Is There More to the Meaning of Terms Than the Things Out There?

In 1980, the philosopher and logician Saul Kripke published a small but hugely influential book, Naming and Necessity, in which he argued that some claims that we discover empirically to be true are also necessarily true – true not just in our world, but in any possible world in which the objects or kinds referred to by the words in the sentence exist. In Meaning and Metaphysical Necessity (Routledge, 2022), Tristan Grotvedt Haze revisits the concept of the necessary a posteriori. He uses a method of “factorization” to explain the sort of a priori philosophical analysis that can give us insight into modal status, but – in contrast to Kripke – defends a neo-Fregean theory of meaning. Grotvedt Haze, who is a lecturer in philosophy at the University of Melbourne, also considers the nature of metaphysical necessity itself, and ends up being a skeptic about strong metaphysical necessity.

Carrie Figdor is professor of philosophy at the University of Iowa.

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