Kripke was right even if he was wrong: Sherlock Holmes and the unicorns

Noonan, Harold

Abstract

In the Addenda to Naming and Necessity (1980), Kripke famously argues that it is false that there could have been unicorns, or more properly, that ‘no counterfactual situation is properly describable as one in which there would have been unicorns.’ He adds that he holds similarly that ‘one cannot say of any possible person that he would have been Sherlock Holmes, had he existed’. He notes the ‘cryptic brevity’ of these remarks and refers to a forthcoming work for elaborations – the work being, of course, the John Locke Lectures (2013). Coming as it does at the end of Naming and Necessity, it is natural to read this discussion as drawing out consequences of Kripke’s non-descriptivist picture of proper names and names of natural kinds. In fact, so much is suggested there by Kripke himself. The question thus arises: can the contentious claims quoted from the Addenda be defended independently of Kripke’s rejection of descriptivism? I shall argue that, as appears from the John Locke Lectures, they can be.

Citation

Noonan, H. (2021). Kripke was right even if he was wrong: Sherlock Holmes and the unicorns. Disputatio, 13(60), 51-69. https://doi.org/10.2478/disp-2021-0003

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Feb 22, 2021
• Online Publication Date: Jul 17, 2021
• Publication Date: 2021-05
• Deposit Date: Feb 22, 2021
• Publicly Available Date: May 31, 2021
• Journal: Disputatio
• Electronic ISSN: 0873-626X
• Publisher: Universidade de Lisboa, Faculdade de Letras, Centro de Filosofia
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 13
• Issue: 60
• Pages: 51-69
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.2478/disp-2021-0003
• Public URL: https://nottingham-repository.worktribe.com/output/5345118
• Publisher URL: https://www.sciendo.com/article/10.2478/disp-2021-0003