Richard: Kripke proposes that we simply stipulate that we’re talking about the possibility in which this very man wins the election, or whatever.

This is a common way of putting Kripke’s view in a nutshell. But I think that his point is actually directed at a more fundamental target than you suggest.

When Kripke talks about stipulating identity across worlds he’s explicitly criticizing the whole Lewisian view on which we are given a set of possible worlds ahead of time, and then strike out to find where a particular object of interest happens to be in them. The idea is not that you have these possible worlds and just stipulate that that man over there is Nixon; it’s that you don’t even have a cognitive grasp on the possible world except by way of starting with considerations about (for example) Nixon and how he might have been. Thus:

“A possible world isn’t a distant country that we are coming across, or viewing through a telescope. Generally speaking, another possible world is too far away. Even if we travel faster than light, we won’t get to it. A possible world is given by the descriptive conditions we associate with it. What do we mean when we say ‘In some other possible world I would not have given this lecture today?’ We just imagine the situation where I didn’t decide to give this lecture or decided to give it on some other day. Of course, we don’t imagine everything that is true or false, but only those things relevant to my giving the lecture; but, in theory, everything needs to be decided to make a total description of the world. We can’t really imaigne that except in part; that, then, is a ‘possible world’. …. ‘Possible worlds’ are stipulated, not discovered by powerful telescopes.” (44)

“Most important, even when we can replace questions about an object by questions about its parts, we need not do so. We can refer to the object and ask what might have happened to it. So, we do not begin with worlds (which are supposed somehow to be real, and whose qualities, but not whose objects, are perceptible to us), and then ask about criteria of transworld identification; on the contrary, we begin with the objects, which we have, and can identify, in the actual world. We can then ask whether certain things might have been true of the objects.” (53)

Of course, it’s a separate question whether Kripke is right or wrong about this; but I do think it’s important to keep in mind that he’s just not starting from the same problem that you are. In fact he’s trying to undermine the idea that there is such a problem at all. If you begin with things (Nixon, the die in front of you, etc.), or with stuff (water, gold, etc.), and then spin out possible worlds around them, then a lot of the problems that exercise accounts of transworld identification simply dissolve. (That doesn’t rule out the anti-essentialist view. You might hold that the range of possible worlds you can successfully spin out around the thing you have in mind is context-relative. But the view becomes much less compelling once you’re no longer worried about haecceities or counterpart relations r the like.

You wrote: Furthermore, ‘the morning star’ and ‘der Morgenstern’ are distinct as signs—one is English, the other German—and each will be related to a different Begriff [concept] in the mind of each speaker who uses these terms.

I think that you have confused concepts with ideas here.

What Frege says in Ãœber Sinn und Bedeutung is: “The Bedeutung and sense of a sign are to be distinguished from the associated idea. … The idea is subjective: one man’s idea is not that of another. … This constitutes an essential distinction between the idea and the sign’s sense, which may be the common property of many people, and so is not a part or a mode of the individual mind.” The German word used for “idea” here is not Begriff, but Vorstellung.

Frege makes clear, from the Introduction of the Foundations onward, that ideas must be distinguished sharply from concepts. Not to distinguish them violates the fundamental principle always to separate sharply the psychological from the logical, the subjective from the objective. Thus: “In compliance with the first principle, I have used the word ‘idea’ [Vorstellung] always in the psychological sense, and have distinguished ideas from concepts [Begriffe] and objects [Gegenständen].” Concepts are logical and objective. The same concept-word in two different people’s mouths will designate the same concept, but will necessarily be associated with numerically different ideas.

In the case of “the morning star” and “der Morgenstern,” there is the further difficulty that “the morning star” and “der Morgenstern” are both (by Frege’s lights) proper names, not concept-words. They have ideas directly associated with them, but not concepts. (They name objects; concepts are the Bedeutungen of concept-words such as “( ) is a horse” or “( ) ist ein Pferd.”)

There may be concepts involved somewhere in the process: for example, concepts might be constitutive parts of their sense. (E.g., “the morning star” may have the sense, “the extension of the concept ‘( ) is a star that appears in the morning in such-and-such a way.’”) But if that’s the story, then “der Morgenstern” and “the morning star” must have identical concepts associated with them in order to have the same sense. (If the sense of each was given in terms of a different concept, then they would have different senses, although they could still have the same Bedeutung.)

Broadly speaking, since for Frege concepts are logical and objective, there is no reason to think that different people couldn’t express the same concept with two different signs. Indeed, I’d wager that he’d think the preservation of the concept is the best way to determine, for example, whether “( ) is a horse” is or is not an adequate translation (for logical purposes) of “( ) ist ein Pferd.”

This may seem nitpicky, but given the extreme importance that Frege puts on his notion of the Begriff, and given how emphatic he is about the distinction between that notion and ideas, and the objective and logical nature of Begriffe in particular, it’s a nit that I think he would rather want picked. (Among other things, the distinction is central to the confusion that he attributes to Benno Kerry in “On Concept and Object.”)

. . . Or are there aspects of a genuinely free market which Carson, Konkin, Rothbard, and other market anarchists would reject as unacceptable – though uncoerced?

Speaking only for myself, provided that “reject as unacceptable” means nothing more than “consider subject to moral criticism and deserving of nonviolent protest,” I’d say sure, of course there may be aspects of a genuinely free market which turn out to be something that libertarians ought to reject as unacceptable. Systematically uncoerced exchange guarantees only that transactions will be free from injustice. But while justice is a virtue, it’s not the only virtue, and if the people in a given culture tend to have despicable values they are willing to pay for (say, white supremacism, or misogyny, or irrationalism) then there will tend to emerge despicable markets that freely serve that demand (say, a market in minstrel-show iconography, or — I think — the modern pornography market, or markets in various sorts of flim-flams such as astrology or spiritualism).

That these transactions would be uncoerced does very little to defend them. It does establish that the nature of the problem has to be identified in terms other than the terms of injustice, and it also establishes that the means of trying to change the situation must not involve the use of force (e.g. boycotts, strikes, moral agitation, etc.). It may be that these sorts of protest are called for simply on their own merits — because besides being a libertarian, you also happen to be an anti-racist or feminist or whatever. But I think that in these specific cases (and in many others) there are also deeper connections between libertarianism and specific cultural and philosophical positions. It’s not that libertarianism entails them (both misogyny and feminism can exist within the boundaries of the non-aggression principle), but rather that there are various sorts of logical and causal connections between the values entailed by the positions, and the grounds for the positions (as I discussed in New York last year).

Does this clarify, or muddify?