Starting with those reasons that I claim Burgess’ own work falls prey to, remember that Burgess argues for R2 on the grounds that Smith did not include some of Kripke’s most important contributions to NTR. In particular, Burgess criticizes Smith for not having recognized the importance of Kripke’s causal historical theory of reference—the idea that names and their referents are passed on from user to user after an initial baptism by being causally connected to the initial bearer. Given that Burgess is criticizing Smith for not having sufficiently looked into his interlocutor’s views, this is a strange claim to make. This is because Smith brings up the causal historical theory of reference multiple times in his work, even explicitly saying “[o]f course some of the ideas in “Naming and Necessity” are genuinely new, such as the causal chain picture of the reference of names, the idea that natural kind terms are rigid designators and the theory of the necessity of origins” (Smith 1995a, 186).
One might still complain that, while Smith recognizes this, he does not sufficiently connect it to NTR since he leaves it out of T1–T6. This seems to be part of what Burgess is saying when he says “[t]he result is that he omits from his list important novelties of the ‘new’ theory” (Burgess 1998, 126). That said, while it is a controversial decision, the causal historical theory of reference does not have nearly the support that T1–T6 do. For starters, theorists have offered compelling arguments that being causally connected to the object of an initial baptism is neither necessary nor sufficient for being the referent of a name. For instance, despite the fact that our current uses of “Madagascar” are causally connected to an initial baptism of part of Somalia, the referent of “Madagascar” is Madagascar—the island off of East Africa (Evans 1973). Furthermore, despite none of us being causally connected to abstract objects, we refer to them quite regularly.
Perhaps even more important for our discussion is that subscribing to the causal historical theory of reference is neither necessary nor sufficient for subscribing to NTR. For instance, causal descriptivists who hold that the description that gives the meaning of a name contains reference to such a causal historical chain subscribe to a causal theory without being New Theorists and Gillian Russell subscribes to NTR without holding on to the causal theory. Russell adopts all of T1–T6, much more of Kripke’s and Kaplan’s work, and was a student of Soames as well as Burgess. That said, she does not accept Kripke’s causal historical theory of reference because she is “uncomfortable with the idea that the reference determiner for an expression might be different for different speakers.” Rather, Russell offers a plausible alternative that “it is the condition specified by the baptiser (using a description, or by pointing) and used to pick out a referent for the name when it was introduced” (Russell 2008, 47).4
Of course, one might still, as Burgess does, worry that without contributions above and beyond T1–T6 “the views of Kripke do not emerge clearly” (Burgess 1998, 126). This is no doubt true, but I do not think it bears on what should be our proper concerns. As mentioned earlier, I do think that Smith, and subsequently Soames and Burgess, made this debate far too much about Kripke. Our concern should be Marcus and her relationship to NTR. Kripke has many views which go beyond NTR shared by “Kripke, Kaplan, Donnellan, Putnam, Perry, Salmon, Soames, Almog, Wettstein and a number of other contemporary philosophers” (Smith 1995a, 179). With our proper concerns in mind, it is no longer such a sin to have left out some of Kripke’s views—even those that are wildly important and novel.
Turning to R3, Burgess holds that it is problematic for one to claim that somebody has introduced something just by endorsing that something because it very obviously could have shown up earlier in the literature. And, as has been mentioned multiple times now, several of the theses in T1–T6 were earlier endorsed by Smullyan and Fitch, among others. Here, though, we find a potential clash with R1 because, again, “the importance of a complex theory consists at least as much in the interconnections it establishes among its novel elements” (Burgess 1998, 125–26). And, while T1, T3, and T5 may have shown up in Smullyan’s and Fitch’s works earlier, these in connection with a formal proof of T4 were new to Marcus’ work. Furthermore, Smith argues that “[t]his modal argument [T3] goes back to Marcus’ formal proof of the necessity of identity [T4] in her extension of S4” (Smith 1995a, 183). Granted, Soames and Burgess both take issue with this way of understanding the relationship between the theses. That said, this is a substantive disagreement (one that I happen to agree with Soames and Burgess on), rather than the methodological one which Burgess thinks helped make the paper inappropriate for presentation.5 Hence, Burgess’ claiming that Smith’s work falls prey to R3 falls prey to his own R1—in thinking that Smith has confused endorsing and introducing part of NTR, he has failed to consider the important interconnections therein.
With R1 coming into the discussion, we should turn to it. Again, my goal with respect to R1 is to show that there is something odd about Burgess saying it should rule out Smith’s work, because it would also rule out much of Soames’ historical work (and much good history). Remember, Burgess claims that the way R1 contributed to Smith’s work being such that it “should never have been taken seriously as a contribution to historical scholarship” was because “[Smith] attempts to reduce a complex philosophical theory to a list of a half-dozen discrete points” (Burgess 1998, 125). Unfortunately, Soames’ most well-known and recognized contribution to the history on these matters—Philosophical Analysis in the Twentieth Century: The Age of Meaning—does this as well.
On the first page of chapter 1, Soames reduces the philosophical work of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations to several discrete views on three discrete topics.6 The discrete topics are:
(i) a critique of what Wittgenstein regards as the dominant referential conception of meaning, and a proposal to replace it with a conception in which to use language meaningfully is to master a certain kind of social practice; (ii) a critique of the previously dominant conception of philosophical analysis, and the substitution of a new conception of analysis to play the central role in philosophy; and (iii) the development of a new philosophical psychology. (Soames 2003b, 3)
Now, I would argue that Philosophical Investigations is a more complex work than Naming and Necessity (and that is meant as a criticism of Wittgenstein, not Kripke). That said, I do not think this means that there is anything wrong with Soames’ work.7 This is what analytic philosophy does at its best—it breaks complex views into the simplest pieces possible and their interrelations. So, again, holding that R1 should rule out Smith’s historical work would also rule out Soames’ own historical work and much good work on the history of philosophy. We find a similar issue in relation to R4—Burgess’ worry that Smith conducts his investigation using “especially ambiguous” terms such as “direct reference” and “necessity of identity.”
Burgess’ R4 would rule out much of Soames’ historical work (and much good history). In fact, every class I took on the history of twentieth century analytic philosophy, which covered matters related to this debate, involved similar use of the terms “direct reference” and “necessity of identity.”
The Discipline Broadly
Now, remember that my goal is not to make charges against Kripke, Soames, Burgess, or any isolated individuals. My goal is to show that analytic philosophy has institutional problems with gender and to use the lack of recognition that Ruth Barcan Marcus has received as an example of that. The point of focusing on Soames and Burgess has been to start a pattern of showing lack of recognition, which is connected to under-citation and under-engagement with Marcus’ work. To continue that pattern, let us turn to the broader literature.8
As I mentioned in the introduction, one of the things that I think warrants marking off a new phase of the analytic movement in the mid-1990s was the development of a self-conscious subfield of the history of analytic philosophy. Consistent with this increased self-reflection,
