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QUENTIN SMITH
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180 QUENTIN SMITH
ii
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MARCUS, KRIPKE, AND THE ORIGIN OF THE NEW THEORY OF REFERENCE 181
italics). Of course, Marcus did not make a claim for the rigidity of common
nouns, and this idea is correctly credited to Kripke, but the same does not
hold for the rigidity of proper names, as we shall shortly see.
Even in cases where we find philosophers listing a series of contributors
to the New Theory of Reference, Marcus is typically not mentioned. John
Perry, who, along with Kaplan, is the leading exponent of the New Theory
of indexicals, writes that "Lessons learned from the works of Donnellan,
Kaplan, Kripke, Putnam, Wettstein and other New Theorists of Reference
have convinced me to accept two theses. ... First, the references of the
singular terms do not depend on Fregean senses, or identifying descriptions
in the mind of the speaker. ... Second, each of these utterances expresses
what David Kaplan has called a 'singular proposition'" (Perry, 1988:
108).
The relevant lessons, however, were first taught by Marcus and repeated
with elaboration by the named individuals. In Nathan Salmon's book on
REFERENCE AND ESSENCE, he writes that versions of the New Theory
of Reference were "developed, to a considerable extent independently, by
several contemporary philosophers of semantics, most notably Keith Don
nellan, David Kaplan, Saul Kripke, and Hilary Putnam" (Salmon, 1981: 3).
Another leading contributor to the New Theory, Howard Wettstein, writes
such things as "New theorists like Keith Donnellan, David Kaplan, Saul
Kripke, John Perry, and Hilary Putnam - and my own work falls into this
tradition - proffer an account (of direct reference that is anti-Fregean)"
(Wettstein, 1986: 185-186). Quotations such as these can picked out at
will from the current literature. I was once myself among the guilty, call
ing Marcus' theory of proper names "the Kripke-Donnellan theory of
proper names" (Smith, 1987: 387)
Occasionally her work is alluded to in the literature on the New Theory1
but her central role is overlooked. It seems to me that, from the point of
view of the history of philosophy, correcting this misunderstanding is
no less important than correcting the misunderstanding in a hypothetical
situation where virtually all philosophers attributed the origin of the Theory
of Forms to Plotinus. This correction is the aim of the following several
sections. In these sections, I will outline some of the basic ideas in Marcus'
work that also occur in Kripke's "Naming and Necessity" and "Identity
and Necessity". As I shall explain later, I believe the two main causes of the
subsequent failure of philosophers to mention her work is that attributions
to Marcus did not appear in the relevant places in "Naming and Necessity"
and "Identity and Necessity" and that many philosophers may have been
insufficiently familiar with Marcus' earlier contributions.
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182 QUENTIN SMITH
III
I shall quote some passages from Marcus' 1961 article that reveal six main
ideas she contributed to the New Theory.
First, let us start with the idea that proper names are directly referential
and are not abbreviated or disguised definitions, as Frege and Russell and
most philosophers up to the 1970s believed. Marcus writes:
But to give a thing a proper name is different from giving a unique description. ... (An)
identifying tag is a proper name of the thing. ... This tag, a proper name, has no meaning.
It simply tags. It is not strongly equatable with any of the singular descriptions of the thing.
(1961:309-310)
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MARCUS, KRIPKE, AND THE ORIGIN OF THE NEW THEORY OF REFERENCE 183
Marcus' earlier statement of them. Let us begin with this passage, where
Marcus is discussing (10) and (15) (in her notation). (10) and (15) are
If we decide that "the evening star" and "the morning star" are [proper] names for the same
thing, and that "Scott" and "the author of WAVERLY" are [proper] names for the same
thing, then they must be intersubstitutable in every context. In fact it often happens, in a
growing, changing language, that a descriptive phrase comes to be used as a proper name
- an identifying tag - and the descriptive meaning is lost or ignored.
Marcus will find that not all of the relevant expressions are names for
the same thing. They are not intersubstitutable in modal contexts; Marcus
writes:
Let us now return to (10) and (15). If they express a true identity, then 'Scott' ought to be
anywhere intersubstitutable for 'the author of WAVERLY' in modal contexts, and similarly
for 'the morning star' and 'the evening star'. If they are not so universally intersubstitutable
- that is, if our decision is that they are not simply proper names for the same thing; that
they express an equivalence which is possibly false, e.g. someone else might have written
WAVERLY, the star first seen in the evening might have been different from the star first
seen in the morning - then they are not identities. ( 1961: 311 )
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184 QUENTIN SMITH
component she introduced into the New Theory of Reference. She showed
that
You may describe Venus as the evening star, and I may describe Venus as the morning star,
and we may both be surprised that, as an empirical fact, the same thing is being described,
But it is not an empirical fact that
Here "I" is the identity symbol. If "Venus" expresses the modally stable
sense expressible by "whatever is actually the evening star and morning
star", then the persons designated by "you" and "I" in the passage quoted
from Marcus' article should be able to know a priori, simply by reflection
upon the semantic content of the expressions "Venus", "the morning star"
and "the evening star" that Venus is both the morning star and the evening
star. The fact that they cannot know this indicates that "Venus" does not
express the modally stable sense expressed by "whatever is actually the
evening star and morning star". Thus we have the irony that Plantinga's
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MARCUS, KRIPKE, AND THE ORIGIN OF THE NEW THEORY OF REFERENCE 185
and Linsky's theory of proper names was refuted years before they for
mulated it, unbeknownst to themselves (and unbeknownst to later New
Theorists)!
Marcus' arguments for the "direct reference theory" make manifest her
discovery of a fifth crucial component of the New Theory of Reference,
the concept of rigid designation (although the name of this concept, "rigid
designation" was first coined by Kripke). "Hesperus" is intersubstitutable
salva veritate with either occurrence of "Phosphorus" in "Necessarily,
Phosphorus is Phosphorus". Each of these two names actually designates
Venus in respect of every possible world in which Venus exists and does
not actually designate anything in respect of worlds in which Venus does
not exist. If these two names were instead equivalent to contingent descrip
tions (e.g. "the morning star" and "the evening star"), they would not be
intersubstitutable salva veritate in this modal context and thus would be
non-rigid designators. Marcus notes in her 1970 APA paper, "Essential
Attribution", presented at a symposium at which Kripke was one of the
symposiasts, that "individual names don't alter their reference, except to
the extent that in (respect of) some worlds they may not refer at all" (1971 :
194).
Although I have used the "rigid designation" terminology, Marcus does
not use it, since Kripke's introduction of this expression in his "Identi
ty and Necessity" (1971) assimilated proper names to some descriptions
(viz., modally stable descriptions), which obscures their different semantic
properties. Marcus' point can be accommodated, consistently with the con
tinued use of "rigid designators", if we make the following classification,
which is familiar to those working with the New Theory of Reference.
Adopting the genus/species terminology, we may say that the genus is
rigid designators, and the different species are (a) proper names, (b) refer
entially used definite descriptions (in Donnellan's sense), (c) attributively
used definite descriptions that express a modally stable sense, (d) uses of
indexicals, (e) natural kind terms, and certain other expressions. We avoid
assimilating proper names to some modally stable descriptions, since prop
er names refer directly, whereas attributively used definite descriptions that
express modally stable senses refer indirectly, via the expressed sense.
A sixth idea introduced into the New Theory of Reference by Marcus
is the idea of a posteriori necessity. Recall our earlier quotation of Marcus'
remarks about Venus and the evening star:
You may describe Venus as the evening star, and I may describe Venus as the morning star,
and we may both be surprised that, as an empirical fact, the same thing is being described.
But it is not an empirical fact that
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186 QUENTIN SMITH
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MARCUS, KRIPKE, AND THE ORIGIN OF THE NEW THEORY OF REFERENCE 187
The tags are the "essential" denoting phrases for individuals, but empirical descriptions
are not, and thus we look to statements containing "tags", not descriptions, to ascertain the
essential properties of individuals. Thus the assumption of a distinction between "names"
and "descriptions" is equivalent to essentialism. (Marcus et al, 1962: 142)
This is mistaken, since Marcus clearly did not claim in her article that
things have their names essentially. As Marcus later explained, "that was
not my claim. Socrates might have been named Euthyphro; he would not
thereby be Euthyphro" (1993: 226-227). To the contrary, her claim was
that names are what later came to described as directly referential. They
are not denoting phrases, essential or otherwise.
This suggests how we may understand the statement in the 1980 Preface
to NAMING AND NECESSITY that "most of the views were formulated
in about 1963-64." We should interpret this as suggesting that Kripke first
correctly understood Marcus' theory in 1963-64 and that before this time,
he did not grasp what she conveyed in the presentation he attended. In par
ticular, it was Marcus' theory of the necessity of identities, where names
flank the identity sign, and the associated ideas of direct and rigid refer
ence that became clear to Kripke in subsequent years. We should perhaps
interpret this 1980 passage from Kripke in this light: He says "Eventually
I came to realize - this realization inaugurated the aforementioned work
of 1963-64 - that the received presuppositions against the necessity of
identities between ordinary names were incorrect, that the natural intuition
that the names of ordinary language are rigid designators can in fact be
upheld" (1980: 5).
But why does Kripke not say instead that at this time he first came
to understand Marcus' arguments for the necessity of identity and the
directly referential and rigid character of proper names? In the 1972 essay,
he attributes one idea to Marcus: "Marcus says that identities between
names are necessary" (1972: 305). But instead of explaining how this
idea and Marcus' other ideas formed the theoretical basis of "Naming and
Necessity", Kripke goes on to criticize a minor aside made by Marcus,
viz., that a good dictionary should be able to tell one if "Hesperus" and
"Phosphorus" have the same reference (1972: 305). (But as Marcus later
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188 QUENTIN SMITH
explained, she should have made it clear that what she had in mind was a
"dictionary" that functions as an encyclopedia, where co-referring names
are listed as in a biographical dictionary (Marcus, 1993: 34, n. 1).) I believe
a reasonable explanation of why Kripke did not attribute the central features
of the "New Theory" to Marcus is that he originally misunderstood Marcus '
New Theory of Reference. When he eventually understood it, after a year
or two, the insight that came made it seem that the ideas were new. I suspect
that such instances occur fairly frequently in the history of thought and
art.3
NOTES
1 Some philosophers have noted in passing some of Marcus' contributions, but have not
recognized their full extent. J. Almog (1986:220, n. 8) goes further than most in recognizing
some of Marcus' contributions (e.g. the idea of direct reference), but confines this remark
to a footnote in an article devoted to the theory that proper names are rigid designators,
which he believes was originated by Kripke rather than Marcus. Another example is Alan
Sidelle's recognition that Marcus, not Kripke, first formulated the idea of the necessity of
identity (1989: 25.), but Sidelle notes this in a book devoted to the idea of a posteriori
necessity, which he believes was originated by Kripke rather than Marcus. John McDowell
(1994: 105, n. 28) mentions the trend towards construing some expressions as directly
referential and, after referring to Kripke and Donnellan as "early proponents of this trend",
writes: "See also, predating the trend, Ruth Barcan Marcus, 'Modalities and Intensional
Languages', Synthese 27, (1962), 303-22." {Material added in May, 1995: It should be
added that in publications subsequent to the ones I quoted from Kaplan, N. Salmon, and
H. Wettstein, each of them credits Marcus for developing at least one of the ideas for the
New Theory of Reference. These appear in Salmon's FREGE'S PUZZLE, Wettstein's HAS
SEMANTICS RESTED ON A MISTAKE? and in Kaplan's contribution to MODALITY,
MORALITY, AND BELIEF: ESSAYS IN HONOR OF RUTH BARCAN MARCUS, Wal
ter Simmot-Armstrong et al. (eds.).}
2 Of course Salmon is expressing here the nearly universal misunderstanding of the origin
of this idea. For another example, consider Sidelle's comment in his book devoted to the
idea of a posteriori necessity: "Enter Kripke and his NAMING AND NECESSITY. Kripke
made it very plausible that there are necessary truths that are synthetic and knowable only a
posteriori. Some of the more familiar examples are 'Hesperus and Phosphorus'" (Sidelle,
1989:2).
3 Even official histories, such as Munitz's CONTEMPORARY ANALYTIC PHILOSO
PHY, get it wrong. In the chapter where the ideas developed by Marcus are explained, we
find the chapter title "Referential Opacity, Modality, and Essentialism: Saul Kripke".
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MARCUS, KRIPKE, AND THE ORIGIN OF THE NEW THEORY OF REFERENCE 189
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Philosophy Department
Western Michigan University
Kalamazoo, MI 49008
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