Lecture 1 - Naming and Necessity (some notes) part i

I'm reading through Naming and Necessity(hereafter N&N) for my paper on referring to God. N&N consists of three lectures by Saul Kripke, then after the lectures were transcribed he came back and wrote the preface. Kripke recommends that one read N&N in order of the lectures then read the preface. This is what I will do, starting with lecture 1, this morning, or this night, depending upon who you are.

One thing to remember about Kripke, he's a genius, a scary genius. However, he is notorious about having really thin-skin and not being able to withstand criticism. So there are many good and helpful arguments that he could attempt that would advance philosophy in general, that Kripke will not make. Simply, because Kripke can't stand criticism. So, many arguments that Kripke makes in N&N could be stronger, but to avoid being wrong, Kripke, hedges, haws, and hems.

Terminology:
'name' - proper name
'designator' - names and descriptions
'referent of the description' - the object uniquely satisfying the conditions in the definite description

Kripke's first substantive claim is that names are not definite descriptions. For Kripke, the form of a definite description is 'the x such that Fx'. However, The Holy Roman Empire and The United Nations aren't descriptions but names. This claim doesn't seem to be that controversial unless one is committed to a two-dimensional semantics of a sort.

Perhaps in mind here is Bertrand Russell (perhaps Frege too). For Russell, 'Walter Scott' is an abbreviation. The only names that exist are demonsratives such as 'this' or 'that' used in a particular manner when the speaker is acquainted with the object. Kripke differs from Russell, in that for Kripke names are not logically proper names and that descriptions have a sense. For a descriptivist theory of names, 'Napoleon' = 'the emperor of the French in the early part of the ninetheenth century; he was eventually defeated at Waterloo'. One of the problems with this theory that even Frege conceded is that names can have different senses. For instance 'Aristotle' could have the sense of 'the student of Plato' and another sense of 'the teacher of Alexander'. These senses are only contingent properties of Aristotle. So perhaps what we associate with names are really cluster of properties.

These clusters (Kripke also refers to them as families) can be used to either give meaning to a name, or fix the referent of the name. Really all the clusters can do is fix the referent of the name. For if we were to say, 'Aristotle didn't exist', then we would be saying something like, 'Aristotle has no meaning' which is a meaningless statement. So, the only option for the cluster theory is that it fixes reference.