Table of Contents

Cover

Key Contemporary Thinkers

Title page

Copyright page

Preface

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Background

Plan

1 Naming

Mill vs Frege

Error and Ignorance

Metalinguistic Theories

The Historical Chain Picture

Reference vs Attribution

2 Identity

Modal Logic and its Archenemy

Rigidity

The Necessity of Identity

Resistance

The Contingent a Priori

3 Necessity

Imagination and the Necessary a Posteriori

Natural Substances

Natural Kinds

Natural Phenomena and Natural Law

The Mystery of Modality

4 Belief

Direct Reference

Puzzling Pierre

Poles Apart

Counterfactual Attitudes

Empty Names

5 Rules

Conventionalism

Kripkenstein

The Analogy with Hume

The Skeptical Paradox

The Skeptical Solution

6 Mind

Physicalism

Functionalism

Against Functionalism

Against Physicalism

The Mystery of Mentality

Appendix A: Models

The Logic of Modality

Kripke Models

The Curse of the Barcan Formulas

Controversy and Confusion

Appendix B: Truth

Paradox and Pathology

Kripke vs Tarski

Fixed Points

The Intuitive Notion of Truth

Bibliography

Index

Copyright  John Burgess 2013

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Saul Kripke has been for a half-century and more a major influence in philosophy and allied fields, despite the fact that only a fraction of his work has ever seen print. Recently the pace of publication has picked up a bit, and commentaries based on authorized access to parts of the extensive archives of unpublished Kripkeana have also begun to appear. I have nevertheless thought it best, in an introductory survey, to concentrate on a handful of works, beginning with his major classic Naming and Necessity and his minor classic ‘A Puzzle about Belief,’ that have been before the public for decades, and have by now already long proved immensely influential. Coverage is pretty strictly confined to work in philosophy proper as contrasted with history of philosophy. The famous or notorious Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language is therefore examined only for what it tells us about Kripke’s own views, to the exclusion of all controversial issues of Wittgenstein exegesis. I take into account lesser works, from the long-published ‘Speaker’s Reference and Semantic Reference’ to the just recently released ‘Vacuous Names and Fictional Entities,’ to the extent that they in one way or another illuminate or amplify the views developed in the Kripke’s best-known philosophical works.

Kripke has been as important a contributor to logic as to philosophy, or very nearly so. Moreover, his influence in fields outside philosophy, notably theoretical computer science and linguistics, has to a considerable degree been through his work in logic. An account of Kripke’s thought omitting his technical contributions to logic can give only a partial indication of why he ranks as high as he does among key contemporary thinkers. But a volume in the present series is simply not the appropriate place for a survey of Kripke’s technical papers. I do discuss – not in the body of the text, but in two appendices, the only places in the book where logical symbols appear – the two items among Kripke’s logical works that are most directly relevant to philosophy, his ‘Semantical Considerations on Modal Logic’ and his ‘Outline of a Theory of Truth.’ Those papers are themselves only semitechnical, and my account is semipopular.

At the beginning of each chapter I give a list of the works of Kripke most relevant thereto; ideally these should be read immediately after the chapter itself. Unpublished works of Kripke, to which most readers would have no access, are not discussed in detail, but only mentioned in notes at points where they would be relevant, with citations of publications where one can read second-hand accounts by reliable commentators. Though it is ideally to be read together with Kripke’s works, this book is not a crib going through those works section by section. Kripke does not really need that kind of commentary, since his style is clear, and difficulties for the reader are very much more likely to lie in seeing the woods as a whole than in seeing the trees one by one. That is why I have adopted an expository procedure more or less the reverse of Kripke’s own. Kripke characteristically moves back and forth among several subjects, enlarging our understanding of a given issue a bit more each time he returns to it, and weaving the different topics together. My approach is to try to separate the strands of argument that Kripke intertwines, expounding one line of thought more or less completely before taking up another.

When it comes to providing context, I have given more of my limited space to the historical background to Kripke’s works than to their critical reception. Given the frequency of allusions to his predecessors in Kripke, there is clearly some need for capsule summaries of the views of some of the earlier major philosophers he cites, but another kind of background seemed to me even more needful: an account of the climate of opinion on the topics Kripke addresses as it was a half-century or so ago, before Kripke’s intervention. Kripke’s work has had so much impact that without such background it may be difficult for newcomers to appreciate how very differently the issues struck philosophers before Kripke came on the scene, and hence to appreciate just what Kripke contributed. As to critical responses, there can be no question, in a book of modest size, of attempting to survey the vast secondary literature. My citations are selective, concentrating on works I believe will enlarge rather than distort the reader’s understanding of Kripke’s thought. When I discuss criticisms, I generally limit my discussion to those that in my judgment are based on a good understanding of Kripke’s views, and point to real gaps or tensions in them. There have been a great many objections based on misreadings, and some of these have unfortunately become rather influential, and I issue explicit warnings against a few of the worst; but only a few. Mostly I proceed in the hope and belief that the most effective way to immunize readers against being misled by misrepresentations of Kripke’s work is simply by providing an accurate representation of it.

My first debt is, I hardly need say, to Saul Kripke, for providing me with my topic. Since it is well known that he and I were colleagues for many years, I should at once add a disclaimer to the effect that, though we had many discussions on matters of intellectual interest over those years, the topic of discussion was virtually never the interpretation of Kripke’s philosophical works. Nor have I sought to involve Kripke in any way in the production of the present volume. So I am in no way his authorized spokesman.

The philosopher who has most influenced my understanding of Kripke’s philosophical works has been Scott Soames. He is the commentator and critic most often cited in the pages to follow, and those scattered citations hardly begin to express the extent of my debt. Nonetheless, he had no direct involvement in the present project, and he has no direct responsibility for the views I express.

Two experts on Kripke, Mario Gomez-Torrente and Mark Steiner, were good enough to provide comments on an earlier draft, and I have made use of their information and advice in several places, especially in connection with the tricky issues and contentious questions addressed in the middle chapters of this book. Arudra Burra also carefully reviewed the manuscript, and his comments on matters of presentation, from the perspective of an avowed non-expert – his specialty is philosophy of law, a topic rather far from any Kripke has treated, unless there is some real surprise waiting for the philosophical public among Kripke’s unpublished papers – have been most useful, persuading me to undertake any number of revisions of my original organizational plans.

The publisher’s external reviewers also provided useful reports, one full of cogent criticisms, and the other of welcome encouragement. The former moved me to revise many details of presentation, the latter confirmed my decision to stick to my chosen overall approach. Susan Beer, Neil de Cort, Emma Hutchinson, and David Winters of Polity were efficient and helpful throughout.

Saul Kripke’s most celebrated work, Naming and Necessity, culminates in a discussion of the mind–body problem, as will the present book. This central issue in modern philosophy goes right back to its origins with René Descartes, who, while not claiming to be able to prove that the mind or soul actually does survive death of the body, claimed to be able to prove at least that it possibly could. His materialist or physicalist opponents generally deny this possibility, maintaining that a living body, with a functioning brain, is necessary for conscious thought and feeling. When the issue is put this way, it is seen to be not just about mind and body, but also about possibility and necessity. Kripke’s greatest contribution to contemporary analytic philosophy is widely held to lie in his clarification of the nature of modality, the category to which the notions of possibility and necessity belong.

Above all, Kripke has striven to disentangle the notion of necessity from two other notions with which, over the course of two hundred years or so of philosophizing, it had tended to become conflated: the notions of the a priori, and of analyticity.¹ The notion of the necessary, which contrasts with the contingent, is the notion of what is and could not have failed to be; its home is metaphysics or the general theory of being. The notion of the a priori, which contrasts with the a posteriori, is the notion of what is known or knowable independently of sense-experience; its home is epistemology or the general theory of knowledge. The notion of the analytic, which contrasts with the synthetic, is the notion of what is true by virtue of meaning; its home is semantics or the general theory of meaning. It was Kripke’s achievement to convince many of the importance of carefully distinguishing these three notions.

It is not that before Kripke it had been wholly forgotten that the trio are at least conceptually distinct, but rather that the three notions generally tended to be assumed to be coextensive, exemplified by exactly the same cases, and accordingly the three labels generally tended to be treated as more or less freely interchangeable. It is not that no one ever mentioned in passing cases where one of these notions might seem to come apart from another, but rather that no one systematically explored the gaps between them in a way that made such gaps impossible for subsequent philosophers to ignore. That is what Kripke accomplished in Naming and Necessity.

That work was not written as a book. Rather, it consists of an edited transcript of an audiotape of a series of three lectures given at Princeton in January 1970, with the addition of footnotes and a section of addenda for publication in an anthology two years later as Kripke (1972), and of a further preface for republication in less expensive book form as Kripke (1980). Henceforth ‘N&N’ will refer indifferently to either version. The first lecture introduces the themes that will be developed in the others. Early on, Kripke has some preliminary remarks on the necessary, the a priori, and the analytic. It will be well to begin here also with a preliminary discussion of the three notions, familiarity with which will be presupposed in most subsequent chapters of this book. A preview of what is in those chapters will follow.

Background

The preliminary account of the necessary, the a priori, and the analytic to be presented here will have a different purpose from the preliminary discussion in Kripke. Kripke’s main aim is simply to remind his audience that the three notions are at least conceptually distinct, and that one should not just thoughtlessly use the three labels interchangeably. My aim is in large part to convey how high the stakes were when Kripke stepped up to deliver his three-lecture series, by presenting the issue in historical terms, as Kripke does not. This will involve indulging in broad-brush historical writing, of the kind in which virtually every assertion can be no more than a first approximation to some more complicated truth, a genre of writing that Kripke himself avoids.

One way to view the history of the dwindling of the necessary, in the thinking of many philosophers, first to the a priori and then to the analytic, is as a history of two centuries of attempts at demystification. The mystery of modality is how we can have knowledge of it. It is often hard enough to understand how we are able to know what is and what isn’t; but how can we, beyond that, know that some but not others of the things there are had to have been, or that some but not others of the things there aren’t might have been? The eventual conflation of necessity with analyticity can be viewed as in large part the result of attempts to solve or resolve or dissolve this mystery. I will briefly trace the relevant history from this point of view through three key eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth-century thinkers: Immanuel Kant, Gottlob Frege, and Rudolf Carnap.

Kant, whose Inaugural Dissertation came exactly two centuries before Kripke’s lectures, and whose famous Critique of Pure Reason followed in the next decade, takes the necessary, the a priori, and the analytic to be distinct classifications. All analytic judgments are known a priori and everything known a priori is necessary, but there are necessities that are not known a priori, and a priori knowledge going beyond analytic judgments: In effect, the necessary properly includes the a priori, which in turn properly includes the analytic. Let me illustrate how these distinctions work for Kant.

The existence of God, a stock example considered a necessary truth by Kant’s ‘rationalist’ predecessors such as Descartes or Leibniz, is still believed to be one by Kant, but for Kant it is supposed to be an example of a necessary truth that is unknowable. Kant thought it important for morality – never mind why, for this is not the place to go into Kant’s moral philosophy, nor am I the person to do so – that there should be such unknowable truths. He famously wrote, ‘I have had to deny knowledge in order to leave room for belief’ (Kant 1929, B3). Of course, for necessary truths that are unknowable, there is no mystery about how they are known: They aren’t. For Kant, the existence of God is a necessary truth that is not a priori, and not a posteriori, either, for that matter, since the distinction between a priori and a posteriori, or ‘pure’ and ‘empirical,’ is for Kant a distinction between two kinds of knowledge.²

That seven plus five makes twelve is, by contrast, for Kant an example of a known necessity: We know not only that seven plus five is twelve, but also that it couldn’t have been anything else. Kant, indeed, counts all of mathematical science, both arithmetical and geometrical, as a body of known necessary truths. Kant observes that experience, our greatest source of knowledge, seems unable to give us knowledge that mathematical truths hold of necessity. He gives the canonical formulation of the mystery of modality in a line that Kripke quotes in the addenda to N&N: ‘Experience teaches us that a thing is thus and so, but not that it cannot be otherwise’ (Kant 1929, B3). Kant concludes that knowledge of necessity must be pure or a priori, as opposed to empirical or a posteriori, and indeed he virtually identifies the two classifications of known necessities and a priori truths (apart from the purely verbal point that it is our knowledge that is called a priori and what it is knowledge of that is called necessary). So for him the mystery of modality takes the form of the question: How is a priori knowledge possible?

Well, in one special case he thinks the question not so hard to answer. The special case in question is that of knowledge of certain trivial truths of the form ‘All As are Bs,’ where being a B is simply part of the concept of being an A. That is Kant’s definition of analyticity. Later philosophers, preferring linguistic-sounding talk to psychological-sounding talk, prefer to put it slightly differently: Being a B is simply part of the meaning of being an A. Kant’s examples of analytic judgments are notoriously very bad,³ and it is customary to substitute for them the example ‘All bachelors are unmarried.’ To know this we need not know anything about objects outside us, but only the content of our own concepts, or the meanings of our own words, and that is why examples like this one are for Kant easy cases. Arithmetic, and Euclidean geometry, and even some principles of Newtonian physics, Kant by contrast supposes to be equally known a priori, but synthetic. So his final formulation of the mystery of modality, excluding the trivial case where he thinks there is no serious problem, is just this: How is synthetic a priori knowledge possible? This is the central question of Kant’s theoretical philosophy. Fortunately, for present purposes there is no need to go into his very complicated answer.

Let us instead move forward a century or so to Frege. Frege was the author of the work that founded modern logic, the Begriffsschrift or Concept-Writing, and was besides the grandfather of the analytic tradition in philosophy, the style of philosophizing that prevails in academic departments of philosophy in the English-speaking world today. Early on in the book he explains in the following words why he will have no symbols for necessity or possibility in his conceptual notation: ‘By saying that a proposition is necessary, I give a hint about the grounds for my judgment. But … this does not affect the conceptual content of the judgment’ (Frege 1967, §4). Thus the classification as necessary or otherwise is for Frege a classification pertaining to how something is known, and in this he is typical of much of later analytic philosophy. By a hundred years after Kant, Kant’s supposed unknowable necessities have generally dropped out of the discussion, and the necessary, if not forgotten altogether, as it effectively is by Frege, is identified with what is known or knowable a priori.⁴ Frege does still distinguish the a priori from the analytic, since he accepts Kant’s claim that geometry is synthetic a priori, but we are at this stage down from three notions to two.

Frege has a new conception of analyticity. For Frege, even in a simple example like ‘All bachelors are unmarried’ there are two components to be distinguished. Pure formal logic teaches us that all unmarried men are unmarried, while our knowledge of the definition or meaning of ‘bachelor’ tells us that we may substitute it as a synonym for ‘unmarried man.’⁵ So for Frege, the analytic is what follows by logic from definitions, or what reduces to logic on substituting synonyms for synonyms. Because his logic is vastly richer than anything available in Kant’s day or indeed in the whole previous history of the subject, his concept of analyticity is vastly broader than Kant’s. In consequence, he is prepared to reject one of Kant’s examples of the synthetic a priori by reclassifying arithmetic, after a searching examination of its foundations and basic laws, as analytic. Fortunately, for present purposes there is no need to go into Frege’s very complicated arguments on this point, or the even more complicated revised arguments offered by Bertrand Russell after he found a flaw in Frege’s work.

Let us instead move forward a half-century or so to Frege’s one-time student Carnap. Carnap was the most influential representative of the logical positivist or logical empiricist school of the nineteen twenties through forties, but his views on issues relevant to the present discussion were shared well beyond that school. For Carnap, as for other positivists, Kant’s whole classification synthetic a priori has been rejected: Every supposed example has been reclassified either as analytic or else as a posteriori. In particular, in the wake of Frege and Russell, arithmetic is taken to be analytic; while in the wake of Einstein, the question whether the geometry of the physical space in which we live and move is Euclidean or non-Euclidean is agreed to be empirical or a posteriori. So the necessary, having first dwindled to the a priori, now dwindles to the analytic, and we are down from three notions to one.

In Carnap (1947), among other writings going back to the nineteen thirties and with roots even earlier, ‘the Leibnizian concept of necessity’ and ‘the Kantian concept of analyticity,’ as he calls them, are explicitly assimilated to each other. A common ‘rational reconstruction’ or ‘explication’ is offered for both: in effect, a new analysis of analyticity. With Frege’s notion it is really not so very clear why we should be able to have analytic knowledge. The problem is not with knowledge of definitions or synonymy or meaning, which presumably we acquire as we learn our language. The problem is with knowledge of logic, given that logic has been vastly expanded. For Carnap, however, our knowledge of logic, too, is ultimately a matter of knowledge of meaning: of the meanings of the logical particles ‘not’ and ‘and’ and ‘or’ and ‘all’ and ‘some’ and so on. Given this linguistic doctrine of logical truth, analyticity becomes simply ‘truth by virtue of meaning.’

And the mystery of modality seems to be solved: We are able to know, for instance, that seven plus five is necessarily twelve, that in no circumstances could seven plus five turn out to be anything other than twelve, simply because we recognize that the rules and conventions of our language, which we have implicitly learned in learning to speak, do not allow any circumstances to be described as ones in which seven plus five has turned out to be something other than twelve. While this sort of view, and the identification of necessity with analyticity, is especially explicit and prominent in the positivist Carnap, it is not limited to Carnap or the positivists, but is found throughout much of analytic philosophy – down to the time of Kripke.⁶

Kripke’s achievement has been to reverse the whole development I have just roughly sketched, thus reinstating the mystery of modality, previously erroneously thought to have been dissolved. (He also offers some hints toward a new solution.) According to Kripke, the whole line of thought from Kant to Frege to Carnap went wrong at its very first step. Kant’s claim that experience does not teach us that something could not have been otherwise may be plausible if what is meant is that sense-experience by itself is not sufficient to teach us that something is necessary, that some additional a priori element is required. But in classifying knowledge of necessity as a priori, Kant has in effect assumed experience is never required, in addition to any a priori element, to teach us that something is necessary. This is definitely a mistake, according to Kripke. Most philosophers circa 1970 found it difficult to conceive of cases where experience would be required to establish necessity, but Kripke in N&N presents many plausible examples of such a posteriori necessities.

Kripke also holds that there are, besides a posteriori truths that are necessary, also a priori truths that are contingent. In the end, the only connection among the three notions that Kripke accepts is that whatever is analytic is also a priori and necessary. Thus an a posteriori necessity or an a priori contingency will be synthetic. So will be the disjunction of two unrelated examples of these types, though such a disjunction is both a priori and necessary. And so the analytic is properly contained in the overlap of the a priori and the necessary, giving a Kripkean picture sharply contrasting with the Kantian or Fregean or Carnapian.

Plan

Let me now describe the plan of this book: the topics and texts to be discussed and the order in which they will be taken. N&N consists of three lectures, and three chapters, constituting the first half of this book, will be devoted to it here, interspersed with some discussion of pertinent lesser works of Kripke’s.⁷ Kripke opens his lectures by saying, ‘I hope that some people see some connection between the two topics of my title.’ Perhaps some did; surely many did not. That there should turn out to be a connection between the question of the meaning of proper names and the question of the nature of necessity was for many one of the great surprises of the lecture series. Kripke was not, however, the first to see a connection between the seemingly arcane linguistic topic of naming and a resonant philosophical topic like necessity. On the contrary, several of his philosophical predecessors, seeing some such connection or other, had already involved themselves with the linguistic issue. Notable among these predecessors were John Stuart Mill (otherwise best known for his work as political theorist and reformer) and Frege (otherwise best known for his work on the foundations of logic and arithmetic, already alluded to above). Their views on naming Kripke takes as foils to his own.

The first two chapters in this book will both be concerned with what Kripke has to say about Mill, Frege, and naming in the first two lectures of N&N. Rather than dealing with the first lecture in Chapter 1 and the second lecture in Chapter 2, I will deal in Chapter 1 with the parts of both lectures that do not involve modality, and in Chapter 2 with the parts of both that do. This way of proceeding involves a deliberate unraveling, in hopes of making logical relationships clearer, of two strands of argument that in Kripke are tightly intertwined.

The first two lectures taken together offer both Kripke’s new picture of how naming works (with criticism of the older pictures it seeks to replace), and what arise therefrom, Kripke’s first examples of a posteriori necessities. Chapter 3 will take up Kripke’s third lecture, in which he vastly expands the range of examples of a posteriori necessities. The same chapter will take briefer note of the addenda to the lectures, in which Kripke offers a hint toward a new solution to the mystery of how we are able to acquire knowledge of necessity and possibility, even after recognizing that the route of reducing the necessary to the a priori and the a priori to the analytic is closed. It is in these parts of his work that Kripke’s most intriguing discussions of the nature of necessity are to be found.

The contents of the second half of this book will be more mixed. Philosophers in the analytic tradition give a good deal of attention to what they frankly call ‘puzzles’ of one sort or another. Generally there is some deeper purpose, some wider moral to be drawn from the puzzling example, though it would be idle to pretend that philosophers only ever engage with puzzles because they have some deeper purpose clearly in view, and never for the sheer challenge of the puzzle itself. Kripke in particular is a philosopher who has never hesitated to digress from work on deep mysteries to work on well-known puzzles, or new ones of his own creation. Chapter 4 will deal with the best known, most-discussed of Kripke’s puzzles, the ‘Puzzle about Belief’ from the paper of that title (Kripke 1979).⁸ There is indeed a ‘deeper purpose and wider moral’ connected with this puzzle, for it is connected with certain questions about naming left hanging in N&N, and so there will be in this chapter a final discussion of naming.

Returning to more direct confrontation with the issue of the nature of necessity, at the moment when the mystery of modality erroneously seemed to have been solved, it appeared that the source of necessity lay in ourselves, and was traceable back to the rules of our language. But the notion of ‘rule’ itself conceals mysteries. It was supposed by many philosophers that the necessity of, say, the laws of arithmetic could be explained by saying that those laws simply follow from linguistic rules. But what sort of a fact is it that they thus follow? Embarrassingly, it would seem to be a necessary fact, and one the source of whose necessity cannot lie in ourselves. Kripke’s subtle thinking about such elusive problems, insofar as it available to us in print, takes the form of a commentary, Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language (Kripke 1982), on key sections of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations. That Kripke should present his own views only in the context of discussion of another thinker is from one point of view rather unfortunate, because in the literature the examination of Kripke’s views has all too often been neglected in favor of debates over purely exegetical issues, over whether Kripke has got Wittgenstein right. Chapter 5 offers a summary or outline of Kripke’s views on rules that leaves entirely to one side all exegetical questions about Wittgenstein, a summary or outline that it is hoped will help make it clearer that Kripke’s views on this topic are by no means as disconnected from his views on necessity and related issues as they may at first appear.

Chapter 6 takes up Kripke’s contributions to the philosophy of mind, his criticisms of the currently fashionable views known as physicalism and functionalism, criticisms based on considerations developed in part in the course of his study of naming and necessity and in part in the course of his reading of Wittgenstein. Kripke has so far published only fragments of his work on these topics: a compressed, rushed discussion of physicalism at the very end of N&N, a single long footnote on functionalism in the Wittgenstein book that amounts to a little more than one full page of small type, and a remark or two in some very recently published work. What Kripke has to say about the mystery of the relation of mind and body is suggestive, but it cannot become compelling without the release of more currently unpublished material; and so the discussion of Kripke’s work in philosophy ends with hopes for the future, but a question mark for the present. Two optional appendices on Kripke’s work in logic then follow.

Appendix A will offer a semipopular account of the nature of Kripke’s technical work on modal logic. If by the time Kripke stepped down after delivering the third of his Princeton lectures on naming and necessity he had become a very prominent figure indeed in analytic metaphysics and epistemology, even before he stepped up to deliver the first lecture he was already a very prominent figure in logic. He was famous most of all, and from well before he presented any philosophical work on the substantive nature of modality, for his technical work on the formal logic of modality. It is this early work that repopularized Leibniz’s old talk, never perhaps entirely forgotten, but no longer very often echoed before Kripke, of necessity as ‘truth in all possible worlds.’ This usage has since, for good or ill, become ubiquitous among philosophers, even those with next to no interest in the technical side of modal logic, and the appendix will, among other things, show where it first came from.⁹

Appendix B will show Kripke’s grappling with one of the oldest and thorniest puzzles in philosophy and logic, the notorious liar paradox: If I say that I am speaking falsely, is what I say true or false? If the traditional attribution to the semi-legendary Cretan sage Epimenides can be believed, this paradox goes back to before the beginnings of logic itself. At the very least it goes back to Eubulides, a contemporary of logic’s founder Aristotle. Kripke’s work on this problem, as made available in his ‘Outline of a Theory of Truth’ (Kripke 1975), another transcript of an audiotape of a lecture, has again generated a large literature. I have tried to keep everything as nontechnical as possible, and for that reason have confined myself to no more than an outline of an outline of the ‘Outline,’ though it is hardly feasible to avoid all technicalities while still giving a genuine idea of the nature of Kripke’s contribution.¹⁰

Notes

1 What abstract noun should go with ‘a priori’ the way ‘necessity’ goes with ‘necessary’ and ‘analyticity’ with ‘analytic’? There is nothing really wrong with ‘aprioriness,’ but Kripke says ‘aprioricity,’ as if the phrase were ‘a prioric,’ while many commentators write ‘apriority,’ as if the phrase were ‘a prior.’ Other Latin prepositional phrases used in philosophy, such as ‘ex nihilo’ or ‘ad hominem’ or ‘in re’ and ‘ante rem,’ seem to be able to get along without corresponding abstract nouns and, so far as I am concerned, ‘a priori’ can do the same.

2 I owe such understanding as I have of the matters treated in this paragraph mainly to my colleague Desmond Hogan, though he is innocent of any responsibility for any misunderstandings on my part.

3 Kripke’s criticism of the example ‘Gold is a yellow metal’ will be recalled in Chapter 3.

4 One subtlety I am eliding but that Kripke discusses is the slide from ‘known’ to ‘knowable’ here, from treating the a priori as a division within actual knowledge to treating it as a division within potential knowledge. Where potential knowability outruns actual knowledge, it is always the abilities of human-like cognitive agents that are in question.

5 It is really only a synonym if we stretch ‘unmarried’ to mean ‘never married,’ but let us follow tradition and ignore this complication.

6 Its prevalence prior to 1970 is evident in several of the quotations that Kripke produces in N&N, where the philosopher quoted writes ‘necessary’ or ‘contingent’ when clearly ‘analytic’ or ‘synthetic’ is what is meant. Kripke has been so influential that there is for students of philosophy today a serious danger of anachronistic misreadings of earlier twentieth-century material, unless it is clearly recognized that the writers being read were for the most part simply oblivious to distinctions that philosophers since 1970 have thought crucial. The conflation, before Kripke, of the necessary, the a priori, and the analytic is a major theme of Scott Soames’s survey of the history of twentieth-century analytic philosophy (Soames 2003).

7 Notes in this section will merely provide references to other works of the present author where some of the issues discussed in this book are treated in a different way. To begin with, in case any reader has seen my previous account of N&N in Burgess (2006), I should say that though there is inevitably some overlap, I here consider N&N at fuller length and in the wider context of Kripke’s total œuvre, and with substantial attention to later developments, whereas the aim of the volume in which my earlier treatment appears is to provide concise, self-contained guides to specific works considered in themselves.

8 I have proposed a solution to the puzzle in a short note Burgess (2005), but will not insist upon the point of view of that note here.

9 The reader who would like to learn more, and is ready to tackle somewhat more technical material, may consult my fuller expositions in Burgess (2011a) or Burgess (2011c). From Burgess (2009), or any other textbook in the field today, one can see how absolutely central Kripke models have become.

10 My fuller outline of the ‘Outline’ can be found in Burgess (2011b), and the place of Kripke’s work in current thinking on the nature of truth is also discussed in chapters 7 and 8 of Burgess and Burgess (2011).