Grice e Kripke

 T. E. Patton takes issue with two points in S. A. Kripke's treatment of H. P. Grice. 

The first point is Kripke's example:

One thief to another thief: 

"The cops is 'round the corner."

Thief Two: Gottya

Kripke suggest that what the first thief implicates is "Let's split: and do stop, for God's sake, to keep gathering booty like that".

Patton disagrees.

Patton thinks that Thief II will believe that (that the thieves should split) REGARDLESS of the intention by Thief I to produce that belief (or desire) that they should split.

He quotes for very good measure Grice’s essay on ‘Meaning’ read at The Oxford Philosophical Society, on 

"a man giving information to another man" 

and suggests that Grice is thinking SPECIFICALLY of those misuses of 'mean' by Kripke to have a caveat or two.

The second point Patton makes -- this is a very subtle piece --  concerns the quantificational use of a ‘definite description’ — iota as a quantifier.

Patton does NOT at this stage quotes from what I believe is the best treatment of this: the section on 'definite descriptions' by Grice in "Vacuous

Names" now repr. in the MIT collection, "Definite Descriptions" (I still think it was  pretty AWFUL of those MIT editors to cut a brilliant piece like that).

Patton's example involves the well-known Donnellan-Kripkean scenario:

"Her husband is very cruel to her" 

-- where "he" is not her husband but mere lover.

"He is drinking champagne like crazy" 

-- where "he" is a tetotaller, and what he wants the people in the sophisticated cocktail to think is

that what is gingerale passes for champagne.

Patton is unhappy with Krikpe's rather brusque misapplication of Grice’s original analysis of meaning' -- for the case of the thieves -- to a even brusquer misapplication of a fictional Grice -- cfr. Kripkenstein -- to matters of 'referring'.

Patton proposes a scenario that involves a gum-chewing cricketer.

It is *known* that the ONLY member of the North Oxfordshire cricket team that chews gum is Marmaduke Bloggs.

This uniqueness we need to be able to apply Grice on Russell for the iota operator, or ‘the'. 

Patton's utterance is:

"The gum-chewing cricketer is about to be ‘traded.’”

Since everyone *knows* that the gum-chewing player is Marmaduke Bloggs, the utterer is REFERRING to Marmaduke Bloggs and we can safely say that what he MEANS (communicates) when he utters (i) is that *Marmaduke Bloggs*  is about to be ‘traded.’

Patton concocts a scenario where the audience or addressee of (i) knows

(i) to be true. 

In fact the only gum-chewer in the team is not Marmaduke Bloggs, but Oliver Poodle.

YET, we can still allow for or deem the utterer U to mean that it was Poodle, because the utterer’s addressee ‘trades’ or strictly *relies* on what the utterer

believes, not on what he himself believes.

Patton goes on to provide the Russellian expansion. 

At some level the incorrectness of Kripke’s approach seems to be intuitive. 

If asked, to whom is the utterer *referring*?

Unless there is a content (or 'dossier', as Grice prefers) in the beliefs or desires of the utterer that involves the expression “Oliver Poodle” we are reluctant to say

that he refers to Oliver Poodle.

In Kripke's analysis, it would seem, if the one and only gum-chewer of the team IS Marmaduke Bloggs, THAT is

the one to whom the utterer is referring.

Patton concludes his piece -- or a section of the piece -- it is a longish one, and this is section II -- with a caveat as to the recherche nature of his example. 

It would seem that Kripke's analysis of referring, if meant to apply to such convoluted Griceian cases, is doomed to fail. 

Patton suggests instead that careful notice should be taken of what, with Grice, he calls the two ‘sub-mechanisms' for both referring (the a, Fido) and predicating (is b — Fido is shaggy) 

He does not, but is very likely to be taken Grice's apt comments on "alpha" and "beta" in WoW:vi --. Grice's example:

"Jones's dog is hairy coated"

"Fido is shaggy"

Just sticking to "Jones' dog" and "Fido", the correlation is SO COMPLEX that Grice found it YET boring (hence 'shaggy-dog story").

So, in "Vacuous Names" Grice goes on to refine it. 

One can surely refer to something by means of a 'false'

sentence, etc. 

This is the 'referring' bit, not the 'predicating' bit.

Grice's notion leads to the pragmatics of ascription. 

As Patton notes, an ascription of a psychological attitude is opaque, but it can be made to be transparent. 

If Jones only THINKS he has named his dog "Fido" -- but the dog's really name is "Marie" -- a female dog --, then it is still true that "Fido is shaggy" -- as Jones's misuses the proper name. 

And while "Jones's dog" is a description, "Fido" is just a name so this will not do.

Now consider:

"The dog that Jones found in the shelter"

"The dog that Jones thinks is called "Fido""

Here we have two definite descriptions alright.

Now, predicate 'shaggy' to D1 and to D2, with the gloss, 'hairy-coated'

The alpha is beta, in Grice's terminology.

The sub-mechanisms for alpha-assignment and beta-assignment involve some pretty convoluted cases where the utterance has to take into account not just the 'states of affairs' but the 'slates' in the psychological attitudes of the uttterer's addressee.

If I THINK that you think that Jones's dog is Marie, I have to use "Marie" to say something about him, and even, if I think you think that 'shaggy' means 'promiscuous' and that 'hairy-coated' has no translation, I'll be careful to say that she is 'hairy-coated', rather than 'shaggy' or 'wire-haired'.

S. A. Kripke, Philosopher Who Finds Truths in Semantics

A leading 20th-century thinker, he published a landmark work at 32. 

Known for lecturing extemporaneously without notes, he dazzled colleagues with the breadth of his ruminations.

Prof. Saul Kripke in 2006. 

He was considered by many one of the most important American philosophers of the 20th century and became something of a cult figure.

Credit...Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times

Sam Roberts

Kripke, a math prodigy and pioneering logician whose revolutionary theories on language qualified him as one of the 20th century’s greatest American philosophers.

His home is in Plainsboro, N. J. 

His death, at Penn Medicine Princeton Medical Center, was caused by pancreatic cancer, according to Romina Padro, director of Kripke’s Centre at the City University of New York, where Kripke is a distinguished professor of “Philosophy and Computer Science” at the Graduate Centrec and caps a career exploring how people — and computers! — communicate.

Kripke’s “Naming and Necessity,” a set of three lectures he delivered at Princeton Is considered one of the century’s most evocative philosophical pieces.

Kripke challenges the notion that any utterer who uses a term, especially a proper name — like American ‘Congress’ — must be able to correctly identify to what the expression *refers*. 

Rather, in his view, an utterer U can use a referential expression like ‘Einstein,’ ‘that springbok,’ perhaps even ‘this computer,’ despite being wrong to produce an identifying description of its denotatum. 

In Kripke’s view, an utterer may use a referential expression — the A — *successfully* not because he knows any proposition much about the denotatum but because U *linked* to the denotatum by a *causal* chain.

Kripke introduceds ways to distinguish kinds of true statements — between statements that are ‘possibly’ true — or false — those that are ‘necessarily’ true,’ and those which are not only contingently but necessarily true — or then again false.

In Kripke’s analysis a statement is possibly true or false if and only if it is true or false in some *possible world*.

‘Snow is white’ or ‘Grass is green’ are possible truth or falsehoods, because, Kripke thinks there might be some possible world in which snow is green and grass is white!

A statement p is necessarily true []p iff it is true (1) in all possible worlds, as in 

‘A bachelor is an unmarried man.’

Professor Kripke’s landmark work, “Naming and Necessity,” was drawn from three lectures he delivered at Princeton in 1970 before he was 30.

Many philosophers rank Kripke with better-known luminaries like the Welsh philosopher, Baron Russell or ‘Vitters.’

Kripke fits the American profile of a distracted, deep-thinker: white-bearded, rumpled and toting his notes on Princeton’s campus in a plastic Filene’s Basement shopping bag, to the awe of the pupils!

He even became something of a cult figure. 

He was said to have been a model for the brilliant but flawed philosopher Noam Himmel in Rebecca Goldstein’s novel “The Mind Body Problem” and a namesake for Barry Kripke, a character on the TV sitcom “The Big Bang Theory.”

But he was not, for the most part, what most people would characterize as a public intellectual.

One reason was that much of his research remained unpublished, surviving in recorded remarks, notes and privately circulated manuscripts. 

He would lecture extemporaneously without notes for hours, leaving it to others to transcribe his taped remarks, which he would later meticulously edit and only then publish in works like “Naming and Necessity” and “Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language”.

Even in academia, polymaths were bedazzled by the breadth of his boundless ruminations into metaphysics, modal logic, recursion theory, identity materialism and the ontological nature of numbers.

“Naming and Necessity” drew such strands together into a groundbreaking work of analytic philosophy.

Kripke shows how necessity — the same kind of necessity as exhibited by mathematical truths — should be seen as a real feature of how some things are in the real world, and no mere artifact of language.

Things like chemical elements and compounds, things like tables and ships, even things like Kripke himself, all exhibit in one way or another the same kind of necessity that arises in mathematics.

Kripke’s realism about necessity, and his insight into its logic, leads to his observation that proper names of people and things —  like ‘Einstein’, ‘King Charles III’, and ‘water’ — is each a ‘rigid designator.’

A rigid designator defines the type of expression that refers to the same thing in all possible worlds, as opposed to a descriptive designator, which may not.

Grice, for example, is always the one and only Grice in any world. 

However, “the inventor of implicature” is a descriptive designator. 

Water is a rigid designator, while “the substance that fills the lakes and oceans” is descriptive.

While the definition may seem self-evident to a layman, its impact in the hermetic world of philosophy was seismic, and challenged by Grice with his theory of relative identity.

Before Kripke, there was a sort of drift in analytic philosophy in the direction of linguistic idealism — the idea that language is not tuned to the world.

Kripke almost single-handedly changes that.

Saul Aaron Kripke was born in Bay Shore, N.Y., on Long Island, the eldest of three children of Dorothy Karp Kripke, who wrote children’s books about Judaism, and Rabbi Myer S. Kripke, who led a Conservative congregation further east on Long Island, in Patchogue.

When Saul was 3, his mother recalled, he walked into the kitchen and asked whether God was everywhere. 

When she replied yes, he asked if that meant that he was encroaching on God’s space in the kitchen.

“I was startled that my son already seemed to have an intuitive grasp of the notion that two objects cannot occupy the same space at the same time”

The Kripkes moved to Omaha, where Rabbi Kripke became the leader of Beth El Synagogue. 

Joining the Rotary Club, he befriended a young money manager, Warren Buffett, with whom he invested $67,000 that by the 1990s, after Mr. Buffett had become one of the world’s most successful investors, was worth $25 million.

The rabbi’s precocious son had taught himself ancient Hebrew by the age of 6, had finished reading Shakespeare’s complete works by 9 and published his first completeness theorem in modal logic when he was 18.

“Saul once told me he would have invented algebra if it hadn’t already been invented,” Ms. Kripke said, “because he came upon it naturally.”

After completing high school, he attended Harvard, taught a graduate-level course in logic at nearby M.I.T. during his sophomore year and graduated summa cum laude from Harvard.

His classmates included Laurence Tribe, the future constitutional scholar, and Theodore Kaczynski, who would become a math whiz and the domestic terrorist known as the Unabomber.

“I wish I could have skipped college,” Kripke said.

“I got to know some interesting people, but I can’t say I learned anything.”

“I probably would have learned it all anyway, just reading on my own.”

He was awarded a Fulbright, taught briefly at Harvard and was appointed to professorships at Rockefeller University in New York, Princeton and then the City University without ever earning a graduate degree.

City University established the Saul Kripke Center at the Graduate Center to archive, study and publish his works. 

Professor Padro, the center’s director, estimated that as much as 70 percent of Kripke’s work remains unpublished.

He delivered the John Locke Lectures at Oxford, appointed to a guest philosopher *not* associated with the varsity!

He was awarded the Rolf Shock Prize from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.

His marriage to Margaret Gilbert ended in divorce. 

His sisters, Madeline Kripke, who kept one of the world’s largest private collections of dictionaries, and Netta Kripke Stern, died before him.

While Kripke’s philosophical theory may seem esoteric, its underpinnings are fundamental.

Are we living in some subjective reality where truth is irrelevant, where truth is relative?

Kripke comes up with this idea of ‘rigid designation.’ 

It sounds arcane. 

But Kripke is saying that an utterer’s utterance attaches to a denotatum in a way that is far more permanent than we ever thought.

A version of this article appears in print on Sept. 22, 2022, Section B, Page 11 of the New York edition with the headline: Saul Kripke, a Philosopher Who Found Truths in Semantics, Dies at 81. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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