(J) ... alrighty, I see more of where you are coming from now. Let me note a couple of very minor points. 1. Let me give some better explanation of "bearer-calls" and "bearer-assignments." Bearer-calls are where bearers and their names are always present (together) in the language game. Here we ALWAYS want to identify some person or thing that bears the N in question. It's a person (or thing) quest. The quest can be for something real or fictional. ("This is Mordor"). But what is key is that we are searching for a person, place or thing that is called by the right N. The game is: match the bearer to the N. One wants to say this "feels" like a kind of archeology or an historicism. You look for the X that is bearing your N. With bearer-assignments, the psychology is different. In this language game, the bearer and the name become separated. And the name of the game (sorry for pun), is to ASSIGN a bearer by DEFINITION. We don't care who is actually bearing any particular N, we care only whether candidates for the bearing of our N FIT THE RULE. Here, the name has become a kind of definition that narrows to one. That's what separates this from ordinary titles, and from words like "bachelor" or "class valedictorian" or "president" -- which are not really "names," but titles (pure). The idea with bearer-assignments is that they are truly NAMES, but they function differently in their grammar. Compare: "He is president" with "He is The Terminator." (Or Unibomber, as you say). "He is Denice the Menace." What bearer-assignments say is something like this: (1) there is an X; and (2) it does attribute-criteria Y. Hence, "Moses" can function in language as a bearer-assignment. So if Bob is the one who saved the Israelites while Moses, his brother, did not, Bob can be "Moses" and his brother not. Note that this can even be the case where the stories were falsely attributed to Bob's brother (Moses). In this language game, we need to ask: by "Moses," do you mean a bearer-call or a bearer-assignment? Here is what I want to say: any language game that separates the bearer from the name creates SENSES of the name. One wonders what this does to Kripke? It's not clear to me if Kripke is saying that bearers cannot become separated from their names -- which is surely false -- or that ONLY IN GAMES WHERE THEY DO NOT, that they are rigid designators. The more I think about Kripke, the more I think that his contributions are quite useless. 2. "Tautology" You are right that You and I are not connecting on this word. All my life, I have been taught that "bachelor" in a school-boy sense is a tautology because it is true by the defintion of the terms, not by looking at the world. Here, I think, the confusion between us is between something being verifiable in theory versus it being in action used to state something in a proposition. I tend to lump words that are only reflections of their definition into the word "tautology." You know what I mean? These "circular worlds?" Consider the medical jargon of "acidosis." Acidosis is defined as arterial PH below 7.35. Therefore, "acidosis" can be taken as a tautology in this way: it only ever means a measure of 7.35. That is, it means nothing other than "verify criterion." However, in a non-tautologous sense it can mean "requisite acidity" being serviced by the measure of 7.35." Under this idea, we might say that 7 or 6.5 might also count once our notion of requisite acidity becomes more clear. So if "acidosis" means something more than verifying a criteria -- if it requires any judgment or thinking -- it isn't tautologous. It becomes tautologous if it has no meaning other than verifying a criteria. If my use of "tautology" is odd here ... what do you call these circular words? (You know, where the "disease" is nothing but the symptoms? You see this in medicine all the time) Regards and thanks. Dr. Sean Wilson, Esq. Assistant Professor Wright State University Personal Website: http://seanwilson.org SSRN papers: http://ssrn.com/author=596860 Discussion Group: http://seanwilson.org/wittgenstein.discussion.html ========================================= Need Something? Check here: http://ludwig.squarespace.com/wittrslinks/