Saul Kripke's Causal Theory of Names

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Part 1: Naming and Necessity by Saul Kripke -...

This is a video lecture in a course on the philosophy of language. It summarizes Saul Kripke's brief and suggestive theory of proper names that he offers as part of his famous 1970 lectures, delivered in January of 1970 at Princeton University, and then published as a book, Naming and Necessity. Kripke presents a causal theory of proper names in lecture 2, after attacking John Searle's Descriptivist theory of proper names. Kripke's basic idea is that a speaker's use of a proper name refers to whomever was dubbed with that name at the earlier end of a causal chain, every link of which consists of a person intending to use a name to refer to whomever other language users in their community were referring to with that name.