The discussion of connections among the concepts of necessity, reference, and quantification had been begun by Quine in the 1940s, but it became especially active in the late 1960s, partly as a result of Kripke’s own work in developing the logic of modalities. In Naming and Necessity, Kripke presents the philosophical underpinnings of his logical work and also responds to both Quine and the discussions of these issues in the years just prior to the lectures.
• He begins with the idea of necessity de re—i.e., the idea of properties that hold necessarily but hold independently of the way things are referred to (and so the necessity can be attributed to the things themselves—i.e., it is de re—rather than merely to what is said—i.e., it is not de dicto).
• First Kripke outlines Quine’s concerns about quantification and modality (pp. 39-42).
• Then he restates the issues as a problem of “transworld identification” (pp. 42-43).
• Next he argues that this is a pseudo-problem (pp. 43-47).
• Kripke next develops his own views on modalities de re.
• He introduces the idea of a rigid designator and states his view of proper names in terms of it (pp. 47-49).
• He then distinguishes the issue of transworld identification from a question concerning the identification of objects in terms of their parts (pp. 49-53).