Rigid Designators Research Articles

The name as a speech act

Drawing on the philosophy of language and anthroponymy, we aim to outline a theory of proper names, deliberately sidestepping conventional perspectives, which we have systematically addressed in previous instances. Articulating a distinctive viewpoint, grounded in the established connotations of the anthroponym (most notably its characterization as a rigid designator), we aim to demonstrate that names function as any linguistic sign, not deprived of any of its dimensions. We will also consider situations involving name changes, whether undertaken with the consent of the bearer or independently of their will. To the best of our current knowledge, the examination of proper names as speech acts has not received substantial attention in past or contemporary studies; hence, we will allocate appropriate attention to it. Furthermore, our investigation will encompass discussions on unconventional anthroponyms, addressing them as a key facet of our current research agenda.

A formalization of Descartes’ causal argument for existence of God

In this paper I attempt a formalization of Descartes’ causal argument for the existence of God presented in the Third Meditation. By taking into account the philosophical setting of Descartes’ Meditations, I argue that the best logical theory to carry out the formalization is quantified modal logic where free logic is used for the first-order axioms. This fact is related to Descartes’ distinction between formal and objective reality which — to my mind — suggests both the adoption of modality (e.g. true in formal vs true in objective reality) and the possibility of using empty names (i.e. names which lack reference in “formal reality”). After presenting the formal system and the reconstruction of Descartes’ proof, I will discuss some issues related to the philosophical import of the formalization, such as the understanding of rigid designation and lack of reference. I will argue that the formalization of Descartes’ argument has an intrinsic philosophical value for it sheds light on the structure of argument, its implicit difficulties, and the use of logic itself to understand the philosophical tradition.

Outlier rejection in the process of pooling.

Ensemble perception allows our visual system to process large amounts of information efficiently by summarizing its statistical properties. A key aspect of ensemble perception is the devaluation of outlying elements, which leads to more informative summary statistics with reduced variance and a more representative mean. However, the mechanisms underlying this outlier rejection process are not well understood. One possibility is that outliers are selectively excluded before summarization. To test this, we investigated whether only weaker items were excluded from averaging. We manipulated the encoding strength of items in a display by changing the emotional intensities of faces, the spatial location of emotional outliers, and the spatial distribution of emotional faces. We found that the response to outliers varied depending on their location. Specifically, outliers were more likely to be excluded from averaging when presented in more peripheral regions, while their exclusion was partial in parafoveal regions. In other words, outlier rejection in ensemble processing is more flexible than the supposed rigid designation of weighting against outliers. Alternatively, the results fit well with hierarchically structured pooling, during which outliers are discounted more dynamically without positing any separate selective mechanism before summarization. We propose an explanation for outlier rejection in light of a recently proposed population response model of ensemble processing.

A monstrous account of non-deictic readings of complex demonstratives

ABSTRACT Complex demonstratives are often seen as a source of trouble for the idea that demonstratives are directly referential. Several authors have provided an array of counterexamples that preclude us from treating complex demonstratives as devices of direct reference, since they could hardly be considered rigid designators. In this paper I argue that a revision of the classic theories can accommodate all the counterevidence from non-deictic uses of complex demonstratives. Namely, I argue that the two chief objections that have been posed to the traditional picture, the so-called ‘quantification in’ and ‘no demonstration, no speaker reference’ problems, can be given a unified solution by treating them as instances of monstrous quantification into the character of the term.

A survey on Named Entity Recognition — datasets, tools, and methodologies

Natural language processing (NLP) is crucial in the current processing of data because it takes into account many sources, formats, and purposes of data as well as information from various sectors of our economy, government, and private and public lives. We perform a variety of NLP operations on the text in order to complete certain tasks. One of them is NER (Named Entity Recognition). An act of recognizing and categorizing named entities that are presented in a text document is known as named entity recognition. The purpose of NER is to find references of rigid designators in the text which belong to established semantic kinds like a person, place, organization, etc. It acts as a cornerstone for many Information Extraction-related activities. In this work, we present a thorough analysis of several methodologies for NER ranging from unsupervised learning, rule-based, supervised learning, and various Deep Learning based approaches. We examine the most relevant datasets, tools, and deep learning approaches like Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs), Bidirectional Long Short Term Memory, Transfer learning approaches, and numerous other approaches currently being used in present-day NER problem environments and their applications. Finally, we outline the difficulties NER systems encounter and future directions.

Deferred Ostension Of Extinct And Fictive Kinds

This article applies Quine's account of deferred ostension and the Kripke-Putnam account of reference to natural kinds in order to solve two problems that arise concerning the deferred ostension of two sorts of absent referents, extinct and fictive kinds. First, the sample problem concerns how a rigid designation to a kind can be established even though the fossil or depiction is an imitative representation rather than an instance of the kind itself. The author argues that the retained characteristic shape, understood via analogy with living creatures, supports the deferred ostension of the extinct kind. Second, the contrast problem concerns how the deferred ostensions of imitative representations for extinct species differ from the imitative representations for fictional species, that is, how sampled fossils differ from sampled depictions. The author argues that the difference is a causal one. We know that fossils happen thanks to a natural causal process that embeds the fossil imitation in the primary world of perceived things; depictions of fictional kinds lack intrinsic causal properties and therefore embed their references in a secondary world of fiction. The article concludes by suggesting we approach the problem of negative existentials as a question of embedding in the primary world of causality or the secondary world of noncausal relations.

Rigid Designators and Descriptivism

Kripke distinguishes necessity and priority as two different categories: priority is a notion of epistemology, while necessity is a notion of metaphysics. Based on this fundamental argument, Kripke objects to Descriptivism, which takes certain properties as the criteria of identity across all possible worlds, and he argues for the legitimacy of a posteriori necessary truths. Kripke also criticizes Russell’s methods for dealing with empty descriptions, and he puts forward a modal world to explain the rigidity of proper names. However, the concept of rigid designation faces some challenges, including Kripke admitting to weak essentialism when he rejects transworld identification, and the fact that the truth value of a sentence containing a rigid designator may change.

Проблема референции имен собственных: дескриптивный и каузальный подходы

The article considers the semantics of proper names in the context of analytical philosophy. The author classifies and analyzes the existing approaches to the issue of proper names reference (the descriptive theory of reference and the direct reference theory) and also reveals the points of their mutual intersection. After briefly defining the main theses of descriptive theory, the author proposes to distinguish its strong version from the weak one. According to the strong version, presented primarily by the works of G. Frege and B. Russell, the name, in fact, is a disguised description (or conjunction of descriptions), while, according to the weak version, dating back to the works of J. Searle, a name is associated with a complex disjunction of descriptions. In both the first and second cases, it is the descriptions that specify the denotation of the name; in other words, the name indicates the object only indirectly. However, this approach, at least, does not take into account the possibility of naming an object using a ‘false’ description, that is, a description that specifies the characteristic(s) to which the object does not correspond. The semantics of proper names is interpreted in a fundamentally different way in direct reference theory, according to which names are labels for objects. The reference of the name in this case is determined either with the help of a causal chain of communication (S. Kripke), or with the help of a historical explanation of the relationship between the one who uses the name and the singular object that is designated by that name (K. Donnellan). The name itself is understood as a rigid designator, directly and strictly pointing to the same object in any factual or counterfactual situation. This approach allows us to show how, for example, it is possible to use an incorrect description to refer to a certain subject. The comparative study of these theories made it possible to discover the presence of causal aspects in the descriptive theory of reference and the significance of descriptive characteristics in the direct reference theory, and thereby more accurately describe the semantics of proper names.

Kant’s Ontology of Appearances and the Synthetic Apriori

AbstractKant’s ontology of appearances implies that the numerical distinctness of empirical objects is grounded in their appearance-aspect, more precisely in space as pure intuition, in which alone such objects can be given. With distinguishing concepts things can only be thought: in contrast to Leibniz’s complete concepts and to Kripke’s rigid designators, Kant’s general concepts do not entail their referents analytically. They must be applied to intuition, i. e. be completed synthetically. Consequently, Kant’s ontology of merely singular (but not unique) individuals (Einzeldinge) is closely connected with a genuine semantics of synthetic reference via intuition, expressed by irreducible demonstratives such as “this”, “here”, and “now”. Accordingly, the judgment “There can be (or could have been) indiscernibles” is synthetic-apriori, which distinguishes Kant’s view both from skeptical empiricism and from heavyweight ontological realism.

Is Reductive Materialism a Defensible Philosophy of Mind?

Over the past decades, reductive materialism has made a recipe for philosophy of mind to explore the subtle nature of the human mind. By and large, many identity theorists were likely to argue that mental states can be found in cognitive faculties of the brain so that the mind, if not most, associates with discoverable phenomena with no burden of proof. To put this bluntly, reductive materialism is typically defined by its very nature: all mental states are neurological states of the brain; ergo, it is implausible to make room for the substance dualism thereto. In response to this naturalist stance, aka reductive materialism, this article, thereby, contends that reductive materialism cannot be placed in a defensible position in philosophy of mind vis-à-vis the Kripkean modality; accordingly, this brief survey has identified several barnstorming findings in support of the thesis: the necessity and contingency, the core plank of possibility, rigid and non-rigid designators, and conceivability and possibility. In spite of its limitations, the study certainly adds to our understanding of the so-called reductive materialism in philosophy of mind. Nevertheless, a full discussion of naturalism lies beyond the scope of this study. Further work is, therefore, needed to fully digest the implications of reductive materialism and Kripke’s modal argument.

All Designators are Rigid

Abstract In Naming and Necessity Kripke introduces the concept of a rigid designator and argues that proper names are rigid designators. He argues that in this way they are different from typical definite descriptions (though he allows that some definite descriptions, e.g., ‘the actual winner of the lottery’, ‘the square of 3’, are rigid designators). His opponents have either argued that names can be regarded as abbreviations of rigid descriptions (e.g., ‘actualized’ ones) or have tried to deny that names are rigid designators. I shall argue that no unambiguous descriptions are non-rigid. All unambiguous descriptions are rigid. The appearance of non-rigidity in descriptions is simply an illusion, a manifestation of ambiguity. I shall then go on to show that an explanation of the difficulty which has been found in extending the rigid/non-rigid distinction from singular terms to predicates follows.

Metalinguistic “Troubles” with Kripkean Proper Names

Proper names interpreted as rigid designators do not allow us to formulate metalinguistic statements of the form ‘NN might not have been named “NN”’. All we can do is to show what we are trying to say. But we cannot properly formulate such a metalinguistic statement about a rigid name. The rigidity of the name establishes a relationship with its bearer that is much stronger than the contingent relationship that is supposed to exist in the natural languages between the name and its bearer. The sentence is intuitively true as expressed in natural languages, but once we translate it, if possible, into Kripkean formal semantics it is false because once the individual is rigidly named, she cannot have been named otherwise; or even worse, as I suspect, the whole sentence is untranslatable, because in Kripkean formal semantics there is no possible world in which she would not have had the name she rigidly has. This problem in Kripkean semantics could well be termed, as Wittgenstein would say, an ineffability. Kripkean semantics makes the actual contingent property anyone has of bearing a proper name ineffable, notwithstanding it is effable in natural languages. Keywords: rigid names, metalinguistic statements, rigid quoted names, ineffability

General-term rigidity is meaning constancy

Abstract It is often thought that some general terms or kind terms, in particular natural kind terms, are rigid designators, and that a properly extended notion of singular-term rigidity can help explain the behaviour of such general terms. In this article, I argue that the only legitimate notion of general-term rigidity is a trivial one and identify some crucial asymmetries between a posteriori necessary truths involving names and a posteriori necessary truths involving general terms. If we pay attention to these asymmetries, it becomes clear that attempts to draw a non-trivial rigid/non-rigid distinction for general terms are bound to fail to offer the explanations we expected. As opposed to singular terms, what is interesting about the behaviour of natural kind terms, even in modal contexts, cannot be accounted for by modal distinctions like rigidity/non-rigidity but must rather track non-modal features.

Интерпретация имен собственных в косвенных кон­текстах: именование de re и фикции

The author explores the meaning of proper names and other types of singular terms in the context of propositional attitudes, combining the problems of empty names, rigid designators and non-specific reading. An object in the attitudes can be given to the agent as such (de re), in the description (de dicto), as well as in several intermediate ways. From the analysis of the phe­nomenon of rigid designation, I move on to the theory of the object, where I consider two alterna­tives — strict, or Leibnizian, and weak. The first explains the actual non-existence by impossi­bility, the second — by occasionality. Here there are two ways of defining non-existent (fiction­al) objects — kinship and the counterpart relation, which are realized in frames that are different in their features. Nonspecific character is inherent in the kinship and counterpart relation in different ways. A special case is formed by hybrid worlds in which the real and the fictitious meet. The result of my analysis is five variants of a weakened de re reading of proper names and other singular terms in the context of attitudes. I describe their features, touching on the cogni­tive effect of narration, which operates with the appropriate attitudes.

A Survey on Deep Learning for Named Entity Recognition

Named entity recognition (NER) is the task to identify mentions of rigid designators from text belonging to predefined semantic types such as person, location, organization etc. NER always serves as the foundation for many natural language applications such as question answering, text summarization, and machine translation. Early NER systems got a huge success in achieving good performance with the cost of human engineering in designing domain-specific features and rules. In recent years, deep learning, empowered by continuous real-valued vector representations and semantic composition through nonlinear processing, has been employed in NER systems, yielding stat-of-the-art performance. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive review on existing deep learning techniques for NER. We first introduce NER resources, including tagged NER corpora and off-the-shelf NER tools. Then, we systematically categorize existing works based on a taxonomy along three axes: distributed representations for input, context encoder, and tag decoder. Next, we survey the most representative methods for recent applied techniques of deep learning in new NER problem settings and applications. Finally, we present readers with the challenges faced by NER systems and outline future directions in this area.

Forty Years Later: Naming Without Necessity, Necessity Without Naming1

AbstractThe essay examines the proper treament of (i) naming (ii) necessity. (A) It argues their mutual independence (B) provides a treatment of naming separately from any idea of “designation” (C) gives treatment of de re modality without any use of possible worlds, essences, concepts, rigid designators (D) it argues an ultimate asymmetry–naming/referring is a key real notion of semantics; necessity should not be the central idea in the metaphysics of nature.

“I Said Something Wrong”: Transworld Obligation inYesterday

Danny Boyle's film Yesterday (2019) is a contemporary morality play in which the main character, Jack Malik, a failing singer-songwriter, is magically sent to a different possible world in which the Beatles never existed. Possessing his memory of the Beatles’ catalogue in the new possible world, he is now in sole possession of an extremely valuable artifact. Recording and performing the songs of the Beatles and passing them off as his own, he becomes rich, famous, and deeply unhappy. Once he confesses his wrong-doing, however, he is redeemed and his life becomes wonderful. The presupposition that underlays the plot is that in claiming authorship of the songs of the Beatles in a world in which the Beatles never existed, he is acting immorally. But on what theoretical grounds can this intuitive judgment be justified? Can one plagiarize work for which there is no author in one's world? Saul Kripke, in Naming and Necessity, dubs terms that refer in all possible worlds to be “rigid designators” and considers the metaphysics necessary to support them. In this case, it is not reference but moral responsibility that is invariant under changes of possible world and so we must ask a similar question for “rigid obligators.” We argue that a virtue ethics approach is the only way to support the foundational moral intuition.

A dose of reality for moral twin earth

ABSTRACT Nearly 30 years ago, Terry Horgan and Mark Timmons published a now- popular article that combines Hilary Putnam’s Twin Earth scenario with G.E. Moore’s open question argument in an effort to show that moral naturalism – the view that moral facts are at bottom ordinary, natural facts of some sort – is probably false. Responses to Horgan and Timmons’s “revised open question argument” have been legion, but surprisingly, no one has attempted to test the core assumption upon which the argument is based; namely, that competent language users univocally treat natural kind-terms as rigid designators. Here, I present evidence that the intuitions of competent English speakers are not as univocal as Horgan and Timmons need them to be to ground their argument against moral naturalism. I also briefly sketch a way that the moral naturalist can respond even if competent language speakers do treat natural-kind terms in the way that Horgan and Timmons suggest.

The early work of Martha Kneale, née Hurst

ABSTRACT This paper offers an account of the early career of Martha Kneale, née Hurst, and of the five papers she published between 1934 and 1950. One on metaphysical and logical necessity, from 1938, is particularly interesting. In it she considers the metaphysics of time and offers an explanation of ‘the necessity of the past’, which has some resemblance to Kripke’s ideas about metaphysical necessities, in that it assigns an important role to experience in how we come to know them. But Kneale’s view is very different from Kripke’s, depending not on doctrines about rigid designation but rather on recognition of the failure of the atomist/empiricist account of ‘simple’ and ‘complex’ concepts. That account cannot deal with such things as the relations of the determinates of a determinable like colour. A plausible corollary of this, which Kneale exploits, is that some of our experience reveals to us that there are phenomena which are intrinsically complex in having multiple distinguishable aspects, but where those aspects are inseparable. Other of the papers show Kneale to have been pursuing interesting lines of thought about McTaggart’s argument against the reality of time and on the mind-body problem.

Being Sceptical about Kripkean A Posteriori Necessities and Natural Kinds

The article discusses Saul Kripke’s influential theories of a posteriori necessary truths and natural kinds. With respect to the statements of identity involving proper names, it is argued that although their truth is a posteriori and necessary in the specific sense of counterfactual invariance, this is of no significance for substantial philosophical issues beyond the philosophy of language, because this counterfactual invariance is a trivial consequence of the use of proper names as rigid designators. The case is made that the expansion of the realm of necessary a posteriori truths to the statements of theoretical identity that involve “natural kind terms”, as well as the Kripkean essentialist theory of natural kinds, have no weighty argumentative support and fit badly both with science and language practice. This sets the stage for the development of an appropriately sophisticated “descriptivist” account of meaning and reference that would be better suited for a widened range of Kripke-Putnam style thought experiments. The general outlines of such a descriptivist account are provided.