Episode 126: Saul Kripke on Possibilities, Language & Science
The Partially Examined Life Philosophy Podcast
Mark Linsenmayer
4.6 • 2.3K Ratings
🗓️ 2 November 2015
⏱️ 138 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
On Naming and Necessity (1980). What's the relationship between language and the world? Specifically, what makes a name or a class term pick out the person or things that it does? Saul Kripke wanted to correct the dominant view of his time (which involved a description in the speaker's mind), and used talk of "possible worlds" to do it! With guest Matt Teichman.
End song: "Reason Enough" by Mark Lint.
Transcript
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| 0:30.0 | You're listening to the partially examined life, |
| 0:34.6 | a philosophy podcast by some guys who at one point said I'm doing philosophy for living, |
| 0:39.2 | but then thought better of it. |
| 0:40.5 | Among the many questions we'll address in episode 126, |
| 0:44.0 | something like, uh, if in some possible world all the cats were actually demons, |
| 0:47.5 | would it be really that instead of all the cats actually being demons, |
| 0:50.0 | there were no cats, just demons that looked like what in our world are cats. |
| 0:53.6 | And we read solid crypties naming in necessity, |
| 0:57.6 | which is a 1980 publication of some lectures given in 1970. |
| 1:00.9 | You join the discussion, get the text to lots of more information at partiallyexaminalife.com. |
| 1:05.6 | This is Mark Linson Meyer, necessarily in Madison, Wisconsin. |
| 1:08.8 | This is Wes Alman, originally designated in Boston, Massachusetts. |
| 1:13.2 | This is Dylan Casey referring in Middleton, Wisconsin. |
... |
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