there's the dis analogy, because the way he sets it up, it sounds like there should be an analogy. It sounds like there should be. Molecular motion is to stimulation of c fibers as feeling of heat is to feeling of ow, it seems like those should line up. And yet he wants to say the feeling of of ow doesn't play the same role, you know, vis a vis stimulation of c fibers as the feeling of heat plays vis a vis the movement of molecules.

1:49:24 Wes: Well, in the heat case, there's three terms exactly. Observer. There's the feeling of heat, and then there's the heat. In the brain case, yeah, there's observer, there's feeling of pain, and then there's pain. But the feeling of pain is collapsed with the thing that is painful.

1:49:40 Mark: So let me just read the quote of him. So he's just talked about the heat case. Now, can something be said analogously to explain away the feeling that the identity of pain and the stimulation of c fibers, if it is a scientific discovery, could have turned out otherwise? I do not see that such an analogy is possible. In the case of the apparent possibility that molecular motion might have existed in the absence of heat, what seemed really possible is that molecular motion should have existed without being felt as heat. That is, it might have been have existed without producing the sensation s than sensation of heat in the appropriate sentient beings.

Is it analogously possible that a stimulation of c fibers should have existed without being felt as pain? If this is possible, then the stimulation of c fibers can itself exist without pain, since for it to exist without being felt as pain is for it to exist without there being any pain. Such a situation would be flat out in contradiction with the supposed necessary identity of pain and the corresponding physical state. And the analog holds for any physical state which might be identified with a corresponding mental state.

1:50:38 Wes: So for the identity theorist, they want to say that the thing that makes the brain state identical with pain is a contingent property, which is to say it's causal function, causal function that leads it to being pain. So that it's contingent. That can explain the fact that even though a certain kind of brain state is identical with pain, it might have been the case that it wasn't in another possible world. The reason would be is because the brain state didn't have that contingent causal property of causing pain in that other causal world. That's what he's saying is absurd, because in that case you'd be saying in that other possible world, hey, this brain state is identical to pain, but it's not pain because it doesn't have the phenomenal feel of pain.

Right. You're just equivocating on those two things. It can't be identical to pain and yet not Cause the feeling of pain? Something like that. I know, it's still confusing.

1:51:38 Unknown speaker: Yeah.

1:51:38 Mark: Was there enough here to see whether you find it convincing or not?

1:51:42 Dylan: Well, I found this distinction completely convincing that the equation between C fibers and pain is distinct from the feeling of heat and the motion of molecules for exactly the reason that Wes pointed out that it's a three term relation versus a two term relation.

1:52:01 Mark: Does that constitute an argument against identity theses?

1:52:05 Dylan: Well, I didn't know that that's exactly what he was arguing because I thought he was qualifying the status of certain identity theses.

1:52:12 Wes: He's saying that you can't assert an identity between C fibers doing their thing

1:52:17 Mark: and pain because you can imagine situations in which one occurs in which the other does not. But I don't.

1:52:24 Dylan: Oh, I'm totally confused then because I thought it was exactly the. He was arguing exactly the opposite. I thought he was arguing that because of the C fibers act being activated is equal to pain.

1:52:36 Wes: No, he's saying it's not equal to pain.

1:52:38 Seth: Yeah, it's like he thinks they're not identical. And then what he's arguing is that you can't use his clever Kripke stuff from these lectures to argue against the intuition that they can come apart. Stimulation of C fibers and pain can come apart the way you can. He thinks, uses clever Kripke stuff to argue against the intuition that the feeling of heat and molecular motion can come apart.

1:53:04 Mark: Yeah, so you might have said. Well, it could have turned out that we discovered that heat was something else. And I'll prove it. I'll show you a possible world in which we have the feeling of heat and yet something else is causing it. It's not the motion of molecules. And Kripke. Well, no, you have not shown in that case that heat turned out to be something else. You've shown that a certain sensation turned out to have a different cause. But heat does not refer to the sensation. Heat already referred to the cause. And so the rigid designator, heat, though it is not, you know, rigidly tied to it causes that thing. It's a contingent matter that it causes that thing in us, but it is rigidly tied to being the motion molecule molecules.

1:53:45 Wes: Okay?

1:53:46 Mark: And whereas you can't make that same move about mind and body.

1:53:49 Wes: Let me try again with this. The identity theory says that the C fiber stimulation is identical with pain and that identity can't be necessary identity. And here's why. Because we can do a thought experiment where we say, oh, what if there was a brain state without the feeling of pain or that there was a feeling of pain without the brain state. Now, if you think we've prejudiced ourselves with that intuition, we haven't. Because even though we know that there's a physically necessary relationship between them, we can conceive of worlds in which the laws of chemistry and physics differ, such that the brain state, the C fiber brain state, doesn't produce pain. So it's certainly a metaphysical possibility, even if it's not a physical possibility or

1:54:29 Mark: that there's pain without that brain state.

1:54:31 Wes: So then the identity theorist needs to show how it's a contingent identity. And to do that they come up with the idea that there's this contingent causal property that the brain has in this world that it doesn't have in the cases where it doesn't produce the feeling of pain and that that causal property is the operator. The problem with that is then you get this weird situation where you're saying that the C fibers activity is identical to pain, but it's somehow not the phenomenal feeling of pain.

1:55:05 Mark: Yeah, exactly. So could you have pain without it being the phenomenal feeling of pain? No, that's the definition of pain. It is a phenomenal feeling. That's not the definition of heat. Heat is not a phenomenal feeling. Heat and the feeling of heat are different. Pain and the feeling of pain are not different.

1:55:19 Dylan: So it sounds to me like what I was missing was the way in which Kripke, in the analysis of the pain in C fibers was showing that there are actually three terms in the phenomenal experience of pain and that the C fiber equivalence theory really only has two terms so they don't map to one another.

1:55:40 Wes: So in other words, in the case of the water, where we say, what if it was a case that water was not H2O, then we get a thing where it's really. It's not that water is not H2O because we know that's necessarily true. It's that there's a water lookalike that's

1:55:54 Dylan: not H2O because of the sense experience of H2O.

1:55:57 Wes: Yes.

1:55:57 Dylan: Yeah.

1:55:57 Wes: So in the same case, heat is necessarily molecular motion in all possible worlds, but it's not the case that the heat feeling is necessarily equal to molecular emotion in all possible worlds. So when you get to the pain example, if you say that pain is identical to C fibers and then you say because it's contingent, it's not the case in all possible words that the pain feeling equals the C fiber stimulation, well, you can't distinguish that from a pain look alike, there's no distinction. In the same way that there's a water lookalike to be distinguished from water, there's no pain look alike to be distinguished from pain. Any pain look alike would just be pain.

1:56:30 Seth: Yeah, exactly. There's no such thing as a pain seeming as opposed to, you know, pain seeming versus actual pain. But there is such a thing as seeming heat as opposed to actual heat.

1:56:40 Wes: Right.

1:56:41 Mark: So I don't know if I have any strong opinions. I'm not particularly convinced that this is any kind of real argument against identity theory. Our intuitions about these things are not so clear as he would make us believe that. I think, again, I know I said this earlier, was that if we discovered, you know, in some other possible world. To bring up the example from the intro, cats are demons, he wants to say our intuitions tell us it's not that cats are demons in this other possible world, it's that there are no cats. There are demons that look like cats.

There are demons that are fool's cats. Like fool's gold, they're fool's cats. So if you think that that is just a really clear intuition, then what you're saying is that what things are in the world is not really have anything to do with what functional role they serve in our lives, how they appear to us. We don't create concepts by dividing up our sensations. What we really do is point out actual things, actual kinds that are in the world, and those. Then they're metaphysical truths about those things. So it's a very realist, Aristotelian kind of picture.

And I just think our intuitions are not so clear so that it makes just as much sense again to talk about. Well, it's not that it would be a different table in the world, that the table was made of a slightly different kind of wood. It's just that what my table is, is the functional role it serves. How it connects to all the other objects in the room and my experiences of it. And so in the same thing, to say that heat, you know, the feeling of heat could actually be caused by something else in another world seems just bizarre and crazy to me. That just like pain, if in the other world these creatures have the feeling of heat, then they are actually feeling heat, even if that thing is actually not the motion of molecules.

It's just that in that other world, heat actually does happen to be something different. I think our intuitions come apart. They're equally strong cases you could make for this phenomenal picture and the realist picture that he's making. And I just don't. I don't see the justification for him preferring one over the other and thereby using it as an argument against identity theory.

1:58:45 Wes: Well, I thought it was stronger than that. And I think this is actually kind of a technical foray and a way to defend identity theory. So the intuitive idea is that you can have a brain state without thoughts or in certain possible hypotheticals, we could be zombies. Right? The whole Chalmers thing, we could just, you know, we could have all the same brain states, states, but have no thoughts correspond to them, which I've explained. And that certainly is a possibility.

1:59:09 Mark: Why would the identity thesis admit that that's a real possibility? That's just an apparent possibility according to the identity thesis.

1:59:17 Wes: No. Why is that that's a real possibility?

1:59:20 Mark: Well, just like it's an apparent possibility. Well, maybe water could have been something else. Well, if we discover that pains are in fact these brain states in our world, then.

1:59:31 Wes: But I'm not saying pain could have been something else, though.

1:59:34 Mark: You're saying that there could have been a brain state without pain or without whatever the mental feature is. That is the same as saying. Well, it's, it's not the same as saying that the mental state could have been instantiated in a different physical way. But those claims rise and fall together. You're saying they're separable. That's what the person who argues for zombies.

1:59:52 Wes: I'm not sure what you're. What you're saying exactly. Are you trying to say that. That if the brain states didn't have pains associated with them, then they wouldn't be brain states? Is that your.

2:00:02 Mark: They wouldn't be that particular kind of brain state?

2:00:04 Unknown speaker: Yes.

2:00:05 Mark: If you admit that in this world the pain. Well, see, I guess that's what the identity person arguing against identity theory is not gonna admit. That the brain states, even in this world, as a matter of physical necessity, are always associated with the pains?

2:00:19 Wes: Well, they could admit that. That's fine. You can admit they're always associated in this world.

2:00:23 Mark: They're associated, but they are not equivalent to. Because if they were, because these are seem to be rigid designators, then according to. Then it would work. Then it would be the case in all possible worlds.

2:00:33 Seth: Anyway.

2:00:34 Mark: I don't think we're going to settle the zombie argument. I think we need to have another episode on this.

2:00:37 Wes: But you see the general line there? Yeah. They would rigidly designate it would be the same in all possible worlds. And you could never do that zombie thought experiment. So then there's a trick to get around that where you come up with this contingent causal property. And then he thinks he shows why that doesn't work. So I think it's quite strong in the sense that he's not really. He's doing something a little new. He's using his technical apparatus to argue for something people have argued for in other ways. The general gist of it at least

2:01:01 Seth: one thing on Mark's earlier point about. So it sounds like Mark has strong intuitions that for many artifactual kinds, their essence has a lot to do with the use we put them to or something like that, or the role they

2:01:11 Mark: play in society or even natural kinds. Water, the thing that flows in rivers and streams. If there really was another world where there was a different thing that flowed in rivers and a different chemical thing, but yet it had all the same properties, it nourished us in the same way, why wouldn't we want to just call that water? It's functional water, functionally equivalent.

2:01:28 Seth: And this is the subject of Putnams.

2:01:30 Mark: Right.

2:01:30 Seth: So the twin Earth. Yeah, this is where the twin earth thing comes from. Yeah.

2:01:33 Mark: So.

2:01:33 Seth: And then maybe we even want to extend that to natural kinds as well. Maybe even gold atoms derive their essence from the use to which humans put gold atoms or something like that, or the role gold atoms play in society. And I'm actually pretty sympathetic to that account of what an essence is. But I think interestingly, you can bring a lot of that in and make it compatible with Kripke's argument. What you can't do is you can't make it necessarily compatible with all the specific examples he chooses of this is a necessary property of that. But the general argument about like if such and such is a necessary property of this thing, then when we reason in these what if scenarios about what if the thing didn't have the property, then that whole story you can hold on to.

Basically what ends up happening is you just change the examples of what's an essential property of what to fit your picture of what essences are for whatever that's worth. So if you wanted to try to synthesize your view with Kripkes, I think it's doable, which seems to take a

2:02:25 Mark: lot of the juice out of. So that's really saying that Wood Kripke's big advance here is just the way of stating the problem. His way of talking about possible worlds in a way that does not have the counterintuitive things that come up when you're talking in the way David Lewis talks about them, the way of talking about Metaphysical necessity without positing these weird Aristotelian essences that we don't even know what they are, but yet still being able to not just say, oh, essences are just what society called it has to do with how we essentially deal with them. Or they're not human dependent. There are sensible ways of talking about essential properties and a lot of the other basic metaphysical stuff without causing any of these problems that past thinkers had. There's a way of modernizing Aristotle.

2:03:10 Wes: Yeah, that's the way I actually, I thought a lot about Aristotle Wiser. I mean, I didn't think. I just free associated to Aristotle.

2:03:18 Mark: You refer Rorty telling you that it wasn't the Rorty.

2:03:21 Wes: That piece is so horrible, I don't even know where to begin.

2:03:24 Mark: We'll link people to this little Richard Rorty, a very famous postmodernist sort of, or, you know, neo pragmatist. We'll do a Rorty episode soon. If you don't know who that is. But he just had an interesting, very high level take on that. You know, Kripke was reviving Aristotelian realism against this Kantian slash pragmatist slash. You know, really putting all these people like Frege and the pragmatists together and the psychologists that would not have wanted to be together. But it's an interesting take. Is it simple enough to be understandable that Kripke is a return to realism?

2:03:58 Wes: Matt, what's your general opinion of Rorty?

2:04:01 Seth: I'm more of a Peircean pragmatist than a Rortyan pragmatist. I think it's kind of hard to figure out exactly where he stands.

2:04:06 Wes: Yeah, I had him pegged as a relativist and this Mirror of Nature book I think was what pissed me off.

2:04:11 Mark: Well, future episode. Future episode. Dylan, do you have a closing here? Do you have.

2:04:16 Dylan: I found the book really, really interesting and I was blown away when I read the preface that these are all but transcripts of lectures that he gave basically extemporaneously and three different lectures, I guess a week apart. And I found it benefited a lot in reading and from that lecture style and made a lot of it very accessible and interesting. I found that maybe this was a consequence of the way the lectures were surely to a relatively knowledgeable audience. And I felt the same kind of thing happening on the podcast here is that we sort of just jumped into details that are interesting.

But I found myself just wondering, why are we talking about these details? What is the question that is being answered by this discussion. Not that the discussion isn't interesting, but that I was finding myself searching for a more sufficient grounding in what was really at stake and what was going on. And I got a lot of that in our discussion tonight. So I appreciate that.

2:05:24 Mark: I'm gonna posit that in the possible world where Seth showed up, he would have said that same thing.

2:05:30 Dylan: Okay, fair enough.

2:05:31 Wes: And that therefore Seth and Dylan are identical.

2:05:36 Seth: That's right.

2:05:36 Dylan: I refer to Seth.

2:05:37 Seth: The reference is fixed only by a description of having this reaction from Key.

2:05:42 Wes: Exactly, exactly.

2:05:43 Mark: It's not rigid. It's not rigid. Come on.

2:05:46 Dylan: So I also found the discussions at the end, and this is why I was so. I mean, maybe it's just obvious why I'd be interested in it, but the discussions of essence, identity and scientific theory and natural kinds, really interesting that they would come naturally out of discussions of what the names of things are. And I mainly found that discussion interesting without necessarily coming to any kind of particular conclusions from it. And I think that's a function of the way the book works. Anyway, that's my little take.

2:06:20 Mark: Well, if you're going to choose an analytic philosophy book and you know how notoriously just, I mean, the obscurity of the problems they seem interested in, this is a great one to actually tackle that you will understand, even if you couldn't follow what we're talking about here, you will understand this book, I think through most of it, he puts things, the scholarly disputes that he has with others mostly into footnotes that you can more or less ignore. Although I found them very clarifying in many places. But, you know, he just has a wonderful style. Just be so grateful that that modal logic, all this talk of possible worlds is founded on a very difficult modal symbolic logic edifice. That Kripke was one of the guys that helped initiate, I guess like 16. He did some.

2:07:04 Wes: And he's actually a mathematician. I don't know if we mentioned that.

2:07:08 Mark: Yeah, he developed the symbolism and stuff, but he hardly ever like a little bit in the preface, you know, they added later preface, he pulls out a little symbolism, just a little bit. But. But for the most part, there's no symbols here, which is very rare for a book about this kind of topic.

2:07:23 Seth: Can I say something really quickly about his modal logic thing? It's sometimes referred to as the relational semantics for modal logic. Never mind what that means. But what he did in that work was because this came up in our discussion, he came up with a unified theory of what necessary or must or should words like these mean regardless of whether you're talking about metaphysical necessity or physical necessity or laws of ethics? He sort of brought all those different flavors of necessity under a single heading and with a general theory about how they're all related to each other and they're all different. So it's a very significant achievement.

2:07:55 Wes: So what's the text to read on that?

2:07:56 Seth: There are a couple papers. Semantical Considerations of Modal Logic. Is the one you mean primary text by Kripke, or do you like more modern stuff?

2:08:03 Wes: Either. Either really. But yeah.

2:08:04 Seth: Yeah. Semantical Considerations of Modal Logic would be the one that's most commonly looked at. There are a couple other papers too. I forget the titles. It's something like completeness proof for S5, something like that. I have to look it up.

2:08:18 Mark: Really eye catching titles like that.

2:08:20 Wes: Yeah.

2:08:20 Seth: But I could definitely recommend, if people are interested in a nice readable introductory exposition of what the Relational Semantics for Modal Logic is all about. There's definitely stuff like that available.

2:08:30 Wes: Okay.

2:08:30 Mark: And so he wrote a couple actual books. Did he even, like. I know he's sort of notorious for just having. You had a whole elucidations episode on just all the notes that are scattered around and how those are being collected. Even though he's not dead yet.

2:08:45 Seth: Oh, no, he's still on the faculty at cuny. He's still writing stuff. He's been writing stuff since the 70s, but he's been a little bit shy about publishing stuff. And only recently have his friends finally coaxed him into publishing stuff again. So in the past, you know, five, six years actually, my father's been working on that a little bit. He's been doing some copy editing because in a lot of cases less so for the technical stuff, which he would sit down and write, but especially this more philosophical stuff. His preferred method of writing was to give a lecture, transcribe it, and then go clean up the transcription. And you can see that really works well in this case.

2:09:16 Wes: Yeah, this was. Yeah, I had the same reaction as Dylan and Mark. Just the clarity of it and the style. It's a really interesting book and I'm generally not into this type of stuff, so I can say that it's my favorite work of analytic philosophy so far. But also I think what was so appealing about it is just. I knew I had a vague uneasiness about the whole definite descriptions approach, but I don't think I had a way to put my finger on that. So this whole idea of rigid designators, I found it actually enormously Intuitively appealing. Even though, you know, of course there are problems that will that crop up as well.

And then the other part of it, just this causal theory of reference, I think Dylan was saying it seemed intuitively plausible as well. And I had the same sort of reaction that this, wow, this is a much better way to go about things. So it was kind of really revealing in that sense. And in a way it felt like a sort of revolutionary. And Matt, you can correct me if I'm wrong, but critique of a lot of the analytic philosophy preceding it. But that's just, you know, that's a layman's kind of impression there.

2:10:16 Seth: Yeah, it's definitely played the role of. So a lot of analytic philosophy between Carnap and this text was very anti metaphysics. And this text is often credited with rehabilitating metaphysics and making it acceptable to do again in mainstream philosophy. And I think that's probably true. I think it probably did have that effect.

2:10:33 Wes: So what's your closing, Matt?

2:10:35 Seth: So I'm really happy you guys liked it. I like this book a lot. It's really fun to read, as you mentioned, but a lot of my friends had it shoved down their throats when they were young un's in philosophy classes and thus have negative feelings about it. So kind of for that reason, even though I love this book, I'm a little bit hesitant to recommend it to people because I know that there's this sensitive history with a lot of people like, you know, they must worship at the Church of Kripke anyway. So I'm just kind of generally psyched that you guys seem to like it.

It's been influential in all kinds of ways. The causal theory of reference that we mentioned, this baptism picture, very influential. And that's especially been taken up by some people on the east coast, particularly Michael devitt. The West Coasters were more interested in the rigid designation part of the story and they explored that a lot. One thing that his observations here gave rise to that was very significant was the theory of what are called indexicals. So words like I and now and these sort of very context dependent expressions. Actually in my opinion, that whole sort of approach to those very tricky context sensitive expressions since the 60s comes out of his remarks in this book about how when I say this refers to the same thing in all possible worlds, I'm talking about the word as we use it in our world.

So a lot of weird behavior of names like mat in what if sentences is replicated by the word I in what if sentences. So he Actually, he brought out a lot of really semantically, really bizarre features. Work that came right after this brought out really bizarre features of words like I that required actually an overhaul of like the whole framework people were using and then eventually turned into this area that people now call two dimensional semantics or two dimensional modal logic. So everybody has their favorite thing in this book that they like.

My favorite thing in this book is really just there's an incredible attention to the behavior of expressions in these what if type sentences. And I think counterfactual reasoning is really important. Reasoning about what could have been, what might be is integral to obviously scientific theorizing. But also I'm especially interested in stuff like reasoning about kinds of people and also reasoning about artifacts, reasoning about social roles. And I think that reasoning about what could have been and what might be and what should be, stuff like that, is really important in those domains.

I think he sort of had the effect of turning our attention to this really important topic of basically modality philosophy with a level of subtlety that wasn't really around so much before a little bit with Barcan Marcus and Quine and some of those debates he talks about. But yeah, I think that's one of the main things I like about this. I also, in my own work, I draw a little bit on his view that basically common nouns like tiger are natural kind terms, which is a little bit hard to hammer out the details of, but that's also something I've tried to explore a little bit.

2:13:09 Mark: All right, well, thanks for adding your expertise, your interest to discuss.

2:13:14 Seth: Thanks so much for having me on.

2:13:15 Wes: Yeah, thanks for coming on.

2:13:16 Mark: Next time we're going to talk about John Dewey's experience and nature from 1925.

2:13:20 Seth: Oh, awesome. Great choice. That's a fascinating book.

2:13:23 Mark: We are supported by your donations. Please go to partiallyexaminedlife.com to make a contribution. Big donors since last time have included Dennis Hellmuth, Bill Mascioli, Gaston Tuafek, Charlotte Steinsig, Meredith Corll, Jeff Mullen, Nick Martin, Louise Wales, Andrew Pendakis, Leonard Williams, David Bunch, Joshua Prinsky, Linda Reeves, Hans Villami, Lucy Hutchinson, Lewis Turnstile, David Richardson, Jose Skinner, Enrique Amador, Chris Statham, Joseph Kuljak, Michael Gushu, Deidre Perry, Aaron Higgins Brake, Robin Body, Damien Bickhoff, Stephen Lange, Mark Featherstone, Jonathan Maithaller, Giselle Stahl, Paul Davis, Michael Callahan, Marco Radenkovic and Kevin Douglas. Thanks also to the smaller donors, including those who are newly, on a continued basis, signed up for our $5 a month citizen site.

2:14:11 Wes: You're not going to read those.

2:14:17 Mark: In an alternate possible world. I'll add an extra hour. We've got a Facebook page you should go look at. You can join the group. There's a lot of discussion going on there that we've got a blog you can subscribe to and get things right in your inbox. Definitely reach out to us, email us, tell us what you think of the show, whether you want us to cover more of this kind of analytic philosophy or go back to the historical stuff, or both. Thanks everybody and good night.

2:14:41 Wes: Good night. Good night.

2:14:42 Seth: Thanks again and good night. What?

2:15:01 Unknown speaker: Unlucky I stand a chance with this girl no, it could not be he I could not deserve this good life, this family. And I said if we should waste four walls well, it's reason enough well, it's reason enough to go on if we should waste our all Is it reason enough Is it reason enough Is it reason enough it's enough now it's gone away Reason enough, it's enough now it's gone away Reason enough it's enough now it's gone away yeah I lost in some line that you could be standing it's standing so still I won't even try Watching my life slip to coals through the grill and I say if we should grace for walls well, it's reason enough Is it reason enough to go on?

If we should waste on all Is it reason enough? Is it reason enough Is it reason enough? It's enough now it's gone away Reason enough it's enough now it's gone away Reason enough it's enough now it's gone away yeah just a little insecurity blowing harder Just my fatalism pissing me off this wall I see the future and it's within us so down hearted but optimism is faking I can be a plague Please don't let me drive you away no, not in a day would something so precious be no, not my last hope Plenty more mornings to wake up the boat and I said if we should waste four walls Is it reason enough Is it reason enough to go on?

If we should waste our all Is it reason enough Is it reason enough? Yes, it's reason enough it's enough now it's gone away Reason enough It's enough now it's gone away Reason enough It's enough now it's gone away Reason enough is enough now it's gone away.

2:17:48 Seth: Sam.