A widely accepted thesis in the philosophy of language is that natural language proper names are rigid designators, and that they are so de jure, or as a matter of the “semantic rules of the language.” This paper questions this claim, arguing that rigidity cannot be plausibly construed as a property of name types and that the alternative, rigidity construed as a property of tokens, means that they cannot be considered rigid de jure; rigidity in this case must be viewed (...) as a pragmatic and not a semantic property. (shrink)

This paper argues that Kripke's claim that there are contingent a priori truths would be vitiated by a seemingly unorthodox understanding of the term "a priori".

This paper has two purposes: the first is to critically examine Kripke’s well-known arguments against Descriptivism and suggest that they are not as decisive as many have thought; the second is to argue that proper names do encode descriptive information of various kinds, that such information may be truth-conditionally significant, and hence that a name’s truth-conditional contribution is not limited to its referent.

This paper questions the claim that definite descriptions have a referential semantics. Two possible definitions of “referential meaning” are discussed, and it is argued that definite descriptions are not referential according to either one. Devitt’s (2004, 2007) recent account of descriptions’ referential meaning is also briefly examined, and some problems with it are pointed out. It is suggested (though not shown) that the troubles with specifying exactly in what sense definite descriptions are referential point to the incoherence of the very (...) notion of semantic reference and support instead a pragmatic understanding of reference. In Spanish. (shrink)

This paper argues that proper names may have literal non-referential truth-conditional values, thereby undermining the notion of semantic reference.

Se examina un argumento de Musonio Rufo sobre la relación entre el placer y el bien moral. In Spanish.