Rigid Designators Essay

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rigi Essay #1 – Rigid Designators and Contingent Identity Theories. In this essay, I will be discussing David Lewis’ materialist theory of identity. More importantly, I will discuss how said theory crumbles under the scrutiny Kripkean analysis. Before we discuss Lewis’ theory, we must first examine Saul Kripke’s theory of rigid designators. A rigid designator is defined as a statement that refers to the same object in any possible world. For example, the statement “The lead singer of The Rolling Stones” is a nonrigid designator because I can imagine a possible world in which the lead singer of The Rolling Stones can be someone other than the actual lead singer (Mick Jagger) of The Rolling Stones. However, the statement “Mick Jagger” is a rigid designator because I cannot imagine a possible world in which Mick Jagger is anything other than Mick Jagger. With that said, we can now apply the concept of rigid designators to identity statements. An identity statement involves two terms. Kripke claims that if one term is rigid and the other nonrigid, then the statement is contingently true. Thus, the statement “Mick Jagger is the lead singer of The Rolling Stones” is contingently true because we can imagine a world where it if false; a world in which Mick Jagger is not the lead singer of The Rolling Stones. However, if an identity statement involves two rigid designators, the statement must be necessarily true. Therefore, the statement “Jay-Z is identical with Shawn Carter” is necessarily true because there cannot exist a world in which both Jay-Z and Shawn Carter exist, but are two separate individuals. We now shift our attention to David Lewis’ materialist theory of identity. This theory states that the concept of whatever mental state or experience is the concept of a state that occupies a certain causal role,
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