Armando Lavalle, "Multipropositionalism and necessary a posteriori identity statements"
When and where
27/04/2018, 15:00 - 00:00
Description
Seminar on Language and Communication
Institute for Logic, Cognition, Language and Information (ILCLI)
UPV-EHU
Friday, April 27th, 2018, 3:00 pm.
Venue: Carlos Santamaria Zentroa, Room A2.
Multipropositionalism and Necessary A Posteriori
Identity Statements
Armando Lavalle (Institut Jean-Nicod)
Kripke claimed that “an identity statement between names, when true at all, is necessarily true, even though one may not know it apriori” (1980, 108). Though the intuitions motivating Kripke’s claim are widely accepted, it continues to be controversial. This talk will be concerned to explain why Kripke’s revolutionary claim is true. The explanation relies on a version of Perry’s (2001/2011) multipropositionalism. On this view, an utterance of ‘Hesperus is Phosphorus’ semantically makes available several propositions, one of which is necessary (and apriori) and another of which is aposteriori (and contingent). This multipropositional view is similar to two-dimensionalism, and thus one might assume that multipropositionalism is undermined by the sorts of nesting arguments that Soames (2005) and others have raised against two-dimensionalism. At the end is demonstrated, however, that because multipropositionalism rejects the traditional monopropositional framework, this explanation of Kripke’s claim is immune to such nesting arguments.