The Rigidity of General Terms

ORLANDO, ELEONORA

Villa Giardino, Córdoba

Workshop; II Workshop on Language, Context and Cognition; 2008

Departamento de Filosofía UBA y Escuela de Filosofía UNC

In this paper, I am concerned with the problem of applying the notion of rigidity to general terms. As is known, Kripke has defined rigidity for singular terms; moreover, the notion he has provided us with is the notion of a rigid designator. And general terms do not designate single individuals: rather, they apply to many of them. Therefore, how is it possible to follow Kripke´s suggestion that, among general terms, we can distinguish the rigid from the nonrigid ones, as is the case with singular terms? How is this distinction to be understood? My purpose in this paper is to defend a particular version of the so-called ‘identity of designation conception’: on my approach, a rigid general term will be one that expresses the same property in all possible worlds and refers to the property it expresses. In my opinion, the position can be established on the basis of an inference to the best explanation of our intuitive interpretation and evaluation, relatively to counterfactual circumstances, of statements containing (different kinds of) general terms, which is strictly analogous to our intuitive interpretation and evaluation, relatively to such circumstances, of statements containing (different kinds of) singular ones. From the suggested perspective, rigid and nonrigid general terms bear different kinds of semantic/pragmatic relations to different kinds of wordly properties; in other words, they differ from each other in both the mechanism of expression and the semantic contribution to the truth-conditions of the statements in which they occur.