Critical Notice of Scott Soames, Beyond Rigidity [Book Review]

Canadian Journal of Philosophy 35 (1):169-178 (2005)
  Copy   BIBTEX

Abstract

In this admirable book, Scott Soames provides well defended answers to some of the most difficult and important questions in the philosophy of language, and he does so with characteristic thoroughness, clarity, and rigor. The book's title is appropriate, since it does indeed go ‘beyond rigidity’ in many ways. Among other things, Soames does the following in the course of the book. He persuasively argues that the main thesis of Kripke's Naming and Necessity—that ordinary names are rigid designators—can be extended to the more general thesis that simple proper names are synonymous with neither nonrigid nor rigidified descriptions, and so have no descriptive content whatever. He thoroughly defends and places in the context of a larger semantic theory the Millian thesis that the sole semantic contents of most proper names are the names' referents, so that sentences containing such names semantically express singular Russellian propositions. He provides and defends at length an innovative pragmatic account of why substitution of co-referring proper names in cognitive contexts intuitively fails to be truth preserving, even though it seems to follow from the Millian thesis that such substitution must be semantically valid. And he thoroughly and persuasively defends a semantic theory of natural kind terms that explains how, following Kripke and Putnam, theoretical identities involving such terms can express a posteriori necessities, even though on Soames's theory, and contrary to the Kripke-Putnam view, such terms are neither names of natural kinds nor rigid designators in any interesting sense.

Similar books and articles

Critical Notice.Christian Piller - 1996 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 74 (2):347-367.
The Good in the Right. [REVIEW]Anthony Skelton - 2007 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 37 (2):305-325.
Critical Notice.Michael D. Resnik - 1992 - Mind 101 (401):107 - 122.
Critical Notice.Michael R. Depaul - 1990 - Mind 99 (396):619 - 633.
Critical Notice.Michael Dummett - 1980 - Mind 89 (356):605 - 616.
Critical Notice.Michael Clark - 1975 - Mind 84 (333):122 - 136.
Strange Multiplicity. [REVIEW]Michael Milde - 1998 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 28 (1):119-143.

Analytics

Added to PP
2013-10-30

Downloads
237 (#78,009)

6 months
45 (#78,999)

Historical graph of downloads
How can I increase my downloads?

Author's Profile

Michael McKinsey
Wayne State University

Citations of this work

Millian descriptivism.Ben Caplan - 2007 - Philosophical Studies 133 (2):181-198.
A pragmatic defense of Millianism.Arvid Båve - 2008 - Philosophical Studies 138 (2):271 - 289.
Frege's Puzzle and Descriptive Enrichment.Jeff Speaks - 2010 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 83 (2):267-282.
On sense and direct reference.Ben Caplan - 2006 - Philosophy Compass 1 (2):171-185.

View all 6 citations / Add more citations

References found in this work

Logic and Conversation.H. P. Grice - 1975 - In Donald Davidson & Gilbert Harman (eds.), The Logic of Grammar. Encino, CA: pp. 64-75.
Logic and Conversation.H. Paul Grice - 1975 - In Maite Ezcurdia & Robert J. Stainton (eds.), The Semantics-Pragmatics Boundary in Philosophy. Broadview Press. pp. 47.
On Quantifier Domain Restriction.Jason Stanley & Zoltán Gendler Szabó - 2000 - Mind and Language 15 (2-3):219--61.
Conversational Impliciture.Kent Bach - 1994 - Mind and Language 9 (2):124-162.
Conversational impliciture.Kent Bach - 1994 - In Maite Ezcurdia & Robert J. Stainton (eds.), The Semantics-Pragmatics Boundary in Philosophy. Broadview Press. pp. 284.

View all 12 references / Add more references