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The New Theory of Reference: Kripke, Marcus, and Its Origins

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The New Theory of Reference: Kripke, Marcus, and Its Origins THE 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 AII Rights Reserved © 1998 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht Originally published by Kluwer Academic Publishers in 1998 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1998 No part ofthis publication may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, inc1uding photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permis sion from the copyright owner. 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 H20, and suchlike quickly became commonplace in philosophical circles 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.
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