"Rather, people can use terms like ‘Einstein,’ ‘springbok,’ perhaps even ‘computer,’ despite being too ignorant or wrong to provide identifying descriptions of their referents. We can use terms successfully not because we know much about the referent but because we’re linked to the referent by a great social chain of communication.”
Said philosophy professor Michael Devitt, quoted in "Saul Kripke, Philosopher Who Found Truths in Semantics, Dies at 81/A leading 20th-century thinker, he published a landmark work at 32. Known for lecturing extemporaneously without notes, he dazzled colleagues with the breadth of his ruminations" (NYT).
Similarly Errol Morris, the filmmaker, a friend of Kripke’s said: “Are we living in some subjective reality where truth is irrelevant, where truth is relative? Saul came up with this idea of ‘rigid designation.’ It sounds arcane. But he is saying our words attach to things in a way that is far more permanent than we ever thought.”
The philosopher Richard Rorty said: “Before Kripke, there was a sort of drift in analytic philosophy in the direction of linguistic idealism — the idea that language is not tuned to the world.... Saul almost single-handedly changed that.”
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My father is a bastard,
My ma's an S.O.B.
My grandpa's always plastered,
My grandma pushes tea.
Dear kindly social worker,
They say go earn a buck.
Like be a soda jerker,
Which means I'd be a shmuck.
In academe, it’s said that the politics is so bitter because the stakes are so low. In Philosophy the arguments are so bitter because the subject matter is so unimportant.
I only know him from his supposed connections to Supernatural and The Big Bang Theory
“Are we living in some subjective reality where truth is irrelevant, where truth is relative?"
We live in Amerika, where progressives are winning the culture war. So, yes.
One of the biggest influences in my thinking over the last decade has been the work of sociologist Nicholas Luhmann, whose major work focused on how people don't communicate with each other, we are part of systems (legal system, education, religion, politics, etc) and operate within these separate systems as cogs of communication. We communicate to communication, not to people. Think of how we interact with a bank teller or in a courtroom, where judge and lawyer and client aren't responding to each other as real people, but as players in a communication to other players' communication.
It's brutal reading, but brilliant in how he describes society, and helpful in that unlike marxism he doesn't associate his description with accompanying solutions (which always distort the analysis to orient toward the solution).
The idea that we're not using terms as independent knowledge but as participants in a social understanding seems to connect with this, though I don't know Kripke's work itself.
Very different than the Habermas school, where rational discourse is seen as an absolute solution, because rational discourse itself is only limited within each system, each system has its own discourse, and people can operate with multiple systems and different system priorities in a given social situation. Yet, the very definition of social life is keeping the appearance, but not the fact, of a kind of pseudo-integration. Politicians are masters of this and use rhetoric to advance their own power using language and priorities and verbal social cues of other systems and vague awareness of real knowledge by their hearers.
With all due respect for words, given the habits they have contracted in so many foul mouths, it actually takes courage not only to write but even to speak. - Francis Ponge
You just have to wipe off the labels.
Sounds remarkably sensible, a rare quality in an intellectual.
Given his renown as a public speaker, it's a little weird that the character named after him on "The Big Bang Theory" was given a "funny" speech impediment.
I would say Wittgenstein debunked the notion long before. Think of meaning as a mouse. Can it come from completely superficial things?
"52. If I am inclined to suppose that a mouse has come into being by spontaneous generation out of grey rags and dust, I shall do well to examine those rags very closely to see how a mouse may have hidden in them, how it may have got there and so on. But if I am convinced that a mouse cannot come into being from these things, then this investigation will perhaps be superfluous.
But first we must learn to understand what it is that opposes such an examination of details in philosophy."
- the latter being philosophy's institutional blindness to it. Its problem is that philosophy abstracts from details and meaning comes from details.
“An excellent plumber is infinitely more admirable than an incompetent philosopher. The society which scorns excellence in plumbing because plumbing is a humble activity, and tolerates shoddiness in philosophy because it is an exalted activity, will have neither good plumbing nor good philosophy. Neither its pipes nor its theories will hold water.”
― John W. Gardner, Excellence
Oh, so we don't need to know what we're saying, the real truth doesn't matter. We just need to know what we know.
I fail to see how any of this is brilliant or made the USA a better place. I'm sure it helped us get where we are today, where the MSM lies and uses propaganda words without any reference to their original or dictionary meaning.
Words reach this absurd OCD level of importance when you don't perform real work in the meataverse.
Saul Kripke was a graduate of Omaha's Central high school. His dad taught Jewish studies at Omaha's Creighton University.
Saul's dad was Rabbi Meyer Kripke and he was at Omaha's only conservative synagogue.
From wikipedia, "From 1976–90, Kripke was an adjunct Associate Professor of Theology at Creighton University, regularly teaching courses in Judaism and Hebrew Bible."
I wish I would have taken his class!
Rabbi Kripke received an honorary doctorate from Creighton in 2000. He lived to be 100.
people can use terms like ‘Einstein,’ ‘springbok,’ perhaps even ‘computer,’ despite being too ignorant or wrong to provide identifying descriptions of their referents.
Just to review.. It's seems, to me; that a Kripke is a word that mean Cocksucking Ignorant Idiot.
Prove Me WRONG
Douglas Hofstadter, the author "Godel, Escher, Bach" has a new book about this, in a way: 'Surfaces and Essences Analogy As The Fuel and Fire of Thinking' which deals a lot with how we use classes, and how we put things in classes, and use them to represent complex, almost ineffable ideas, but still are able to adroitly communicate and cooperate.
Semantic drift with special, peculiar, and wicked causes.
Rare video footage of Kripke demonstrating how one may not understand completely the underlying referent.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g8YaoxnQcSA
philosophy - definition
The study of and construction of explanations for the world around us and the human interactions therein while simultaneously ignoring the world around us and how humans interact within it that don't fit the philosophy's premises.
I liked him better on the "Big Bang Theory".
Most people here seem to have an idea of what he's talking about. I'm afraid I don't.
"Kripke challenged the notion that anyone who uses terms, especially proper names, must be able to correctly identify what the terms refer to."
It sounds to me like he's saying you don't need to know what a word means in order to use it correctly. That's nuts. Some examples would be nice.
Problems arise when terms mean different things to different folks. For example, any time I disagreed with my 4 year old daughter, she would cry and demand I stop "yelling" at her, no matter how gentle my voice, or minor the disagreement. It took some linguistic training to get her to stop that childish tantrum nonsense. So then she would cry and demand I stop "disagreeing" with her. Progress!
Once again, it's Mandy Patinkin: "You keep using that word, but I do not think you know what it means."
The line is actually, "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."
Could apply to many things.
Baby if you love your baby.
Fetus if you hate your baby.
i think that line was in the vein of 'there are more things in heaven and earth, that are in your philosophy,' wallace shawn was trained to be a diplomat before he went into the theatre,
A thesaurus must have driven him to distraction. So many words to mean the same thing! A d yet somehow people do communicate. In different settings.
Hi Tim @ 2:32
"It sounds to me like he's saying you don't need to know what a word means in order to use it correctly. That's nuts. Some examples would be nice."
I can give an abbreviated explanation. There’s a long-standing problem in understanding how names refer or how they can have meaning. One theory was that a name is just an abbreviation for a description and the referent of a name is just the referent of the description. A description picks out one object in the world if that is the only object that satisfies the description. Moreover, to know the meaning of a word is to know when it is right to use it, and in the case of this description theory that means you have to know what the uniquely identifying description is. Kripke thinks that that’s impossible: we don’t know the uniquely identifying descriptions of almost anything in the world. The name ‘Kripke’ might be a good example of this. Also, we can successfully refer to things even when we have in mind incorrect descriptions of things.
"It sounds to me like he's saying you don't need to know what a word means in order to use it."
This thread is a great example
Also see climate change or CRT. Lots of people use the terms but they're mostly references for social positions not indicating actual familiarity with the actual formal meanings.
In AA they/we talk about a God of our understanding.
It's liberating not to be hemmed in that way.
Saul probably spoke Yiddish.
How do you say "Better Call Saul" in Yiddish?
“But he is saying our words attach to things in a way that is far more permanent than we ever thought.”
I don’t know about that...we used to know what a woman was.
Rocket surgeon
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