虽然翻译没什么大毛病,为保险起见,还是和原文对照一下罢。有些地方还是要慎重的。
p29 如果一个指示词在每一个可能的世界中都指示同一个对象,我们就称之为严格的指示词。否则就称之谓非严格的或偶然的指示词。我们当然不要求对象在所有可能世界中存在。如果尼克松的父母不曾婚配,在正常情况下,尼克松当然也就不会存在。当我们把一种特性看作某个对象的本质时,我们通常指的是,这对于那个对象来说,在它可能存在的人和场合下都是真的。一种必然存在的严格指示词可以叫做强严格指示词。
我在这些演讲中主张的直观论题之一就是:名称是严格指示词。
Let’s call something a rigid designator if in every possible world it designates the same object,a nonrigid or accidental designator if that is not the case.Of course we don’t require that the objects exist in all possible worlds.Certainly Nixon might not have existed if his parents had not gotten married,in the normal course of things.When we think of a property as essential to an object we usually mean that it is true of that object in any case where it would have existed.A rigid designator of a necessary existent can be called strongly rigid.
One of the intuitive these I will maintain in these talks is that names are rigid designators.
Of course I don’t imply that language contains a name for every object.Demonstratives can be used as rigid designators,and free variables can be used as rigid designator of unspecified objects.Of course when we specify a counterfactual situation, we do not describe the whole possible world, but only the portion which interests us.
Even if this is the only standard of length that he uses, there is an intuitive difference between the phrase ‘one meter’ and the phrase ‘the length of S at t0’. The first phrase is meant to designate rigidly a certain length in all possible worlds, which in the actual world happens to e the length of the stick S at t0. On the other hand ‘the length of S at t0’ does not designate anything rigidly. In some counterfactual situations the stick might have been longer and in some shorter, if various stresses and strains had been applied to it. So we can say of this stick, the same way as we would of any other of the same substance and length, that if heat of a given quantity had been applied to it, it would have expanded to such and such a length. Such a counterfactual statement, being true of other sticks with identical physical properties, will also be true of this stick. There is no conflict between that counterfactual statement and the definition of ‘one meter’ as ‘the length of S at t0’, because the ‘definition’, properly interpreted, does not say that the phrase ‘one meter’ is to be synonymous(even when talking about counterfactual situations) with the phrase ‘the length of S at t0’, but rather that we have determined the reference of the phrase ‘one meter’ by stipulating that ‘one meter’ is to be a rigid designator of the length which is in fact the length of S at t0. So this does not make it a necessary truth that S is one meter long at t0. In fact, under certain circumstances, S would not have been one meter long. The reason is that one designator(‘one meter’)is rigid and the other designator(‘the length of S at t0’)is not.
More important for present purposes,though,than accepting this example as an instance of the contingent a priori, is its illustration of the distinction between ‘definitions’ which fix a reference and those which give a synonym.