Saul Kripke Quotes on Knowledge
Kripke's Naming and Necessity (lectures 1970, book 1980) overturned the descriptivist theory of reference that had organized analytic philosophy of language since Frege and Russell. Proper names are rigid designators that pick out the same individual in every possible world in which that individual exists, and their reference is fixed not by the descriptions a speaker associates with them but by causal-historical chains running back to an original baptism. The result is the recovery of necessary a posteriori truths (water is H2O, Hesperus is Phosphorus) and the closely related contingent a priori (the meter is the length of the standard meter bar) that the prevailing Quinean orthodoxy had denied to be possible at all.
Quotes
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Attributed to Saul Kripke:
“A name is a rigid designator: it picks out the same object in every possible world in which that object exists.”
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Attributed to Saul Kripke:
“Identity statements between proper names, if true, are necessarily true.”
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Attributed to Saul Kripke:
“Necessity is a metaphysical, not an epistemological, notion.”
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Attributed to Saul Kripke:
“A statement can be necessary and yet known only a posteriori.”
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“It really is a nice theory. The only defect I think it has is probably common to all philosophical theories. It's wrong.”
Naming and Necessity (1980, p. 64) -
“If I use the name 'Hesperus' to refer to a certain planetary body when seen in a certain celestial position in the evening, it will not therefore be a necessary truth that Hesperus is ever seen in the evening. That depends on various contingent facts about people being there to see and things like that. So even if I should say to myself that I will use 'Hesperus' to name the heavenly body I see in”
Naming and Necessity (1980, p. 291)