Introducción A Kripke

Introduction to Kripke
Alan Berger
Kripke’s professional career began as a high school student when he

published his early pioneering work in logic on the semantics and
completeness proofs of the normal and non-normal modal systems. Not
much later, his seminal work on “Semantical Analysis of Intuitionistic
Logic” appeared. Shortly after that came his founding of transinite
recursion theory with his two classic papers, “Transinite Recursions
on Admissible Ordinals” and “Admissible Ordinals and the Analytic
Hierarchy.” Had he accomplished nothing else in his intellectual life,
Kripke would have already earned his claim to fame.
But his thoughts in what turned out to be his greatest area of
accomplishment, philosophy, were just beginning to gel. Already as a
college student he had the basic ideas of his classic seminal work, Naming
and Necessity, which was to revolutionize the ield of philosophy. The work
revealed what has become a hallmark of Kripke: his conceptual clarity
par excellence. While continuing to develop his ideas in mathematical
logic, he developed many important thoughts in philosophy. His work
on a new theory of truth for dealing with the Epimenides paradox (the
semantical paradox of the liar), on a puzzle about belief, and on his
novel interpretation of Wittgenstein on rules and private language have
dominated discussion and generated an industry on these topics.
Today, Kripke’s accomplishments span several areas of philosophy,
including epistemology; metaphysics; and philosophy of language, logic,
mathematics, and mind; as well as areas of mathematical logic and more
recently of linguistics as well. His work has also extended to important
scholarship in the history of twentieth-century philosophy and in the his-
tory of logic and set theory.
In his irst seminal work in philosophy, Naming and Necessity, Kripke
discusses his historical predecessors, Mill, Frege, and Russell, and
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2 Alan Berger
continues the debate regarding the meaning of proper names and

general names and their relation to determining the reference of these
terms. He defends a view of the reference of these terms akin to Mill’s
over the then-dominant view of Frege and Russell, but adds a new “pic-
ture” of how these terms have their reference determined. This so-called
new theory of reference (which is now more than forty years old and
should more properly be called “the new received view of reference”)
replaced the Frege and Russell received view of reference. This Kripkean
picture has done much to change our thinking about meaning and ref-
erence and the connection between these notions.
Kripke makes perhaps an even greater philosophical impact in Naming
and Necessity with his discussion of modalities. In particular, he clariies
the epistemic notion of apriority and the metaphysical notion of neces-
sity and the distinction between them. Contrary to the once received
view, he argues that not all a priori truths are necessary truths and vice
versa. His analysis of these notions has unquestionably changed our phil-
osophical thinking about them.
Kripke ends Naming and Necessity with an application of his views on
reference and necessity to philosophy of mind. He presents a novel
treatment of Cartesianism and a critique of naturalism in philosophy
of mind. In particular, he offers a critique of the once dominant view in
philosophy of mind, known as the identity thesis, a view that identiies
mental states, such as pain, with brain states.
In his book Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language, Kripke presents
a novel view of the late Wittgenstein’s challenge to the traditional pic-
ture of language as having truth conditions. He then presents a novel
interpretation of the late Wittgenstein’s view that language has assert-
ability conditions and of Wittgenstein’s defense of this view. Kripke
relates this to Humean skepticism. The book reveals a deep understand-
ing of Wittgenstein’s picture of the relation among language, mind, and
the world.
In his “A Puzzle about Belief,” Kripke shows how the ordinary way in
which we attribute belief to people leads to certain puzzles, which previ-
ously were thought to present a puzzle for anyone holding a view simi-
lar to Mill’s on names. This important work reveals further connections
between mind and language and has changed our philosophical outlook
about what are called propositional attitudes.
In what may be called “philosophical logic,” there simply isn’t a more
important and inluential igure in the current discipline. His work on
the semantics of modal logic and intuitionism and his outline of a theory
Introduction to Kripke 3
of truth have been the foundations for all that is contemporary and state-
of-the-art in philosophical logic.
There are many gifted logicians, but none that display Kripke’s keen
judgment regarding the nature of logic and its philosophical implica-
tions, especially with regard to the epistemic status of logic. Countering
views that are in vogue, Kripke shows the problems of viewing logic as
an empirical science and even of the coherency of claiming that we can
“adopt a logic,” whether for empirical or linguistic reasons.
Structure of the Book

Accordingly, this book on the philosophy of Saul Kripke contains the
following parts and chapters.
Part I. Naming, Necessity, and Apriority

Part I consists of the irst four chapters. Chapter 1, “Kripke on Proper
and General Names,” by Bernard Linsky, not only offers an original
interpretation of what Kripke means by the rigidity of a general term,
but also is a review of Kripke’s Naming and Necessity lectures, summarizing
the famous arguments and examples they introduced, with indications
of the lines of investigation that they initiated. Accordingly, this is a good
chapter for someone who does not have much familiarity with Kripke’s
views to read irst.
Linsky discusses at length Kripke’s famous refutation of the “cluster of
descriptions theory of proper names” with his well-known examples of
‘Jonah’, ‘Moses’, ‘Aristotle’, and ‘Gödel’ and ‘Schmidt’. The arguments
against the descriptions theory have come to be classiied as “modal,”
“epistemic,” and “semantic” arguments. Linsky summarizes notions that
Kripke’s own account of names introduced, such as “rigid designator,”
“baptism and chain of reference,” and “ixing the reference of a name
with a description.” He also summarizes Kripke’s arguments, which arise
from considering identity statements, for a priori contingent and a pos-
teriori necessary truths, in particular the necessity of identity and the
essentiality of origin. Whereas Kripke himself only claimed to offer a
“better picture” of names than the “cluster theory,” almost immediately
a range of theories were presented to ill out the picture. Linsky distin-
guishes several of these attempts to ill out what Kripke had introduced,
including the “causal-historical theory of reference” and the “theory of
direct reference.”
4 Alan Berger
Naming and Necessity also introduced the view that natural kind terms
and some general terms are also rigid designators, including ‘water’,
‘tiger’, and ‘lightning’. Linsky’s survey of Naming and Necessity concludes
with a defense of the very notion of a kind or general term being a rigid
designator against recent arguments from Soames. The inal section
addresses Kripke’s discussion of deinite descriptions, in particular the
account of Donnellan’s “referential/attributive” distinction in the 1977
paper “Speaker’s Reference and Semantic Reference.”
As presented here, the wider importance of the Naming and Necessity
lectures came from their application to issues outside the narrow dialec-
tic of descriptions and Millian names that had bounded the discussion
through Russell, Frege, and Strawson, and on to Searle with the cluster
theory. With the sharp distinction between the mechanism that deter-
mines the referent of a name and what descriptive properties might
pick out that referent, Kripke made it possible to consider metaphysical
issues separately from the epistemic issues with which they had been so
closely associated. Whereas Quine’s “jungle of Aristotelian essentialism”
was thus opened to exploration, more immediate results came from
the clearing away of possible objections to the thesis of the necessity
of identity. As will be seen in the following chapters, Kripke’s theory of
proper and general names also had consequences in many other areas
of philosophy.
In Chapter 2, “Fiction, Myth, and Reality,” Nathan Salmon argues
that Kripke’s account of names from iction illuminates, but exacer-
bates, the perennial problem of true singular negative existentials: An
atomic sentence is true only if its subject term designates; and yet (S)
‘Sherlock Holmes is nonexistent’ is true only if its subject term does
not designate. In his 1973 John Locke lectures, on vacuous names and
names in iction, Kripke argues that natural-language discourse about
(not within) iction posits a realm of abstract entities, ictional characters,
supposedly created by storytellers. He contends further that a proper
name from iction, such as ‘Holmes’, is ambiguous between a primary
(in a “primordial” sense), typically object-ictional use – ‘Holmes1’ – on
which it is non-designating and therefore without semantic content,
and a secondary (in a non-primordial sense), metaictional use –
‘Holmes2’ – on which it names the character. He says further that in
(S), the name has its primary use, which is “quasi-intensional,” with the
result that (S) typically expresses that there is no true proposition that
Holmes1 exists. But this contention is subject to the same dificulty as
the original sentence, since the ‘that’-clause is a non-designating term
on a par with ‘Holmes1’. Salmon proposes an alternative account on

which ‘Holmes’ univocally designates the character, and (S), although
false, is often used to convey correct information that it does not seman-
tically express.
In Chapter 3, “Kripke on Epistemic and Metaphysical Possibility: Two
Routes to the Necessary A Posteriori,” Scott Soames argues that Naming
and Necessity and “Identity and Necessity” contain two routes to neces-
sary a posteriori truths. On the irst, they are necessary truths that pred-
icate essential properties of objects or kinds that the objects or kinds
can be known to possess only a posteriori. This encompasses all putative
instances of the Kripkean necessary a posteriori – including necessary a
posteriori statements of non-identity (as in ‘Saul Kripke ≠ David Kaplan’),
and necessary a posteriori identity statements involving a simple name
or natural kind term plus a descriptive constituent (as in ‘Water is the
substance instances of which are made up of molecules with two hydro-
gen atoms and one oxygen atom’). Simple identities such as ‘Hesperus
is Phosphorus’ and ‘woodchucks are groundhogs’, Soames claims, are
left out of this picture.
The second route, Soames maintains, commits Kripke to an implicit
appeal to his strong disquotational principle connecting evidence
required to justify accepting a sentence one understands with evidence
required to justify belief in the proposition it expresses. Soames con-
tends that the two routes to the necessary a posteriori differ in that
(i) the irst applies to a proper subset of cases to which the second is
meant to apply; (ii) the irst, but not the second, leads to the recognition
of epistemically possible world-states over and above the metaphysically
possible; and (iii) the irst takes the empirical evidence required for a
posteriori knowledge of p to rule out epistemic possibilities in which p is
false, whereas the second does not. Soames argues that the irst route is
sound, whereas the second is not.
Nevertheless, Soames maintains that an insight is extractable from
the failed second route. Its guiding idea is that belief in singular propo-
sitions may result either from understanding and accepting sentences
that express them, or from thinking of individuals or kinds as bearers of
certain descriptive properties – and that because of this, believing the
bare proposition that o is F may always involve also believing a related,
descriptive or metalinguistic proposition that provides a way of think-
ing about o. In short, according to Soames, there may be something
broadly Fregean about mental states the contents of which include sin-
gular propositions.
6 Alan Berger
In Chapter 4, “Possible Worlds Semantics: Philosophical Foundations,”

Robert Stalnaker discusses Kripke’s early formal contributions to the
semantics for modal logic and his philosophical application of possible
worlds semantics to philosophical problems in Naming and Necessity. This
raises questions about the metaphysical status of possible worlds that
have been much discussed in the philosophical literature. This chapter is
about Kripke’s views about some of the questions raised in those discus-
sions. Stalnaker’s interpretation of Kripke is based entirely on remarks
made in Naming and Necessity, and in the preface to the edition of those
lectures that was published in 1980.
Kripke made it clear that he rejected David Lewis’s modal realist
interpretation of possible worlds, according to which they are con-
crete universes spatially and temporally disconnected from ours, but
the alternative “actualist” interpretation of possible worlds raises at
least these further questions: What exactly are possible worlds (or pos-
sible states of the world, which Kripke suggests would be less mislead-
ing terminology)? What contribution do they make to the explanation
of modal discourse, and of the distinctive facts that modal discourse is
used to state? Does the slogan “necessity is truth in all possible worlds”
provide, or point to, a reductive analysis of necessity? Are possible
worlds, in some sense, prior to modal operators and modal auxiliaries?
If not, in what sense are they explanatory? How are possible worlds,
or counterfactual situations, speciied? How do they contribute to our
understanding of speciic metaphysical questions about the relations
between particular individuals and their qualitative characteristics,
the kinds to which they belong, and the matter of which they are con-
stituted? How are we to understand the possible existence of individu-
als that do not actually exist? Section 2 discusses Kripke’s rejection
of modal realism and of the idea that the analysis of necessity and
possibility in terms of possible worlds provides a reductive analysis of
modal concepts, and raises the question of exactly what role the notion
of a possible world plays in a philosophical explanation of modality.
Section 3 aims to disentangle what Kripke regards as a pseudoprob-
lem about the identiication of individuals across possible worlds from
the questions about such identiications that Kripke acknowledges are
legitimate. Section 4 speculates about Kripke’s views about the status
of merely possible individuals – the interpretation of individuals that
are members of the domains of other possible worlds, but not in the
domain of the actual world.
Part II. Formal Semantics, Truth, Philosophy of

Mathematics, and Philosophy of Logic
Part II consists of Chapters 5, 6, 7, and 8. They are devoted to Kripke’s
work in the semantics of various formal systems, his views in philosophy
of mathematics and logic, and his resolution of the Liar Paradox via his
theory of truth.
John Burgess’s irst contribution, Chapter 5, “Kripke Models,” is
primarily an elementary introduction to Kripke’s contributions to devel-
oping models for modal and intuitionistic logic, intended to prepare
the reader to tackle more formal treatments elsewhere. Burgess takes
the occasion to warn against some common misunderstandings (notably
the impression that the model theory commits one to a metaphysical
rather than a logical understanding of modality), to clarify the history
of the subject (notably the roles of McKinsey and Jonsson on the one
hand, and Kanger and Hintikka on the other, as precursors, and the
greater importance of the former pair), and to indicate something of
the relationship of the work in model theory to the work on the nature
of modality (the latter is in no way implicit in the former, but the philo-
sophical work is needed to clarify the ultimate signiicance of the earlier
mathematical work).
Chapter 6, “Kripke on Truth,” Burgess’s second contribution, is again
primarily an elementary introduction. It includes a comparison of
Kripke’s theory of truth with Tarski’s and discusses the extent to which
they need a hierarchy of metalanguages. The last section does, however,
go beyond Kripke’s “Outline” to say a little about the content of Kripke’s
unpublished work on related topics.
In Chapter 7, “Kripke on Logicism, Wittgenstein, and De Re Beliefs
about Numbers,” Mark Steiner discusses Kripke’s unpublished Whitehead
Lectures, in which he sets forth a new view of numbers that has two main
features: (a) Numbers are not numerals, so the view is not nominalist;
and (b) the properties of the numbers depend upon the properties of
the numerals (and thus, for example, the binary and the decimal numer-
als refer to different sets of numbers), so the view is not platonist. Steiner
calls this view “quasi-nominalist,” and argues that the view is the clos-
est to that of the later Wittgenstein that Kripke has set forth. He also
discusses what he takes to be the evolution of Kripke’s thought concern-
ing Wittgenstein, and suggests a slow convergence of Kripke’s views to
the actual views of Wittgenstein taking place from Naming and Necessity,
8 Alan Berger
through Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language, to the Whitehead

Lectures. Steiner also discusses Kripke’s views on de re beliefs about num-
bers, which is based on Kripke’s notion of a buckstopper.
In Chapter 8, “Kripke on the Incoherency of Adopting a Logic,” I irst
discuss Kripke’s general objections to the notion of adopting a logic.
Whether we view logic as a set of statements or as a formal system, Kripke’s
various applications of the Lewis Carroll ininite regress argument show
that we cannot be neutral and adopt one for evaluation or compare one
with another. In Section 2, I consider whether we can adopt a “logic” that
is not subject to this argument: “quantum logic.” In Section 3, I evaluate
the claim of adopting intuitionist logic.
Kripke maintains that there are four possible claims of what one means
by a change in logic:
1. We could merely be introducing, or recognizing, a new set of con-
nectives. These connectives may not be introduced by deinition,
but may be introduced as new primitive notions in any system. This
is Kripke’s view of intuitionist logic, and he adds, “One may always,
of course, invent new connectives, which … satisfy somewhat dif-
ferent laws [from our connectives] because they have a somewhat
different interpretation. That should be uncontroversial.”
2. We could be introducing new connectives and repudiating our old
connectives as meaningless. This has two forms:
a) syntactic, or “axiomatic,” presentation of the new system of logic.
Here, we just introduce a language purely syntactically, or an
uninterpreted axiomatic, or formal, system, and given some-
thing called “formation rules” we are to deine something we
call “grammatical strings” and then we deine which strings are
going to be called “axioms” and which will be called “inference
rules.” But Kripke maintains that if you only look at the formal
system, then you really can’t tell whether these connectives mean
the same as the old ones or not because no one has explained
or given you the slightest idea of what they mean. Similarly, as
Kripke has been urging, “One has to irst use reasoning in order
to even see what is provable in a formal system.”
b) semantic interpretation of the symbols.
The symbols have been explained and the old connectives
are repudiated as meaningless. Kripke has argued that accept-
ing these new connectives is not an objection to accepting the
old connectives as well. Further, this is the view held by Kreisel,
probably Gödel, and Kleene, as well as Kripke.
3. We could claim to have discovered a deinite fallacy.

We may discover, in an a priori manner, that something thought
of for centuries as a sound principle of logic was actually based on
a fallacy. This is not because we are “adopting a new logic,” but
because we look at the old formal system and see that it wasn’t
really sound with respect to its informal interpretation, and that
the “proof” we had that it was sound was fallacious. This is what
happened in the case of the Aristotelian syllogism, and for all we
know there are other such proofs that we make that contain a fal-
lacy. But this should no more count against the notion of self-ev-
idence or apriority than the fact that something may seem to be
supported by experiment and then later turn out not to be so well
supported by experiment should undermine our using being sup-
ported by experiment as a justiication for accepting something.
4. We could claim that we mean what we always meant by a certain
connective, but we now have discovered that new laws apply to the
connective.
The real problem, Kripke states, is not whether the new connec-
tives mean the same as the old ones, but whether there’s anything
in the new language satisfying the same laws as the old.
But Kripke’s main point is this: “There aren’t different logics. There
is only logic. There are different formal systems.” We use logic to reason
about them to see if a new formal system has an interesting interpreta-
tion that may have sound principles of logic. But we can’t adopt it.
Part III. Language and Mind

Chapters 9, 10, 11, and 12 bridge the gap between Kripke’s views on
these two topics.
In Chapter 9, “Kripke’s Puzzle about Belief,” Mark Richard considers
whether Kripke’s puzzle about Pierre (who thinks true both ‘Londres est
jolie’ and ‘London is not pretty’) might be a puzzle about belief: Does
Pierre, or does he not, believe that London is pretty? But if there is no
univocal answer to that question, Richard considers whether perhaps it is
more a puzzle about belief ascription: In such-and-such a situation would
it be right to say that Pierre believes that? Or perhaps it is a puzzle about
translation: Can we invariably translate what Pierre says with ‘Londres
est jolie’ into our idiom? Richard’s own view is that the puzzle is irst and
foremost a puzzle about how we talk about beliefs; his essay attempts to
defend this view.
10 Alan Berger
In his second contribution, Chapter 10, “A Note on Kripke’s Puzzle

about Belief,” Nathan Salmon contrasts different versions of Kripke’s
puzzle about belief, drawing different conclusions from each. Arguing
that every instance of the disquotational principle schema is analytic,
Salmon reconstructs the original puzzle, which employs that schema, as
an argument demonstrating that (evidently contrary to Kripke) one can
believe contradictions while being completely rational (and even while
being a logician who will correct any belief that he/she recognizes is con-
tradictory). More signiicantly, Salmon reconstructs the puzzle employ-
ing the strengthened disquotation principle schema as a disproof, by
reductio ad absurdum, of that stronger principle – not merely demonstrat-
ing (as Kripke appears to favor) that not all instances of strengthened
disquotation are true even if none are false, but demonstrating, more-
over, that some instances must be altogether false. A perfectly compe-
tent speaker who is relective and non-reticent, and who believes what
is expressed by a simple sentence, may nevertheless sincerely dissent to
that sentence under normal circumstances. Such, Salmon argues, is the
inevitable moral of Kripke’s strengthened puzzle. For further details, see
Salmon’s abstract at the beginning of his contribution.
Chapter 11, “On the Skepticism about Rule-Following in Kripke’s
Version of Wittgenstein,” George Wilson’s contribution, is on what is
sometimes referred to as “Kripkenstein’s” skepticism in rule-following.
It is widely supposed that the conclusion of the Skeptical Argument in
Kripke’s Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language says that there are no
facts about someone’s meaning or understanding something by a term.
It is also supposed that Kripke’s Wittgenstein responds to this conclusion
by denying in the Skeptical Solution that ascriptions of meaning even
purport to state or represent facts – say, facts about a speaker’s use of an
arbitrary term. In the irst section of the paper, Wilson outlines his chief
reasons for thinking that these related interpretative suppositions are
false. The Skeptical Argument does not aim at establishing semantic non-
factualism, and the Skeptical Solution does not presuppose it. Second,
Wilson argues that the framework of the Skeptical Solution actually
depends upon the idea that meaning ascriptions are, in some substantial
sense, factual in content, and he attempts to specify the type of facts that
are represented by correct meaning ascriptions according to Kripke’s
Wittgensteinian perspective. Roughly, the meaning of a term in a com-
munity is constituted by facts about the assertability conditions of the
term and about its role or utility in the relevant “language games” that
the community’s linguistic practices have established. It is hard to make
sense of the main strands of the Skeptical Solution without attributing to

it this much positive factualism about the meaning of terms.
Last, Wilson argues in the lengthy third section that the factualist
version of Kripke’s Skeptical Solution requires, for its minimal coher-
ence, a certain temporally externalist perspective on meaning. That is, the
Skeptical Solution allows that the instance-by-instance assertability condi-
tions for a term ‘Φ’ are “open-textured” over time. Thus, the normative
warrant for novel applications of ‘Φ’ will characteristically not have been
settled by prior ascriptions of the term up to and including t. Moreover,
what the term comes to mean for the community after t may be affected
by determinations about assertibility conditions and “language game”
functions that come to be established only when t is in the past.
This latter concession may leave the impression that such tempo-
ral externalism, incorporated into the Skeptical Solution, undermines
one of Wilson’s chief earlier contentions. That is, it may appear that
these qualiications imply that the Skeptical Solution is committed to
some signiicant version of semantic nonfactualism after all. Wilson con-
cludes by explaining why this impression rests on an important confu-
sion and why any residual nonfactualism in the Semantic Solution is
philosophically innocuous. The confusion that he investigates at this
juncture may have tempted Kripke himself into some of his remarks
that make it sound as if Wittgenstein endorsed a notable version of
semantic nonfactualism. Wilson does not investigate this speculation
about Kripke’s exegetical conception at any length, but he does insist
that such a temptation should be irmly rejected in an adequate inter-
pretation of Wittgenstein. As Wilson explains, some form of temporal
semantic externalism does seem to play a critical but murky role in his
thought about following a rule.
In the late 1980s, Kripke expanded the opposition to dispositional-
ism about color briely expressed in Naming and Necessity. This expan-
sion includes an argument that there could be such a thing as “fool’s
red,” analogous to there being “fool’s gold,” and its implications to
the traditional view of the distinction between primary and second-
ary qualities. Sections 2 to 4 of Mario Gómez-Torrente’s contribution,
Chapter 12, “Kripke on Color Words and the Primary/Secondary Quality
Distinction,” summarizes these expanded ideas. Section 5 briely reviews
some recent defenses of dispositionalism, sketching broadly Kripkean
objections to them.
Section 2 explains some of Kripke’s criticisms of several arguments for
dispositionalism and for the Lockean division of the sensible qualities. The
12 Alan Berger
criticized arguments include some perceptual variation arguments and

arguments based on the physical diversity of the causes of perceived color.
Dispositionalists typically hold the thesis that biconditionals of roughly
the form “o is yellow iff o would produce such-and-such sensations in
normal humans under normal conditions” (for some non-trivial illing
out of “normal humans” and “normal conditions”) are true and a priori.
Their apriority supposedly distinguishes the traditional secondary qual-
ities from the primary, for which no such biconditionals are both true
and a priori. Section 4 presents some Kripkean counterexamples to the
dispositionalist thesis. Kripke noted, for example, that intuitively there
might be shades of yellow with such a high brightness as to kill a normal
human; this suggests that the “only if” direction of dispositionalist bicon-
ditionals is not a priori true. Other counterexamples involve faint colors,
substances that distort color vision when seen, and cases of color mixture
(for example, where an object looks yellow but from close up appears
composed of red and green parts).
In Naming and Necessity Kripke had said that the reference of ‘yellow-
ness’ is ixed like that of a natural substance term, by means of a refer-
ence-ixing identity such as ‘yellowness is the property which produces
such-and-such sensations’. Section 3 explains some reinements Kripke
introduced into this view, which help explain our intuitions about his
counterexamples. He developed the notion of a prejudice, a belief irmly
held onto by speakers, which need not be analytic or a priori, but which
shapes their intuitions about the reference of the terms involved. The
preceding identity is a prejudice about ‘yellowness’, but there are oth-
ers, like the belief that certain objects are paradigms of yellow, that yel-
lowness is dissective, and so on. The community of speakers attempts to
hold onto as many of these reference-shaping prejudices as possible. For
example, by color mixture some paradigms of yellow don’t intuitively
satisfy dissectiveness, but since they are few, they lose their paradigm sta-
tus and dissectiveness is kept as a prejudice about ‘yellow’. On the other
hand, dispositionalism contradicts many of our chromatic prejudices.
Section 5 does three things: (1) It rejects as inadequate some weaken-
ings of the dispositionalist biconditionals introduced by Mark Johnston,
noting that most of the Kripkean counterexamples continue to work
against them. (2) It criticizes the objection that while Kripke’s view
implies that science might discover that our intuitive judgments of color
similarity are incorrect, such judgments are not scientiically refutable;
the objection is weak, for intuitive similarity claims, apparently justiied
purely visually, are also made about traditionally primary qualities. (3) It
rejects Crispin Wright’s idea that dispositionalist biconditionals (strictly,

similar devices he calls “provisoed biconditionals”) may be conceptu-
ally necessary but not conclusively recognizable as true, just as Church’s
Thesis supposedly is; despite the popularity of the idea that Church’s
Thesis cannot be conclusively recognized as true, if it’s conceptually nec-
essary then nothing precludes a recognizably conclusive proof of it.
Part IV. Philosophy of Mind and Philosophical Psychology

Sydney Shoemaker, in Chapter 13, “Kripke and Cartesianism,” maintains
that Kripke supports a rejection of physicalism by arguing that psychophys-
ical identities (for example, ‘pain = C-iber stimulation’) could be true
only if they were necessarily true, and that the seeming possibility of their
falsehood is reason for thinking they are not necessarily true and so are
not true. Shoemaker then points out that Kripke argues that the seeming
possibility of their falsehood cannot be explained away in the way we can
explain away the seeming possibility of heat not being molecular motion,
or water not being H2O. He seems to assume what Yablo calls “textbook
Kripkeanism,” the view that “The only way for E to be conceptually pos-
sible but not ‘really’ – metaphysically – possible is for something else to be
really possible, namely E’s presentation E*.” Apparent counterexamples
to this principle are presented. The counterexamples suggest that the
seeming possibility of necessarily true identity statements being false can
be due to a confusion of epistemic possibility and metaphysical possibility.
If this is so, then, contrary to Kripke, psychophysical identities can hold
necessarily despite the seeming possibility of their not holding.
Jeff Buechner observes in Chapter 14, “Not Even Computing Machines
Can Follow Rules: Kripke’s Critique of Functionalism,” that Kripke’s
refutation of functionalism is a corollary of his work in Wittgenstein on
Rules and Private Language; in particular, it is a corollary of the argu-
ments against dispositionalist (and extended dispositionalist) solutions
to the meaning normativity paradox. For further details, see Buechner’s
abstract at the beginning of his contribution.
Most of the chapters are intended to be a detailed introduction to

Kripke’s views and current state of the art on the controversies that they
raise. The volume can be used in an advanced undergraduate course
to familiarize someone with the details of Kripke’s views, as well as in a
graduate course (and by scholars) to bring the reader up to speed with
state-of-the-art criticism of and controversies of these views.
14 Alan Berger
First, we would like to thank Saul Kripke for his choice of the contributors
to this volume. In addition to Kripke’s published material, the follow-
ing sources were among those used in writing this volume: transcription
of the John Locke Lectures; transcription of the Whitehead Lectures;
transcription of the Lectures (“No Fool’s Red?: Some Considerations
on the Primary/Secondary Quality Distinction”); transcription of the
International Wittgenstein Symposium lecture on functionalism; tape
of Kripke’s Duke University lecture on functionalism; tapes of Kripke’s
course at Princeton on color words and the dispositional analysis of
the primary/secondary quality distinction; transcriptions of several of
Kripke’s seminars on truth including three Princeton lectures; Allen
Stairs’s “Quantum Mechanics, Logic and Reality” (unpublished Ph.D.
dissertation, University of Western Ontario, 1978), which contains a
summary of Kripke’s University of Pittsburgh lecture “The Question of
Logic”; Clifton MacIntosh’s notes on Kripke’s 1974 seminar on rules
and adopting a logic; lecture notes from Kripke’s 1974 seminar and the
CUNY Graduate Center seminar on the epistemology of logic; and tran-
scription of Kripke’s three Princeton lectures on truth. The contributors
thank Saul Kripke and these sources for providing access to these materi-
als. We also thank Glenn Branch for his expertise and excellent copyedit-
ing and indexing of the entire manuscript.

Introducción A Kripke

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Introducción A Kripke

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Introduction to Kripke

Kripke’s professional career began as a high school student when he

continues the debate regarding the meaning of proper names and

Structure of the Book

Part I. Naming, Necessity, and Apriority

on a par with ‘Holmes1’. Salmon proposes an alternative account on

In Chapter 4, “Possible Worlds Semantics: Philosophical Foundations,”

Part II. Formal Semantics, Truth, Philosophy of

through Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language, to the Whitehead

3. We could claim to have discovered a deinite fallacy.

Part III. Language and Mind

In his second contribution, Chapter 10, “A Note on Kripke’s Puzzle

sense of the main strands of the Skeptical Solution without attributing to

criticized arguments include some perceptual variation arguments and

rejects Crispin Wright’s idea that dispositionalist biconditionals (strictly,

Part IV. Philosophy of Mind and Philosophical Psychology

Most of the chapters are intended to be a detailed introduction to

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