DSH: As the cynics…
DSH: As the cynics of ancient Greece and Rome (also known as “skeptics” and “pyrhonnists”) demonstrated, knowledge and reason is always contingent, never necessary.
Here’s a condensed version of popular old chestnut:
If there is a greatest prime number, then there is a natural number N that is the product of all the prime numbers.
If there is a natural number N that is the product of all the prime numbers, then N+1 is a natural number.
If N+1 is a natural number, then there is at least one prime number P that divides N+1. (By the fundamental theorem of arithmetic.)
If there is at least one prime number P that divides N+1, then P does not divide N. (Impossibility of dividing 1.)
If P does not divide N, then P is not prime. (Defn. of N)
If there is a greatest prime number, then there is a number P which is both prime and not prime.
There is no number P which is both prime and not prime.
Therefore, there is no greatest prime number.
It seems to me that, having this argument in hand, I know that there is no greatest prime number, on the basis of a deductive argument (by reductio).
Are you suggesting that the Pyrrhonians and Hume demonstrated (a) that “there is no greatest prime number” is true only contingently and not necessarily? Or (b) that I don’t actually have knowledge about whether there is or is not a greatest prime? Or (c) something else?
Help me out here.
On Wittgenstein and Kripke:
DSH: As Wittgenstein monumentally said, “use determines meaning.”
Actually, he didn’t say this. Here’s what he said: “43. For a large class of cases—though not for all—in which we employ the word meaning it can be defined thus: the meaning of a word is its use in the language game.” (Boldface mine.)
DSH: Language rigidly designates what I have picked out to be highly variable; by language I can mean the same thing through different experiences. “Use determines meaning,” and Kripke’s insight, “meaning determines use.” It’s a game of language. … But I can relate experiences through my use of language, and by language “fix” the referent. Reason? We’re playing the same “language game.” Hence, essences are metaphysical nonsense. Not only do they not “exist,” but there’s nothing to “know.”
This is not what Kripke says.
Kripke specifically argues that natural kind terms such as “rose” pick out their referents on the basis of naming a kind which can be identified by an essence. He suggests that the essences can often be investigated by natural science (e.g. it is essential to roses that they are members of such-and-such a biological taxon; it is essential to gold that it is element Au). He explicitly denies (in his discussion of Wittgenstein and Strawson in Naming and Necessity) that “family resemblances” explain how names or natural kind terms work.
Kripke is rather notorious among contemporary philosophers for being a scientific essentialist. Why are you invoking him here in an attempt to argue against essentialism? Do you think that Kripke has unwittingly given an argument against essentialism in spite of himself? If so, you ought to at least note that that is what you are doing. Or are you trying to do something else? If so, what?
Anticopyright.