Abstract
Although it is common to claim that certain general terms or kind terms are rigid designators and that their rigidity helps explain their behavior in modal contexts, it has turned out to be surprisingly difficult to define an adequate notion of rigidity for general terms. Such definitions tend, as argued in particular by Scott Soames, to lead to a type of overgeneralization that leaves the purported rigidity of general terms explanatorily inert. In recent years, several attempts have been made to circumvent the problem, and the present article focuses on a particular and potentially powerful strategy developed by Joseph LaPorte in his recent book Rigid Designation and Theoretical Identities for blocking one of the core inferences in Soames’s case against general term rigidity. I argue that the type of response LaPorte promotes is bound to fail; though it might initially appear to circumvent the threat of trivialization described by Soames, it is susceptible to a different and arguably even worse kind of trivialization challenge. In conclusion, Soames’s arguments remain a significant obstacle to identifying a non-trivializing definition of kind term rigidity, and we have good reasons to think that an explanation for the modal status of theoretical identity statements must be sought elsewhere.
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Notes
It is often pointed out that rigidity itself is not the ultimate explanation of these phenomena but is itself in need of explanation. In the case of names, it may for instance be the fact that ‘Aristotle’ is directly referential, whereas the description ‘the teacher of Alexander’ is not, that ultimately explains the expressions’ modal behavior, not rigidity. The point remains, however, that ‘rigidity’ is a label that, correctly applied, at least tracks properties that play important explanatory roles (and in a manner that is neutral with respect to what the semantic content of proper names ultimately is). The theoretical usefulness of general term rigidity would likewise be its ability to track important semantic (or even metaphysical) distinctions, and a good test case for whether a notion of general term rigidity is useful is whether it predicts necessity and contingency, regardless of what the ‘ultimate’ explanation might be. Predicting the status of theoretical identities is at least fundamental to the rigid/non-rigid distinction in LaPorte (2013), and I aim to show that LaPorte fails to give us a distinction that systematically tracks anything useful; that is, the way it is drawn makes the rigidity or not of ‘X’ and ‘Y’ irrelevant to whether (‘all X are Y’) is necessary or contingent. None of this should be taken to suggest I deny that certain general terms are special. The meaning of ‘water’, for instance, may be determined by cognition-external factors and even have an indexical component that ‘clear stuff that fills lakes and rivers’ lacks. My argument is that rigidity does not label any useful property in the case of general terms, not that there aren’t other properties that set some kind terms apart from other general expressions.
A note about terminology: We may need to distinguish ‘water’ used as a predicate from ‘water’ used as a term (I leave open whether all occurrences are ultimately predicate occurrences). The phrase ‘kind term as it occurs in predicate position’ may be an oxymoron, but will I use it for simplicity. I use ‘kind term rigidity’ and ‘general term rigidity’ to characterize the rigidity of expressions like ‘water’ or ‘tiger’, regardless of whether they occur as terms or predicates.
Soames’s goal was more ambitious, but I grant here for the sake of argument that ‘blue’ in ‘blue is a color’ may be a name for the kind blue.
It is interesting that color terms may be a major exception. We often talk about colors themselves (‘green is pretty’, ‘blue is the color of the sky’) and such talk cannot be straightforwardly interpreted as talk about things that instantiate those kinds. ‘Green is pretty’ is not equivalent to ‘green things are pretty’. But color terms seem to be something of a special case. It is less clear that the sentence ‘water is H2O’, for instance, doesn’t convey the same content as ‘stuff that is water is also H2O’.
Most attempts to secure a theoretically interesting position for rigidity for general terms occurring as predicates (e.g. Linsky 2006; Martí and Martínez-Fernández 2010) use something like this distinction between levels to argue that certain predicates have different (rigid v. non-rigid) readings – designating being the chemical usually served as a beverage v. water – and that the reading may matter to the truth-conditions of sentences containing these predicates. I take no stance on whether such approaches may work here, and may grant that ‘the chemical usually served as a beverage’ is ambiguous (the significance of this ambiguity is a different matter, see Soames 2002: 261, and Martí and Martínez-Fernández 2010: 50–53 for discussion). Even so, the role of rigidity is significantly limited compared to what Kripke and others arguably thought; the truth-conditional differences are discernible only in certain sentences involving second-order definite descriptions and special modal operators such as the actually-operator. No one except LaPorte has, to my knowledge, challenged Soames’s derivation of necessarily true universally quantified sentences from kind identities. (Linsky and Martí & Martínez-Fernández, like Salmon (2005), (appear to) treat sentences like (1) as predicative sentences, not identities.) If he succeeds it may, as far as I can tell, potentially change the face of the debate; whether a general term used as a predicate is rigid or not may matter to the modal profile of any sentence containing it, making the rigid/non-rigid distinction far more significant than most seem to assume.
Of course, some might be wary of making such revisions to the semantic content of predicates merely to circumvent overgeneralization. It is striking that such moves are justified primarily by a motivation to ensure that rigidity can play a significant role in discussions of kind terms, and seem hard to motivate on independent grounds, thus raising the suspicion of ad hocness.
In fact, LaPorte’s suggested approach is closer to the latter suggestion; LaPorte sketches an account according to which kind terms are first-order names for kinds even in predicate position. In that case the copula, for instance, cannot be interpreted (as it usually is) as a subset relator, but must instead be a binary relation of sorts. Unfortunately, too few details are provided to fully evaluate the approach. LaPorte’s response to Soames is supposed to work in general, however, and I will accordingly assume the somewhat more intuitive intensional approach just described; nothing should hinge on the details.
For a sustained defense of a parallel analysis of singular terms (and response to Quine), see Neale (1990).
LaPorte has an extended discussion of what he calls shadowing properties (chapter 2): unintended alternative designations for kind terms. But that discussion seems to be orthogonal to the issues at hand. When I say that ‘water is the chemical …’ I am talking about water and the property of being the chemical … – that property is not an unintended designation but the intended one. In any case, LaPorte admits that being the chemical … may be the designation in some contexts, and that is all I need for my arguments.
The present worry is reminiscent of another issue Soames raises (Soames 2002, p.261), namely that it does not matter to the truth-conditions of ‘water is the chemical …’ whether we take ‘the chemical …’ to designate being the chemical … – the sentence has the same truth conditions regardless of reading. I am not ruling out the possibility that some sophisticated account could distinguish the readings in certain special circumstances involving certain modal operators (see e.g. Martí and Martínez-Fernández (2010) for discussion), but appealing to contextual information is insufficient at best, and it is far from obvious that any such account would salvage LaPorte’s reading of (1).
Though I think a similar conclusion hold for the singular case – ‘Aristotle is the teacher of Alexander’ is not a contingent identity statement (one may perhaps call it an identity statement on the de re reading on which it is necessarily true) – the arguments in this section rely on the fact that general terms, even by LaPorte’s admission, designate different things. The arguments do as such not obviously extend to the singular case.
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Acknowledgements
The research behind this article was made possible in part through a grant from the SASPRO/FP7-Marie Curie Actions-COFUND scheme [grant number 0086/01/03/-b]. I wish to thank two anonymous referees for helpful comments on an earlier version of this article.
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Haraldsen, F. Kind Term Rigidity and Property Identities. Philosophia 45, 1179–1193 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-017-9822-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-017-9822-3