Names And Rigid Designation

This chapter discusses a version of the descriptive account of content which is compatible with rigidity thesis (RT) and critiques of RT. The rigidity of proper names demonstrates that utterances of sentences containing proper names, and utterances of sentences differing from those sentences only in containing non-rigid descriptions in place of the proper names, differ in content. The fact that natural-language proper names are rigid designators is an empirical discovery about natural language. The chapter intends to be a survey of both the background and contemporary discussion of this discovery. However, the survey takes place in the context of an evaluation of the extent to which the discovery that English proper names are rigid itself threatens the descriptive picture of the content of names. The goal is to show that the exact philosophical significance of the discovery that natural-language proper names are rigid designators is still, and should still be, a matter of controversy.