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Review

Christopher Hughes has written what is likely the most patient, meticulous, and philosophically even-handed book-length treatment of Saul Kripke's Naming and Necessity available. That he has done so without producing a work of hagiography is the book's central achievement. The prevailing reception of Kripke's 1970 Princeton lectures has long oscillated between two unhelpful poles: on one side, the view that the lectures settled the major questions of reference, modality, and essentialism once and for all; on the other, the suspicion that the whole apparatus rests on a house of cards — shaky intuitions about possible worlds, an unearned confidence in what we can "stipulate," and a picture of reference that cannot handle the messiness of actual linguistic practice. Hughes's Kripke: Names, Necessity, and Identity takes neither shortcut. It is a work of dialectical close-reading that reconstructs Kripke's arguments with care and charity, then systematically tests them against the strongest objections in the literature — and finds Kripke largely right on the foundations, but importantly wrong, or at least overconfident, in several of his applications.

The book's structure is disarmingly simple. Four chapters treat, in sequence, the topics of the title: names, necessity, identity (across worlds and times), and the mental-physical relation. But the simplicity is deceptive. Hughes operates in the characteristic mode of analytic philosophy at its best — taking one objection at a time, distinguishing senses, clarifying modal principles, and refusing to let a disputed claim pass without examining what the disputant would have to give up to sustain it. The result is a book that feels less like a monograph advancing a single thesis and more like a guided tour through three decades of philosophical argument, with Hughes as a judicious and occasionally interventionist guide. He does not attempt a book-level synthesis, and he acknowledges as much: the work is, in his own implicit self-characterization, a series of "discussion and criticism of this or that particular view of Kripke." What holds it together is not a grand reinterpretation but a sensibility — a conviction that Kripke got the fundamental moves right and that the most interesting philosophical work lies in seeing how far those moves can be pushed before they break.

The chapter on names is the most expository, and in some ways the most assured. Hughes lays out Kripke's three-pronged attack on the descriptivist tradition of Frege and Russell — the modal argument (if "Hesperus" meant "the celestial body visible in the evening," a contingent truth would be necessary), the epistemological argument (if "Gödel" meant "the discoverer of incompleteness," we could know a priori that Gödel discovered incompleteness, which we manifestly cannot), and the semantic argument (if "Peano" meant "the discoverer of the Dedekind postulates," then "Peano" would refer to Dedekind, which it does not). Each argument is reconstructed with care, and the responses — Dummett's wide-scope readings, Searle's cluster theory, the charge that Kripke simply trades on intuition — are given their due. But Hughes also introduces his own tightening of the dialectic. His notion of an "n-d-i-free definite description" — a description that is name-free, demonstrative-free, and indexical-free — makes explicit what the descriptivist must produce: a purely qualitative condition that is intensionally and epistemically equivalent to the name. Once that demand is on the table, the descriptivist's project looks considerably harder, and the force of the pejorative "intuition-mongering" charge diminishes. Intuitions about cases, after all, are doing real work when the alternative is a theory that cannot produce a single plausible analysans.

Hughes's most original contribution in the opening chapter, however, is the "duplicability" argument against pure descriptivism. The argument is elegant in its generality: if a proper name were equivalent in meaning to a n-d-i-free description, then there would have to be a purely qualitative condition C such that Mount Faverghera exists if and only if C is uniquely satisfied. But another mountain, in New Zealand or a different geological epoch, could have possessed all of Mount Faverghera's qualitative properties. So no such condition exists — and descriptivism, as a thesis about meaning, fails for names of particular individuals. Hughes attributes the argument to no one in particular, and the modesty of the attribution is telling: he presents it not as a knock-down refutation but as a challenge that, to his knowledge, no pure descriptivist has met. It is characteristic of his method throughout the book — prefer a difficult question to an easy verdict, and let the opponent show where the argument falters.

The extended discussion of the Pierre/Paderewski puzzle is similarly patient. Kripke's argument that the apparent non-substitutivity of co-referential names in belief contexts does not refute Millianism — because the same "straightforward absurdities" can be derived from the seemingly innocuous principles of disquotation, translation, and a translation claim — is laid out with clarity. Hughes canvasses the descriptivist responses and shows that each either reintroduces the absurdity or abandons the intuition that "London" and "Londres" mean the same thing. The upshot is not that Millianism is vindicated — Hughes is careful to note that Kripke stops short of endorsing the "no-connotation" thesis — but that the anti-Millian's weapons are turned against her own starting points. The puzzle, on this reading, is everyone's problem, not a special embarrassment for the direct-reference theorist.

Where the book grows more argumentatively original — and more interesting — is in the chapters on necessity and identity. Hughes's treatment of the necessary a posteriori and the contingent a priori is a model of careful qualification. The distinction between a sentence's being necessary and its being knowable a priori is one of Kripke's most celebrated contributions, but Hughes resists the temptation to treat it as a settled result. The metre-stick case — the claim that the reference-fixer knows a priori that stick S is one metre long, but that the proposition expressed is contingent because S could have been longer or shorter — is examined in detail, and the Plantinga-Donnellan-Hossack response (the reference-fixer knows a priori that the sentence expresses a truth, without knowing the contingent truth it expresses) is given a sympathetic hearing. Hughes's verdict is characteristically measured: "It is one thing to accept (i) and (ii), and another to embrace the necessary a posteriori and the contingent a priori (as these terms are usually understood)." The hedged formulation is philosophically honest — it acknowledges that the terrain is more contested than the standard textbook narratives suggest — and it signals that Hughes's allegiance is to the arguments, not to a canonical reading of Kripke.

The chapter on identity, worlds, and times is the book's center of gravity, and it is here that Hughes's critical engagement is most sustained. Kripke's rejection of the "foreign country" picture of possible worlds — "A possible world isn't a distant country that we are coming across, or viewing through a telescope ... 'Possible worlds' are stipulated, not discovered by powerful telescopes" — is taken as the starting point for a defense of trans-world identitarianism against Lewisian counterpart theory. The four standard arguments for counterpart theory — the theological or scope argument, the extrinsic-determinants argument, the plant-stem non-sharing-of-parts argument, and the bicycle non-transitivity argument — are each examined and found wanting. Hughes's treatment of the extrinsic-determinants case is particularly effective. The intuition that whether a given possible person is Humphrey depends on facts about other people in the world — that identity is somehow extrinsically determined — is shown to rest on a conflation of epistemic and metaphysical questions. (Nathan Salmon's work is the acknowledged source here, but Hughes develops the point with his own examples.) And the discussion of the bicycle case, which Kripke himself tentatively endorsed as a problem for identitarianism, draws on Kripke's unpublished 1978 Cornell lectures to argue that the non-transitivity of the "would-have-been" relation is a genuine puzzle — but not one that counterpart theory alone can solve. If the temporal analogue — the "will-be" relation — is unquestionably transitive, why should the modal analogue be different? The question is left open, but the dialectical point is clear: the identitarian is not uniquely embarrassed.

Hughes's own interventions in the identity chapter — the tripartite distinction between the "is" of identity, constitution, and co-constitution, and the distinction between hard and soft facts — are philosophically substantive and deserve wider discussion than they have received. The Goliath/Lumpl puzzle (is the statue identical with the lump of clay that constitutes it?) has generated a vast literature, much of it tending toward the conclusion that permanent co-constitution just is identity — that to deny this is to multiply entities beyond necessity and perhaps beyond coherence. Hughes's response is to re-parse the copula. "The statue is a piece of bronze," he argues, does not express identity but co-constitution — a relation of being currently made of the same matter as, which is a tensed relation and not transitive in the way identity is. And the "too many statues" objection — that if Goliath and Lumpl are distinct, then there are two material objects exactly where we thought there was one — is rebutted by appeal to the hard/soft facts distinction. If Goliath were identical with Lumpl, then the fact that there are n rather than n+1 material objects on the table would depend on what happens in the future (e.g., whether the lump is squashed tomorrow). But facts about how many things exist here and now should be "hard" facts — they should not be hostage to the future. The argument is ingenious, and it reveals something important about Hughes's philosophical temperament: he is willing to accept ontological proliferation if the alternative is a violation of deep modal intuitions about what depends on what.

The final chapter, on the mental and the physical, is the most revisionary — and the one most likely to unsettle readers who come to the book expecting a straightforward defense of Kripke. Hughes reconstructs Kripke's broadly Cartesian arguments against the identification of persons with their bodies and against the type-identity theory of pain and C-fibre stimulation, and then argues, with considerable dialectical resourcefulness, that the person-body identity thesis is more defensible than Kripke allows. The key move is an extension of Kripke's own epistemic-counterpart strategy — the very strategy Kripke used to explain away the apparent contingency of "Hesperus is Phosphorus" and "Water is H₂O." If the person-body materialist has independent reason to believe the identity (and Hughes thinks she does), then the apparent possibility of Descartes existing without his body can be defused in the same way: it is an epistemic possibility, not a metaphysical one, and the illusion of metaphysical possibility is generated by the fact that our epistemic counterparts — things that have the features by which we identify Descartes — could exist without their bodies. Hughes pushes the point further than many commentators would dare, but he does so with full awareness of the counter-considerations. The second temporal argument — that Descartes's body might exist at the funeral while Descartes does not — is treated as sound once the Aristotelian view that organisms cease to exist at death is accepted. The materialist who identifies persons with bodies_L (essentially living bodies) can grant this without abandoning the identity thesis.

Where Hughes draws the line, and where he thinks Kripke is importantly right, is the type-identity theory. Pain and C-fibre stimulation are not, he argues, in the same dialectical position as water and H₂O. Kripke's own remark — that a particular pain could not have existed without being a sensation, "the way a certain inventor (Franklin) could have existed without being an inventor" — points to a genuine asymmetry. We have strong pro-identification intuitions in the water case that we lack in the pain case. George Bealer's "hydor/algos" thought experiment, which Hughes develops at length, makes the point forcefully: we can imagine a stuff that behaves like water but lacks H₂O and feel the pull of the intuition that it is not water; we cannot, in the same way, imagine a sensation that feels like pain but lacks C-fibre stimulation and feel the pull of the intuition that it is not pain. The type-identity theorist, Hughes concludes, faces "a very stiff challenge" — exactly the challenge Kripke described — and no one in the materialist literature has yet met it. Hughes's own reformulation, the "nothing over and above" thesis in a compositional sense, is offered as a materialist fallback position that captures what is plausible in the identity thesis without inheriting its modal liabilities.

The book belongs squarely in the tradition of analytic metaphysics and philosophy of language that runs from Frege and Russell through Quine to Kripke, Lewis, and their successors. It is, more specifically, a contribution to the post-Kripkean literature that takes the modal revolution as given and asks what it commits us to. The canonical traditions identified for this work — analytic, rationalist, materialist — are apt but require nuance. The "rationalist" tradition is present in Kripke's essentialism and his willingness to take a priori modal intuitions as philosophically authoritative; Hughes's qualified defense of Aristotelian essentialism (against both hypo-essentialism and hyper-essentialism) places him in this lineage, though his essentialism is more piecemeal and kind-relative than Kripke's. The "materialist" tradition is engaged critically throughout Chapter 4, and Hughes's own "nothing over and above" proposal is an attempt to articulate a materialism that can survive Kripke's modal scrutiny. The cross-references are exhaustive — Lewis, Stalnaker, Plantinga, Salmon, van Inwagen, Noonan, Chandler, Gibbard, Feldman, Williams, Shoemaker, Bealer, and many others appear — and Hughes's engagement with them is invariably substantive. He does not name-drop; he reconstructs arguments and tests them.

The book is not without limitations, and its virtues are also the source of its difficulties. The dialectical method — take an argument, canvass objections, evaluate replies — requires patience from the reader, and Hughes's prose, while admirably clear, rarely achieves momentum. The chapter on modal logic systems S1–S5 and quantified modal logic, though presented as an accessible introduction, is dense enough that readers without prior exposure may find themselves bogged down in counter-model diagrams and Barcan-formula derivations. And the book's refusal to attempt a unified interpretation of Kripke — its insistence on treating each topic as a separate dialectical engagement — means that a reader seeking a single, overarching thesis about what Kripke's project really amounts to will be disappointed. Hughes's Kripke is not a system-builder but a philosopher who made a series of interconnected but separable interventions, and Hughes treats each intervention on its own terms. This is intellectually honest, but it leaves the reader to do the synthetic work that the author declines.

There is also a deeper question about methodology that Hughes addresses only indirectly. The book relies heavily — as does the literature it engages — on intuitions about modal cases: about what we can "stipulate," about what seems possible, about what "intuitively" depends on what. Kripke's own defense of this method is that "we are being the philosophers" when we take such intuitions seriously, and Hughes largely accepts this self-conception. But the book does not mount a sustained defense of the method itself against those who would regard the entire enterprise as a kind of sophisticated intuition-mongering. The Quinean modal skeptic is given a hearing in Chapter 2, but the response — that Kripke's possible-worlds semantics shows how quantified modal logic can be coherent — may not satisfy someone who regards the whole apparatus of possible worlds as a philosophers' fiction. Hughes's own distinctions — epistemic vs. metaphysical possibility, hard vs. soft facts, identity vs. constitution vs. co-constitution — are themselves tools for regimenting intuition, and a reader unsympathetic to the method will find them ingenious solutions to problems that may not need solving.

What, then, is this book for? It is not an introduction to Kripke — the modal logic sections assume a tolerance for formalism, and the chapter on identity engages technical debates about counterpart theory, supervenience, and four-dimensionalism that will be opaque to newcomers. It is not a polemic — Hughes advances his own views, but always in the subjunctive mood of "one could respond" or "the materialist might say." It is, rather, a work of philosophical midwifery: a book that helps the serious reader of Naming and Necessity see where the arguments lead, where they falter, and what remains to be done. The scholar who wants to understand the state of play on rigid designation, the necessary a posteriori, the Humphrey objection to counterpart theory, or the modal argument against type-identity will find here a guide that is exhaustive without being exhausting, critical without being hostile, and clear without being simplistic. The book's closing endorsement of Kripke's own verdict on the mind-body problem — "wide open and extremely confusing" — is, in its way, a summary of Hughes's own philosophical temperament: a willingness to live with confusion where the arguments do not compel, and a conviction that clarity about what we do not know is a form of philosophical progress.