scholarly journals Reply to Ezcurdia and Gómez-Torrente

2004 ◽  
Vol 36 (108) ◽  
pp. 83-114
Author(s):  
Scott Soames

Contra Ezcurdia, it is argued that my thesis —that substitution of coreferential names or indexicals in attitude ascriptions preserves truth values of propositions semantically expressed, although it often changes truth values of propositions asserted— is compatible with the fact that belief ascriptions play important explanatory roles. Contra Gómez-Torrente, it is argued that although single-word natural kind terms are rigid in Kripke's original sense, natural kind predicates containing them are neither rigid nor obstinately essential —in the sense of applying to the same individuals in every possible world-state, whether those individuals exist at the world-state or not.

Author(s):  
Scott Soames

This chapter approaches the ontological question, “What are natural kinds?” through another, partially linguistic, question. “What must natural kinds be like if the conventional wisdom about natural kind terms is correct?” Although answering this question will not tell us everything we want to know, it will, be useful in narrowing the range of feasible ontological alternatives. The chapter summarizes the contemporary linguistic wisdom and then tests different proposals about kinds against it. It takes simple natural kind terms—like “green,” “gold,” “water,” “tiger,” and “light”—to be Millian terms that rigidly designate properties typically determined by a reference-fixing stipulation to the effect that the general term is to designate whatever property provides the explanation of why, at actual world-state, all, or nearly all, the samples of items associated with the term by speakers who introduce it have the observational properties they do.


1993 ◽  
Vol 23 (3) ◽  
pp. 389-411 ◽  
Author(s):  
Harry Deutsch

According to the well-known Kripke-Putnam view developed inNaming and Necessityand ‘The Meaning of Meaning’, proper names and ‘natural kind terms’ - words for natural substances, species, and phenomena (‘water’, ‘rose’, ‘light’) - are non-descriptional and rigid. A singular term isrigidif it has the same referent in every possible world (and with respect to other extension-determining parameters, such as the passage of time), and isnon-descriptionalif, roughly speaking, its referent (at a possible world or other parameter) is not secured by purely descriptive conditions analytically tied to the term. Thus, ‘the inventor of bifocals’ is nonrigid and descriptional, while ‘the unique even and prime integer’ is rigid and descriptional, and ‘Noam Chomsky’ is rigid and non-descriptional.


2014 ◽  
Vol 45 (3) ◽  
pp. 199-216
Author(s):  
Lifeng Zhang

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emily Foster-Hanson ◽  
Marjorie Rhodes

Draft of chapter to appear in: The Psychology of Natural Kinds Terms. In S.T. Biggs, & H. Geirsson (Eds.) The Routledge Handbook on Linguistic Reference. London: Routledge.


Erkenntnis ◽  
2011 ◽  
Vol 76 (3) ◽  
pp. 403-425 ◽  
Author(s):  
Corine Besson

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