I am going through David Papineau's beautiful little book, Philosophical Devices, and I've run accross a claim that I don't understand.
He claims the following is a contingent fact that I can know a priori:
(J) Julius invented the Zip. (Where 'Julius' is defined as "the inventor of the zip.")
He notes that "The inventor of the zip necessarily invented the zip" is ambiguous, and is true if "the inventor of the zip" is used de dicto, but false if used de re. So far so good.
But then he says
(1)I can know J a priori because I have defined "Julius" as "the inventor of the zip" but
(2) J is only contingently true because "Julius" is a proper name, and hence a rigid designator, and Julius might have been dropped on his head when he was a child and then not gone on to invent the zip.
But I don't see how you can both define Julius as the inventor of the zip AND treat it as a rigid designator. If I define Julius as "the inventor of the zip" than the statement is necessary and knowable a priori. But if Julius is a proper name, then it doesn't admit of a definition, and hence the statement is contingent, but not knowable a priori (if Julius is really a proper name, then a fortiori I could learn that he did not invent the zip--in some sense I take one of Kripke's main insights to be that we use names to track objects about which we could learn any number of new facts).
The relevant passage is here.
I'm not a philosopher of language so forgive me if I botched all this. Thoughts? Comments?
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