Beyond Rigidity

In Naming and Necessity, Saul Kripke undermined descriptive analyses of names by showing that they are rigid designators. He thereby told us what their meanings are not, but not what they are. In Beyond Rigidity, Scott Soames fills this gap. Using a new conception of how the meaning of a sentence relates to the information asserted and conveyed by utterances, Soames argues that the meaning of a linguistically simple name is its referent and that a meaning of a (linguistically complex) partially descriptive name is a compound that includes a referent and partial description.