4.3.1 Kripke, Putnam, Burge
InNaming and Necessity, having disposed of Frege-Russell descriptivism about names,
Kripke needed something to stand in its stead. In particular, he needed to answer the question ofhow it is that names refer to what they refer to. The Frege-Russell view is simple here: a name refers to whatever satisfies its associated description. But that leads to familiar mispredictions. If the associated description is the meaning of the name, then, were, say, the description associated with ’Alexander the Great’the teacher of Aristotle, the following would be false, or at least has a false reading:
(119) Aristotle might have never got into teaching.
Even if the description just determined the referent, we would still get bad results. Imagine Gödel hadn’t discovered incompleteness, but Schmidt had, and imagine the description associated with ’Gödel’ is the discoverer of incompleteness. Then ’Gödel’ would refer to Schmidt, which seems like the wrong result (though see below for dis- sent.).
As an alternative, Kripke famously proposes a picture about how our naming prac- tices work:
Someone, let’s say, a baby, is born; his parents call him by a certain name. They talk about him to their friends, Other people meet him. Through various sorts of talk the name is spread from link to link as if by a chain. A speaker who is on the far end of this chain, who has heard about, say Richard Feynman, in the market place or elsewhere, may be referring to Richard Feynman even though he can’t remember from whom he first heard of Feynman or from whom he ever heard of Feynman. (Kripke (1980, p. 91)) He then goes on to make some necessary conditions a bit more explicit: an initial
baptismtakes place (which could be by ostension or by description), and then the name
’is passed from link to link’, where a necessary condition of this passing is that the hearer and subsequent user intends to use the name with the same reference as the person he picked it up from: if I tell you about Napoleon, and on that basis you go on to refer to your pet aardvark with that name, you don’t get initiated in the usage (Kripke, 1980, p96).
To spell that out a bit more, think about the circumstances that attended my friend Kitty being named: her parents said, at some point, ’let’s call her Kitty’ (or something like that), and thus baptised her. Then they told their best friends, the X’s who straight- away could start asking ’how’s Kitty today?’, clearly using the name to refer to Kitty. These friends could go on to mention my friend’s parents had a child called Kitty to others (the Y’s), and thentheyin turn, could start using ’Kitty’ to refer to Kitty. What enables these Y’s to refer to Kitty is that they’re connected, in the right way, to her: they learnt her name from someone who learnt her name from someone who bestowed her name upon her. But this is not only an epistemic point about learning, but also a se- mantic point: the Y’s utterance of ’Kitty’meansKitty because they became competent
in the word’s use from someone who was connected to the bestowal of the name in the baptism.
We can see why, then, that it doesn’t matter whether it was Gödel or Schmidt who discovered incompleteness, since what determines whether a given speaker refers to Gödel is not her beliefs, but her standing in the appropriate chain of communication. Provided her use of ’Gödel’ eventually leads back to Kurt, as it presumably does, she refers to Gödel, regardless of what he did (or didn’t do). This is externalism about the content of names.
Next, let’s turn to Putnam (Putnam, 1975), who proposes externalism about natural kind terms. His argument goes by his famous twin earth thought experiment. In our world, the clear potable liquid in streams and the like is H2O. He asks us to imagine a world in which the clear, potable liquid were instead some other chemical element, say, XYZ. Let’s call that world Twin Earth. Apart from that difference, Twin Earth and Earth are the same in every other respect: in particular, there’s an identical copy of me now writing this chapter on Twin Earth . Now consider the sentence:
(120) Water is H2O
If I utter that sentence, then I have said something true; on the other hand, if my twin, TwinMatt, utters the sentence, he utters something false. For TwinMatt, ’water’ refers to XYZ, not to H20. Of course, I know, and thus my twin knows, the relevant factors about chemistry, and one might think that this prevents us from being identical copies. But we can easily get around this by changing the thought experiment. Imag- ine going back to some time prior to 1750 when the relevant chemical factors were not known,and consider two identical speakers, one on earth and the other on twin earth. Even then, Putnam says, they ’understood the term "water" differently in 1750although
they were in the same psychological state’ ( Putnam (1975, p. 141)). If the reference of an ex-
pression were determined by factors internal to the speaker, then two duplicates would refer to the same thing. But the preceding thought experiment is meant to establish this as false.
Finally, let’s turn to Burge’s famous discussion (Burge, 1979). He extends the Put- nam line of argument even further. Consider Alf, who has a sore thigh, and falsely believes that arthritis occurs in the thigh. When he utters
(121) Arthritis occurs in the thigh
He says something false. But imagine a world in which doctors used ’arthritis’ to refer to a different ailment, say tharthritis, which is a condition marked by pain in the thigh or joints. Moreover, imagine there were an identical ailing Alf in that world, who utters that sentence. Then, Burge says, he says something true, and refers to tharthritis in using ’arthritis’. But again, Alf and Twin Alf are internally identical: the both associate with ’arthritis’ something likethe ailment causing pain in the thighs and joints. If reference were determined by description, ’arthritis’ would mean the same in Alf and in Twin Alf’s mouths. The key point here is that a word like ’arthritis’ expresses adeferential
concept: what it means depends on what the relevant experts say it means (Burge thinks externalism extends beyond such concepts, but I won’t consider that here, as taking us too far off track). And so if one varies what the experts mean, without making any internal changes to a given language user, what that average user like Alf will mean will change too.
These arguments, of course, are not uncontroversial. It would take us too far afield to consider and respond to the various objections and replies one finds in the litera- ture1. If you’re already an externalist, then I’ll urge below that you accept externalism about metaphysical matters. If you’re not, I urge that you accept the conditional that if one is an externalist, then one should be an externalist about metaphysical matters.