When one wants to give a theory of language the natural place to start is the sentence. When one wants to give a theory of the mind the natural place to start is the thought. Given that both thoughts and sentences are said to have meanings and that semantics is the study of meaning we can see that there is a potential ambiguity in defining the semantic task.

One might take the semantic task to be that of giving the meaning of and truth-conditions for thoughts, as Michael Devitt does. On the other hand, when one asks what the point of a language is, the natural answer to give is that it is used to express thoughts. This leads us to ask just what the relation is between our thoughts and the sentences that we use to express them and one striking result from the philosophy of language in the last century is the realization that often times the content of the sentence does not capture the content of the thought. One might then take the semantic task to be that of giving the meaning of sentences independently of their being used to express any thought. Broadly speaking this is the conception of semantics that P. F. Strawson had.

I will use ‘P-semantics’ for semantics in the psychological sense that we want to give a theory of the meaning of thoughts and ‘L-semantics’ for semantics in the liguistic sense that we want to give a theory of the meaning of sentences considered apart from their being used to express any given thought. This lets me be neutral on issues about semantic and pragmatics and also recognizes that each deals with meaning and truth conditions.

Each of these two views will be interested in sentences. So, for instance take the sentence

(S) Saul Kripke, the world’s greatest living philosopher, likes tea.

When we want to know what the truth conditions for this sentence are we could mean one of two things. We could be taking this sentence to represent an utterance, an actual saying of it or a writing of it, and therefore be using it to evaluate a certain thought or we could take it as a linguistic type and be trying to evaluate its truth conditions independantly of any thought it may be used to express.

I can then neutrally formulate the distinction between rigidity and frigidity by saying that there is no such L-semantic property of rigidity. There are no singular terms in English; there is no L-semantic property that some English expressions have and that others lack such that they pick out the same object in all modal contexts. When we contruct a linguistic theory of natural languages (as opposed to a physcological theory of thoughts) we should do it so that it is free of singular terms. Our L-semantic theory should contain only descriptions.

The causal theory of reference that Kripke intiates and the Devitt develops is to be taken as a P-semantic theory. It explains how it is that we can have singular thoughts, given that the right kinds of causal/historical connections hold between ceratin thought contents and the world, but we express those thoughts using a language that itself does not have singular terms. Something like this kind of view is developed in Kent Bach’s Thought and Reference. I have coined the term ‘frigidity’ to designate this kind of view to contrast it with rigidity have tried to develop three lines of argument to prefer frigidity to rigidity.

1.) In the first place the truth conditions of sentences with names (or natural kind terms, like above) in them will change depending on who (or what) the person ‘has in mind’. We cannot determine who a name picks out independently of evaluating what thought it is being used to express (Introducing Frigidity). In the normal course of communicating who or what someone is thinking about when entertaining a singular thought is determined by the relation that the thought has to some thing or stuff in the world. Thus when evaluating a sentence like (S) we have to stipulate that we mean to be talking about Saul Kripke.

One response to this argument that I have heard from people, among them Michael Devitt, is that it fails to take serious the argument that names are ambigiuous. So, it is urged, ‘Saul Kripke’ is ambiguious in as many ways as there are people, places, and things called ‘Saul Kripke’. Thus we take each actual thing named ‘Saul Kripke’ ans collect all of teh tokens of ‘Saul Kripke’ that causally/historically ground out in the philosopher and call that a type. There will be one type for each person place or thing that tokens of ‘Saul Kripke’ causally/historically trace back to. So the truth conditions will change because the token sentence will have a token name that traces back to different objects in the world. This answer in effect denies that there is a viable distinction between L-semantics and P-semantics.

But even if we grant this point it will be the case that there is a linguistic type ‘personal name’ and that ‘Saul Kripke’ is an instance of that type as well. So there is a sense of type for which it makes sense to say that there is only one name, ‘Saul Kripke’ in English and every person who says ‘Saul Kripke’ is using that type. This is the type as considered apart from its individual uses to name particular people, the L-semantic type. What would a person have to know in order to use it correctly or understand an instance of it? They would arguably only need to know that it was used to refer to persons who bear that name or ‘are called that’. This just is its L-semantic meaning so Devitt’s objection is not really an objection.  

2.) In the second place frigidity can make sense of the debate about whether and which expressions are rigid designators that is not mere ‘intuition mongering’. How could anything solve the dispute between David Lewis and Kripke on whether ‘pain’ is a rigid designator that did not appeal to stipulations about what ‘pain’ was suppose to refer to? (Applying Frigidity)

3.) More recently I have been pushing an argument that when our logical theory incoperates the idea that linguistic names are rigid designators we end up with some counter-intuitive logical results, like that I (or you or unicorns) necessarily exist (Logic, Language, and Existence).

Now one might object to this argument because one thinks that it shows too much. One natural way to show this is by pointing out that since we can have singular thoughts we can take the singular terms in logical theory to be modeling the contnet of a singular thought. So when I think that Saul Kripke likes tea I have a thought that has some content part of which is a mental name for Saul Kripke in virtue of it tracing back to him. So I can stipulate that by ‘Saul Kripke’ I mean that guy (pointing at Saul Kripke), and I can then represent this as T(sk) where I stipulate that SK stands for that guy, Saul Kripke, and T stands for ‘likes tea’. So the argument of Logic, Language, and Existence, seems to work equally well against a P-semantic theory that has something like rigid designators.

Now, this would be nothing more than an inconvienence if we took SK to be short hand for (Ex) (SK(x)) where SK is a predicate and means ‘bears the name “Saul Kripke”‘ or ‘is called “Saul Kripke”‘ and so T(sk) to really mean (Ex) (SK(x) & T(x)). The problem only arises when we want to say that SK directly picks out a certain person of which (Ex) (x=sk) is true and so T(sk) really says (Ex) ((x=sk) & T(sk)). The question here is ‘what is the right way to capture the content of the thouoght?’ and that is a question about how to express it in language. So, it is a question of what the best L-semantic theory is, and we have many reasons, some of which I have talked about and others that are well known and time worn, for not including singular terms in our L-semantic theory.