Page "Saul Kripke" Paragraph 95

The three lectures that form Naming and Necessity constitute an attack on descriptivist theory of names.

Kripke attributes variants of descriptivist theories to Frege, Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein and John Searle, among others.

According to descriptivist theories, proper names either are synonymous with descriptions, or have their reference determined by virtue of the name's being associated with a description or cluster of descriptions that an object uniquely satisfies.

Kripke rejects both these kinds of descriptivism.

He gives several examples purporting to render descriptivism implausible as a theory of how names get their references determined ( e. g., surely Aristotle could have died at age two and so not satisfied any of the descriptions we associate with his name, and yet it would seem wrong to deny that he was Aristotle ).