Abstract
Rigid expressionism is the view that all natural kind terms and many other kind terms are rigid designators. Rigid expressionists embrace the ‘overgeneralization’ of rigidity, since they hold that not just natural kind terms but all unstructured kind terms are rigid designators. Unfortunately overgeneralization remains a defeating problem for rigid expressionism. It runs together natural kind terms and nominal kind terms in a way that enforces a false semantic uniformity. The Kripke/Putnam view of natural kind terms minus the claim of rigidity is correct, but a traditional descriptivist theory is appropriate for nominal kind terms. None of them should be thought of as either rigid or non-rigid, however.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
“According to the view I advocate, then, terms for natural kinds are much closer to proper names than is ordinarily supposed.” (Kripke 1980, p. 127.) Note that here and throughout this article I am addressing the issue as it applies to natural kind and other terms used as general terms or predicates subject to quantification. The use of natural kind terms used as singular terms such as “Red is a color” is derivative according to Soames (2002, pp. 246–247). Furthermore kinds, species, properties are not as robust as the physical objects such as persons that are typically the objects of rigid proper names. Certainly the ontological status and nature of biological species is a hotly contested issue. Soames also argues that treating such singular natural kind terms as rigid does not shed light on necessary a posteriori identities. See Soames (2002, pp. 308–311).
But not entirely without advocates. See Kosterec forthcoming and references therein. I would like to thank an anonymous referee for pointing this out. Unfortunately this article came available after I had substantially written this piece, thus I am unable to effectively evaluate this option here. This option is worth careful assessment, but it strikes me as another desperate attempt to retain the notion of rigidity for general terms by piling on complexities. But at least if we must no matter what retain rigidity for natural kind terms, then they should be non-rigid as Kosterec proposes.
They do not use the name ‘rigid expressionists’ of themselves. I am introducing it here as a term of convenience in order to be able to consider their views in a general way.
Both Salmon (2005) and Johnson (2011) use the phrase ‘rigid expression of a property’ but other proponents are happy to stick with ‘designation’. Orlando in her paper on the topic calls rigid expressionism ‘the identity of designation conception’ (Orlando 2014, p. 51). The difference is purely terminological for our purposes here.
Nothing is meant by the use of ‘nominal kind term’ beyond that the kinds are not natural kinds. In particular there should be no suggestion that nominal kinds are not real kinds. In any case, the distinction between natural kinds and artifact and social kinds is not sharp. Many natural kinds are artifacts or the result of human intervention. We breed new animal types and create elements that are not found in nature. There are also intermediate and hybrid kinds. None of this affects the main points in this paper.
The cluster theory associated with Wittgenstein and Searle is a variant of the traditional description theory introduced to account for vagueness of common terms. Kripke notes that all considerations that apply to the traditional description theory apply with only slight modifications to the cluster theory. There is no need here to discuss it in detail separately. The traditional description theory associated with Mill, Russell and Frege is the view that general terms are definable by compound property descriptions.
This is the epistemic sense of ‘may’ that Kripke distinguishes from the metaphysical.
See Schwartz (1978) for extensive discussion of this example and similar ones.
See Devitt and Sterelny (1999, p. 101–104) for a helpful discussion of the logical underpinnings of analytic truths.
I would like to thank an anonymous referee and other readers for pointing out this issue about reference fixing.
See Fernández Moreno (2016), especially Chapter 8 for a useful discussion of this.
References
Boghossian, P. (1996). Analyticity reconsidered. Noûs, 30(3), 360–391.
Devitt, M. (2005). Rigid application. Philosophical Studies, 125, 139–165.
Devitt, M., & Sterelny, K. (1999). Language and reality (2nd ed.). Cambridge: The MIT Press.
Donnellan, K. (1977). The contingent a priori and rigid designators. Midwest Studies in Philosophy, II, 12–27.
Donnellan, K. (1983). Kripke and Putnam on natural kind terms. In C. Ginet & S. Shoemaker (Eds.), Knowledge and mind (pp. 84–104). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Fara, D. G. (2014). Names as predicates. Philosophical Review, 124(1), 59–117.
Fernández Moreno, L. (2016). The reference of natural kind terms. Bern: Peter Lang.
Goodman, N. (1965). Fact, fiction, and forecast (2nd ed.). Indianapolis: The Bobbs-Merrill Company Inc.
Johnson, M. (2011). Harlequin semantics. Ph.D. dissertation Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey.
Johnson, M. (unpublished). Rigidity for the common noun. Available at http://michaeljohnsonphilosophy.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/Rigidity-Reborn.pdf.
Kosterec, M. (forthcoming). Criteria for nontrivial general term rigidity, Acta Analytica.
Kripke, S. A. (1980). Naming and necessity. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
LaPorte, J. (2000). Rigidity and kind. Philosophical Studies, 97, 293–316.
LaPorte, J. (2013). Rigid designation and theoretical identities. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Linsky, B. (1984). General terms as designators. Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, 65, 259–276.
Linsky, B. (2006). General terms as rigid designators. Philosophical Studies, 128, 655–667.
López de Sa, D. (2008). Rigidity for predicates and the trivialization problem. Philosophers’ Imprint, 8(1), 1–13.
Martí, G., & Martínez-Fernández, J. (2010). General terms as designators: A defense of the view. In H. Beebee & N. Sabbarton-Leary (Eds.), The semantics and metaphysics of natural kinds (pp. 46–63). Abingdon: Routledge.
McGinn, C. (1982). Rigid designation and semantic value. The Philosophical Quarterly, 32(127), 97–115.
Nimtz, C. (2017). Paradigm terms: The necessity of kind term identifications generalized. Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 95(1), 124–140.
Orlando, E. (2014). General terms and rigidity: Another solution to the trivialization problem. Manuscrito, 37(1), 51–84.
Putnam, H. (1975a). The analytic and synthetic. In Philosophical papers: Vol. 2: Mind, language, and reality (pp. 33–69). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Putnam, H. (1975b). The meaning of ‘Meaning’. In Minnesota studies in the philosophy of science vol. VII: Language, mind, and knowledge (pp. 131–193). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Quine, W. V. (1966). Truth by convention (1935). In The ways of paradox. New York: Random House.
Rubin, M. (2013). Are chemical kind terms rigid appliers? Erkenntnis, 78, 1303–1316.
Salmon, N. (2005). Are general terms rigid? Linguistics and Philosophy, 28, 117–134.
Schwartz, S. P. (1978). Putnam on artifacts. The Philosophical Review, 87(4), 566–574.
Schwartz, S. P. (2002). Kinds, general terms, and rigidity: A reply to LaPorte. Philosophical Studies, 109, 265–277.
Soames, S. (2002). Beyond rigidity: The unfinished semantic agenda of naming and necessity. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Sullivan, A. (2007). Rigid designation and semantic structure. Philosophers’ Imprint, 7(6), 1–22.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Andrea Bianchi, Michael Devitt, Michael Gardner, Michael Johnson, Joseph LaPorte, Genoveva Marti, and three anonymous referees for helpful comments on and discussions of previous versions of this paper.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Schwartz, S.P. Against rigidity for natural kind terms. Synthese 198 (Suppl 12), 2957–2971 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-018-1857-x
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-018-1857-x