Rigid Designator - Proper Names and Definite Descriptions

Proper Names and Definite Descriptions

The notion of rigid designation was first introduced by Saul Kripke in the lectures that became Naming and Necessity, in the course of his argument against descriptivist theories of reference, building on the work of Ruth Barcan Marcus. At the time of Kripke's lectures, the dominant theories of reference in Analytic philosophy (associated with the theories of Gottlob Frege and Bertrand Russell) held that the meaning of sentences involving proper names could be given by substituting a contextually appropriate description for the name. Russell, for example, famously held that someone who had never met Otto von Bismarck might know of him as the first Chancellor of the German Empire, and if so, his statement that (say) "Bismarck was a ruthless politician" should be understood to mean "The first Chancellor of the German Empire was a ruthless politician" (which could in turn be analysed into a series of more basic statements according to the method Russell introduced in his theory of definite descriptions). Kripke argued — against both the Russellian analysis and several attempted refinements of it — that such descriptions could not possibly mean the same thing as the name "Bismarck," on the grounds that proper names such as "Bismarck" always designate rigidly, whereas descriptions such as "the first Chancellor of the German Empire" do not. Thus, for example, it might have been the case that Bismarck died in infancy. If so, he would not have ever satisfied the description "the first Chancellor of the German Empire," and (indeed) someone else probably would have. It does not follow that the first Chancellor of the German Empire may not have been the first Chancellor of the German Empire—that is (at least according to its surface-structure) a contradiction. Kripke argues that the way that proper names work is that when we make statements about what might or might not have been true of Bismarck, we are talking about what might or might not have been true of that particular person in various situations, whereas when we make statements about what might or might not have been true of, say, the first Chancellor of the German Empire we could be talking about what might or might not have been true of whoever would have happened to fill that office in those situations.

The "could" here is important to note: rigid designation is a property of the way terms are used, not a property of the terms themselves, and some philosophers, following Keith Donnellan, have argued that a phrase such as "the first Chancellor of the German Empire" could be used rigidly, in sentences such as "the first Chancellor of the German Empire could have decided never to go into politics." Kripke himself doubted that there was any need to recognize rigid uses of definite descriptions, and argued that Russell's notion of scope offered all that was needed to account for such sentences. But in either case, Kripke argued, nothing important in his account depends on the question (see: Naming and Necessity p. 6n8, p. 59n22). Whether definite descriptions can be used rigidly or not, they can at least sometimes be used non-rigidly, but a proper name can only be used rigidly; the asymmetry, Kripke argues, demonstrates that no definite description could give the meaning of a proper name—although it might be used to explain who a name refers to (that is, to "fix the referent" of the name).