Reference, necessity, and social terms

Abstract

The aim of this thesis is to provide an application of Kripke’s views regarding reference and modality into social terms which pick out social entities. Specifically, I argue that a non-problematic application is not possible as proper names of social entities and social kind names provide counterexamples not only to Kripke’s thesis of rigid designation but also to his proposed metaphysical necessities. To circumvent such worries, I introduce the minimally conventionalist idea of criterion of identity regarding rigid designation. The idea is that speakers actually employ a convention, a criterion to track the sameness of an entity across possible worlds. I show this by arguing that cases of rigid designation from varying domains involve the employment of such conventions which come into play to ensure that the same entity is picked out across all possible worlds. Lastly, I argue that, instead of the classical Searlean intention and belief-based approach to social ontology, we must employ practices to track social entities across possible worlds. The benefit of this proposed paradigm shift is that it can both take into account epistemic opacity that is normal of social phenomena and solve modal problems which spring from the Searlean view on the constitution of social phenomena. The upshot of putting practices at the center is that one cannot evaluate counterfactuals that involve both social entities and shifts in social contexts in a straightforward and a priori fashion.