What’s in a Name? (Part 3)

This is the third in a three-part series.

3.

I SELL THE SHADOW

What do these things have in common? Impostors, various 19th- and early-20th-century attempts at unique identification involving photography, measurement of physical characteristics and fingerprinting? Doppelgängers, twins, mirror-reflections and uncanny resemblance? At the heart of our fascination with these things are deep metaphysical questions: What is identity? Does it consist of a set of attributes? How many attributes could you add or subtract from me, and I would still be me? Would I still be me if I had only one arm? No arms? No arms and no legs? Different DNA? If I were a moose? If I am “identical” to someone else, is that clone me, a simulacrum of me, or someone else altogether? [1]

In Part 2, I discussed how Francis Galton, Alphonse Bertillon and their 19th-century confederates aspired to link every individual to a name and a history through descriptive attributes — the details of a face, the length of a finger, the whorls of a thumbprint. Through standardized descriptions, Bertillon argued, one could “fix the human personality [and] give to each human being a definite individuality.” Saul Kripke — one of the preeminent philosophers of the 20th century — has addressed many of the same questions. Unlike Galton and Bertillon, however, Kripke questions whether descriptions can determine reference.

In the early 1970s, Kripke published “Naming and Necessity.” It included a groundbreaking theory of proper names and what they refer to — essentially, a theory about how language attaches to the world. Then, a decade later, he published a series of lectures on Wittgenstein and private language. [2] In the subsequent years, Kripke produced much but formally published very little. [3] However, these early works have become cornerstones of modern analytic philosophy.

Although Kripke’s theory of proper names is clearly the work of an analytic philosopher, there is an oft-quoted passage from “Naming and Necessity” that could have been lifted from the 19th-century literature of forgeries, doubles and mistaken identities. Here is Kripke on Gödel (one of the great mathematicians of the 20th century who famously proved the incompleteness of arithmetic) and Schmidt (a fictitious mathematician invented by Kripke):

Let’s suppose that someone says that Gödel is the man who proved the incompleteness of arithmetic … In the case of Gödel that’s practically the only thing many people have heard about him — that he discovered the incompleteness of arithmetic. Does it follow that whoever discovered the incompleteness of arithmetic is the referent of “Gödel”? Imagine the following blatantly fictional situation. (I hope Professor Gödel is not present.) Suppose that Gödel was not in fact the author of this theorem. A man named Schmidt whose body was found in Vienna under mysterious circumstances many years ago actually did the work in question. His friend Gödel somehow got hold of the manuscript and it was thereafter attributed to Gödel. On the [descriptionist] view in question, then, when our ordinary man uses the name “Gödel,” he really means to refer to Schmidt, because Schmidt is the unique person satisfying the description, “the man who discovered the incompleteness of arithmetic” … Since the man who discovered the incompleteness of arithmetic is in fact Schmidt, we, when we talk about Gödel, are in fact always referring to Schmidt. But it seems to me that we are not. We simply are not.” [4]

Could it be that Gödel is an impostor who plotted and connived to steal Schmidt’s manuscript, so that he could take credit for one of the central theorems of 20th-century mathematics? Of course, it’s possible. But how does this possibility affect the meaning and reference of proper names?

Here is my version of Kripke’s account. It is 1930. Both Gödel and Schmidt are students at the University of Vienna. One day, Gödel jimmies the lock on Schmidt’s desk. The center drawer slides open, and there it is — a recently completed manuscript: “Über formal unentscheidbare Sätze der Principia Mathematica und verwandter Systeme I.” Gödel is ecstatic. At last, he can get the better of the terribly annoying Schimdt, who was more talented at mathematics and the bane of his existence. “Oh, how I hate him,” Gödel was often heard to exclaim.

The point of Kripke’s story is that if “Gödel” means “the man who discovered the incompleteness of arithmetic,” then if Schmidt really discovered it, then “Gödel” really refers to Schmidt. But this violates our belief — from John Stuart Mill and from common sense — that names are attached to things, to something in the world. [5]

I can believe that Gödel proved the incompleteness of arithmetic. Or I can believe someone else did. But independent of my beliefs about Gödel, I still refer to him — that man. Gödel. [6] It reminds me of Twain’s “Pudd’nhead Wilson” — substitute Tom and Chambers for Gödel and Schmidt, respectively: Tom, the true heir, and Gödel, the true author; Chambers and Schmidt, the impostors.

Twain — when he refers to the faux Tom after Tom and Chambers have been switched — always uses quotation marks. He is “Tom” — that is, he is Chambers — not Tom. Some people may erroneously believe that Chambers is Tom or vice versa, but that doesn’t mean that the reference of the name changes. [7] You could call it the Pudd’nhead Wilson Principle – once Chambers, always Chambers; once Tom, always Tom; and our proper names should reflect that fact. Names are affixed to people like gummy labels. [8]

But how does the label get affixed in the first place? Part of Kripke’s theory is the baptismal moment — the moment the name is attached to the thing it names.

An initial “baptism” takes place. Here the object may be named by simply pointing it out — “that’s it, over there” — or the reference of the name may be fixed by a description. When the name is “passed from link to link,” the receiver of the name must, I think, intend when he learns it to use it with the same reference as the man from whom he heard it. If I hear the name “Napoleon” and decide it would be a nice name for my pet aardvark, I do not satisfy this condition.[9]

The “initial baptism,” whatever that is, can occur in many, many different ways. It can be fixed by pointing at something (that baby) or by a definite description (the baby with the big head). Someone could point at an infant in a nursery or say something to the effect of, “Let’s call the baby in the third bassinet from the left ‘Gödel.'” Then, the name is passed along. There is a causal chain connecting one speaker with another. Kripke writes,

…Someone, let’s say, a baby, is born; his parents call him by a certain name. They talk about him to their friends. Other people meet him. Through various sorts of talk the name is spread from link to link as if by a chain. [10]

This passing of the name from person to person can continue for generations even if the name stands for someone who lived far back in the long-lost past. Abraham Lincoln died almost 150 years ago, but his name has been passed “forward” through many generations of language users. The mechanism presumably would be no different for someone who died 3 million years ago, although I doubt the australopithecine now named “Lucy” was originally given that name. [11]

According to Kripke, as long as each speaker in the chain intends to refer to the same person referred to by the person who introduced the name to them, then reference is preserved. That reference, once fixed, is preserved independent of our beliefs.

I have tried many times to explain “Naming and Necessity” to anyone willing to listen. [12] Many people had trouble understanding how a proper name could refer to a person (once the reference is initially fixed) regardless of any beliefs we have about that person. (Can I refer to Abraham Lincoln even if all the beliefs I have about Lincoln are false?) I probably wasn’t explaining it well — but then I started to use photographs as a metaphor, hoping to make Kripke’s idea clear. All of a sudden people seemed to get it.

Ask yourself: do our beliefs about a photograph determine what a photograph is a photograph of?

No. They do not. Simple as that. Once the shutter is clicked and a photograph has been taken, the photograph “refers” to what has been photographed, independent of any thoughts I have about it.

An enormous amount has been written about Kripke’s theory of proper names. But no one (to my knowledge) has examined this similarity between his account of proper names and photography. [13] [14] [15] And I began to wonder whether it was more than a metaphor. Perhaps there is a connection between language and images, in particular, between proper names and photography. And perhaps that connection can deepen our understanding of both. To what extent are photographs like proper names and vice versa? What are the similarities? What are the differences? I was hopeful that it might provide a way of thinking about words and images.

Take this photograph of Gödel. It was taken in 1926 and is signed by Gödel. (Take my word for it that this really is a photograph of Gödel, and it was signed by him — signed and captioned.)

Allow me to make a few claims. This is a photograph of Gödel, independent of any beliefs we may have about the photograph (or anything else for that matter). We could believe it’s a photograph of Einstein or Dirac or Bohr. It might even look like a photograph of one of them. Or we might think the man in the photograph resembles Einstein or Dirac or Bohr. But so what? What do my beliefs have to do with what it is a photograph of? If Gödel sat in front of the lens of the camera and this photograph was taken, then it’s a photograph of Kurt Gödel. And nothing I think or believe changes that fact.

Let’s take it one step further. With a photographic portrait, clicking of the shutter and exposing the negative “baptizes” him, to use Kripke’s terminology. It fixes the reference. If the reference of the name “Gödel” is Gödel, in the same sense the reference of a photograph of Gödel could also be thought to be Gödel. Whatever beliefs we have about the photograph of Gödel, they have no bearing on the fundamental question of whether it is a photograph of Gödel (or whether it refers to Gödel). The photo may even resemble some other person more than the person the photo is of, say, a photograph of Gödel could resemble Einstein or Dirac or Bohr more than it resembles Gödel. It doesn’t matter. It is still a photograph of Gödel.

A name under a photograph could suggest that the person looks like this — but it most often asserts: this is (a photograph of) the person we are talking about. (Like Goldie, it could mean this is the fish that is golden in color — but it doesn’t. It means: this is a photograph of that specific fish.) Once you take a photograph of a person, it is always a photograph of that person. It doesn’t matter what the photograph looks like or whom it resembles, it is still a photograph of that person. Alexander Gardner could take a picture of Abraham Lincoln, and the picture could turn out to look like John Wilkes Booth. It could look so much like John Wilkes Booth that John Wilkes Booth could use it for identification. People could look at the photograph and say, “That’s a photograph (or a likeness) of John Wilkes Booth.” John Wilkes Booth could even prefer it (as a likeness) to photographs of himself. He could even think it is a picture of himself and not Lincoln.

But like Kripke, we could say: It is not. It simply is not. It is a photograph of Abraham Lincoln. It’s not what’s in our brains — our beliefs, our descriptions, our associated ideas, whatever — that determines what a photograph refers to; it’s that causal (read physical) connection between the photograph and the thing it is a photograph of. [16]

This theory (or picture) of photographs is not unlike Kripke’s causal theory. It analyzes the relationship between a photograph and the thing photographed. We can believe whatever we want to believe about a photograph, but it doesn’t change one iota the causal chain that links the image with reality. Keep in mind that with the theory of descriptions, the reference of Kurt Gödel changes if we find out that he is a mathematical impostor, but with Kripke’s theory, the reference, once fixed, never changes. Same with a photograph. Once this photograph is taken, it will forever be a photograph of Gödel. Nothing can alter that fact.

Early writers on photography were captivated by the mechanical nature of photography. A camera is pointed at Abraham Lincoln, the shutter is released and a picture of Abraham Lincoln results. (It doesn’t matter whether it is a positive print from a 19th-century wet-plate collodion negative or from a 21st-century charge-coupled device.) There is a causal relationship between the camera being pointed at Lincoln and the photograph that results. Intentions, thoughts, desires — mental entities of any kind — are not involved, just the mechanical act of clicking the shutter and taking the picture. Once again, it doesn’t matter what’s in our heads. At least not with respect to this causal relationship. It is not in us. It is not in our brains. It is in the world. [17]

Yet there is a difference between photographs and names. With photographs we do not need intentions. Not really. We can physically pass the photograph from person to person and the reference is automatically preserved. A name can be “passed” from person to person, but according to Kripke, it is the chain of intentions that preserves reference.

In the 1860s a former slave, Sojourner Truth, came to prominence. She had changed her name from her slave name, Isabella Baumfree.[18] [19]

On her calling card, Truth wrote: “I Sell the Shadow to Support the Substance.”

Indeed, her photograph is a kind of shadow. But it is her shadow, produced by her substance. Shadows are odd things. They lack definition, substance, but there is a causal relationship between a person and their shadow — specifically, a shadow is the result of a material interaction between a person and a source of light. My shadow belongs to me and not to anyone else for the simple reason that it is a causal product of my physical existence and not of anyone else. After all, it’s my shadow. (Take your hands off of it. It belongs to me.) Likewise, a photograph.

Sojourner Truth is correct. Her photograph is like a shadow. There can be no photograph of Sojourner Truth without Sojourner Truth. [20]

These intuitions about photographs and shadows presumably can be turned around and applied to Kripke’s theory of proper names. But questions remain. Is a proper name like a shadow? Does it follow the person it refers to like a shadow? It occurred to me that many of Kripke’s ideas work better for photographs than for proper names. With photographs, reference is physically preserved. It is causal. A photograph is a physical object. Handing a photograph from one person to another is like the passing of a baton in a relay race. One runner handing the baton to another. With proper names, in Kripke’s theory, reference is preserved through a causal chain of intentions. We are looking forward in time. One language user speaking to another. A chain of transmission.

Kripke’s important contribution is to emphasize that this chain of transmission that attaches a name to an object is independent of our descriptions, associated beliefs — everything except our intention to refer to the same thing the person we learned the name from intended to refer to.

But can intentions do the job? Are they up to the task? [21]

Take the game of Telephone (or Whisper Down the Lane). A chain of participants. A phrase or sentence is whispered from one person to another. Nobody has the intention of changing the phrase. Quite the contrary. Each participant is instructed to repeat exactly what she heard from the person before her and intends to do so. Invariably, the last person to whisper the phrase whispers something radically different from the first person, despite her intention to repeat the phrase verbatim. Is reference like this? Do intentions really preserve reference? Can’t we intend to refer to something and end up referring to something or someone altogether different?[22]

If our brains are just big lumps of electric jelly, presumably, our intentions must be found somewhere inside those lumps. But what is it that reaches from our brains back out into the world? How does language work? How do our words (in particular, proper names) connect with things? Does Kripke’s mechanism — this chain of intentions — really tell us how this is done? [23] O.K., it supposedly provides a kind of metaphysical glue, but just how reliable is that glue? Does Kripke’s mechanism offer any sort of guarantee that glue will not come unstuck? If it’s a “hello, my name is so-and-so” label, how can we be sure that it has been stuck on permanently? Kripke’s intuition about baptism, the causal chain, etc., is a powerful dream, a dream of a real connection with the world, but in real life we may need to muddle our way through with our beliefs. Our associated beliefs may not guarantee reference, but they may be all we’ve got.

Charles Silver has written about the failure of intentions to preserve reference and offers an excellent example (of this sort of failure). One of the first settlers to come to Australia questioned an aborigine about the name for a kangaroo. He replied, “Kangaroo,” which supposedly means, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Here, the settler most likely intended to refer to what the aborigine was referring to. Alas, he was unsuccessful. The aborigine was referring to nothing. [24] The road to hell may not be paved with good intentions, but neither is the road to successful reference.

Despite my suspicions about intentions — at least with respect to reference — there were other questions about Kripke’s theory. They came from photography. And from my background as a private detective. Let’s assume that the name is passed from link to link. Let’s give Kripke his due. Has the problem of reference been solved?

Kripke emphasizes the role of a social contract.

…a baby, is born; his parents call him by a certain name. They talk about him to their friends. Other people meet him. Through various sorts of talk the name is spread from link to link as if by a chain. A speaker who is on the far end of this chain, who has heard about, say Richard Feynman, in the marketplace or elsewhere, may be referring to Richard Feynman even though he can’t remember from whom he first heard of Feynman or from whom he ever heard of Feynman. He knows that Feynman is a famous physicist. A certain passage of communication reaching ultimately to the man himself does reach the speaker. He then is referring to Feynman even though he can’t identify him uniquely. He doesn’t know what a Feynman diagram is, he doesn’t know what the Feynman theory of pair production and annihilation is. Not only that: he’d have trouble distinguishing between Gell-Mann and Feynman. So he doesn’t have to know these things, but, instead, a chain of communication going back to Feynman himself has been established, by virtue of his membership in a community which passed the name on from link to link…[25]

In Kripke’s theory I learn a name from someone and pass it on. The name is being passed forward — into the future. And it is held in place by the aspic of intentions. But there are also historical questions — looking backward. Where did the name come from? As Kripke writes, “a certain passage of communication reaching ultimately to the man himself does reach the speaker. He then is referring to Feynman even though he can’t identify him uniquely.” But is it enough to know that a causal chain exists? That “Feynman” refers to Feynman? I may want to know more. What is reference if it doesn’t provide a unique identification? What good is it? Isn’t this the same quandary that vexed Bertillon and Twain? If you cannot identify someone uniquely, how do you know you’re referring to him?

I imagine a trunk in the attic. [26] The cobwebs are dusted off, the rusty padlock smashed, the hasp pulled back, and the lid opened. Inside is a photograph. It is a portrait of a person. Nothing is written on it. No caption. No inscription. I presume (à la Kripke) that the photograph is causally connected to reality. (It was caused by something.) It’s now my job to figure out who that person is and when the photograph was taken. [27]

A man who looks a lot like Saul Kripke is standing in the corner. In the shadows. I didn’t notice him at first. I express to him my concern about the lack of documentation in the trunk. He reassures me: “Don’t worry. The photograph is a photograph of the person it is a photograph of.” I’m writing about a photograph, but I could just as well be writing about a proper name. A name on a sheet of paper found at the bottom of the trunk. And in this instance Kripke would reply, “No need to worry. The name refers to the person that the person who wrote the name on the slip of paper intended to refer to.” [28]

Huh?

I’m sorry. I’m not satisfied by the reply. It is not that the argument is circular. It isn’t. But I want to know more. It is not enough to be told that photographs are causally connected to the scenes they photographed. Ditto: names. We want to know — we need to know something about what we are looking at. Who is that a picture of? When was it taken? Who took it? What is it showing? We need to know something more than just the fact that it uniquely refers to something. It would be no different if we found a name at the bottom of the trunk. It’s not enough to know the name is the name of a specific person. Who is that person?

Let me give you another example. Someone reads to me a passage from “Exodus,” 2:10.

And the child grew, and she brought him unto Pharaoh’s daughter, and he became her son. And she called his name Moses: and she said, “Because I drew him out of the water.”

Let’s imagine that I have constructed a time machine and I go back to ancient Egypt. I’m looking for Moses. (I wish to prematurely congratulate him for leading the Jewish people out of Egypt.) The “Moses” that is mentioned in “Exodus, Book II.” I ask someone, “How do I find Moses?” He says, “Which Moses?” I say, “The Moses that was rescued by Pharaoh’s daughter.” He is still unsure who I am referring to. Additional questions have to be asked; additional beliefs expressed. Perhaps there are five Moseses. Maybe 20. Is it the Moses who lives near the river? Or perhaps the Moses who is living with Pharaoh’s family. How do I determine that I have found the correct Moses, the Moses I’m looking for? [29] I could be right, that there is one, unique Moses that the name refers to. But how do I know which one? We have Kripke’s intuition that there is only one, unique Moses, but we will need descriptions to find him.

Say we are investigating a crime — say, a murder. We know there is a real world. Someone pulled the trigger, swung the club, poured the poison in the glass. We have the metaphysical assurance that it is someone, a specific person. But we may not have the knowledge of who it is. Uncovering who that someone is, more often than not, requires an investigation. Reference is like a crime. Someone did it. And we need to trace the causal chain back to the event. [30]

Photographs could add some clarity here. We can talk about photographs both in terms of what they are of — what they refer to — and the beliefs and descriptions associated with them. Likewise, we endow words, concatenations of sounds — ejective fricatives, diphthongs and the like — also splotches of ink on a page — with significance. We want to be left with the feeling we are talking about something rather than nothing and that other people understand what we’re talking about.

A proper name captures the human predicament — the need for significance and the need to be grounded in the world. As such, it has two parts: the beliefs associated with it and what it refers to. The two are not one and the same. The problem arises when people ask the further question: what does a proper name “mean”? On one hand, it is the sum total of all the associated beliefs about it (the definite and indefinite descriptions associated with the name). [31] And on the other, it is what it refers to.

The same could be said of a photograph. We can believe many things about what a photograph depicts, even though most of them may be false. Just as we can believe lots of things about what a name names. That two people with the same name are the same person or are possibly related. That naming something gives it a supposed provenance or set of traits. Like slapping the name “Vermeer” on a painting, or “Rockefeller” on a German student. The descriptionists are right. There is often a cluster of descriptions associated with a name, or at least a cluster of beliefs. They are wrong that any of these descriptions (or beliefs) guarantee reference. (Unless, of course, it is a unique and necessary description.) Kripke is right that reference is not determined by a bundle of descriptions, even though it may be fixed by a definite description in an initial baptism.

Photographs are physical objects. They exist in time. There is a causal chain leading back into the past — to that moment when the shutter was clicked and the photograph was taken. But with many photographs we have lost a link to that past. There are boxes upon boxes of old photographs in curio shops. The identity of the people in them has been lost. Perhaps we can reconstruct a history of the photographs — a provenance — perhaps we cannot.

We are at sea looking for land. We know that a causal chain exists, even if we cannot reconstruct it. We know that something was there, something was in front of the camera, and we’re looking at it. We know that something cast a shadow — and we’re looking at it. Even if we can’t know what that something is.

I imagine a kosher kitchen. Two sinks — one for meat, the other for milk. Reference is in one sink; beliefs in the other. According to Kripke, beliefs can attach a name to a thing (say, at a baptismal moment), but from then on our beliefs — indeed, the things in our heads — become irrelevant to reference. This may be true, but without them, reference seems empty. We can refer but refer to what? And to what end? There is the metaphysical comfort that we are referring to something. But, as with photographs, we need to know who and what we are referring to. With both photographs and proper names, we can speak about associated beliefs and reference. [32] In this view, we can agree that there is a causal connection with the world — for both proper names and photographs — but the connection is meaningless without the beliefs — both true and false beliefs — that lead us back into the past.

There are few kosher kitchens in real life. In real life, beliefs, names and photographs are often jumbled together. False beliefs collect around both photographs and names. A man can call himself “Clark Rockefeller.” He has done something more than just re-baptized himself. He has wrapped himself in a web of associations and beliefs. Photographs can be used in a similar fashion. They can be altered, cropped and manipulated in sundry ways to misdirect and mislead. After the Civil War there was a legend about Jefferson Davis — that he donned a woman’s clothing in order to escape from the advancing Union armies. But in the era of the photograph and the carte de visite, simply creating a false belief about Jefferson Davis — or if the reader prefers, a false description associated with his name — was not considered sufficiently defamatory. A false picture was required, as well. It is interesting to compare Davis’s real carte de visite with the defamatory one published in 1865, shortly after the end of the Civil War. It must have been incredibly exciting to learn that photography could be used to enhance a lie and most people would believe it.

There has been a belief that language and vision are separate faculties and are processed in separate parts of the brain. That may well be, but from the foregoing discussion, it seems that there might be a more complex interaction of images and words — that sometimes images act like words, and sometimes it’s the other way around. Magritte didn’t have Kripke’s name or image in mind, but he may be right, “An object encounters its image, an object encounters its name. It may be that the image and the name of the object encounter each other.”

*******

Acknowledgments. I am particularly indebted to Charles Silver. This essay could not have been written without his ideas, advice and support. We were both graduate students in philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley. He wrote his thesis on Saul Kripke’s theory of proper names, and the term “associated beliefs” as well as many other ideas comes from him. More of his beliefs can be found in his e-book “The Futility of Consciousness.” Saul Kripke and Jason Stanley also read a draft of this essay and made a number of helpful suggestions. I would also like to thank my researchers and editors — Julie Fischer, Zach Arnold, James Larkin and Ann Petrone. And last but not least, I would like to acknowledge my debt to Saul Kripke. His ideas — developed in his lectures “Naming and Necessity” — about proper names are at the heart of much of this discussion. In particular, Kripke’s ideas suggested to me a “new” way to think about photographs. Forget about writing about what you believe about a photograph, the meaning of a photograph is in its (causal) connection to the world. Try to recover something about the world in which the photograph was taken. Try to walk through the photograph back into history, back to the moment when the photograph was taken. My movie “Standard Operating Procedure” (2009) and my book “Believing Is Seeing” (2011) attempted to do just that. I should also call attention to Kripke’s “Philosophical Troubles,” a recently published collection which includes several essays relevant to this discussion from the ’70s and ’80s.

*******

[1] Saul Kripke urged me not to leave the reader with the impression that essential properties provide unique identification. He wrote to me: “Please don’t give the impression that I myself believe that there is an issue of re-identifying a person in counterfactual situations (possible worlds) by identifying properties, constituting the person’s essence. I specifically deny this in ‘Naming and Necessity.’”

[2] Some of the discussion that ensued concerned whether Kripke was actually addressing Wittgenstein’s view of private language or whether he had constructed a version of Wittgenstein to suit his own purposes, a straw-man Wittgenstein, a faux Wittgenstein — a double — which he could then criticize. As a result, Kripke’s Wittgenstein was given the name “Kripkenstein.” Kripke has written: “I suspect — for reasons that will become clearer later — that to attempt to present Wittgenstein’s argument precisely is to some extent to falsify it. Probably many of my formulations and recastings of the argument are done in a way Wittgenstein would not himself approve. So the present paper should be thought of as expounding neither ‘Wittgenstein’s’ argument nor ‘Kripke’s’: rather Wittgenstein’s argument as it struck Kripke, as it presented a problem for him.” (Kripke, “Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language,” p. 5, Harvard University Press, 1982.) Kripke wrote to me: “I am, as you see, rather cautious as to how accurate my book is as exegesis of Wittgenstein. As I say, W probably wouldn’t like any attempt to state his views more precisely. And I liked David Lewis’s comment that if W didn’t say that (what I attribute to him), so much the worse for him! However, I have been unimpressed with the attempts to refute my interpretation as exegesis. It stands against any criticism I know.” Of course, Kripke’s interpretation of Wittgenstein could be false or fail to truly characterize Wittgenstein’s theory, but nevertheless, Kripke would still be referring to the actual Wittgenstein. Ironically, many of these issues concern reference versus resemblance.

[3] The Saul Kripke Center in New York houses thousands of pages of Kripke’s work awaiting publication.

[4] Saul Kripke, “Naming and Necessity,” Harvard University Press, 1980, pp. 83-84.

[5] The history of mathematics is replete with misidentifications. Peano is not responsible for Peano’s postulates, Dedekind is. Charles Silver showed that “Cantor’s Back and Forth” argument didn’t come from Cantor. It came from Hausdorff. (“Who Invented Cantor’s Back-and-Forth Argument?” Modern Logic, Vol 4, No. 1, January 1994.) And at a conference a lecturer referred to Zorn’s Lemma. A hand went up in the back of the auditorium. When called on, the person said that Zorn had never proved Zorn’s Lemma. The lecturer asked how he knew this. He replied, “I’m Zorn.”

[6] This idea could be expressed with a different kind of terminology, e.g., it could involve my descriptions of Gödel or the properties I ascribe to him — it could involve pointing to him — but it comes down to the same thing. Once the label is “attached,” I can refer independent of descriptions, properties, and beliefs. Kripke’s theory is also expressed using possible worlds, e.g., the possible world in which Gödel didn’t discover the incompleteness of arithmetic.

[7] The story of Twain’s “Pudd’nhead Wilson” is discussed in Part Two of this essay.

[8] This squares with our intuitions about people. People don’t suddenly become other people. Renee Richards can become a female ophthalmologist, but just because he/she has a newly manufactured set of genitals doesn’t mean that he/she (or she/he) has become a newly manufactured person.

[9] Saul Kripke, “Naming and Necessity,” p. 96.

[10] Saul Kripke, “Naming and Necessity,” p. 91.

[11] Lucy, in fact, was named after the Beatles song “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.” Although I never met Lucy — I’m much too young — I may have met Kurt Gödel. Or at least, I may have seen him. I lived for a year on Linden Lane in Princeton, N.J. Kurt Gödel also lived on Linden Lane. It was 1972. I thought I saw him, but I’m not completely sure. Informed people have told me that Kurt Gödel didn’t go out very much. He spent the last years of his life doing complicated calculations on his heating bills. He died in 1978. I never got to take a photograph of him.

[12] My most recent attempt was in my Times essay “The Ashtray.” There, I employed the example of two goldfish, Goldie and Greenie, to illustrate Kripke’s idea that names adhere to things not because of descriptions but in spite of descriptions. Some philosophers complained that the Goldie/Greenie example was overly simplistic and misleading and could be handled by descriptivists by merely adding a “time-stamp.” But the example was not designed to prove that such cases could not be handled by some variant of the description theory. It would be like arguing that some variant of the Ptolemaic model of the solar system could not account for the observed motion of the planets. Given enough epicycles, of course, it could. Just as there are Newtonian “explanations” for the gravitational redshift or the precession of the perihelion of Mercury. My point was a different one. To show that there are different intuitions — a different explanation — behind Kripke’s ideas and the various description theories extant.

[13] It is interesting that the word “of” is used in portrait photography and proper names. We speak of a photographic portrait and a proper name being of someone. Charles Silver, after reading a draft of this essay, called my attention to several passages about a “photograph model of representation” in Gareth Evans. Here is a quote from Evans: “‘The Photograph Model of Mental Representation’, in which the causal antecedents of the information involved in a mental state, like the causal relationship Kripke was concerned with, are claimed to be sufficient to determine which object the state concerns.” (Gareth Evans, “Varieties of Reference,” ed. by John McDowell, Oxford, 1982, pp. 76-79) Despite his use of this suggestive phrase “photographic model,” Evans is writing about mental representations, not about photographs per se. Photographs are merely taken as an example of a causal relationship between the mental representation of an object and the object itself. Evans does not go into further detail about how photography relates to our understanding of proper names and vice versa. He ridicules the idea — an idea he attributes to Kripke’s followers — that there is a simple causal relationship between a mental state and an object. More about this at another time.

[14] Charles Silver and Saul Kripke have pointed out to me that David Kaplan has written about the relationship between photography and proper names. And this is long before Gareth Evans did the same. Kripke recently wrote to me, “The comparison of my views on the transmission of proper names with photographs is already emphasized by David Kaplan in his ‘Quantifying In’ (Synthese Vol. 19, No 1/2 (Dec., 1968), pp. 178-214). This actually appeared before ‘Naming and Necessity’ was published. But I had told him some of the ideas (see his credits to me in the first footnote and especially footnote 24, attached to a discussion of photographs and the possible distortions over a causal history on pages 199ff).” Kaplan’s paper, as Kripke emphasizes, is influenced by “Naming and Necessity.” But it is an early paper and I believe misinterprets some of Kripke’s central ideas. For example, Kaplan writes, “Returning now to names, it is their descriptive content that determines what if anything they denote. Thus, denotation is the analogue for names to resemblance for pictures.” In Kripke, the descriptive content of a name does not determine denotation or reference. Quite the contrary. It is part and parcel of Kripke’s criticism of the theory of descriptions, that a description can fix a reference, but cannot provide the meaning of a proper name. Furthermore, I believe Kaplan incorrectly describes the relationship between proper names and photographs. Reference (or denotation) for names is not analogous to resemblance for pictures. This is just not so. The crucial point is that a photograph can resemble somebody without being of them. Resemblance is not reference nor is it denotation.

[15] Although I have not discussed Kripke’s possible world view in this essay, it could be argued that photographs are, like proper names, rigid designators.

[16] Kripke in “Naming and Necessity” uses this as a jumping-off point to discuss his possible worlds view and his idea of proper names as rigid designators — namely, a proper name grabs ahold of that thing it names in all possible worlds. Once again, there have been endless discussions about the idea of possible worlds, in Leibniz, Kripke, and elsewhere. Presumably, it allows us to grab ahold of the essence of a thing — what must be true of it in every possible world. Kripke uses the example of gold’s atomic number. We can envision possible worlds in which gold has different characteristics from gold as we know it, but one cannot imagine a possible world in which gold’s atomic number is not 79. The reader may wonder, at this point, how these “modal” concepts relate to photography. Curiously, photography is not about the surface of things. (No more than naming is about sense-data.) Consider the following thought experiment. Abraham Lincoln has a face-transplant. An impossibility in mid-19th-century America, but today, a not unheard of medical procedure. The face of Jefferson Davis has been transplanted onto Lincoln, and a photograph is taken. Ask yourself: who is it a photograph of? To me, even though we are looking at the face of Jefferson Davis, it is still a photograph of Lincoln. Hence, photographs attach to the essence of things and not their surfaces. Photons bounce off of Abraham Lincoln or John Wilkes Booth or Saul Kripke and enter the lens of a camera. They are focused by the lens on a photographic plate and cause a chemical reaction in the silver atoms of that film emulsion (or in a charged coupled device or some such equivalent) in the camera. There is a physical connection (a type of causal connection) between a thing-photographed and a photograph-of-that-thing. The photograph is attached by virtue of this causal relationship.

[17] By separating the reference of photographs from the meaning of photographs, I started to think of photographs in a different way. Indeed, I have produced a book, “Believing Is Seeing,” about retracing photographs back to their point of origin or back to their causal connection to the world.

[18] For Kripke this would amount to a re-baptism.

[19] In Nell Painter’s biography “Sojourner Truth: A Life and Legend” there is a story of how she became involved in politics after the outbreak of the Civil War in April 1861. Truth crossed the border from Michigan to Indiana to appear at various pro-Union rallies. She made her way through a mob at the Steuben County Courthouse, spoke briefly, and was arrested for violating an Indiana law preventing people of African descent from entering the State. Truth said, according to her host, Josephine Griffing, a white Ohio abolitionist:

It seems that it takes my black face to bring out your black hearts; so it’s well I came… You are afraid of my black face, because it is a looking glass in which you see yourselves.

[20] These are the first two stanzas from Robert Louis Stevenson’s poem “My Shadow,”from “A Child’s Garden of Verses.”

I have a little shadow that goes in and out with me,
And what can be the use of him is more than I can see.
He is very, very like me from the heels up to the head;
And I see him jump before me when I jump into my bed.

The funniest thing about him is the way he likes to grow —
Not at all like proper children, which is always very slow;
For he sometimes shoots up taller like an india-rubber ball,
And he sometimes gets so little that there’s none of him at all.

[21] Kripke prefers the term “picture”: “…philosophical theories are in danger of being false, and so I wasn’t going to present an alternative theory. Have I just done so? Well, in a way; but my characterization has been far less specific than a real set of necessary and sufficient conditions for reference would be. Obviously the name is passed on from link to link. But of course not every sort of causal chain reaching from me to a certain man will do for me to make a reference. There may be a causal chain from our use of the term ‘Santa Claus’ to a certain historical saint, but still the children, when they use this, by this time probably do not refer to that saint. So other conditions must be satisfied in order to make this into a really rigorous theory of reference. I don’t know that I’m going to do this because, first, I’m sort of too lazy at the moment; secondly, rather than giving a set of necessary and sufficient conditions which will work for a term like reference, I want to present just a better picture than the picture presented by the received views.” Kripke, “Naming and Necessity,” p. 93.

[22] I suppose it could be argued that Telephone is not really analogous to the picture that Kripke proposes. Strictly speaking, that’s true. With Telephone a person tries hard to repeat verbatim a phrase that was said before. The important thing is that there is the intention to preserve something — meaning, reference, whatever — but that intention does not guarantee anything. Kripke’s intention to preserve reference is supposed to work over centuries; with Telephone it fails after a couple of iterations.

[23] It is ironic that a philosophy that tries to make reference completely metaphysical suddenly plunges into “intentions,” that is, complex mental entities. One could argue that “intentions” are even more difficult and complicated than “reference” and thus shouldn’t be used to explain it. “Causal” and “causality” are similarly words that defer explanation; they do not provide it.

[24] I have been fascinated for years by this anecdote and asked Julie Fischer, one of my researchers, to investigate it for me. She found a substantial amount of information that is somewhat inconclusive but endlessly interesting. According to the Oxford English Dictionary and “Austral English: A Dictionary of Australasian Words, Phrases and Usages” (Morris, Edward Ellis. 1898.), the first use of “kangaroo” by English speakers was in 1770, when Captain Cook and his expedition surveyed the area that is now Cooktown, Queensland. However, both sources question the validity of the “I don’t know” story. Three entries appear in Cook’s Journal:

May 1, 1770: An animal which must feed upon grass, and which, we judge, could not be less than a deer. June 23, 1770. One of the men saw an animal something less than a greyhound; it was of a mouse colour, very slender made, and swift of foot. August 4, 1770. The animals which I have before mentioned, called by the Natives Kangooroo or Kanguru.

In the larger Austral English & O.E.D.:

Kangaroo, n. (1) an aboriginal word. See Marsupial. The Origin of the Name. The name was first obtained in 1770, while H.M.S. Endeavor lay beached at the Endeavor River, where Cooktown, Queensland, now is. The name first appears in print in 1773, in the book brought out by the relatives of Mr. Parkinson, who was draughtsman to Banks the naturalist, and who had died on the voyage. The object of this book was to anticipate the official account of Cook’s Voyage by Hawkesworth, which appeared later in the same year. It is now known that Hawkesworth’s book was like a rope twisted of four strands, viz. Cook’s Journal, the diaries of the two naturalists, Banks and Solander, and quartum quid, the Johnsonian pomposity of Dr. Hawkesworth. Cook’s Journal was published in 1893, edited by Captain Wharton, hydrographer to the Admiralty; Banks’s Journal, in 1896, edited by Sir J.D. Hooker. Solander’s Journal has never been printed. When Englishmen next came to Australia in 1788, it was found that the word “kangaroo” was not known to the natives round Port Jackson, distant 1,500 miles to the South of Cooktown. In fact, it was thought by them to be an English word. (See quotation, Tench, 1789.) It is a question whether the word has belonged to any aboriginal vocabulary since. “Capt. Philip P. King, the explorer, who visited that locality [sc. Endeavor River] forty-nine years after Cook, relates in his ‘Narrative of the Survey of the Intertropical and Western Coasts of Australia,’ that he found the word kangaroo unknown to the tribe he met there, though in other particulars the vocabulary he compiled agrees very well with Captain Cook’s.” (Curr’s “Australian Race,” vol. i. p. 27.) In the fourth volume of Curr’s book a conspectus is given of the words used in different parts of Australia for various objects. In the list of names for this animal there are a few that are not far from “kangaroo,” but some inquirers suspect the accuracy of the list, or fancy that the natives obtained the words sounding like “kangaroo” from English. It may be assumed that the word is not now in use as an aboriginal word. Has it, then, disappeared? Or was it an original mistake on the part of Banks or Cook? The theory of a mistake has obtained widely. It has figured in print, and finds a place in at least one dictionary. Several correspondents have written that the word “kangaroo” meant “I don’t understand,” and that Banks mistook this for a name. This is quite possible, but at least some proof is needed, as for instance the actual words in the aboriginal language that could be twisted into this meaning. To find these words, and to hear their true sound, would test how near the explanation hits the mark. Banks was a very careful observer, and he specially notes the precautions he took to avoid any mistake in accepting native words. Moreover, according to Surgeon Anderson, the aborigines of Van Diemen’s Land described the animal by the name of Kangaroo. (See quotation, 1787). On the other hand, it must be remembered that it is an ascertained fact that the aborigines taboo a word on the death of anyone bearing that word as a proper name. (See quotations under Nobbler, 1880.) If, therefore, after Cook’s visit, some man called Kangaroo died, the whole tribe would expunge “kangaroo” from its vocabulary. There is, however, some evidence that the word was much later in use in Western Australia. (See quotation, 1835.)

Alas, there is no discussion in these dictionaries (or elsewhere to the best of my knowledge) of the effect of this taboo on the use of a proper name after the death of its referent. Could Kripke’s causal theory survive. If I can no longer use the name “Gödel,” do I pick a new name or just use a bundle of descriptions that are not taboo? If I pick a new name does this involve a re-baptism — the re-baptism of a dead person?! Or if I can’t use a proper name, any proper name, do I have to resort to descriptions. For an aborigine, the theory of descriptions could be thought of as the posthumous theory of naming or, better yet, the descriptionist theory of posthumous naming.

[25] Saul Kripke, “Naming and Necessity,” p. 91.

[26] This is an idea from my recent book, “Believing Is Seeing: Observations on the Mysteries of Photography.”

[27] Necessity is also involved, but we will pass over this for the time being. Kripke would say that the photograph is “necessarily” a photograph of the person that it is a photograph of.

[28] It could be argued that this is not what Kripke is talking about. That Kripke is concerned with a community of speakers, and the trunk in the attic clearly involves something else. Perhaps, but shouldn’t Kripke’s picture also include written forms of communication? It could also be argued that a proper name written on a piece of paper in the trunk is not enough, that the proper name should be embedded in a sentence or paragraph, just as a speaker uses a name in a “passage of communication.” Fine, but the underlying problem still remains.

[29] This point was made to me by Charles Silver.

[30] Carlo Ginzburg writes about this in “Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method,” Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992. “When causes cannot be reproduced, there is nothing to do but deduce them from their effects.” My thanks to Paul Holdengraber at the New York Public Library for pointing out the relevance of this essay.

[31] Part of the problem is that there are so many philosophical terms used with respect to meaning and reference, e.g., intension and extension, connotation and denotation. Philosophical tradition has it that meaning implies reference. But even if the beliefs we have about proper names do not determine reference (as Kripke argues) that, of course, does not mean that we do not have beliefs about proper names and the things they refer to.

[32] In my book “Believing Is Seeing” I tried to emphasize the importance of reference in photography — to uncovering the relationship between a photograph and the world. Yes, we can have many diverse beliefs about a photograph, say, the Hooded Man (at Abu Ghraib), the iconic photograph of the war in Iraq, but it still important to trace the photographic image back to the reality to which it is causally linked.