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The Planets are Nine in Number

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Joseph Margolis
Joseph Margolis*
Affiliation:
Temple University
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Extract

W. V. Quine had, in Word and Object, drawn prominent attention to the opacity of the necessity operator, by comparing the sentences

(1) Necessarily 9 > 4

and

(2) Necessarily the number of major planets > 4.

Of these, Quine had said, “surely, on any plausible interpretation, (1) is true and (2) is false. Since 9 = the number of major planets, we can conclude that the position of ‘9’ in (1) is not purely referential and hence that the necessity operator is opaque.” The puzzle has generated a good deal of interest, particularly with an eye to the prospects of quantifying in modal contexts. But, given the substantial literature that has sprung up around the issue, it is rather easy to misunderstand the force of any challenge to Quine's account.

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Philosophy , Volume 4 , Issue 3 , March 1975 , pp. 459 - 465
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 1975

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References

1 (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1960), p. 41.

2 For reasons irrelevant here, (2) appears as (3) in the original text.

3 Quine, op. cit., p. 197Google Scholar. Quine, offers precisely the same argument in “Three Grades of Modal Involvement,” reprinted in The Ways of Paradox (New York: Random House, 1966), pp. 160–161.Google Scholar

4 I have taken advantage of the nice wording that appears in David Kaplan's discussion, “Quantifying In,” Synthese, XIX (December 1968), 188.

5 Quine, op. cit., p. 197.

6 In fact, for Kripke, the distinction between rigid designator and non-rigid (or accidental) designator does not entail that whatever may be designated by a rigid designator must exist in all possible worlds; for instance, Nixon might be designated by a rigid designator. All that Kripke holds is that something is “a rigid designator if in any possible world it designates the same object.” Cf. his “Naming and Necessity” in Semantics of Natural Languages, ed. Davidson, D. and Harman, G. (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1971 )Google Scholar. Kripke is interested here in defending the thesis that proper names are rigid designators (and that strongly rigid designators are rigid designators of necessary existents). The question of the intentionality of reference he mentions only briefly.

7 The point here, of course, trades on the distinction between the referential and attributive use of definite descriptions provided by Donnellan, Keith “Reference and Definite Descriptions,” The Philosophical Review, LXXV (1966), 281–304.CrossRefGoogle Scholar