Stimulating as always! I have a criticism to make of the use made of the term ‘rigid designation’.
Multiple philosophers have suggested that this stance seems similar to “rigid designation”, i.e., when I say ‘fair’ it intrinsically, rigidly refers to something-to-do-with-equal-division. I confess I don’t see it that way myself [...]
What philosophers of language ordinarily mean by calling a term a rigid designator is not that, considered purely syntactically, it intrinsically refers to anything. The property of being a rigid designator is something which can be possessed by an expression in use in a particular language-system. The distinction is between expressions-in-use whose reference we let vary across counterfactual scenarios (or ‘possible worlds’), e.g. ‘The first person to climb Everest’, and those whose reference remains stable, e.g. ‘George Washington’, ‘The sum of two and two’.
There is some controversy over how to apply the rigid/non-rigid distinction to general terms like ‘fair’ (or predicates like ‘is fair’) - cf. Scott Soames’ book Beyond Rigidity—but I think the natural thing to say is that ‘is fair’ is rigid, since it is used to attribute the same property across counterfactual scenarios, in contrast with a predicate like ‘possesses my favourite property’.
Multiple philosophers have suggested that this stance seems similar to “rigid designation”, i.e., when I say ‘fair’ it intrinsically, rigidly refers to something-to-do-with-equal-division. I confess I don’t see it that way myself—if somebody thinks of Euclidean geometry when you utter the sound “num-berz” they’re not doing anything false, they’re associating the sound to a different logical thingy. It’s not about words with intrinsically rigid referential power, it’s that the words are window dressing on the underlying entities.
I just wanted to agree with Tristanhaze here that this usage strikes me as non-standard. I want to put this in my own words so that Tristanhaze/Eliezer/others can correct me if I’ve got the wrong end of the stick.
If something is a rigid designator it means that it refers to the same thing in all possible worlds. To say it’s non-rigid is to say it refers to different things in some possible worlds to others. This has nothing to do with whether different language users that use the phrase must always be referring to the same thing. So George Washington may be a rigid designator in that it refers to the same person in all possible worlds (bracketing issues of transworld identity) but that doesn’t mean that in all possible worlds that person is called George Washington or that in all possible worlds people who use the name George Washington must be referring to this person or even that in the actual world all people who use the name George Washington must be referring to this person.
To say “water” is a rigid designator is to say that whatever possible world I am talking about, I am picking out the same thing when I use the word water (in a way that I wouldn’t be when I say, “the tallest person in the world”—this would pick out different things in different worlds). But it doesn’t say anything about whether I mean the same thing as other language users in this or other possible worlds.
ETA: So the relevance to the quoted section is that rigid designators aren’t about whether someone that thinks of Euclidean geometry when you say “numbers” is right or wrong—it’s about whether whatever they associate with that word is the same thing in all possible worlds (or whether it’s a different thing in some worlds).
ETA 2: I take it that Eliezer’s paragraph here is in response to comments like these. I’m in a bit of a rush and need to think about it some more but I think Richard may be making a different point here to the one Eliezer’s making (on my reading). I think Richard is saying that what is “right” is rigidly determined by my current (idealised) desires—so in a possible world where I desired to murder, murder would still be wrong because “right” is a rigid designator (that is, right from the perspective of my language, a different language user—like the me that desires murder—might still use “right” to refer to something else according to which murder is right. See the point about George Washington being able to be rigid even if people in other possible worlds use that name to name someone else). On the other hand, my reading of Eliezer was that he was taking the claim that “right” (or “fair”) is a rigid designator to mean something about the way different language users use the word “fair”. Eliezer seemed to be suggesting that rigid designation implied that words intrinsically mean certain things and hence that rigid designation implies that if someone uses a word in a different way they are wrong (using numbers to refer to geometry). I could have misunderstood either of these two comments but if I haven’t then it seems to me that Eliezer is using rigid designator in a non-standard way.
I think Richard is saying that what is “right” is rigidly determined by my current (idealised) desires—so in a possible world where I desired to murder, murder would still be wrong
...is your real claim here, independent of any points about language use?
If so, I think I would just straightforwardly modify my paragraph above to say that my statements are not trying to talk about language use or human brains / desires, albeit that desire is both an optimization target of, and a quotation of, morality.
I’m not sure what you have in mind here. We need to distinguish (i) the referent of a concept from (ii) its reference-fixing “sense” or functional role. The way I understood your view, the reference-fixing story for moral terms involves our (idealized) desires. But the referent is “rigid” in the sense that it’s picking out the content of our desires: the thing that actually fills the functional role, rather than the role-property itself.
Since our desires typically aren’t themselves about our desires, so it will turn out, on this story, that morality is not “about” desires. It’s about “love, friendship,” and all that jazz. But there’s a story to be told about how our moral concepts came to pick out these particular worldly properties. And that’s where desires come in (as I understand your view). Our moral concepts pick out these particular properties because they’re the contents of our idealized desires. But that’s not to say that therefore morality is “really” just about fulfilling any old desires. For that would be to neglect the part that rigid designation, and the distinction between reference and reference-fixing, plays in this story.
Does that capture your view? To further clarify: the point of appealing to “rigid designation” is just to explain how desires could play a reference-fixing role without being any part of the referent of moral talk (or what it is “about”). Isn’t that what you’re after? Or do you have some other reference-fixing story in mind?
This all does sound good to me; but, is there a way to say the above while tabooing “reference” and avoiding talk of things “referring” to other things? Reference isn’t ontologically basic, so what does it reduce to?
Basically, the main part that would worry me is a phrase like, “there’s a story to be told about how our moral concepts came to pick out these particular worldly properties” which sounds on its face like, “There’s a story to be told about how successorship came to pick out the natural numbers” whereas what I’d want to say is, “Of course, there’s a story to be told about how moral concepts came to have the power to move us” or “There’s a story to be told about how our brains came to reflect numbers”.
Can you give an example of a rigid designator (edit: that isn’t purely mathematical / logical)? I don’t understand how the concept is even coherent right now. “Issues of transworld identity” seem to be central and I don’t know why you’re sweeping them under the rug. More precisely, I do not understand how one goes about identifying objects in different possible worlds even in principle. I think that intuitions about this procedure are likely to be flawed because people do not consider possible worlds that are sufficiently different.
Okay, so three things are worth clarifying up front. First, this isn’t my area of expertise so anything I have to say about the matter should be taken with a pinch of salt. Second, this is a complex issue and really would require 2 or 3 sequences of material to properly outline so I wouldn’t read too much into the fact that my brief comment doesn’t present a substantive outline of the issue. Third, I have no settled views on the issues of rigid designators, nor am I trying to argue for a substantive position on the matter so I’m not deliberately sweeping anything under the rug (my aim was to distinguish Eliezer’s use of the phrase rigid designator from the standard usage and doing so doesn’t require discussion of transworld identity: Eliezer was using it to refer to issues relating to different people whereas philosophers use it to refer to issues relating to a single person—or at least that’s the simplified story that captures the crucial idea).
All that said, I’ll try to answer your question. First, it might help to think of rigid designators as cases where the thing to be identified isn’t simply to be identified with its broad role in the world. So “the inventor of bifocals” is the person that plays a certain role in the world—the role of inventing bifocals. So “the inventor of bifocals” is not a rigid designator. So the heuristic for identifying rigid designators is that they can’t just be identified by their role in the world.
Given this, what are some examples of rigid designators? Well, the answer to this question will depend on who you ask. A lot of people, following Putnam would take “water” (and other natural kind terms) to be a rigid designator. On this view, “Water” rigidly refers to H2O, regardless of whether H20 plays the “water” role in some other possible world. So imagine a possible world where some other substance, XYZ, falls from the sky, sakes thirst, fill rivers and so on (that is, XYZ fills the water role in this possible world). On the rigid designation view, XYZ would not be water. So there’s one example of a rigid designator (on one view).
Kripke (in his book naming and necessity) defends the view that names are rigid designators—so the name “Thomas Jefferson” refers to the same person in all possible worlds (this is where issues of transworld identity become relevant). This is meant to be contrasted with a view according to which the name “John Lennon” refers to the nearest and near enough realiser of a certain description (“lead singer of the Beatles, etc). So on this view, there are possible worlds where John Lennon is not the lead singer of the Beatles, even though the Beatles formed and had a singer that met many of the other descriptive features of John (born in the same town and so on).
Plausibly, what you take to be a rigid designator will depend on what you take possible worlds to be and what views you have on transworld identity. Note that your comment that it seems difficult to imagine how you could go about identifying objects in different possible worlds even in principle makes a very strong assumption about the metaphysics of possible worlds. For example, this difficulty would be most noticeable if possible worlds were concrete things that were causally distinct from us (as Lewis would hold). One major challenge to Lewis’s view is just this challenge. However, very few philosophers actually agree with Lewis.
So what are some other views? Well Kripke thinks that we simply stipulate possible worlds (as I said, this isn’t my area so I’m not entirely clear what he takes possible worlds to be—maximally consistent sets of sentences, perhaps—if anyone knows, I’d love to have this point clarified). That is, we say, “consider the possible world where Bill Gates won the presidency”. As Kripke doesn’t hold that possible worlds are real concrete entities, this stipulation isn’t necessarily problematic. On Kripke’s view, then, the problem of transworld identity is easy to solve.
More precisely, I do not understand how one goes about identifying objects in different possible worlds even in principle. I think that intuitions about this procedure are likely to be flawed because people do not consider possible worlds that are sufficiently different.
I don’t have the time to go into more detail but it’s worth noting that your comment about intuition is an important point depending on your view of what possible worlds are. However, there’s definitely an overarching challenge to views according to which we should rely on our intuitions to determine what is possible.
Thank you for the clarification. I agree that the question of what a possible world is is an important one, but the answer seems obvious to me: possible worlds are things that live inside the minds of agents (e.g. humans).
Water is one of the examples I considered and found incoherent. Once you start considering possible worlds with different laws of physics, it’s extremely unclear to me in what sense you can identify types of particles in one world with particles in another type of world. I could imagine doing this by making intuitive identifications step by step along “paths” in the space of possible worlds, but then it’s unclear to me how you could guarantee that the identifications you get this way are independent of the choice of path (this idea is motivated by a basic phenomenon in algebraic topology and complex analysis).
possible worlds are things that live inside the minds of agents (e.g. humans).
Yes, but almost everyone agrees with this (or at least, almost all views on possible worlds can be interpreted this way even if they can also be interpreted as claims about the existence of abstract—non-concrete—objects). There are a variety of different things that possible worlds can be even given the assumption that they exist in people’s heads (almost all the disagreement about what possible worlds are is disagreement within this category rather than between this category and something else).
Water is one of the examples I considered and found incoherent. Once you start considering possible worlds with different laws of physics, it’s extremely unclear to me in what sense you can identify types of particles in one world with particles in another type of world.
Two things: first, the claim that “water” rigidly designates H2O doesn’t imply that it must exist in all possible worlds—just that if “water” exists in a possible world then it is H2O. So if we can’t identify the same particles in different worlds then this just means that water exists in almost no worlds (perhaps only in our own world).
However, the view that we can’t identify the same particles in other worlds is a radical one and would be a strong sign that the account of possible worlds appealed to falls short (after all, possible worlds are supposed to be about what is possible and surely there are possibilities that revolve around the particles existing in our world—ie. surely it’s possible that I now be holding a glass of H2O. If your account of possible worlds can’t cope with this possibility it seems to not be a very useful account of possible worlds).
Further, how hard it is to identify sameness of particles across possible worlds will depend on how you take them to be “constructed”—if they are constructed by stipulation, ie. “consider the world where I am holding a glass of H2O” then it is very easy to get sameness of particles.
I’m not saying there’s not room for your criticisms but for them to hold requires substantial metaphysical work showing why your account, and only your account, of possible worlds works and hence that your conclusions hold.
Okay. I think what I’m actually trying to say is that what constitutes a rigid designator, among other things, seems to depend very strongly on the resolution at which you examine possible worlds.
When you say the phrase “imagine the possible world in which I have a glass of water in my hand” to a human, that human knows what you mean because by default humans only model the physical world at a resolution where it is easy to imagine making that intervention and only that intervention. When you say that phrase to an AI which is modeling the world at a much higher resolution, the AI does not know how to do what you ask because you haven’t given it enough information. How did the glass of water get there? What happened to the air molecules that it displaced? Etc.
First thing to note, possible worlds can’t be specified at different levels of detail. When doing so we are either specifying partial possible worlds or sets of possible worlds. As rigid designation is a claim about worlds, it can’t be relative to the level of detail utilised as it only applies to things specified at one level of detail.
Second, you still seem to be treating possible worlds as concrete things rather than something in the head (or, at least, making substantive assumptions about possible worlds and relying on these to make claims about possible worlds generally). Let’s take possible worlds to be sets of propositions and truth values. In this case there’s no reason to find transworld identity puzzling. H2O exists in this world just if a relevant proposition is true (like, “I am holding a glass of H2O”). There’s also no room for this transworld identity to be relative to a context. Whether these things are puzzling depends on your account of possible worlds and it seems like if you’re account of possible worlds can’t account for transworld identity it can’t do the work required of possible worlds and so it is open to the challenge that it should be abandoned in favour of some other account.
Third, it’s important to distinguish questions about the way worlds are from questions about how they can be specified. It’s an interesting question how we should specify individual possible worlds and another interesting question whether we often do so or whether we normally specify sets of possible worlds instead. However, difficulties with specification do not undermine the concept of a rigid designator.
Fourth, even if it were a relative matter whether H2O exists in a world this wouldn’t undermine the concept of rigid designation. Rigid designation would simply imply that if this were the case then it would also be a relative matter whether water existed in that world.
The summary of what I’m trying to get at is the following: you have raised concerns for practical issues (how we specify worlds) and epistemic issues (how we know what’s in worlds) but these aren’t really relevant to the issue of rigid designation. So, for example, I don’t think your claim that:
I think what I’m actually trying to say is that what constitutes a rigid designator, among other things, seems to depend very strongly on the resolution at which you examine possible worlds.
Follows from your argument (for the reasons I’ve outlined above, recap: from the fact that humans often specify sets of worlds rather than worlds nothing about rigid designation follows), even though I think your argument is an insightful one that raises interesting epistemic and practical issues for possible worlds.
First thing to note, possible worlds can’t be specified at different levels of detail.
Let’s take possible worlds to be sets of propositions and truth values.
I think that these two desires are contradictory. Part of what I’m trying to say is that it’s a highly nontrivial problem which propositions are even meaningful, let alone true, if you specify possible worlds at a sufficiently high level of detail. For example, at an extremely high level of detail, you might specify a possible world by specifying a set of laws of physics together with an initial condition for the universe. This kind of specification of a possible world doesn’t automatically allow you to interpret intuitive referents like “I,” so the meaning of a statement like “I am holding a glass of water” is extremely unclear.
you have raised concerns for practical issues (how we specify worlds) and epistemic issues (how we know what’s in worlds) but these aren’t really relevant to the issue of rigid designation.
How do you know what things are rigid designators if you neither know how to specify possible worlds nor how to determine what’s in them?
I think this is getting past the point that I can useful contribute further though I will note that the vast literature on the topic has dealt with this sort of issue in detail (though I don’t know it well enough to comment in detail).
Saying that, I’ll make one final contribution and then leave it at that: I suspect that you’ve misunderstood the idea of a rigid designator if you think it depends on the resolution at which you examine possible worlds. To say that something is a rigid designator is to say that it refers to the same thing in all possible worlds (note that this is a fact about language use). So to say that “water” rigidly denotes H2O is just to say that when we use the word water to refer to something in some possible world, we are talking about H2O. Issues of how precisely the details of the world are filled in are not relevant to this issue (for example, it doesn’t matter what happens to the air molecules—this has no impact on the issue of rigid designation).
The point you raise is an interesting one about how we specify possible worlds but not, to my knowledge, one that’s relevant to rigid designation. But beyond that I don’t think I have anything more of use to contribute (simple because we’ve exhausted my meagre knowledge of the topic)...
I’d like to say “sure” and then delete that paragraph, but then somebody else in the comments will say that my essay is just talking about a rigid-designation theory of morality. I mean, that’s the comment I’ve gotten multiple times previously. Anyone got a good idea for resolving this?
You may have resolved this now by talking to Richard (who knows more about this than me) but, in case you haven’t, I’ll have a shot at it.
First, the distinction: Richard is using rigid designation to talk about how a single person evaluates counterfactual scenarios, whereas you seem to be taking it as a comment about how different people use the same word.
Second, relevance: Richard’s usage allow you to respond to an objection. The objection asks you to consider the counterfactual situation where you desire to murder people and says murder must now be right so the theory is extremely subjective. You can respond that “right” is a rigid designator so it is still right to not murder in this counterfactual situation (though your counterpart here will use the word “right” differently).
Suggestion: perhaps edit the paragraph so as to discuss either this objection and defence or outline why the rigid designator view so characterised is not your view.
Stimulating as always! I have a criticism to make of the use made of the term ‘rigid designation’.
What philosophers of language ordinarily mean by calling a term a rigid designator is not that, considered purely syntactically, it intrinsically refers to anything. The property of being a rigid designator is something which can be possessed by an expression in use in a particular language-system. The distinction is between expressions-in-use whose reference we let vary across counterfactual scenarios (or ‘possible worlds’), e.g. ‘The first person to climb Everest’, and those whose reference remains stable, e.g. ‘George Washington’, ‘The sum of two and two’.
There is some controversy over how to apply the rigid/non-rigid distinction to general terms like ‘fair’ (or predicates like ‘is fair’) - cf. Scott Soames’ book Beyond Rigidity—but I think the natural thing to say is that ‘is fair’ is rigid, since it is used to attribute the same property across counterfactual scenarios, in contrast with a predicate like ‘possesses my favourite property’.
I just wanted to agree with Tristanhaze here that this usage strikes me as non-standard. I want to put this in my own words so that Tristanhaze/Eliezer/others can correct me if I’ve got the wrong end of the stick.
If something is a rigid designator it means that it refers to the same thing in all possible worlds. To say it’s non-rigid is to say it refers to different things in some possible worlds to others. This has nothing to do with whether different language users that use the phrase must always be referring to the same thing. So George Washington may be a rigid designator in that it refers to the same person in all possible worlds (bracketing issues of transworld identity) but that doesn’t mean that in all possible worlds that person is called George Washington or that in all possible worlds people who use the name George Washington must be referring to this person or even that in the actual world all people who use the name George Washington must be referring to this person.
To say “water” is a rigid designator is to say that whatever possible world I am talking about, I am picking out the same thing when I use the word water (in a way that I wouldn’t be when I say, “the tallest person in the world”—this would pick out different things in different worlds). But it doesn’t say anything about whether I mean the same thing as other language users in this or other possible worlds.
ETA: So the relevance to the quoted section is that rigid designators aren’t about whether someone that thinks of Euclidean geometry when you say “numbers” is right or wrong—it’s about whether whatever they associate with that word is the same thing in all possible worlds (or whether it’s a different thing in some worlds).
ETA 2: I take it that Eliezer’s paragraph here is in response to comments like these. I’m in a bit of a rush and need to think about it some more but I think Richard may be making a different point here to the one Eliezer’s making (on my reading). I think Richard is saying that what is “right” is rigidly determined by my current (idealised) desires—so in a possible world where I desired to murder, murder would still be wrong because “right” is a rigid designator (that is, right from the perspective of my language, a different language user—like the me that desires murder—might still use “right” to refer to something else according to which murder is right. See the point about George Washington being able to be rigid even if people in other possible worlds use that name to name someone else). On the other hand, my reading of Eliezer was that he was taking the claim that “right” (or “fair”) is a rigid designator to mean something about the way different language users use the word “fair”. Eliezer seemed to be suggesting that rigid designation implied that words intrinsically mean certain things and hence that rigid designation implies that if someone uses a word in a different way they are wrong (using numbers to refer to geometry). I could have misunderstood either of these two comments but if I haven’t then it seems to me that Eliezer is using rigid designator in a non-standard way.
Correct. Eliezer has misunderstood rigid designation here.
So does that mean this:
...is your real claim here, independent of any points about language use?
If so, I think I would just straightforwardly modify my paragraph above to say that my statements are not trying to talk about language use or human brains / desires, albeit that desire is both an optimization target of, and a quotation of, morality.
I’m not sure what you have in mind here. We need to distinguish (i) the referent of a concept from (ii) its reference-fixing “sense” or functional role. The way I understood your view, the reference-fixing story for moral terms involves our (idealized) desires. But the referent is “rigid” in the sense that it’s picking out the content of our desires: the thing that actually fills the functional role, rather than the role-property itself.
Since our desires typically aren’t themselves about our desires, so it will turn out, on this story, that morality is not “about” desires. It’s about “love, friendship,” and all that jazz. But there’s a story to be told about how our moral concepts came to pick out these particular worldly properties. And that’s where desires come in (as I understand your view). Our moral concepts pick out these particular properties because they’re the contents of our idealized desires. But that’s not to say that therefore morality is “really” just about fulfilling any old desires. For that would be to neglect the part that rigid designation, and the distinction between reference and reference-fixing, plays in this story.
Does that capture your view? To further clarify: the point of appealing to “rigid designation” is just to explain how desires could play a reference-fixing role without being any part of the referent of moral talk (or what it is “about”). Isn’t that what you’re after? Or do you have some other reference-fixing story in mind?
This all does sound good to me; but, is there a way to say the above while tabooing “reference” and avoiding talk of things “referring” to other things? Reference isn’t ontologically basic, so what does it reduce to?
Basically, the main part that would worry me is a phrase like, “there’s a story to be told about how our moral concepts came to pick out these particular worldly properties” which sounds on its face like, “There’s a story to be told about how successorship came to pick out the natural numbers” whereas what I’d want to say is, “Of course, there’s a story to be told about how moral concepts came to have the power to move us” or “There’s a story to be told about how our brains came to reflect numbers”.
Can you give an example of a rigid designator (edit: that isn’t purely mathematical / logical)? I don’t understand how the concept is even coherent right now. “Issues of transworld identity” seem to be central and I don’t know why you’re sweeping them under the rug. More precisely, I do not understand how one goes about identifying objects in different possible worlds even in principle. I think that intuitions about this procedure are likely to be flawed because people do not consider possible worlds that are sufficiently different.
Okay, so three things are worth clarifying up front. First, this isn’t my area of expertise so anything I have to say about the matter should be taken with a pinch of salt. Second, this is a complex issue and really would require 2 or 3 sequences of material to properly outline so I wouldn’t read too much into the fact that my brief comment doesn’t present a substantive outline of the issue. Third, I have no settled views on the issues of rigid designators, nor am I trying to argue for a substantive position on the matter so I’m not deliberately sweeping anything under the rug (my aim was to distinguish Eliezer’s use of the phrase rigid designator from the standard usage and doing so doesn’t require discussion of transworld identity: Eliezer was using it to refer to issues relating to different people whereas philosophers use it to refer to issues relating to a single person—or at least that’s the simplified story that captures the crucial idea).
All that said, I’ll try to answer your question. First, it might help to think of rigid designators as cases where the thing to be identified isn’t simply to be identified with its broad role in the world. So “the inventor of bifocals” is the person that plays a certain role in the world—the role of inventing bifocals. So “the inventor of bifocals” is not a rigid designator. So the heuristic for identifying rigid designators is that they can’t just be identified by their role in the world.
Given this, what are some examples of rigid designators? Well, the answer to this question will depend on who you ask. A lot of people, following Putnam would take “water” (and other natural kind terms) to be a rigid designator. On this view, “Water” rigidly refers to H2O, regardless of whether H20 plays the “water” role in some other possible world. So imagine a possible world where some other substance, XYZ, falls from the sky, sakes thirst, fill rivers and so on (that is, XYZ fills the water role in this possible world). On the rigid designation view, XYZ would not be water. So there’s one example of a rigid designator (on one view).
Kripke (in his book naming and necessity) defends the view that names are rigid designators—so the name “Thomas Jefferson” refers to the same person in all possible worlds (this is where issues of transworld identity become relevant). This is meant to be contrasted with a view according to which the name “John Lennon” refers to the nearest and near enough realiser of a certain description (“lead singer of the Beatles, etc). So on this view, there are possible worlds where John Lennon is not the lead singer of the Beatles, even though the Beatles formed and had a singer that met many of the other descriptive features of John (born in the same town and so on).
Plausibly, what you take to be a rigid designator will depend on what you take possible worlds to be and what views you have on transworld identity. Note that your comment that it seems difficult to imagine how you could go about identifying objects in different possible worlds even in principle makes a very strong assumption about the metaphysics of possible worlds. For example, this difficulty would be most noticeable if possible worlds were concrete things that were causally distinct from us (as Lewis would hold). One major challenge to Lewis’s view is just this challenge. However, very few philosophers actually agree with Lewis.
So what are some other views? Well Kripke thinks that we simply stipulate possible worlds (as I said, this isn’t my area so I’m not entirely clear what he takes possible worlds to be—maximally consistent sets of sentences, perhaps—if anyone knows, I’d love to have this point clarified). That is, we say, “consider the possible world where Bill Gates won the presidency”. As Kripke doesn’t hold that possible worlds are real concrete entities, this stipulation isn’t necessarily problematic. On Kripke’s view, then, the problem of transworld identity is easy to solve.
More precisely, I do not understand how one goes about identifying objects in different possible worlds even in principle. I think that intuitions about this procedure are likely to be flawed because people do not consider possible worlds that are sufficiently different.
I don’t have the time to go into more detail but it’s worth noting that your comment about intuition is an important point depending on your view of what possible worlds are. However, there’s definitely an overarching challenge to views according to which we should rely on our intuitions to determine what is possible.
Hope that helps clarify.
Thank you for the clarification. I agree that the question of what a possible world is is an important one, but the answer seems obvious to me: possible worlds are things that live inside the minds of agents (e.g. humans).
Water is one of the examples I considered and found incoherent. Once you start considering possible worlds with different laws of physics, it’s extremely unclear to me in what sense you can identify types of particles in one world with particles in another type of world. I could imagine doing this by making intuitive identifications step by step along “paths” in the space of possible worlds, but then it’s unclear to me how you could guarantee that the identifications you get this way are independent of the choice of path (this idea is motivated by a basic phenomenon in algebraic topology and complex analysis).
As I said, these are complex issues.
Yes, but almost everyone agrees with this (or at least, almost all views on possible worlds can be interpreted this way even if they can also be interpreted as claims about the existence of abstract—non-concrete—objects). There are a variety of different things that possible worlds can be even given the assumption that they exist in people’s heads (almost all the disagreement about what possible worlds are is disagreement within this category rather than between this category and something else).
Two things: first, the claim that “water” rigidly designates H2O doesn’t imply that it must exist in all possible worlds—just that if “water” exists in a possible world then it is H2O. So if we can’t identify the same particles in different worlds then this just means that water exists in almost no worlds (perhaps only in our own world).
However, the view that we can’t identify the same particles in other worlds is a radical one and would be a strong sign that the account of possible worlds appealed to falls short (after all, possible worlds are supposed to be about what is possible and surely there are possibilities that revolve around the particles existing in our world—ie. surely it’s possible that I now be holding a glass of H2O. If your account of possible worlds can’t cope with this possibility it seems to not be a very useful account of possible worlds).
Further, how hard it is to identify sameness of particles across possible worlds will depend on how you take them to be “constructed”—if they are constructed by stipulation, ie. “consider the world where I am holding a glass of H2O” then it is very easy to get sameness of particles.
I’m not saying there’s not room for your criticisms but for them to hold requires substantial metaphysical work showing why your account, and only your account, of possible worlds works and hence that your conclusions hold.
Okay. I think what I’m actually trying to say is that what constitutes a rigid designator, among other things, seems to depend very strongly on the resolution at which you examine possible worlds.
When you say the phrase “imagine the possible world in which I have a glass of water in my hand” to a human, that human knows what you mean because by default humans only model the physical world at a resolution where it is easy to imagine making that intervention and only that intervention. When you say that phrase to an AI which is modeling the world at a much higher resolution, the AI does not know how to do what you ask because you haven’t given it enough information. How did the glass of water get there? What happened to the air molecules that it displaced? Etc.
Okay, perhaps I can have another go at this.
First thing to note, possible worlds can’t be specified at different levels of detail. When doing so we are either specifying partial possible worlds or sets of possible worlds. As rigid designation is a claim about worlds, it can’t be relative to the level of detail utilised as it only applies to things specified at one level of detail.
Second, you still seem to be treating possible worlds as concrete things rather than something in the head (or, at least, making substantive assumptions about possible worlds and relying on these to make claims about possible worlds generally). Let’s take possible worlds to be sets of propositions and truth values. In this case there’s no reason to find transworld identity puzzling. H2O exists in this world just if a relevant proposition is true (like, “I am holding a glass of H2O”). There’s also no room for this transworld identity to be relative to a context. Whether these things are puzzling depends on your account of possible worlds and it seems like if you’re account of possible worlds can’t account for transworld identity it can’t do the work required of possible worlds and so it is open to the challenge that it should be abandoned in favour of some other account.
Third, it’s important to distinguish questions about the way worlds are from questions about how they can be specified. It’s an interesting question how we should specify individual possible worlds and another interesting question whether we often do so or whether we normally specify sets of possible worlds instead. However, difficulties with specification do not undermine the concept of a rigid designator.
Fourth, even if it were a relative matter whether H2O exists in a world this wouldn’t undermine the concept of rigid designation. Rigid designation would simply imply that if this were the case then it would also be a relative matter whether water existed in that world.
The summary of what I’m trying to get at is the following: you have raised concerns for practical issues (how we specify worlds) and epistemic issues (how we know what’s in worlds) but these aren’t really relevant to the issue of rigid designation. So, for example, I don’t think your claim that:
Follows from your argument (for the reasons I’ve outlined above, recap: from the fact that humans often specify sets of worlds rather than worlds nothing about rigid designation follows), even though I think your argument is an insightful one that raises interesting epistemic and practical issues for possible worlds.
I think that these two desires are contradictory. Part of what I’m trying to say is that it’s a highly nontrivial problem which propositions are even meaningful, let alone true, if you specify possible worlds at a sufficiently high level of detail. For example, at an extremely high level of detail, you might specify a possible world by specifying a set of laws of physics together with an initial condition for the universe. This kind of specification of a possible world doesn’t automatically allow you to interpret intuitive referents like “I,” so the meaning of a statement like “I am holding a glass of water” is extremely unclear.
How do you know what things are rigid designators if you neither know how to specify possible worlds nor how to determine what’s in them?
I think this conversation is now well into the territory of diminishing return so I’ll leave it at that.
I think this is getting past the point that I can useful contribute further though I will note that the vast literature on the topic has dealt with this sort of issue in detail (though I don’t know it well enough to comment in detail).
Saying that, I’ll make one final contribution and then leave it at that: I suspect that you’ve misunderstood the idea of a rigid designator if you think it depends on the resolution at which you examine possible worlds. To say that something is a rigid designator is to say that it refers to the same thing in all possible worlds (note that this is a fact about language use). So to say that “water” rigidly denotes H2O is just to say that when we use the word water to refer to something in some possible world, we are talking about H2O. Issues of how precisely the details of the world are filled in are not relevant to this issue (for example, it doesn’t matter what happens to the air molecules—this has no impact on the issue of rigid designation).
The point you raise is an interesting one about how we specify possible worlds but not, to my knowledge, one that’s relevant to rigid designation. But beyond that I don’t think I have anything more of use to contribute (simple because we’ve exhausted my meagre knowledge of the topic)...
I assume the AI could concoct some plausible explanation(s).
I’d like to say “sure” and then delete that paragraph, but then somebody else in the comments will say that my essay is just talking about a rigid-designation theory of morality. I mean, that’s the comment I’ve gotten multiple times previously. Anyone got a good idea for resolving this?
You may have resolved this now by talking to Richard (who knows more about this than me) but, in case you haven’t, I’ll have a shot at it.
First, the distinction: Richard is using rigid designation to talk about how a single person evaluates counterfactual scenarios, whereas you seem to be taking it as a comment about how different people use the same word.
Second, relevance: Richard’s usage allow you to respond to an objection. The objection asks you to consider the counterfactual situation where you desire to murder people and says murder must now be right so the theory is extremely subjective. You can respond that “right” is a rigid designator so it is still right to not murder in this counterfactual situation (though your counterpart here will use the word “right” differently).
Suggestion: perhaps edit the paragraph so as to discuss either this objection and defence or outline why the rigid designator view so characterised is not your view.