Introduction

1. Introduction Must I exist? Common sense seems to indicate not. My parents might not have met and therefore I might never have been born. But it is well known that we can prove that any and every object must necessarily exist in S5 (Prior 1956). Here is a standard proof (from Menzel 2005) 1 x=x 2 (y) (y≠x) → (x≠x) 3 (x=x) → ~(y) (y≠x) 4 (x=x) → Ey (y=x) 5 Ey (y=x) 6 □Ey (y=x) 7 (x)□Ey (y=x)  Language, Thought, Logic, and Existence Richard Brown On the other hand One might take the semantic task to be that of giving the meaning of sentences independently of their being used to express any thought. This way of thinking about semantics has it as simply a part of grammar. According to Bach the job of semantics is to provide an account of how information is linguistically encoded. NDT So for instance on this view the sentence ‘Saul Kripke likes tea,’ would be rendered as (3), (3) The English sentence ‘Saul Kripke likes tea’ is true if and only if (Ex) (is called “Saul Kripke”(x) & Likes tea(x)) Its truth condition is that there is an object which is called ‘Saul Kripke’ and which likes tea. I Choose Both We have two legitimate conceptions of what the semantic task is. I will use ‘P-semantics’ for theories that want to give a theory of the meaning of thoughts and ‘L-semantics’ for theories that want to give a theory of the meaning of sentences considered apart from their being used to express any given thought. Rigid Designation? But how do we reconcile this with the thesis of rigid designation? Indeed, isn’t adopting NDT really admitting that there is no such semantic property? Who the description in (3) picks out can vary from counter-factual situation to counter-factual situation. The reference of the name depends on pragmatic facts. Open Minded? Necessary existence is usually reserved for such lofty beings as numbers and God; who would’ve thought that my computer and I kept such company?! So what are we to do? Luckily for those who feel like I do there is Kripke’s well known solution to this problem (Kripke 1963) which has two parts Frigidity I have coined the term ‘frigidity’ and ‘frigid designator’ as a way to contrast a view like Bach’s with the semantic conception of rigidity. But this begs the question about the ‘right’ way to draw the semantic/pragmatic distinction. If there is a real issue here then it should be possible to formulate it in a way that is neutral Neutrality Frigidity is the claim that there is no such L-semantic property of rigidity. So what I think the problem of necessary existence shows is that our L-semantic theory cannot contain rigid designators. When we treat names as singular terms our best logic goes off the rails. Semantical Considerations Following Quine, he invokes the ‘generality interpretation’ of variables and requires that no free variables be allowed in our instances of axioms in a proof (Quine 1940).Kripke’s next move is to require that there be no singular terms in our formal language. His quantified modal logic includes only variables. The Semantic Task One might take the semantic task to be that of giving the meaning of and truth-conditions for thoughts, as Michael Devitt does (Devitt 1997). For Devitt meaning is primarily a property of thoughts and the semantic task is to explain what property they have which allows them to play the role in behavior that they do Conclusion The causal theory of reference is a P-semantic theory. It says that we can have singular thoughts, given that the right kinds of causal/historical connections hold between certain thought contents and the world. But we express those thoughts using a language that itself does not have singular terms as per NDT. ◊ ~Ex (x=SK) How do we say that Kripke might not have existed in a language with no singular terms? One option is Kent Bach’s Nominal Description Theory (NDT). NDT says that a name N is semantically equivalent to the description that mentions N, something like ‘is called “N”’ or, as Bach prefers, ‘is the bearer of “N”’.