Kripke

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. Saul Kripke was an American philosopher and logician known for his work on modal logic, naming, and the philosophy of language
2. The surname of Saul Kripke, the American philosopher and logician whose influential ideas shaped modern modal logic and philosophy of language
3. A reference to Saul Kripke, a twentieth-century American thinker famous for contributions to possible-worlds semantics and the theory of reference

Etymology: Saul Kripke, the American philosopher and logician, gave his surname to several technical terms rather than to a new everyday sense. As a young man he published a 1959 paper on modal logic, and the framework he developed from it, now called Kripke semantics, models necessity and possibility as truth across a set of "possible worlds." Logicians speak of Kripke frames and Kripke models, using the name as a label for that system. His later work in the philosophy of language, especially the lectures published as "Naming and Necessity" in 1980, made the name familiar well beyond logic. Its arguments about reference and necessity are discussed in philosophy courses, where the surname often stands in for the ideas themselves.