Table Of ContentTHE NEW THEORY OF REFERENCE
SYNTHESE LIBRARY
STUDIES IN EPISTEMOLOGY,
LOGIC, METHODOLOGY, AND PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE
Managing Editor:
JAAKKO HINTIKKA, Boston University
Editors:
DIRK V AN DALEN, University of Utrecht, The Netherlands
DONALD DAVIDSON, University of California, Berkeley
THEO A.F. KUIPERS, University ofGroningen, The Netherlands
PATRICK SUPPES, Stanford University, California
JAN WOLEN-SKI, Jagielionian University, KrakOw, Poland
THE NEW THEORY OF
REFERENCE:
KRIPKE, MARCUS, AND
ITS ORIGINS
Edited by
PAUL W. HUMPHREYS
University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA, U S.A.
and
JAMES H. FETZER
University of Minnesota, Duluth, MN, US.A .
.....
"
SPRINGER-SCIENCE+BUSINESS MEDIA, B.V.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.
ISBN 978-0-7923-5578-6 ISBN 978-94-011-5250-1 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-94-011-5250-1
Printed on acid-free paper
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© 1998 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
Originally published by Kluwer Academic Publishers in 1998
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1s t edition 1998
No part ofthis publication may be reproduced or
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
PAUL W. HUMPHREYS and JAMES H. FETZER / Introduction vii
PART I: THE APA EXCHANGE
1. QUENTIN SMITH / Marcus, Kripke, and the Origin of the New
Theory of Reference 3
2. SCOTT SOAMES / Revisionism about Reference: A Reply to Smith 13
3. QUENTIN SMITH / Marcus and the New Theory of Reference:
A Reply to Scott Soames 37
PART II: REPLIES
4. SCOTT SOAMES / More Revisionism about Reference 65
5. JOHN P. BURGESS / Marcus, Kripke, and Names 89
6. JOHN P. BURGESS / How Not to Write History of Philosophy:
A Case Study 125
7. QUENTIN SMITH / Direct, Rigid Designation and A Posteriori
Necessity: A History and Critique 137
PART III: HISTORICAL ORIGINS
8. DAGFINN F0LLESDAL / Referential Opacity and Modal Logic,
§§ 16-19 181
9. STEN LINDSTROM / An Exposition and Development of Kanger's
Early Semantics for Modal Logic 203
10. QUENTIN SMITH / A More Comprehensive History ofthe New
Theory of Reference 235
Name Index 285
Subject Index 287
v
PAUL W. HUMPHREYS AND JAMES H. FETZER
INTRODUCTION
On January 20th, 22nd, and 29th, 1970 Saul Kripke delivered three lectures at
Princeton University. They produced something of a sensation. In the lectures
he argued, amongst other things, that many names in ordinary language
referred to objects directly rather than by means of associated descriptions;
that causal chains from language user to language user were an important
mechanism for preserving reference; that there were necessary a posteriori and
contingent a priori truths; that identity relations between rigid designators
were necessary; and argued, more tentatively, that materialist identity theories
in the philosophy of mind were suspect. Interspersed with this was a consider
able amount of material on natural kind terms and essentialism. As a result of
these lectures and a related 1971 paper, 'Identity and Necessity' (Kripke
[1971]), talk of rigid designators, Hesperus and Phosphorus, meter bars, gold
and H 0, and suchlike quickly became commonplace in philosophical circles
2
and when the lectures were published under the title Naming and Necessity in
the collection The Semantics of Natural Language (Davidson and Harman
[1972]), that volume became the biggest seller in the Reidel (later Kluwer) list.l
The cluster of theses surrounding the idea that a relation of direct reference
exists between names and their referents2 is now frequently referred to as 'The
New Theory of Reference'. 3
On December 28, 1994, Quentin Smith read a paper at the Eastern Division
meetings of the American Philosophical Association that produced a different
kind of sensation. In his paper, Smith suggested that most of the major ideas in
the New Theory of Reference had been developed by Ruth Barcan Marcus in
the period between 1946 and 1961.4 Smith argued that Kripke had erroneously
been given credit for these ideas and, more contentiously, that Kripke had
heard some of these ideas at a lecture Marcus gave in February 1962, had
unconsciously assimilated them (while not properly understanding them at the
time) and had later incorporated them into his Princeton lectures.
Word of Smith's paper had spread before the meetings and, perhaps
attracted by a provocative sentence in the published abstract,5 an overflow
crowd assembled to hear the session. The proceedings were in sharp contrast to
the sleepy atmosphere prevailing at most APA sessions. Smith was heckled by
some members of the audience, others shouted down the chairman when he
tried to limit the length of Smith's responses, and a few listeners walked out in
apparent protest. The task of responding to Smith fell to Scott Soames6 who, in
Vll
viii PAUL W. HUMPHREYS AND JAMES H. FETZER
a paper twice as long as Smith's, provided a detailed set of arguments designed
to show that all of Smith's claims on Marcus' behalf were groundless. Smith
then read, in great haste due to time constraints, a response to Soames that was
itself almost as long as Soames' reply. The session lasted for three hours and the
polarized differences of opinion about the merits of the case - and the propriety
of holding the session at all - continued to be discussed in the hallways at the
convention, in a lead story in a mass circulation magazine,7 in letters to the
editor of the APA Proceedings,8 and elsewhere.9
It is important to note that although Smith apparently was the first to
publicly argue the misattribution claims, his paper did not emerge from a
vacuum. In particular, at least as early as the mid-1980's, Ruth Marcus had
sent out many copies of an eight page letter in which she made a case for her
own priority in many of these matters.
10
What tended to be lost in the acrimonious debate were several important
historical questions: how did the various ideas that are now known as the New
Theory of Reference come to be developed? Was the picture conveyed by the
casual attributions in the literature, that Kripke had created the theory from
whole cloth, accurate? Was, as Smith originally claimed, the theory essentially
due to Marcus or was the true history one of a cumulative set of contributions
by various philosophers, with a particularly successful version of the theory
eventually augmented by and effectively dramatized by Kripke? These are
serious questions and ones familiar to historians dealing with older ideas. In
the interests of starting an objective discussion of this question, we decided to
publish the original APA papers in Synthese. We had originally planned to
devote a second issue of Synthese to this topic, but the first issue generated so
much interest that we arranged for the present collection of papers to be
published in place of that second issue. This is an especially appropriate venue,
for many of the original papers that bear on the issue originally appeared either
in Synthese or in The Synthese Library.
ADVICE TO THE READER
Because much of this dispute inevitably revolves around published work, one
must be careful to note which version of a text is the relevant one. Both
Kripke's and Marcus' work have been reprinted, sometimes many times, and
changes and additions have been made in some of them, often by the authors
themselves. So a few words of caution might be helpful to those readers - of
whom we hope there will be many - who wish to read the original sources and
to make up their own minds on the merits of the arguments presented in the
collection.
Marcus' paper 'Modalities and Intensional Languages' was presented at a
meeting of the Boston Colloquium for the Philosophy of Science in February
1962. II It was published in an issue of Synthese XIII, noA (December 1961),
pp.303-322, followed by Quine's response, op. cit., pp. 323-330. As often
INTRODUCTION IX
happens with academic journals, that issue did not actually appear in print
until some time later.12 However, some reprintings of Marcus' paper, e.g., in
her collection Modalities (Marcus, 1993) and especially in Zabeeh et al. (1974),
pp. 838-853, contain changes and additions and are thus not reliable sources
for historical research. In addition, a considerable portion of the disagreement
between Smith and Soames revolves around remarks made by Marcus and
Kripke during the discussion that occurred after Quine's response to Marcus'
paper 'Modalities and Intensional Languages', this discussion being published
in Synthese XIV, nos. 2/3 (September 1962), pp. 132-143. Naturally, the
arguments of Smith, Soames, and others were based on the published
transcript of that discussion (Marcus et al. (1962)).
Having discovered that the early sessions of the Boston Colloquium were
recorded on audio tape, we became curious as to whether the original
recording of the discussion still existed. After an extended search, Robert S.
Cohen, a former Director of the Boston Colloquium, located a large collection
of unlabelled tapes and sent them to us. The relevant discussion turned out to
be on the last tape sampled and a direct transcription was made from the
tape. \3 It turned out that there were major differences between what was
actually said at the discussion and what was eventually published in Synthese,
most notably in the contributions of Ruth Marcus. Indeed, even a contempor
ary transcript that was circulated to the participants for approval contains
many inaccuracies, omissions and changes. 14
We had originally hoped to include our new transcript as part of this
collection. To this end we circulated a letter to all the participants in the
original discussion informing them of our intention. Shortly thereafter, both
editors were informed by Professor Marcus that she was adamantly opposed to
our publishing the new transcript. As of this date, Professor Marcus is the only
person who has voiced any objection to us about our publishing the new
transcript. We hope, nevertheless, that at some point in the future this
important part of the historical record will be made available to the philoso
phical community through an appropriate forum.
THE PAPERS
Some comments are necessary on a few of the papers in order to provide
relevant background information. The first section here, Part I, reproduces, as
far as possible, the papers read at the 1994 APA session.ls Smith's paper is
reprinted in its original form, with an addition to one footnote. The response by
Scott Soames now includes four notes that were not part of the original.
Consequently, with full concurrence on both sides, Quentin Smith has included
replies to this new material in his response to Soames. These are clearly
identified in the text.
Part II begins with a new paper by Scott Soames that expands upon the
criticisms he made in 1994 of Smith's arguments. This is followed by two
x PAUL W. HUMPHREYS AND JAMES H. FETZER
papers by John Burgess. The first (originally published in Philosophical Studies,
reprinted here with an additional footnote) directly addresses the extent to
which, if at all, Marcus' work anticipates Kripke's. This is followed by a second
paper by Burgess in which he attacks the historiographical methods used by
Smith in his two APA papers. The section concludes with a third paper by
Smith extending his earlier arguments and responding to Soames' and Burgess'
previously published papers.
Part III begins with an excerpt from Dagfinn F011esdal's dissertation
Referential Opacity and Modal Logic. F011esdal's dissertation was submitted to
the Harvard University philosophy department on April 3 1961.16 It has
previously been available only in a mimeographed version, containing slight
revisions and additions, from Oslo University Press (F011esdal (1966)).
F011esdal's work is especially interesting because one finds in it explicit
assertions of theses that later become widely accepted. One important example
is this:
"This solution leads us to regard a word as a proper name of an object only if it refers to this one
and the same object in all possible worlds. This does not seen unnatural. Neither does it seem
preposterous to assume as we just did, that if a name-like word does not stick to one and the same
object in all possible worlds, the word contains some descriptive element.! eThis attitude towards
proper names is not unlike that of [Neil] Wilson e.g., in The Concept ofL anguage.}" (Ff1JllesdaI1961
§17)
Here, the proper names are terms such as 'Hesperus' and 'Phosphorus' and
the quoted sentences occur in the course of a lengthy collection of arguments
designed to show that a definite description ~[X(r, can be treated as a genuine
singular term if and only if the condition, ~3yDllx(¢>(x) == x = yr, holds. In
addition, the characteristic formula, IIxlly(x = y J D(x = y)), can also be
preserved and substitutivity of identity can be maintained in modal contexts
with an ontology of non-intensional objects if this condition is imposed. There
is much of interest here, including a discussion of 'Aristotelian essentialism',
but the reader can make his or her own way through the material.
Next is Sten Lindstrom's paper on the development of modal semantics in
the 1950's, focussing on the contributions of the Swedish logician Stig Kanger
and of Saul Kripke, with attention given to work of Richard Montague and of
Jaakko Hintikka. These contributions are highly relevant to the development of
the New Theory. This is in part because the development of modal semantics
involves delicate issues of how to handle names and descriptions in modal
contexts and also because Quine's arguments against the very possibility of
modal logic rest, amongst other things, on the difficulties of quantifying in to
such modal contexts and on the role of referentially opaque contexts. More
over, individual variables can be viewed as the archetypes of rigid designation
(they have no descriptive content) and at least some of these priority disputes in
reference revolve around the differences between asserting, say, the necessity of
identity relations between variables and asserting the necessity of identity
relations between names. Lindstrom's careful analysis concludes that Kanger's
INTRODUCTION Xl
contributions to modal semantics (e.g., Kanger, 1957), which were made earlier
than Kripke's, are distinctive and different in kind. Lindstrom contends that
Kanger's semantics are adequate for logical necessities, whereas Kripke's are
adequate for metaphysical necessities. This part then concludes with a long,
final paper by Smith that attempts to put the central dispute into a broader
historical context.
We believe that there is more than enough material here to allow the reader to
decide which of the various claims to priority has merit. It would hardly be
surprising, however, if any attribution to a single figure turns out to be a gross
oversimplification. The historical development of ideas is often a subtle process
with contributions coming from many sources, even when individuals undeni
ably produce singularly creative advances. There is such a thing as philosophical
novelty, but modern philosophers rarely work in such isolation as to insulate
then from contemporary research. It is of great importance to properly attribute
ideas to their originators, and we hope that this collection has served that end.
THREE SUGGESTIONS
We conclude with three suggestions. First, that others who are interested in this
important period of twentieth-century philosophy would do well to continue
the research that is begun here in order to provide the philosophical commu
nity with a full account of the development of ideas that have been so
influential on contemporary philosophy. Secondly, that the philosophical
community develop more refined criteria for what counts as a genuinely novel
contribution to an area of research and for attributing ideas to one individual
rather than to another. This will not be an easy task, but it is one that is long
overdue and, if accomplished, might help to resolve heated debates that
disagreements over priority tend to generate. Thirdly, rather than suggesting
that the APA repress public discussion of these issues, it would be preferable
for that organization to formulate guidelines governing the appropriate
attribution of sources. It is our impression as editors of some experience that
many authors are very conscientious about citing sources, yet others are quite
negligent about this, where the number of those who need to be reminded to
cite prior work is growing. Such guidelines, which would have to rely on a
successful outcome to the second project above and would necessarily have to
be somewhat flexible, could then serve as a working standard for authors,
publishers, editors and referees.
August 29, 1997
Corcoran Department of Philosophy
University of Virginia
Department of Philosophy
University of Minnesota, Duluth
