Joseph LaPorte offers a new account of the connections between the
reference of words for properties and kinds, and theoretical
identity statements. Some terms for concrete objects, such as
'Hesperus' and 'Phosphorus', are rigid, and the rigidity of these
terms is important because it helps to determine whether certain
statements containing them, including identity statements like
'Hesperus = Phosphorus', are necessary or contingent. These
observations command broad agreement. But there has been much less
agreement about whether and how designators for properties are
rigid: terms like 'white', 'brontosaur', 'beautiful', 'heat',
'H2O', 'pain', and so on. In Rigid Designation and Theoretical
Identities, LaPorte articulates and defends the position that terms
for properties are rigid designators. Furthermore, he argues that
property designators' rigidity is put to good use in important
philosophical arguments supporting and impugning certain
theoretical identity statements. The book as a whole constitutes a
broad defense of a tradition originating largely in seminal work
from Saul Kripke, which affirms the truth and necessity of
theoretical identities such as 'water = H2O', 'heat = the motion of
molecules' and the like, and which looks skeptically upon
psychophysical identities like 'pain = c-fiber firing'. LaPorte
responds to detractors of the Kripkean tradition whose objections
and challenges indicate where development and clarification is
needed, as well as to sympathizers who have put forward important
contributions toward such ends. Specific topics discussed by way of
defending the Kripkean tradition include conventionalism and
empiricism, nominalism about properties, multiple realizability,
supervenience, analytic functionalism, conceptual dualism and 'new
wave' or a posteriori materialism, the explanatory gap, scientific
essentialism (more broadly: scientific necessitarianism), and
vitalism.
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