Carnap: Meaning and Necessity

This paper is an amended version of a talk Saul Kripke gave at the Eastern Division meeting of the APA in 1992 (an extended abstract was previously published as Kripke, 1992). It contains philosophical reflections and technical results concerning “Carnapian” quantified modal logic, that is, modal logic with quantification over individual concepts. The paper contains the fullest statement by the author available of (un)axiomatizability results he obtained in the 1970s. (The Editors.).

Fregean theories of descriptions as terms have to deal with improper descriptions. To save bivalence various proposals have been made that involve assigning referents to improper descriptions. While bivalence is indeed saved, there is a price to be paid. Instantiations of the same general scheme, viz. the one and only individual that is F and G is G, are not only allowed but even required to have different truth values.

InWord and Object W. V. Quine argues that there is no uniquely correct way to assign referents to the terms of a language; any claim about the reference of a term is implicitly relative to a manual of translation. To Rudolf Carnap this must have seemed familiar. BeforeWord and Object was written Carnap had been saying the same thing inMeaning and Necessity: under the assumption of the method of the name-relation, any claim about the reference of a term is implicitly (...) relative to what Carnap calls a conception of the name-relation. Yet Carnap is often taken to be a victim of Quine's relativistic notion of reference. Drawing on Carnap's discussion of the name-relation inMeaning and Necessity, it is argued that Carnap's and Quine's views on reference are not so far apart as is usually perceived. (shrink)

This is identical with the first edition (see 21: 2716) except for the addition of a Supplement containing 5 previously published articles and the bringing of the bibliography (now 73 items) up to date. The 5 added articles present clarifications or modifications of views expressed in the first edition. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2009 APA, all rights reserved).