Kripke, Saul

"Proper names are directly referential"

"The sense-reference distinction needs careful philosophical treatment"

"We refer to objects in virtue of causal connection to them"

"Modal logic illuminates the structure of reality"

"Properties that are essential are so necessarily"

"The question of necessity is not merely linguistic"

"Vagueness in language does not entail vagueness in the world"

"Understanding requires grasping how terms are connected to reality"

"Identity statements between proper names can be synthetic a posteriori"

"The problem of other minds cannot be solved by metaphysics alone"

"We must distinguish between conceptual and metaphysical analysis"

"Demonstratives introduce special problems for meaning and reference"

"The truth conditions of a sentence depend on facts about the world"

"Our standards for evaluating a theory must include intuitive appeal"

"The scope of quantifiers creates important ambiguities"

"Modality is not reducible to language or concepts"

"Names inherit their reference through historical causal chains"

"The speaker's reference can diverge from the semantic reference"

"Understanding meaning requires understanding how language hooks onto reality"

"Descriptions and proper names have fundamentally different semantics"

"The essential property is what cannot be otherwise without the object ceasing to be"

"Convention creates artificial standards, not natural kinds"

"We grasp necessity through understanding possible worlds"

"The problem of universals cannot be solved by linguistic analysis alone"

"Intuitions are our primary data in philosophical investigation"

"Identity is not created by our descriptions; it is discovered"

"The reference of a term can be fixed in multiple ways"

"Analytic truths are often dependent on the particular language used"

"Metaphysical questions are not merely semantic questions"

"We must take seriously the appearance that necessity is mind-independent"