Saul Kripke Quotes on Truth
Kripke's Outline of a Theory of Truth (1975) gave the most influential contemporary technical solution to the semantic paradoxes that had organized the philosophy of truth since Tarski. The construction defines truth not as a single classical predicate of a language but as a partial predicate built up through transfinite stages, with the liar sentence and other paradoxical constructions falling into the gap of sentences that are neither true nor false on the resulting valuation. The framework supplies the technical resources for a non-classical analysis of truth that preserves the intuitive desideratum that ordinary unproblematic sentences come out true or false in the standard way while accommodating the genuinely problematic cases that motivate the paradoxes.
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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Attributed to Saul Kripke:
“There can be no fact about meaning over and above the totality of past and present uses.”
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“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 the evening in yonder position of the sky, it will not be necessary that Hesperus was ever seen in the evening. But it may be a priori in that this is how I have determined the referent.”
Naming and Necessity (1980, p. 291) -
“I am somewhat uncertain whether there is a definite factual question as to whether natural language handles truth-value gaps … Nor am I even quite sure that there is a definite question of fact as to whether natural language should be evaluated by the minimal fixed point or another, given the choice of a scheme for handling gaps. We are not at the moment searching for the correct scheme.”
Philosophical Troubles (2011, p. 95)