Reference and Contingency

Abstract

logical theory may be tested by its capacity for dealing with puzzles, and it is a wholesome plan, in thinking about logic, to stock the mind with as many puzzles as possible, since these serve much the same purpose as is served by experiments in physical science.'1 This paper is an attempt to follow Russell's advice by using a puzzle about the contingent a priori to test and ex plore certain theories of reference and modality. No one could claim that the puzzle is of any great philosophical importance by itself, but to understand it, one has to get clear about certain aspects of the theory of reference; and to solve it, one has to think a little more deeply than one is perhaps accustomed about what it means to say that a statement is contingent or necessary. The idea that there might be truths which are both contingent and a priori was thrown up by Kripke in the course of his celebrated discussion of the modal and epistemic categories to which the notions of the contingent and the a priori respectively belong.2 There has been some discussion of the idea since Kripke raised it, all of it based upon the assumption that the existence of a statement which is both contingent and a priori would constitute an in tolerable paradox. For example, Michael Dummett has argued that the fact that Kripke's views on reference and modality appear to lead to the recogni tion of the existence of contingent a priori truths shows that something must be wrong with those views.20 In other recent discussions, attempts are made to dissolve the puzzle by showing that, properly understood, the problematical statements are not both contingent and a priori. There seem to me to be clear logical and semantical errors in all of these attempts, but more importantly, their starting point seems incorrect. There is no paradox in the existence of statements which are both contingent and a priori, at least, not in the sense in which the problematical statements may be claimed to be con tingent. There are two quite different conceptions of what it is for a statement to be contingent; statements may be, as we might say, deeply contingent or superficially contingent. Whether a statement is deeply contingent depends upon what makes it true; whether a statement is superficially contingent depends upon how it embeds inside the scope of modal operators. While it would be intolerable for there to be a statement which is both knowable a priori and deeply contingent, I shall try to show that there is nothing par ticularly perplexing about the existence of a statement which is both