Kripke's Naming and Necessity and Rigid Designators

Saul Kripke (1940–2022) delivered the three lectures that would become his most influential work, Naming and Necessity, at Princeton University in January 1970; a transcript was published in 1972 in the volume Semantics of Natural Language, edited by Donald Davidson and Gilbert Harman, and the lectures were later published as a standalone book in 1980 with a new preface. Kripke's central target was what he called the descriptivist (or Frege-Russell) theory of proper names, the widely held view, developed from Frege's notion of sense and Russell's Theory of Descriptions and further systematized by John Searle's "cluster" version in his 1958 article "Proper Names," that a proper name like "Aristotle" is semantically equivalent to, or has its reference fixed by, some definite description or cluster of descriptions competent speakers associate with the name, such as "the teacher of Alexander the Great" or "the author of the Metaphysics and the Nicomachean Ethics."