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Rigid designator - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia rigid designator when it picks out the same thing in all possible worlds in which that thing exists (and picks out nothing in those possible worlds in which it does not exist). Rigid designators are contrasted with non-rigid or flaccid designators, which may pick out different things in different possible worlds. The notion of rigid designation was first introduced by Saul Kripke in the lectures that became Naming and Necessity, in the course of his argument against descriptivist theories of reference. en.wikipedia.org /wiki/Rigid_designation   (596 words)

Introduction In the first case, rigidity entails that ``a'' and ``b'' always pick out or designate the same object; therefore, there is no possible circumstance in which they designate a different object. Whether we agree that NAMES are rigid designators or not is in an important sense quite beside the point: whatever functions as a rigid designator, Kripke is making two claims which stand independently of how proper names themselves function. Rigid designators function as they do because they are connected to reality in a certain way. www.hum.utah.edu /~phanna/classes/ling5981/autumn03/web/webnotes/22sept/node1.html   (1067 words)

20th WCP: On Naming and Possibility in Kripke and in the Tractatus Bradley accordingly defends the idea that the theory of rigid designation finds its basis in two intuitions: that objects can form part of states of affairs other than those in which they in fact occur, and that names can be used to stand for objects, regardless of the states of affairs in which they occur. In the third lecture, Kripke develops the thesis regarding necessity and essentialism, and applies the notion of rigid designator to natural kind terms, to definitions in scientific theories, and, finally, to the particular case of the mind-body identity thesis. These considerations allow us to conclude that although tractarian names somehow might be considered to be rigid designators, so far as the relation between a name and an object is constant and unchangeable, the basis for the peculiar tractarian rigidity is not the same as that for the rigidity of kripkean names. www.bu.edu /WCP/Papers/Lang/LangCere.htm   (3444 words)

[No title] We determine the reference of ‘one meter’ by stipulating, “ that ‘one meter’ is to be a rigid designator of the length which is in fact the length of S at to”. I conclude that the rigidity of ‘one meter’ and the supposed contingency of statement (1) are on bad terms. In either way we conceived of ‘one meter’ as a rigid designator, the notion of ‘rigid designator’ proved to be on bad terms with the supposed contingency of the meter example. www.perrick.nl /kripke.doc   (2977 words)

a_sullivan Rigidity, unbaptized, is very much there in Kripke’s (1959, 1963) semantics for modal logic; and lies just beneath the surface of much other logical and semantic work in the 1950s and 1960s. Rigid designation is first baptized, in print, by Kripke (1971, 1972), in the course of his developing a wide range of arguments about reference and content. Rigidity is a semantic thesis about the relation between ‘D’ and D, not a metaphysical thesis about the essence of D. [2] This thesis offers an illuminating picture of the historical continuity, of the progress in philosophical logic, from Mill through Frege and Russell on into Kripke and Kaplan. www.ub.es /grc_logos/bw3/abstracts/a_sullivan.htm   (976 words)

DIRECT, RIGID DESIGNATION AND A POSTERIORI The formal part is a definition of rigid designation in terms of a semantics for modal logic, and embodies the formal notion of the referent of a singular term at a model or possible world. The rigid designation of an individual constant a is achieved by loading an individual b from the domain D into the proposition expressed by the sentence (or, in Marcus’ terminology, loading the individual into “what is said” [the singular proposition] by the “statement” [the sentence]). There are characteristic cases of rigid designation where the designator does not directly refer to its referent, and were the referent is not a component of the proposition expressed by the sentence. www.qsmithwmu.com /direct,_rigid_designation_and_a_posteriori.htm   (15989 words)

RIGID DESIGNATOR Design   (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-08-31) Kripke’s causal theory of names along with his theory of descriptions as non-rigid designators in meant as a criticism, and a brutal one at that, of description theory of names which can primarily be sourced back to Frege. Names, however, are rigid designators in that they refer to the same thing across all possible worlds in which the thing exists.Thus, according to Kripke, the sentence ‘Elizabeth Windsor is wise’ always refers to the same individual across all possible worlds in which this individual exists. Thompson refers to an actual person, while the URI of his web-page may refer to him as a rigid designator, or it may refer to itself, as explored in § Our take on the ordinary understanding of URIs is that a URI addresses a Web-based encoding of a description or depiction of a denotation. www.webalice.it /design_2000/Rigid_designator.html   (726 words)

wo's weblog: Two Kinds of Rigidity Recently I argued that the assumption that ordinary proper names are rigid designators leads to an implausibly excessive form of essentialism. That's why one usually defines a rigid designator as a term whose referents at different worlds are related by identity. The thing to do is to say that what distinguishes the temporal intension of temporally rigid designators from that of temporally non-rigid designators is that the former are in some sense more natural than the latter. www.umsu.de /wo/archive/2003/12/17/Two_Kinds_of_Rigidity   (2096 words)

Is Pain Like Lightning   (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-08-31) This suggests that lightning is a rigid designator, because it necessarily refers to a specific electric discharge. Because one is a rigid designator and the other is a nonrigid designator, we cannot say that the two concepts are precisely the same. As a result, we cannot compare this to a situation involving a rigid and a nonrigid designator, because it is precisely because of the nonrigid nature of that one designator that its identity with the other is contingent. s94176570.onlinehome.us /Philosophy/Is_Pain_Like_Lightning.htm   (2536 words)

[No title] Kripke first establishes the claim that sensory states and physical states are described using rigid designators, which is any term that refers to the same thing in every possible world in which it exists. Specific examples of rigid designators are proper names and natural kind terms such as heat, water, pain, etc. Kripke notes that the identity put forth in the mind brain identity theory consists of rigid designators. Such an identity contains the non-rigid designator ‘the inventor of bifocals’ and is therefore, not of the same nature of the identity between brain states and sensory [or psychological] states. www.angelfire.com /jazz/bryanestes/writingpages/modalargument.html   (985 words)

Levine Rigid designators are linked to their referents by acts of ostensive dubbing, or "initial baptism," in which an agent names an object picked out by some non-descriptive, deictic means. And if we suppose natural kind terms to be rigid designators, we gain the ability to understand scientific progress in the rather straightforward way denied in the relativistic response to the case with which I began. Let us see what becomes of Kripke's claim that rigid designators are devoid of Fregean sense when we distinguish the two kinds of Fregean sense, sense-1 (that which determines the reference of an expression) and sense-2 (that which a speaker who understands the reference of an expression grasps). www.lehigh.edu /~incog/v10n1/levine.htm   (3419 words)

Identification and Identity Rigid designators are not descriptive, but are simply references that pick out specific things within possible worlds. According to Jackson, Smart intended the identity to be between a rigid designator and a definite description; and did not intend to fix both references. For if the identities are between two rigid designators then they, and the type identity theory as a whole, falls prey to Kripke’s two-part thesis. www.sfu.ca /~nicolea/papers/Identification_and_Identity.htm   (2296 words)

Kripke, Casullo, One Metre, my two cents, and the Contingent A Priori Rigid designators, on the other hand, are not descriptive (at all), but are simply references (name tags) that pick out specific things within possible worlds. However, if we stipulate that ‘water’ is the term we wish to use to designate that same kind of stuff in all possible worlds (whether or not any token of that type of stuff exists in other worlds) then we are using ‘water’ as a rigid designator. The difference between an identity statement with two rigid designators and a statement with one rigid designator and one non-rigid designator is the difference between identity and identification. www.sfu.ca /~nicolea/papers/Kripke,_Casullo,_One_Metre,_my_two_cents,_and_the_Contingent_A_Priori.htm   (4157 words)

[No title] Rigid designators and possible worlds (Objection to 6): cluster theory claims the necessary truth Rigid designator: a subject term designating the same object in all different possible situations (or possible worlds) in which the object exists, so long as the meaning of the term is held constant. Examples to show why a name is a rigid designator: Aristotle might not have done any of the things attributed to him without ceasing to be Aristotle. That means the rigid designator uniquely refers to one thing and its referent is this one thing in every possible, no matter what it would be called there, depending on language, culture or convention. chaos.myweb.uga.edu /kripke/kripke.doc   (1468 words)

WAS AN KRIPKES MODALEM ARGUMENT GEGEN That means: Inside the scope of a modal operator a rigid designator names always the same object whereas the semantic value of a non-rigid designator depends on the possible world at stake. In the beginning, the modal operators had been designed in such a way that all predications inside their scope had to be evaluated always with respect to the possible world at stake as determined by the modal operator. (c*) is certainly a rigid designator, and (d*) isn’t a designator at all because it contains a freely occurring subjunctive marker. stl.recherche.univ-lille3.fr /archives/archivesset/colloques/PREUVERuckert.html   (1672 words)

8439 ·ì¹û½³ ÃŵÂÀ­ºÕ et al. ------------- Blogcn | Öйú²©¿ÍÍø | ²©¿Í(blog)ÍйÜÉÌ | ... Thus pain, unlike heat, is not only rigidly designated by ¡®pain¡¯ but the reference of the designator is determined by an essential property of the referent. In fact, no one would deny that, in a logical or pure semantic sense, a designator¡¯s meaning is a function from possible worlds and contexts to individuals in the discourse domain. So they either regard the individual¡¯s essence as the meaning of the designator, or refute the existence of meaning and find other approaches to the explanation of the referential relation between the designator and the individual. www.blogcn.com /user20/hippogavagai/blog/34288067.html   (3148 words)

Bloomsbury.com - Research centre A rigid designator, in philosophy, designates the same thing in all possible worlds. That is, it designates water in the actual world, and (unless its meaning is changed) there is no possible situation in which it designates anything other than water. The word 'water' is a rigid designator, it designates the same thing in all possible worlds. www.bloomsbury.com /ARC/detail.asp?EntryID=102819&bid=2   (542 words)

Phil200 Introduction to Philsophy | Philosophy of Mind Handout 3 If, when you replace the ‘x’ in this biconditional with a designator, and there is no interpretation of the resulting sentence on which it makes sense to suppose that it is true, then, according to Kripke, that suggests that designator is rigid. If Kripke is right that the expressions flanking the identity signs here are rigid designators (do they pass the intuitive test?), then, on the assumption that these identity claims are true, they must be necessarily true. Given that a’ and ‘b’ are rigid designators, it thereby follows that the identity claim éa=bù is false. academic.reed.edu /philosophy/courses/phil200/handouts/hd-fall05-mind-3.html   (1280 words)

EFFECTS Frege's thesis makes a descriptive phrase a contingent designator in the sense of designating at each world/time whatever object (if any) is singled out by the corresponding determiner in that world at that time. A non-rigid designator, presumably, is then one which is ambiguous in that its reference depends on the context in which it stands. Kripke speaks explicitly about designators of individuals, but he does not mean to confine the notion of rigidity to designators of this sort. nb.vse.cz /kfil/elogos/logpoint/94-2/THE_MYTH.htm   (5079 words)

Bayne on Kripke , a rigid designator is a term which refers to the same thing in all possible worlds in which it refers at all. If the identity theorist is right, then on the theory of rigid designation it is necessary that what they designate is one and the same thing. The trouble is that although 'heat' is a rigid designator, heat is picked out by the contingent property of its being felt in a certain way; pain, on the other hand, is picked out by an essential (and indeed necessary and sufficient) property. www.hist-analytic.org /Kripkedoc.htm   (1317 words)

Fides Quaerens Intellectum :: Kripke’s Objection to the Identity Theory of Mind A rigid designator would be a way of picking out the same object in all possible worlds. Non-rigid designators are names or descriptions that pick out an object in some worlds, but not in others. There is an aspect of Kripke’s remarks, though, that I think is distinct from the issues having to do with rigid designation and more to do with the idea that of concepts picking out properties/states that are ‘eligible’ for turning out to figure in aposteriori identity claims. blog.johndepoe.com /?p=9   (1154 words)

20th WCP: A Unified Theory of Names However, both of these phenomena — cognitive content and rigid designation — are immediate consequences of the unified theory. A name will designate its bearer at every possible world in which the bearer exists — not just at those worlds in which the name is used. On the other hand, it is far from clear that the rigid designation of proper names could ever be satisfactorily explained if names were shared by different individuals in different possible worlds. www.bu.edu /wcp/Papers/Lang/LangJust.htm   (3155 words)

Mormon Philosophy & Theology Ostler, in a move similar to Cornelius Plantinga's social trinitarianism, suggests that God is a name-title designating a collection of individuals with certain properties. What this implies to me is that if people take seriously their descriptionist, or definitional theories of reference when it comes to God-concepts, then their own concepts fail to refer to God more often than not. Yet the rigid designator fails, because it can't deal with this fact, given it reliance on picking out the same entity in all possible worlds. www.lextek.com /clark/10200.html   (1376 words)

Marcus, Kripke, and the Origin of The New Theory of Reference He correctly notes that "the term 'rigid designator' was coined by Kripke to characterize those expressions which designate the same thing in every possible world in which that thing exists and which designate nothing elsewhere". Although I have used the "rigid designation" terminology, Marcus does not use it, since Kripke's introduction of this expression in his "Identity and Necessity" (1971) assimilated proper names to some descriptions (viz., mod- ally stable descriptions), which obscure their different semantic properties. Adopting the genus/species terminology, we may say that the genus is rigid designators, and the different species are (a) proper names, (b) referentially used definite descriptions (in Donnellan's sense), (c) attributively used definite descriptions that express a modally stable sense, (d) uses of indexicals, (e) natural kind terms, and certain other expressions. www.qsmithwmu.com /marcus,_kripke,_and_the_origin_of_the_new_theory_of_reference.htm   (3711 words)

DirRef But the latter claim does not quite amount to Millianism, for not all rigid designators are Millian names. Then there are arithmetical descriptions, such as "the positive square root of nine," that are rigid, because they designate the same number in every possible world, but are certainly not Millian because in order to secure their reference they exploit their conceptual content. So that description is not Millian even though it is rigid, because it does not simply introduce its bearer (the number three) into the discourse; it also characterizes three as being something which when multiplied by itself yields nine. www.unc.edu /~ujanel/DirRef.htm   (1735 words)

Modality, Reference and Sense An Essay in the Philosophy of Language It is generally taken for granted that proper names are rigid designators, having no meaning content, which explains their in translatability into other languages. One of the advantages of this position is that it blocks the emergence of the Kripkean puzzle about belief by accepting different belief contents corresponding to a variation in the senses of the names involved. 'Is Kripke's distinction between rigid and non-rigid designators finally valid?' the author asks, questioning the corollaries that are supposed to follow from the distinction, viz., that proper names do not have descriptive backing, and that there are contingent a priori truths. www.exoticindiaart.com /book/details/IDC834   (253 words)

[No title] What these expressions actually designate they designate in all possible circumstances. The assertion that there might not have been any pain in the world or that there might have been Martians that experience pain is an assertion about the very thing that pain actually refers to, namely, a certain (painful) sensation. “Heat” is a rigid designator that refers to intense molecular motion in all possible circumstances. www.sussex.ac.uk /Users/muralir/philmind/philmindwk3.doc   (1946 words)

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