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General Terms and Relational Modality *
Author(s) -
Glüer Kathrin,
Pagin Peter
Publication year - 2012
Publication title -
noûs
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 2.574
H-Index - 66
eISSN - 1468-0068
pISSN - 0029-4624
DOI - 10.1111/j.1468-0068.2010.00783.x
Subject(s) - modality (human–computer interaction) , computer science , psychology , mathematics , natural language processing , artificial intelligence
Natural kind terms have exercised philosophical fancy ever since Kripke, in Nam- ing and Necessity, claimed them to be rigid designators. He there drew attention to the peculiar, name-like behavior of a family of prima facie only loosely related general terms of ordinary English: terms such as 'water', 'tiger', 'heat', and 'red'. Just as for ordinary proper names, Kripke argued that such terms cannot be syn- onymous with any of the definite descriptions ordinary speakers associate with them. Rather, the name-like behavior of these so-called natural kind terms is to be explained, just as in in the case of proper names, by the doctrine of rigid desig- nation. And as a consequence of thus extending the notion of rigid designation to general terms, he famously endorsed the claim that so-called 'theoretical identifi- cations', i.e. statements like