Kripke's Theory Of Proper Names

Kripke is a famous American logician and philosopher. He has a good reputation and a significant influence in the academic field of philosophy and logic. This partly comes from the creation of his modal logic semantics, and partly from some new ideas he has proposed, including names and reference, the causal theory of reference .Starting from the possible world semantics, Kripke distinguished between proper names and descriptions, he emphasized that proper names have reference but do not have any meaning or sense which was considered as determining the reference. On this basis, Kripke proposed the causal theory of reference. He stressed that proper names refer a particular object via causal-historical chains related to the proper name and the chains would contact an object and a language event. Kripke's theory got extensive attention, also shaked the Theory of Description,which was advocated by Frege, Russell and Searle.This thesis mainly do researches on Kripke's theory of proper names. On the one hand, try to capture the overall trends for researches on proper names through background researches. On the other hand, hope to make a comprehensive and objective evaluation and critical understanding about Kripke'causal theory by reflecting on previous ideas.