Over the winter, “Jonathan Ichikawa”:http://jonathanichikawa.net/, “Ishani Maitra”:http://andromeda.rutgers.edu/~ishanim/ and I wrote up a paper on recent experimental work on reference. Here it is.

bq. “In Defense of a Kripkean Dogma”:http://brian.weatherson.org/IDKD.pdf

The paper is primarily a response to “Against Arguments from Reference”:http://www.philosophy.utah.edu/faculty/mallon/Materials/AAFR.pdf, though some of what we have to say is relevant to the arguments in “Semantics, Cross-Cultural Style”:http://www.philosophy.utah.edu/faculty/mallon/Materials/sccs.pdf. Really, we want to make three points.

1. The experimental data presented to date don’t undermine what Kripke says about the Gödel-Schmidt case;
2. The Gödel-Schmidt case is only relevant to a very small part of Kripke’s overall theory of reference, so if he’s wrong about it the bulk of the theory is unaffected; and
3. The main philosophical applications of Kripke’s theory have concerned the bits that are already established in _Naming & Necessity_ before the Gödel-Schmidt case comes up, not the bits that are supported by the Gödel-Schmidt case. So even if the experiments do show that Kripke’s wrong about that case, not a lot follows for the applications of Kripke’s theory in the last four decades.