Quentin Smith on the New Theory of Reference, Ruth Marcus, and Saul Kripke
I began the introduction with a number of quotations from philosophers with vastly different positions on how connected work in analytic philosophy is to goals of moral significance like that of increasing social, gender, and racial justice. I believe the existence of such different positions can be explained by the fact that there is much potential for critical analytic work, but this potential has all-too-rarely been realized. The theorists who are hopeful about this relationship focus on that potential and those who are despairing of this relationship focus on the actual absence. Here, I illustrate both sides of this coin by looking at one particular case study—the Marcus/Kripke dispute.
More than twenty-five years ago, Quentin Smith gave his paper at the APA on the relative priority of Ruth Barcan Marcus and Saul Kripke with respect to the “new theory of reference”—that cluster of views on naming, reference, and semantics, which took the field away from the descriptivist theories of Frege, Russell, and Wittgenstein. While this led to years of heated discussion, which got overly personal at times, I do not believe the debate got to any reasonably settled point. In this chapter, I show that, while Soames is right that Kripke cannot be accused of plagiarism, there is good reason to believe that the entire discipline of philosophy should be accused of—what Rebecca Kukla (2014) has called—discursive injustice in its treatment of Marcus’ works. I begin with this as a case study, despite the fact that it comes closer to the end of the era, which I will focus on, because it:
(1) allows us to see a clear case of analytic tools being used to identify a distinctive type of injustice,
(2) allows us to see why analytic philosophy as an institution needs to—as a perpetrator of injustice—pay more attention to thinking about injustice, and
(3) gives us a model for thinking about how this can be done more going forward.
Given just how central Kripke’s work is to the institution of analytic philosophy over the last fifty to sixty years, such a case exhibiting all of (1)–(3) should not be overlooked. Before we can get to any of that, though, we must first set the stage that we will be discussing with some basic historical facts.
The saga under consideration began in December of 1994, when Quentin Smith gave a paper at the Eastern APA in Boston, which “argued that Ruth Barcan Marcus’ 1961 article on ‘Modalities and Intensional Languages’ originated many of the key ideas of the New Theory of Reference that have often been attributed to Saul Kripke and others” (Smith 1995a, 179). At the same session, Scott Soames gave a strong reply, which argued that “Smith does Kripke a grave injustice” since “providing [Marcus and others] with proper credit does not result in a reassessment of the seminal role of Kripke and others as primary founders of contemporary nondescriptivist theories of reference” (Soames 1995, 208). Consistent with APA practice, Smith also gave a reply to that reply in which he argues that, given the concessions Soames makes, “if Soames is to draw a conclusion that is consistent . . . he should have concluded that the evidence [Smith] presented established that Marcus was a primary founder of the New Theory of Reference, even though Soames does not agree with all of the points [Smith] made about her primacy” (Smith 1995b, 243).
Since this APA session predictably created a great deal of discussion and controversy, all three of these papers were published in Synthese in August 1995. Roughly a year later, Soames’ colleague, John Burgess, joined the discussion with his October 1996 paper “Marcus, Kripke, and Names.” Here, Burgess joins the side of both Kripke and Soames, arguing against Marcus’ “claim, which has subsequently been stated more explicitly by others . . . that certain remarks on names in her colloquium talk “Modalities and Intensional Languages” anticipate in an important but unacknowledged way Saul Kripke’s discussion of names in his lecture series “Naming and Necessity”” (Burgess 1996, 1). In 1998, all of the papers mentioned so far were gathered together—along with new contributions from Burgess, Smith, and Soames, as well as some pieces providing historical context—in the book The New Theory of Reference: Kripke, Marcus, and Its Origins. This controversy was not limited to specialists, either, receiving popular coverage by Jim Holt (friendly to Smith’s original) in the January/February 1996 issue of Lingua Franca and Stephen Neale (falling squarely in the Burgess/Soames camp) in the February 2001 Times Literary Supplement. As if to put in his last word on the matter, Soames then published his two-volume history of analytic philosophy in 2003 with Kripke as the culmination and primary hero (and almost no mention of Marcus) (Soames 2003a, 2003b).2
Not only has little agreement been made on the substantive issues, there was significant controversy over whether or not the debate should have even happened in the way it did in the first place. Within a year of the initial session, Anscombe, Davidson, Geach, and Nagel published a letter to the editor in the APA Proceedings stating their “dismay” due to the fact that “a session at a national APA meeting is not the proper forum in which to level ethical accusations against a member of our profession, even if the charges were plausibly defended.” Furthermore, while it has not featured as prominently in the published literature, my personal experience evidences the fact that the matter has not left philosophers’ minds. At my very first departmental gathering in graduate school in 2010, it became one of the significant topics of conversation—and this was not the only departmental event that involved such a conversation. Since then, I have also been a part of multiple conversations on the dispute at various conferences on the history of analytic philosophy. When I gave earlier versions of this chapter as talks at conferences, I also had responses ranging from laughter and scoffing to invitations to contribute my work.
For these reasons, I believe it is time to reopen the debate in the published literature. In doing so, I will defend a more middling position than was gotten from either the Smith or Soames side of the debate. In particular, I will be trying to flesh out what Jaakko Hintikka might have meant when he said,
I’ve no doubt that Kripke has acted in good faith . . . he’s not appropriating anyone else’s ideas, at least consciously. . . . The real blame in all this lies with the philosophical community—which, owing to its uncritical, romantic view of this prodigy, is far too quick to give him credit for new ideas while neglecting the contributions of others. Kripke probably got his results independently, but why should he get all the credit? (Holt 2018, 328)
Focusing more on Marcus not getting credit than Kripke getting credit, again, I will argue that this mistake made by the philosophical community was perpetrating sexist discursive injustice against a woman in a field dominated by men, which implicitly expects genius to be masculine. Toward this end, we will discuss a section each on:
(1) Smith’s claims from the original APA session, as well as Soames’ and Burgess’ responses to them,
(2) oddities that can be found in Soames’ and Burgess’ responses to Smith,
(3) the general background for Kukla’s notion of discursive injustice,
(4) an argument that discursive injustice is the best explanation for what went on in the Kripke/Marcus dispute, and
(5) gesturing at how we might proceed with our investigations into the history of philosophy with this case in mind.
§1.2 Scott Soames and John Burgess Respond to Quentin Smith
As has been alluded to, Smith’s original APA paper has as primary thesis that there is a combination of six main theses associated with the New Theory of Reference (NTR), which originated in Ruth Barcan Marcus’ work. A subsidiary claim is that this has been missed because Kripke originally misunderstood Marcus’ work and, as a result, did not cite it. The works discussed by Smith, which he thinks Kripke should have cited, include her pioneering works on quantified modal logic from 1946 to 1947 (Marcus 1946a, 1946b, 1947) and, more importantly, her “Modalities and
