Agreements and Disagreements on Lecture 1 [Hui Yang]

Agree

"But what I am concerned with here is a notion which is not a notion of epistemology but of metaphysics, in some (I hope) nonpejorative sense. We ask whether something might have been true, or might have been false. Well, if something is false, it's obviously not necessarily true. If it is true, might it have been otherwise? Is it possible that, in this respect, the world should have been different from the way it is? If the answer is 'no', then this fact about the world is a necessary one. If the answer is 'yes', then this fact about the world is a contingent one. This in and of itself has nothing to do with anyone's knowledge of anything. It's certainly a philosophical thesis, and not a matter of obvious definitional equivalence, either that everything a priori is necessary or that everything necessary is a priori. Both concepts may be vague. That may be another problem. But at any rate they are dealing with two different domains, two different areas, the epistemological and the metaphysical" (Kripke, 1980, P35-36).

Kripke seems to point out here that there is significant difference between the thing we do not know and do not believe if we could ever know is true or not, and the thing is simply not true, letting along we know it or not. When we say “I don’t know something”, we are talking about something definitely not on the same level of “something could not possibly be true/does not exist as if in we could at least know something/as if we consider in the situation beyond us”.

I agree with him because I also believe it is necessary to separate these two domain, or it will be difficult to make argument regarding naming, as we would do in case of someone writes incorrect Italian sentence in his/her French exam: firstly point out that what he/she writes is a completely different language from what is requested, and secondly point out that even if it is an Italian exam, he/she still spells some Italian words incorrectly. I, an agnatic, for example, have to make arguments here as if I do at least know/could possibly know something, for the sake of keeping the conversation going.

Disagree

"Perhaps according to me the truth should not be put in terms of saying that it is necessary that there should be no unicorns, but just that we can't say under what circumstances there would have been unicorns. Further, I think that even if archeologists or geologists were to discover tomorrow some fossils conclusively showing the existence of animals in the past satisfying everything we know about unicorns from the myth of the unicorn, that would not show that there were unicorns" (Kripke, 1980, P24).

What Kripke tries to make distinction here is similar to the case of "a man with a glass of champagne case in his hand which is intact water”. He point out that even if later on we create something true or discover something true that have the same characters that given by people to the word “unicorn”, that is still not "the unicorn” but rather something else which happens to have all features that a nonexistent creature given name “unicorn” is subject to have.

I don’t completely disagree with Kripke in this specific case, although I do agree with him in some parts and wish he is simply presenting a bad example here that contradicts his main thoughts. First, in this specific case of unicorn from the folktale, I do not think we can say this thing with all features of a “unicorn” is not the unicorn in the folklore, because we do not know who exactly first created this “fiction” animal and what exactly was in his/her/their mind when he named the first “unicorn”. Maybe he/she/they did see the real unicorns that archeologists discover, and maybe although he/she/they did imagine this animal but when he/she/they give “it" its name, he/she/they were hold a belief of “although I/we never see a real animal like this, this animal possibly exists”.