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A long, long, time ago, in a forum far, far away, I was blessed with a relatively huge endowment of facts, figures and general know-how about Where Things Fit in the Grand Scheme of Things. I was well-known in this pleasant, if slightly under-educated cyber-community for my democratic and unpatronising pointing-out of meaning. I started to think of myself as a designator of sorts: benign; accurate, yet yielding. Non-rigid, if you will. Well, the time came for me to choose a new ficsuit through which to dispense these well-appreciated sage pearls, and I thought long and hard about it. After much brow-furrowing and anguished deliberation, I hit upon Non-Rigid Designator , and I was pleased. My peers endorsed my choice, and happily, and bendily, I Designated the hours away, never once questioning my claim to uniqueness.
A few months later, when this suit really was becoming comfortable - fibres softened, and with none of that constrictive tightness around the wrists - I was rifling through a second-hand academic bookshop, in an attempt to better my Designation skills. I stumbled upon a thin and unthreatening tome, innocuously titled 'Naming and Necessity', by a Saul Kripke. I had been leafing just a few minutes (I'm a fast reader and a lightning assimilator), when I came across a chapter that struck misery into my very core. Not only had this Kripke chancer appropriated my much-loved and very definitely descriptivist name, he had done so chronologically before me, and (in a crushing meta-blow) used it to demonstrate precisely how some names can refer to MORE THAN ONE OBJECT! That is to say, if Non-Rigid Designator could not be proven to refer to me in all possible worlds in which I existed, it was itself a non-rigid designator. Alas, a quick thought experiment, right there in the shop, showed me that there was indeed a possible world in which I had been a designator, but rigid, pompous and supercilious (one defined, say, by my not being rejected from Oxford). As if to hammer the point home, I soon started to lurk in another possible world called Barbelith, where it was immediately clear that I was far too intellectually inferior to every other inhabitant ever to claim to be any kind of designator. I left the shop with a pronounced dejected slump, having scribbled '= TWAT' under Kripke's name on the title page. I have since discovered (via a wonderful tool named "Google" that one of my kind associates bestowed upon me) that he is some kind of Professor in New York, and in between sending him obscene and threatening hate emails have been saving up for the airfare so I can go and deck the prick. |
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