/lit/ - Literature

>>22399824
It's very easy to see that Kripke is quite right if you just follow an intensional possible world semantics. Quine was a nominalist who refused to accept anything but a very austere extensional semantics restricted only to one (the actual, spatiotemporal) world. Quine's extensionalism also poses problems for all kinds of reasons. It's especially embarrassing given that pre-Quine analytics (and anyone who was a competent language speaker of English) understood well how there is a sense/reference distinction, how meanings can vary in their denotations at different specified indices (for example, this place, or this time; possible worlds are just an extension of this index senstivity). Carnap before Quine was open minded enough to develop a modal semantics, and C.I. Lewis also before Quine developed modal syntax too. And nevertheless Quine acted like an ostrich out of nominalist prejudice. Kripke set us back on the right track. Anyone who thinks otherwise doesn't have a proper understanding of language but pretends otherwise.
>>22399952
He really doesn't have to elaborate because the dude spent his early career when he was like 17 designing possible world semantics. It's not his fault you or OP aren't familiar with that, I'm not blaming you either though, but he did do the formal work that underpins the meaning and justification of what he's saying.

>>18755387
He developed possible semantics for modal logic. He (simultaneous with Ruth Barcan Marcus) proved the necessity of identity. He developed a neo-Millian theory of proper names and with it the causal theory of reference, rejecting the old descriptivist theory of names. He pried apart the a priori from the necessary and the a posteriori from the contingent, showing the possibility of a priori contingency and a posteriori necessity. He also gives an interesting argument in passing in Naming and Necessity for a modal view distinct from David Lewis' counterpart theory (Kripke's argument is known as the Humphrey objection). Last of all he raised skeptical problems for rule-following (the "quus" problem), inspired by his reading of Wittgenstein.

>>16104009
>>16104028
Godel's theorems show that if arithmetic is consistent (= doesn't lead to contradictions), then it is not complete (= some truths of arithmetic cannot be proven within the language of arithmetic to be true). It is true that arithmetic would be considered analytic for logical positivists like Carnap. But their conception of analyticity in arithmetic was closely connected with the old logicist hope that arithmetic was consistent and complete. That is to say, analyticity was supposed to be connected to aprioricity, and Godel's proofs suggest that these two actually come apart. Let's put the problem this way. I don't think anyone would be too worried if we can't prove a certain fact of arithmetic just because we would need some infinite mind to grasp it. Godel's proof goes beyond that though: even an infinite mind would not be able to prove certain truths of arithmetic. As far as I understand, you need ascent to a meta-language to prove every truth of arithmetic, and the same is true of other languages. Should positivists be worried by this? Maybe. I think they should, although maybe they would think they shouldn't. If anyone is interested, Kripke says what I'm saying on p. 37 of Naming and Necessity. Godel's proofs suggest that some supposed analytic truths (and certainly necessary truths) are not a priori known or even knowable, even with infinite minds (barring what I said about a meta-language). Maybe the positivists would say Godel's proofs are no big worry, but I do think they are a worry, if not for Kripke's reasons then at least because of problems with analyticity (which for the positivists was conventionalist) that Quine lays out in "Truth by Convention." Even if they aren't a worry though, I would refer back to Fitch's paradox of knowability, which remains a problem for verificationists.
>t. the effortposter