Kripke I [Sam Hinderaker]

Agree:
"We may raise the question whether a name has any reference at all when we ask, e.g., whether Aristotle ever existed. It seems natural here to think that what is questioned is not whether this thing (man) existed. Once we've got the thing, we know that it existed. What really is queried is whether anything answers to the properties we associate with the name--in the case of Aristotle, whether any one Greek philosopher produced certain works, or at least a suitable number of them." (Kripke 29)

I agree with this very much because it clearly picks out a person - as Kripke mentions, this can be anybody. However, for this to pick out a certain individual, they must satisfy a set of conditions. Those conditions are specific enough that there can only be one Aristotle, therefore this reference refers not to the name itself, but some unspecified person who seems to have existed. This isn't really covered by Frege or Russell, because it seems to be a reference without a referent (in the case that we don't know who Aristotle was.)

Disagree:
"Suppose we have someone, Nixon, and there's another possible world where there is no one with all the properties Nixon has in the actual world. Which one of these other people, if any, is Nixon? Surely you must give some criterion of identity here! If you have a criterion of identity, then you just look in the other possible worlds at the man who is Nixon; and the question whether, in that other possible world, Nixon has certain properties, is well defined." (Kripke 42)

I disagree with this because Nixon seems to me to be a very specific referent. I think that Nixon exists the way he does in history and in our minds because of his associations through our culture, and that even if a 'Nixon' did exist in some other world, we would clearly mean someone and something different than we mean here - but take and replace Nixon with someone else, or change his life course so that he does not match our descriptions in our universe, and we will seem to mean something different. To me, this seems to be because we can use Nixon as a descriptive term, not literally, but still be referring to the individual. For example, we can say "Trump in the white house would be another Nixon." where we don't think that he would actually be Donald Nixon, but we ascribe the properties that Nixon had as a president to the situation of our current presidency. I think even if Nixon was well defined in another world, he wouldn't be able to have his name used this way unless he was the same Nixon we have in this universe.