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Saul Kripke

Analytic · North America · 1940 to 2022

American logician who argued that names point straight at things, and that some truths are necessary yet learned only by experience.

What it is

Saul Kripke (1940 to 2022) was an American logician and philosopher. He was born in New York, grew up in Omaha, Nebraska, and made his first important discovery in logic while still a teenager. From the 1960s he was a leading figure in analytic philosophy, the tradition that works by close argument about language, logic and knowledge.

He is known for a logic of necessity and possibility, for a new account of how names refer to things, and for the claim that some truths are necessary even though only experience can tell us they are true.

The main ideas

  • Possible worlds. He gave the logic of necessity and possibility a semantics built on possible worlds, which is now called Kripke semantics.
  • How names refer. A name does not stand for whatever description a speaker attaches to it. It refers because of a causal chain of earlier uses that leads back to the thing itself. This is called the causal theory of reference.
  • Necessary but learned by experience. That water is H2O is a necessary truth, and yet it was found out by science, not by thinking alone.
  • Three questions, kept apart. Whether a truth is necessary, whether it can be known without experience, and whether it is true by the meaning of its words are separate questions, and he challenged the conventional view that they go together.
  • Truth and paradox. He put forward a theory of truth, including a way of handling the liar paradox without a hierarchy of languages.

What it looks like in practice

Imagine someone who uses the name of an ancient thinker and knows only one thing about him, which turns out to be false. Kripke would say that the person is still talking about that thinker, because the name is connected through other speakers to the man himself, whatever the person believes. This is an illustration of the idea, not a passage from his writing.

Books and moments

  • 1959. A paper on modal logic appeared while he was a young student.
  • 1962. He took his degree in mathematics at Harvard.
  • Naming and Necessity. He gave the lectures at Princeton in 1970, and they were published as a book in 1980.
  • 1973. He gave the John Locke Lectures at Oxford.
  • Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language (1982) offers a skeptical reading of Wittgenstein on meaning and rules, nicknamed Kripkenstein.
  • 2001. He received the Schock Prize in logic and philosophy.

Questions and criticism

  • Few publications. He published little, and much of his work spread through lectures and manuscripts, so it is fair to ask how well his views are known.
  • Reading Wittgenstein. He said himself that his skeptical argument is the argument as it struck him, and that Wittgenstein might not approve of it, so it is fair to ask how far it is Wittgenstein's.
  • Learned but necessary. It is fair to ask whether the claim that some necessary truths are found only by experience fits how we think about necessity.

Close neighbours

The pages on Ludwig Wittgenstein, Gottlob Frege and Bertrand Russell show the thinkers whose views on meaning and names he answers or reads.

Written by epchē in our own words, and checked against independent sources on 29 October 2026. The sources are listed below.

Who they connect to

Influenced by

  • Ludwig Wittgenstein · His book on rules and private language reads Wittgenstein in a bold and much-discussed way.

Reacted against

  • Bertrand Russell · He attacked the view of names, due to Frege and Russell, that a name stands for a set of descriptions.

Other Analytic thinkers

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