Kripke, Saul

"The existence of God cannot be settled by linguistic convention or stipulation."

"Intuition pumps are legitimate philosophical tools when they probe real conceptual structures."

"A thing can be essentially what it is while being contingently what else it is."

"The necessity of identity statements reflects mind-independent facts about reality."

"We should not multiply possible worlds beyond what our best theories require."

"The semantics of propositional attitudes reveals the structure of thought itself."

"Names are not abbreviations for descriptions, no matter how natural they seem."

"The modal argument for God's existence deserves serious engagement, not dismissal."

"Reference-fixing descriptions do not determine the meaning of proper names."

"Possible worlds are not entities in the full metaphysical sense, but useful fictions."

"The private language argument does not establish the impossibility of private experiences."

"We can know facts about possible worlds through rigorous philosophical analysis."

"Names introduce objects directly into our thoughts without conceptual intermediaries."

"The world contains genuine de re modalities, not merely de dicto truths."

"Philosophical method must respect both intuition and empirical constraint."

"The same object can be essentially rigid yet accidentally vague in its identity."

"Metaphysical necessity exceeds both logical and physical necessity in scope."

"The necessity of identity is not a linguistic phenomenon but a metaphysical one."

"We must resist the temptation to reduce all modality to linguistic possibility."

"The baptism ceremony fixes reference but leaves semantic content open to discovery."

"Ordinary language philosophy rightly insists that meaning determines reference."

"Yet the connection between meaning and reference is more subtle than descriptivism allows."

"An object's essential properties are those it possesses in all possible worlds containing it."

"Rigid designators allow us to quantify over possible objects and their properties."

"The causal-historical account explains reference without invoking sense or meaning."

"Identity through time is neither a matter of convention nor mere physical continuity."

"We can coherently discuss what would be true if things had been otherwise."

"Names function to introduce objects into discourse, not to describe them."

"The speaker's referential intention fixes the reference of ambiguous terms."

"Possible worlds provide the framework for understanding modality rigorously."