Concept
Rigid designator
Overview
In modal logic and the philosophy of language, a term is a rigid designator or absolute substantial term when it designates (picks out, denotes, refers to) the same thing in all possible worlds in which that thing exists. A designator is persistently rigid if it also designates nothing in all other possible worlds. A designator is obstinately rigid if it designates the same thing in every possible world, period, whether or not that thing exists in that world. Rigid designators are contrasted with connotative terms, non-rigid or flaccid designators, which may designate different things in different possible worlds.
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
Possible passages
Found by search and not yet checked by a person; they may only mention the idea in passing.
Congruence was to refer to geometrical bodies, with none of the properties of ordinary bodies except impenetrability (Erdmann, Axiome der Geometrie, p. 26). A straight line is defined as determined by two of its points[14], and a plane as determined by three. These premisses, with a slight exception as to the straight line, we shall hereafter find essential to every Geometry.
Bertrand Russell, An essay on the foundations of geometry
States what Rigid designator is; the author is tied to Rigid designator in the knowledge graph.
Even among philosophers, we may say, broadly, that only those universals which are named by adjectives or substantives have been much or often recognized, while those named by verbs and prepositions have been usually overlooked. This omission has had a very great effect upon philosophy; it is hardly too much to say that most metaphysics, since Spinoza, has been largely determined by it. The way this has occurred is…
Bertrand Russell, The Problems of Philosophy
States what Rigid designator is; the author is tied to Rigid designator in the knowledge graph.
To sum up, for me to imagine that I get out of my prison, I have only to imagine that the walls seem to open, when I move. I believe, therefore, that if by space is understood a mathematical continuum of three dimensions, were it otherwise amorphous, it is the mind which constructs it, but it does not construct it out of nothing; it needs materials and models. These materials, like these models, preexist within it…
Henri Poincaré, The Foundations of Science
States what Rigid designator is.
Philosophers who discussed Rigid designator
Related ideas
- Naming and Necessity
- Natural kind
- Analytic philosophy
- Middle Ages
- Water
- Modal logic
- Ruth Barcan Marcus
- Descriptivist theory of names
- Scholasticism
- Bertrand Russell
- Keith Donnellan
- Saul Kripke
- Gottlob Frege
- Definite description
- Proper noun
- Philosophy of language
- Concept
- Causal theory of reference
- Possible world
Place in the tradition
Part of American philosophy.