Ramachandran On Restricting Rigidity

Abstract

In Gallois 1986 I developed an account of rigid designation which was designed to make room for the contingency of identities. The problem I was responding to was this. Consider an identity sentence a=b. Suppose that either of the names a9 or b is an accidental designator in the sense that it designates distinct things in distinct worlds. In that case, may be contingently true, but will not imply that any contingent identity holds. On the other hand, suppose that a and b are both rigid designators. In that case, it seems, cannot be contingently true. In response to this problem I distinguished between two types of rigid designator. I entitled those belonging to one type restrictedly rigid designators (RR designators for short). My central claim was this. If, for example, a and b are both RR designators then a=b is compatible with 0(a=b), and the truth of does imply that some contingent identity holds. Murali Ramachandran (in Ramachandran 1992) identifies an interesting difficulty with appealing to the concept of an RR designator in order to defend the contingency of identities. He argues that the price of defending the contingency of identities in this way is that it ensures the necessity of non-identities. His argument goes as follows. My definition of an RR designator went like this: