In Naming and Necessity, Saul Kripke challenges the Frege-Russell tradition of descriptivism, argued by Gottlob Frege and Bertrand Russell, by arguing that proper names are rigid designators. Descriptivism frames names as abbreviations of descriptions, such as “Aristotle” as an abbreviation for “Plato’s disciple and the teacher of Alexander the Great” (30). A designator is rigid if it “designates the same object in all possible worlds in which that object exists and never designates anything else” (LaPorte, Joseph. “Rigid Designators.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 3 Feb. 2022). This modal stability distinguishes names from nonrigid definite descriptions; while Aristotle might not have been Alexander the Great’s teacher, he could not, in any counterfactual situation, have failed to be Aristotle. This insight undermines descriptivist analyses of identity statements across possible worlds.

Kripke contends that descriptivism conflates a name’s meaning with the description used to establish its target. He clarifies, “If, on the other hand, we merely use the description to fix the referent then that man will be the referent of ‘Aristotle’ in all possible worlds” (57). This separation of reference-fixing from meaning is central to his argument. A description like “the length of stick S” can fix the reference of “one meter,” yielding contingent a priori knowledge without being its synonym. This method also refutes cluster-of-description theories, which fail his Gödel-Schmidt thought experiment. Even if Schmidt secretly proved the incompleteness theorem, the name “Gödel” still refers to Gödel, not Schmidt. Kripke concludes that scope maneuvers cannot resolve this fundamental issue of reference. He thus replaces descriptivism with a causal-historical theory, where a name’s reference is transmitted through a community from an initial baptism.