Rigid designator

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A rigid designator (Engl. Rigid designator ) is a name / identifier , which in all possible worlds the same object referenced . Designators like “water” or “H 2 O”, for example, are rigid because they mean the same substance under all circumstances , including counterfactual ones . “My grandma's favorite drink”, on the other hand, is a non-rigid designator, because in reality it also means water, but circumstances are conceivable in which this is not the case.

According to Saul Kripke, establishing the reference of a name takes place in a kind of baptism. The reference to the object is made possible for the entire language community by using a “reference chain”, the last link of which is the object. Because of this procedure of defining and passing on names, names have no semantic content , whereas in the classical theory of proper names (see Frege , Russell , Wittgenstein ) the unambiguous identifications determine the semantics of names. The basic idea behind the labeling theory of proper names is that a name like "Aristotle" simply means "the greatest philosopher of antiquity". The main argument against the characterization theory of proper names in their various variants is Kripke's consideration of name and necessity that (1) “Aristotle could not have been the greatest philosopher of antiquity” is true, but (2) “The greatest philosopher of antiquity would have Nor can the greatest philosopher of antiquity be “seems wrong. If the characterization theory were correct, (1) and (2) would have to have the same truth value.

The term was formulated by Kripke in his work Name and Necessity in the field of the theory of proper names . There he defends the view that terms for natural species (such as “tigers”) are also rigid designators. Hilary Putnam is best known for his Gemini Earth argument, which also supports the view (among other things) that terms that denote natural species are rigid designators. Among other things, David Kaplan has argued in his work On the Logic of Demonstratives that indexical expressions such as “this” are rigid designators.

literature

  • Kaplan, David: "On the Logic of Demonstratives" Journal of Philosophical Logic , VIII 1978: 81-98; and reprinted in French et al. (eds.), Contemporary Perspectives in the Philosophy of Language (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1979): 401-412.
  • "Demonstratives" and "Afterthoughts" in Themes From Kaplan (Almog, et al., Eds.), Oxford 1989.
  • Putnam, Hilary: The meaning of 'meaning'. In Philosophical Papers, Vol. 2: Mind, Language and Reality. Cambridge University Press. 1975
  • Putnam, Hilary: The meaning of "meaning" , translated by Wolfgang Spohn, Klostermann texts philosophy.
  • Saul Kripke: Naming and Necessity . Harvard University Press, Cambridge 1982
  • Saul Kripke: Name and Necessity . Translated from the English by Ursula Wolf. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt a. M. 2005

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