General terms, rigidity and the trivialization problem

Genoveva Martí

José Martínez-Fernández

pp. 277-293

in: Marc Moffett, Greg Ray (eds), The 37th annual meeting of the society for exact philosophy, Synthese 181 (2), 2011.

Abstract

We defend the view that defines the rigidity of general terms as sameness of designated universal across possible worlds from the objection that such a characterization is incapable of distinguishing rigid from non-rigid readings of general terms and, thus, that it trivializes the notion of rigidity. We also argue that previous attempts to offer a solution to the trivialization problem do no succeed.