On a Derivation of the Necessity of Identity - Princeton University

designator” comes from Kripke’s “Naming and Necessity” lectures in 1970. The
notion of an invariant denoting expression appears earlier, in Føllesdal’s 1961
dissertation; but it is too early to speak of rigid designation at that date, since
“metaphysical” necessity was not systematically distinguished from other kinds of
“alethic” modality in the pre-1970 literature. 17
So far, all this has been about what Kripkean rigid designators by definition
are like if there are any. But are there any in natural language? It has by now
become comparatively uncontroversial that a minority of definite descriptions with
certain special features are such rigid designators. These include descriptions
containing the adverb “actually”, as in the candidate who actually came in second.
Even when speaking of some way the world might potentially have been under
which a given description, with “actually” omitted, would have been met by some
different individual, as in If he had not been so burdened by associations with an
unpopular war, the candidate who actually came in second might have become
president, insertion of the adverb pulls us back to the actual situation, so to speak,
so that the description continues to denote the same individual that it denotes when
speaking of the actual situation, as in The candidate who (actually) came in second
was the democratic nominee. But Kripke has his eye on a more interesting but
more controversial class of singular terms: names in the ordinary sense, the
expressions traditional grammar calls “proper nouns”, as in Hubert Humphrey.
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