Beyond Rigidity: The Unfinished Semantic Agenda of Naming and Necessity by Scott Soames

by Scott Soames

In this fascinating work, Scott Soames offers a new conception of the relationship between linguistic meaning and assertions made by utterances. He gives meanings of proper names and natural kind predicates and explains their use in attitude ascriptions. He also demonstrates the irrelevance of rigid designation in understanding why theoretical identities containing such predicates are necessary, if true.

Genres: Philosophy, Linguistics

Paperback Bunko

First published January 1, 2002

About the author

Scott Soames is a professor of philosophy at the University of Southern California. He specializes in the philosophy of language and the history of analytic philosophy.

Reviews

[Raymond Lam · Rating 4 out of 5]

Soames substantially expands and develops Kripke's thesis on rigid designator in Naming and Necessity in scope and depth. He covers proper name as rigid designator, attitude reports, natural kind names and general terms. This work is original and most contributing in analysing issues in attitude report which Kripke did not devote much discussion in Naming and Necessity.

In the first chapter, Soames introduces the discussion by clarifying how identity statement using proper names such as "Hesperus is Phosphorus" is necessary but a posteriori,  different from "Hesperus is Hesperus" which is necessary a priori. The idea to emphasize is that if an identity statement is acceptable and knowable by a user by mere linguistic competence independent of investigation in his world, the statement would be necessary a priori, otherwise a posterior if investigation of its use in w needs to be examined.  The next chapter in exploring Kripke's rigid designator thesis is showing how the semantic content of proper name is different from semantic content of definite description by showing that the epistemic status of propositions containing proper names is different from that of propositions containing definite descriptions. The latter is knowable a priori while the former is a posterior.

Then Soames devotes two chapters to meaning of names. The first one is on two concepts of meaning. One is context independent meaning from semantic encoding of the linguistic meaning of words in a sentence, I.e., semantic meaning. The other is context dependent meaning based on additional information that a speaker may further convey beyond semantic meaning, I.e.  speaker's meaning. This chapter also covers partially descriptive names, names containing descriptions, such as Princeton university and New York city. The subsequent chapter on meaning of names touches on ambiguity and indexicality issues, addressing how the same names may refer to different referents depending on context and speaker reference.

In the centre of the book, Soames devotes three chapters on attitude ascriptions . This issue further highlights ambiguity of propositions containing names when they are ascribed to reporting what speakers asserts in using them. Soames examined the Linguistically Enhanced Proposition approach which he sees as unsuccessful. That approach develops an amalgam of semantic contents expressed in propositions such as objects corresponding to names and indexicals, and the properties and relations corresponding to predicates, together with linguistic expressions they present as a result. Soames prefers a Millianism and Pseudo Fregean attitude. Millianism retains Kripke's thesis that names have semantic contents which are just their referents. Substitution of co-referential names does not change the proposition expressed by the ascription. However, Fregeans are right in suggesting such substitutions can affect the truth value of what is asserted by normal assertive utterances of such ascriptions depending on the speaker's attitude.

The ending chapters of the book are about general terms and natural kind names as rigid designators. Soames highlights Kripke's thesis of the similarities between proper names and natural kind names, especially how theoretical identity statements are necessary a posteriori. Statements such as "Water is H2O", "Gold is the element with atomic number 79", "Light is a stream of photons". But Kripke was not thorough in his treatment of natural kinds as predicates to which Soames vastly expanded on the topic. Soames treated the meaning problem, namely, description of natural kind as predicate can equate the predicate of "is water" and "is a substance the molecule of which contains two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom". The two predicates don't mean the same. The other problem is the depth problem. Natural kinds can be characterized at different level with different specificity. Water can be characterized at molecular level, atomic level, and subatomic level reflecting different properties, and hence different predicates .

This work is written with much more technical depth and detail in style than Naming and Necessity.  It would be very useful as a text book for a graduate seminar if one wants a detailed technical treatment of rigidity, proper names,  natural kind names and propositional attitudes.

[Erik Cameron · Rating 2 out of 5]

While interesting, probably represents most of the things people hate about analytic philosophy. (It is quite dry, and not terribly convincing.)

[Alex · Rating 4 out of 5]

Totally rad, which is not to say unobjectionable... like some of the best philosophical writings, it sets itself up for interesting objections.