PHIL 4233: Philosophy of Language Prof. Funkhouser Graduate Student Paper Assignment #1 Shorter Paper (200 points) Write a paper – 6 to 10 pages – on the topic below. Make sure your paper is typed, double-spaced, written in proper English, stapled, with the pages numbered. Do not bother with a lengthy introduction or any other irrelevancies; stick to the assigned topic. Paper Due Date: Wednesday, October 4th, 2017 *** So that you are not too pressed for time, you should read the Kripke (especially Lecture 3) ahead of the syllabus schedule. Topic: One major lesson commonly drawn from Naming and Necessity is that Kripke has established the category of necessary a posteriori truths, breaking the traditional alignment of the necessary with the a priori. I want you to focus on his examples, from Lecture 3 of Naming and Necessity, of supposed identity statements involving natural kind terms (e.g., ‘water is H2O’). Kripke claimed that such necessity is found in the world; the necessity is not simply an artifact of language or contained in our concepts. After reading Lecture 3, I want you to also read criticisms and clarifications from Jerry Fodor and Scott Soames. In particular, read this book review by Fodor: http://www.lrb.co.uk/v26/n20/jerry-fodor/waters-water-everywhere Also read Chapter 10 of Soames’ Beyond Rigidity (copy available on Blackboard). Now consider: Are Kripke’s examples of necessary a posteriori identities really true, and are they genuinely a posteriori? Does the world really tell us what water’s essence is (as Kripke would have it), or do we make the decisive contributions to determining its essence? Consider what all is smuggled into the Kripkean claims. Fodor writes: “I can only think of one answer: if water is actually H2O, then ‘water is necessarily H2O’ is some kind of conceptual truth. The idea (endorsed in one form or other by many analytic philosophers) is that ‘water’ is the concept of a ‘material kind’…So it is, after all, our grasp of concepts (or our mastery of language) that underwrites the modal intuition that ‘water is H2O’ is necessary. It’s just like the old days, really.” In a similar vein, Soames writes: “We may put this by saying that when we introduce the predicate is a drop of water, we in effect stipulate that it is to apply to instances of the substance—that is, the unique physically constitutive kind—that nearly all members of the sample are instances of.” (274) In light of these readings (and perhaps others), write about whether Kripke has really found cases of necessity in the world—the necessary a posteriori—in examples like ‘water is H2O’.
