Thank you for helping me get to gripke with Kripke today :)

When Bonevac is talking about possible worlds and replacing Nixon with an alien it makes me remember Shelly Kagan's lectures on death and personal identity. I can't wrap my head around the ontology.

5:24 I don't get this thing about names as rigid designators accross possible world. Surely one possible world is a world just like ours except where Aristotle was named Plato and Plato was named Aristotle.

Very interesting

There's one thing about this that confuses me, maybe I just don't understand it enough: We can assume that Aristotle is a rigid designator, that is, Aristotle refers to the same in every possible world. But Nichomacus was the father of Aristotle. Nicomachus is also a rigid designator, that is, when we refer to the name Nicomachus we refer to the same thing in all possible worlds. Now one of the descriptions of Nicomachus, presumably, is that he was the person who named Aristotle. But that is a description, in other words, we can imagine a world in which Nicomachus named his son something else, for example, Joe. So how would Kripke deal with the argument that we can imagine a world that was exactly the same as ours, with the sole exception that Nicomachus named his child Joe? Would Aristotle still be a rigid designator?

45:47 a unicorn needs to be biologically the same as a horse but with a narwahl tusk coming out of its head. There is a lot known about unicorns and there behavior, including how to successfully hunt them. Seems to me that their non existence has to be necessary (e.g. because a narwahl tusk is too heavy for the neck muscles of a horse to support).

What about the possibility that there is only one possible world, which is the real world? Why is this not taken into consideration in the two Kripke lectures? Why is there just some ambiguous plurality of possible worlds? Infinite? Finite? Is that considered unimportant rather than a failure of the system of thought? He spoke of all past events as just being unnecessary and coincidental or contingent, as if they might not have happened since something else could have occurred instead. That's not a good way to think all of the time, is it? Also, the theoretical denial of the real world is not considered, which is a serious but abnormal way of thinking for some with Cotard syndrome. Kripke bases his entire framework on the concepts of real and unreal coincidence. However, he does so in a way that fails to consider the other opposing systems of thought. So, his contributions are likely to merely remain in one system and to be advocated by thinkers in that system. This brings setbacks for methodologies.

I find it perplexing that Kripke's conception has become received wisdom within philosophy. The idea of a Rigid Designator is founded on the obvious fallacy that you can identify fixed objects within multiple possible universes. If the universe is difference then ever object in it is different. Designators are not even rigid within our own time line: if you said "Water is H2O" to a medieval person they would probably go look for a stake and some kindling!

Do "rigid designators " act like a patent or copyrights on naming? Where use or misuse of a name would cause a counter reaction on the level of a lawsuit. infringement of names are in cases the wrong way to use a name, and whom can claim definition of a name. Is it something that others have to agree with? Who owns the definition. By owning I mean a way of claiming a definition of a name?

Contingent a priori and necessary a posteriori are totally self defeating concepts. Kripke should be understood as the person who decisively proved that the causal theory of reference is untenable. It's beyond me how analytic philosophers manage to draw any other lesson from all this.

Can an act be a rigid designator? The reason I ask is that given Divine Simplicity, God's essence is identical to his act of creation and thus his act of creation is necessary (across all possible worlds).

I'm fascinated that American academics keep mentioning their daughters. Really odd.

This any world rhetoric seems like a lot of mumbo jumbo to me