Description:

If there is such a thing as essential reading in metaphysics or in philosophy of language, this is it.

Ever since the publication of its original version, Naming and Necessity has had great and increasing influence. It redirected philosophical attention to neglected questions of natural and metaphysical necessity and to the connections between these and theories of reference, in particular of naming, and of identity. From a critique of the dominant tendency to assimilate names to descriptions and more generally to treat their reference as a function of their Fregean sense, surprisingly deep and widespread consequences may be drawn. The largely discredited distinction between accidental and essential properties, both of individual things (including people) and of kinds of things, is revived. So is a consequent view of science as what seeks out the essences of natural kinds. Traditional objections to such views are dealt with by sharpening distinctions between epistemic and metaphysical necessity; in particular by the startling admission of necessary a posteriori truths. From these, in particular from identity statements using rigid designators whether of things or of kinds, further remarkable consequences are drawn for the natures of things, of people, and of kinds; strong objections follow, for example to identity versions of materialism as a theory of the mind.

This seminal work, to which today's thriving essentialist metaphysics largely owes its impetus, is here published with a substantial new Preface by the author.

Review

It is hard to overstate how much philosophical furniture Saul Kripke rearranged in three afternoons at Princeton in January 1970. The lectures that became Naming and Necessity were delivered without notes, transcribed from tape, and published first in 1972 and again, with the famous Preface, in 1980. Their informality is part of their authority: Kripke is plainly thinking in front of the audience, doubling back, conceding ground he has not yet had time to defend, sometimes apologizing for compression. And yet by the time the third lecture closes, the analytic philosophy of language and mind he inherited from Frege, Russell, Wittgenstein, and Quine has been remade. The book's distinctive achievement, the one I want to defend, is not that it refutes the description theory of names, nor that it revives essentialism, nor even that it gives us the necessary a posteriori. It is that Kripke teaches philosophy how to think about modality without smuggling in epistemology, and in doing so he reopens questions about essence, science, and mind that the Vienna-trained generation had pronounced closed.

What this means in practice is that Kripke's most important moves are subtractive. He pries apart conflated distinctions that had been treated as one, and the philosophical landscape that emerges from those separations is barely recognizable as the same terrain. The work succeeds because Kripke trusts ordinary modal intuitions about ordinary objects and ordinary names, and refuses to let philosophical theory shame those intuitions into submission. Where Quine had treated de re modality as quasi-mystical and Frege had treated names as condensed descriptions, Kripke treats both positions as philosophical artifacts that survived only because nobody had drawn the right lines.

The premise is announced quietly. A rigid designator, Kripke says, is a term that designates the same object in every possible world in which that object exists; a nonrigid or accidental designator is one whose referent varies. Ordinary proper names, he claims, are rigid. Definite descriptions ("the inventor of bifocals," "the last great philosopher of antiquity") generally are not. From this seed grow nearly all the book's mature theses: the necessity of true identity statements between names, the necessary a posteriori, the contingent a priori, the essentialism about origin and substance, the extension of rigidity to natural kinds, and finally the assault on the type-type mind-body identity theory. The seed is small. The tree is enormous. And it grows so fast partly because Kripke insists that we already believe most of what he is saying, and have only been talked out of it by bad theory.

The first lecture is a clearing operation. Kripke pulls apart the a priori from the necessary, distinguishes giving the meaning of a term from merely fixing its reference, and dismantles the demand for qualitative criteria of trans-world identification. The meter-stick passage is the showpiece. If we stipulate that Stick S is one meter long at time t0, then we can know a priori that S is one meter long at t0 (we set up the standard, after all), but the truth is contingent: S might have been stretched, or shorter, or longer. A priori does not entail necessary. Conversely, "Hesperus is Phosphorus" is necessarily true if true at all (the planet Venus cannot fail to be self-identical), yet was discovered by Babylonian astronomers through patient observation. Necessary does not entail a priori. Kant, Kripke says, ran these together; so did most of the empiricist tradition. Once you see the four boxes rather than two, the philosophical world looks different.

The trans-world identification material is handled with the same impatience. Philosophers had worried that to talk about Nixon in a counterfactual situation we needed a qualitative description that would pick him out across possible worlds, as if possible worlds were distant planets full of strangers we had to recognize. Kripke will have none of it. "'Possible worlds' are stipulated, not discovered by powerful telescopes," he writes, and again: "A possible world isn't a distant country that we are coming across, or viewing through a telescope." The point is not merely rhetorical. If possible worlds are stipulated, then asking what might have happened to Nixon does not require giving necessary and sufficient conditions for being Nixon; we just stipulate that we are talking about him. The 1980 Preface returns to this with the dice analogy: when we ask the probability that two dice sum to eleven, we describe the relevant abstract possibilities, we do not search a parallel universe of dice rolls. Modal talk is a tool we use, not a domain we explore. The same goes for the table I am writing on: "Don't ask: how can I identify this table in another possible world, except by its properties? I have the table in my hands, I can point to it, and when I ask whether it might have been in another room, I am talking, by definition, about it."

The second lecture is where Kripke earns his fame as a destroyer of theories. He states the cluster-of-descriptions theory of names as six numbered theses plus a non-circularity condition, treating his opponents with the kind of charity that promises destruction. "The only defect I think it has is probably common to all philosophical theories," he remarks. "It's wrong." Then come the counterexamples, which by now are part of the working vocabulary of every analytic philosopher under sixty. Most speakers cannot give a description that uniquely picks out Richard Feynman; they know he is a physicist of some sort, perhaps that he worked on quantum electrodynamics, perhaps not even that. Yet they refer to Feynman when they use the name. Most speakers cannot uniquely identify Cicero except as "a famous Roman orator," which fails the uniqueness condition. The Gödel case is the killer: if it turned out that Gödel had stolen the incompleteness proof from a man named Schmidt who was murdered in Vienna, ordinary speakers would still be referring to Gödel when they used the name, not to the true discoverer, because they intend to refer to the man their elders called Gödel. The description theorist's verdict—that the name "Gödel" refers to whoever proved incompleteness—gets the case backwards.

What replaces the description theory is not, Kripke insists, a rival theory but what he calls a better picture. Reference is transmitted from speaker to speaker through historical or causal chains originating in an initial baptism. "Someone, let's say, a baby, is born; his parents call him by a certain name. They talk about him to their friends. Other people meet him. Through various sorts of talk the name is spread from link to link as if by a chain." Each subsequent speaker intends to use the name with the same reference as the speaker from whom it was acquired. This is not a reduction of reference to anything more fundamental, and Kripke is clear about why. "I'm always sympathetic to Bishop Butler's 'Everything is what it is and not another thing'—in the nontrivial sense that philosophical analyses of some concept like reference, in completely different terms which make no mention of reference, are very apt to fail." A picture is what you offer when reductive analysis is the wrong shape of demand.

This methodological move is more radical than it sounds. The whole post-positivist project of explaining reference in nonreferential terms, or meaning in physicalistic terms, takes a hit here, and Kripke knows it. He is not anti-naturalist, but he is anti-greedy-reductionist, and the willingness to stop short of necessary-and-sufficient conditions is part of why the chain picture has aged better than most twentieth-century semantic theories. Critics have pressed on the chain picture's vagueness—how the chain is maintained, what counts as preserving reference, how reference shifts (the Madagascar case Kripke acknowledges in the Addenda) can occur without breaking the framework—and these pressures are real. The chain picture is genuinely contested in a way the destructive arguments are not. But Kripke is right that those who pulled down the description theory owe nothing more than a picture, and the picture he gives is fertile enough that decades of work in semantics have grown from it.

The second lecture closes with the necessity of identity statements between rigid designators. If "Hesperus" and "Phosphorus" each rigidly designate Venus, then in every world in which Venus exists, "Hesperus is Phosphorus" is true; the discovery was empirical, the truth is metaphysically necessary. Kripke is generous to Ruth Barcan Marcus here, crediting her for the view that identities between genuine names are necessary, while disagreeing with her suggestion that a dictionary should settle whether two names co-refer. Dictionaries cannot settle astronomical questions. He is harder on Quine, who had insisted such identities were contingent because their discovery was empirical, and harder still on David Lewis, whose counterpart theory he calls bizarre: when we ask whether Humphrey might have won the election we are asking about Humphrey himself, not about some resembling man in another world.

The third lecture extends the apparatus to natural kinds and then turns it on philosophy of mind. The natural-kind extension is in some ways the most ambitious move in the book. Terms like "gold," "water," "tiger," "heat," and "light" are not, Kripke argues, cluster concepts defined by surface properties—yellowness, drinkability, stripes, warmth-producing capacity—but rigid designators of kinds whose essences science discovers. "Gold has atomic number 79" is necessary a posteriori. "Water is H2O" is necessary a posteriori. The apparent contingency of these claims—the feeling that water might have turned out to be XYZ—is a kind of optical illusion produced by the contingent reference-fixing properties. We could have been in a qualitatively identical epistemic situation in which the watery stuff had a different chemistry, but then we would not have been referring to water; we would have been referring to whatever-it-was that filled the lakes and rivers of that scenario.

The essentialism is not limited to kinds. Particulars too have essential properties. The most famous and most contested example is the essentiality of origin. "It seems to me that anything coming from a different origin would not be this object," Kripke says, defending the claim that Queen Elizabeth could not have been born of the Trumans and that this table could not have been made from a different block of wood, let alone from ice. Whether such modal intuitions can carry the weight of a metaphysical doctrine is a fair question, and Kripke himself marks the argument as more contested than the necessity-of-identity material. But the bare claim is impressively hard to dislodge. When I imagine Queen Elizabeth as the Trumans' daughter, I find that I am imagining a different woman who happens to resemble Elizabeth, not Elizabeth herself living a different life. That something so close to common sense should yield essentialism is, for Kripke, the point. Common sense is not always wrong; the philosophical tradition has often been wrong about what common sense believes.

I want to spend a moment on the unicorn passage in the Addenda, because it is more peculiar than its brevity suggests. Kripke argues that there could not have been unicorns: not just that we do not happen to find them, but that no possible species would have been the unicorns of the myth. The myth underdetermines internal structure. A reptilian unicorn, a mammalian unicorn, an amphibious unicorn would all equally satisfy the surface description, and there is no principled way to pick out one as the unicorns the myth was about. This is essentialism cashed out as a constraint on what counterfactual descriptions can succeed. It will strike many readers as overreach—surely fiction is permitted some looseness—but it is a clean test case for the natural-kind doctrine, and Kripke is willing to bite the bullet rather than soften the apparatus.

Then comes the philosophy-of-mind argument, which Kripke presents almost in passing and which has generated a literature of its own. The type-type identity theorists, Smart and Armstrong and the Lewis of "An Argument for the Identity Theory," had claimed that pain is identical with C-fiber stimulation, and that this identity was a contingent scientific discovery on the model of heat being identical with molecular motion. "Such psychophysical identifications can be contingent facts just as the other identities are contingent facts," they said. Kripke's response works by tightening the heat analogy until it breaks. Heat=molecular motion is necessary if true, with apparent contingency explained by the fact that "heat" was originally fixed by reference to the sensation S it produces; there could have been beings in a qualitatively identical epistemic situation, having sensation S, in whom S was not produced by molecular motion. So far so good. But now try the same move for pain. Pain is rigid. Its reference is fixed not by an accidental appearance but by what Kripke calls its immediate phenomenological quality. "Pain, on the other hand, is not picked out by one of its accidental properties; rather, it is picked out by the property of being pain itself, by its immediate phenomenological quality." The qualitatively identical epistemic situation defense, which works for heat, cannot work for pain, because there is no gap between pain and its appearance. "To be in the same epistemic situation that would obtain if one had a pain is to have a pain."

The God thought experiment seals the move. "Suppose we imagine God creating the world; what does He need to do to make the identity of heat and molecular motion obtain? Here it would seem that all He needs to do is to create the heat, that is, the molecular motion itself." If He creates molecular motion, He has created heat, period. But if He creates C-fiber stimulation, He has not yet, it seems, created pain; some further act is needed to make the C-fiber stimulation be felt. If a further act is needed, then pain is not strictly identical with C-fiber stimulation. The argument is not a proof of dualism. Kripke is at pains to say it does not vindicate Descartes, and indeed he suggests that the essentiality-of-origin thesis cuts against any conception of a soul independent of bodily provenance. What the argument shows is that the standard physicalist analogy fails, that materialism's preferred way of accommodating apparent contingency in mind-body identification has been ruled out. He leaves the mind-body problem, in his own words, wide open and extremely confusing.

That last note of restraint is characteristic. Naming and Necessity is in many ways an immodest book—it demolishes a dominant theory of reference, revives a metaphysical doctrine that two generations of philosophers had treated as embarrassing, and reframes the agenda of philosophy of mind—but its tone is consistently modest about what has been proved and what remains. Kripke distinguishes strong claims (the rigidity of names, the necessity of identity for rigid designators, the necessary a posteriori) from contested ones (the essentiality of origin, the chain picture, natural kinds as rigid designators) from speculative ones (the unicorn argument). He acknowledges that his refutation of the identity theory does not give him dualism. He gestures at unresolved issues in extensive footnotes rather than papering over them. The book reads less like a manifesto than like the working notes of a philosopher confident in his moves but candid about their limits.

This is also where I find the most honest criticism to make. The strongest arguments in the book are the ones that pull apart conflated distinctions and refute the description theory; the weaker ones lean heavily on modal intuitions that not everyone shares. The Gödel/Schmidt case is decisive because nearly everyone shares the intuition. The Queen Elizabeth case is less decisive, because some readers find their modal intuitions wobbling, and the natural-kinds extension is shakier still, since terms like "water" and "gold" do double duty across pre-scientific and scientific contexts in ways the rigid-designator framework smooths over. The mind-body argument depends crucially on the claim that pain has no appearance distinct from itself, which is contested by every functionalist and higher-order representationalist who has answered Kripke since. None of this is a defect in the book; the relative weights are part of Kripke's own structure. But a reader who comes to Naming and Necessity looking for a settled metaphysics rather than a set of opening moves will be disappointed by how much remains to be argued out.

It is worth saying something about how the book sits in the analytic tradition. Kripke is unmistakably an analytic philosopher: he engages closely with Frege, Russell, Mill, Wittgenstein, Searle, Strawson, Quine, Marcus, and Lewis; he uses the technical apparatus of modal logic; he prizes clarity over rhetorical flourish. But he is doing something the postwar analytic mainstream had largely forsworn, namely metaphysics in the old key. The Frege-Russell tradition had tried to dissolve metaphysical problems into questions about language. Logical positivism had pronounced metaphysics nonsense. Quine had treated essentialism as scarcely intelligible. Kripke uses the tradition's own tools—careful conceptual distinctions, ordinary-language counterexamples, modal-logical formalism—to argue that the metaphysical questions the tradition had hoped to bury are alive after all. Aristotle is back, dressed in twentieth-century clothes. Mill's account of singular names is rehabilitated, against the consensus that had buried it. The book is at once the most analytic and the most anti-analytic-mainstream work of its era.

One sometimes hears that Kripke's chief contribution was a technical apparatus, the rigidity-and-possible-worlds machinery, and that the metaphysics was a bonus. I think the inverse is closer to the truth. The technical apparatus is genuinely valuable but in many cases recoverable from work others were doing at the same time, including Hilary Putnam, whom Kripke acknowledges as having independently developed similar views on natural kinds and whose "It Ain't Necessarily So" he cites approvingly. Donnellan's referential-attributive distinction lies in the same neighborhood. What Kripke contributes that nobody else quite contributed, and that nobody had contributed in this way since Aristotle, is the willingness to let modal intuition do metaphysical work without being shamed by either positivist scruple or Quinean skepticism. That willingness is what makes the book a turning point. It is also what makes it contested even forty-five years later.

The book is for the philosopher who wants to see the analytic tradition's foundations rearranged in real time by someone who knew them inside out. It is for the working scientist who has wondered why "water is H2O" feels different from "this water is cold" and wants a serious account of why. It is for anyone who has been talked into a description theory of names against the grain of their own usage and would like to be talked out. It is not, despite its informal surface, a beginner's book; the arguments compress decades of background and the prose demands the patience of someone willing to pause and ask whether they really do share the modal intuition Kripke claims they share. The patient reader is rewarded with a vision in which language and the world fit together more closely than the empiricist tradition had been willing to allow, in which science discovers essences rather than merely correlations, and in which the mind, stubbornly, refuses to reduce.

What Kripke does not give us is a finished metaphysics. He gives us the conceptual tools and the negative results that any finished metaphysics would have to take account of. That is plenty. The work earns its status as a touchstone less by what it settles than by what it makes thinkable again. Read it for the demolitions; stay for the methodological courage of a philosopher willing to say, of his own positive proposal, that it is a better picture and not a theory, that everything is what it is and not another thing, and that this is enough.

Notable Quotes

Although someone other than the U.S. President in 1970 might have been the U.S. President in 1970 (e.g., Humphrey might have), no one other than Nixon might have been Nixon.

Kripke introduces the intuitive test for rigid designation, distinguishing names from definite descriptions — rigid designation, proper names, identity, possible worlds

One of the intuitive theses I will maintain in these talks is that names are rigid designators.

Statement of the central thesis of the entire work — rigid designation, proper names, philosophy of language

The terms 'necessary' and 'a priori', then, as applied to statements, are not obvious synonyms. There may be a philosophical argument connecting them, perhaps even identifying them; but an argument is required, not simply the observation that the two terms are clearly interchangeable.

Kripke argues for separating epistemological and metaphysical modality — necessity, a priori knowledge, epistemology, metaphysics

A possible world isn't a distant country that we are coming across, or viewing through a telescope. Generally speaking, another possible world is too far away. Even if we travel faster than light, we won't get to it. A possible world is given by the descriptive conditions we associate with it.

Kripke demystifies possible worlds against the 'foreign country' picture — possible worlds, modal metaphysics, counterfactuals

'Possible worlds' are stipulated, not discovered by powerful telescopes. There is no reason why we cannot stipulate that, in talking about what would have happened to Nixon in a certain counterfactual situation, we are talking about what would have happened to him.

Against the demand for purely qualitative descriptions of counterfactual situations — possible worlds, identity, essentialism, transworld identification

I think it is very heavy evidence in favor of anything, myself. I really don't know, in a way, what more conclusive evidence one can have about anything, ultimately speaking.

Kripke on the evidential weight of intuitions, responding to those who dismiss intuitive content — philosophical methodology, intuition, evidence

It just is not, in any intuitive sense of necessity, a necessary truth that Aristotle had the properties commonly attributed to him.

Refuting Searle's claim that the disjunction of properties commonly attributed to Aristotle is necessary — necessity, proper names, description theory, contingency

Consider Richard Feynman, to whom many of us are able to refer. He is a leading contemporary theoretical physicist. Everyone here (I'm sure!) can state the contents of one of Feynman's theories so as to differentiate him from Gell-Mann. However, the man in the street, not possessing these abilities, may still use the name 'Feynman'.

Showing that uniquely identifying descriptions are not required for successful reference — reference, description theory, proper names, knowledge

Someone, let's say, a baby, is born; his parents call him by a certain name. They talk about him to their friends. Other people meet him. Through various sorts of talk the name is spread from link to link as if by a chain.

The initial statement of the causal-historical theory of reference — causal theory of reference, naming, communication, community

What I think the examples I've given show is not simply that there's some technical error here or some mistake there, but that the whole picture given by this theory of how reference is determined seems to be wrong from the fundamentals.

Kripke's summary of his case against the cluster-of-descriptions theory — description theory, reference, philosophy of language

It would seem that it's a contingent fact that Aristotle ever did any of the things commonly attributed to him today, any of these great achievements that we so much admire.

Against treating biographical achievements as essential properties attached to names — contingency, essentialism, proper names, necessity

Hitler might have spent all his days in quiet in Linz. In that case we would not say that this man would not have been Hitler, for we use the name 'Hitler' just as the name of that man, even in describing other possible worlds.

Illustrating that names are rigid designators, not abbreviations for descriptions of famous deeds — rigid designation, proper names, counterfactuals, identity

Suppose that Gödel was not in fact the author of this theorem. A man named 'Schmidt', whose body was found in Vienna under mysterious circumstances many years ago, actually did the work in question. His friend Gödel somehow got hold of the manuscript and it was thereafter attributed to Gödel.

The famous Gödel-Schmidt thought experiment against the description theory of names — reference, description theory, proper names, thought experiment

I have been told that these axioms were not first discovered by Peano but by Dedekind. Peano was of course not a dishonest man. I am told that his footnotes include a credit to Dedekind. Somehow the footnote has been ignored.

A real historical case showing that names refer despite widespread misinformation about referents — reference, misinformation, description theory, history of mathematics

Don't ask: how can I identify this table in another possible world, except by its properties? I have the table in my hands, I can point to it, and when I ask whether it might have been in another room, I am talking, by definition, about it.

Kripke on the directness of reference and the spurious demand for transworld identification criteria — reference, identity, essentialism, possible worlds

It seems to me that anything coming from a different origin would not be this object.

Stating the essentiality of origin for material objects and persons — essentialism, origin, necessity, identity

We use 'gold' as a term for a certain kind of thing. Others have discovered this kind of thing and we have heard of it. We as part of a community of speakers have a certain connection between ourselves and a certain kind of thing.

Extending the causal-historical theory of reference from proper names to natural kind terms — natural kinds, reference, community, causal theory

So the term 'tiger', like the term 'gold', does not mark out a 'cluster concept' in which most, but perhaps not all, of the properties used to identify the kind must be satisfied. On the contrary, possession of most of these properties need not be a necessary condition for membership in the kind, nor need it be a sufficient condition.

Arguing that natural kind terms, like proper names, are not defined by clusters of properties — natural kinds, cluster concepts, essentialism, definition

Characteristic theoretical identifications like 'Heat is the motion of molecules', are not contingent truths but necessary truths, and here of course I don't mean just physically necessary, but necessary in the highest degree—whatever that means.

The thesis that scientific identifications are metaphysically necessary, not merely empirically discovered — necessity, scientific identity, metaphysics, natural kinds

We have concluded that an identity statement between names, when true at all, is necessarily true, even though one may not know it a priori.

Summarizing the necessary a posteriori status of true identity statements between rigid designators — necessity, a posteriori, identity, rigid designation

Can any case of essence be more obvious than the fact that being a pain is a necessary property of each pain?

The key asymmetry in the mind-body identity argument: pain is essentially painful, unlike heat which is only contingently felt as hot — mind-body problem, essentialism, pain, consciousness

I'm always sympathetic to Bishop Butler's 'Everything is what it is and not another thing'—in the nontrivial sense that philosophical analyses of some concept like reference, in completely different terms which make no mention of reference, are very apt to fail.

Kripke on the difficulty of reductive philosophical analysis — philosophical methodology, reductionism, reference, analysis

The picture which leads to the cluster-of-descriptions theory is something like this: One is isolated in a room; the entire community of other speakers, everything else, could disappear; and one determines the reference for himself.

Diagnosing the individualist assumption underlying the description theory of names — description theory, individualism, community, reference

Any necessary truth, whether a priori or a posteriori, could not have turned out otherwise. In the case of some necessary a posteriori truths, however, we can say that under appropriate, qualitatively identical evidential situations, an appropriate corresponding qualitative statement might have been false.

Kripke's general answer to the objection that necessary a posteriori truths 'might have turned out otherwise' — necessity, a posteriori, epistemology, possible worlds