Kripke's Objection To The Counterpart Theory

In this essay I will be outlining and critically assessing Kripke’s ‘Humphrey’ objection to Counterpart Theory. To first understand the ‘Humphrey’ objection, it is crucial to understand the Counterpart Theory. This theory has the core belief of individuals only existing in a specific world, however they have similar counterparts in other possible worlds. Kripke’s ‘Humphrey’ objection is in light of the Counterpart Theory. Stephen Yablo’s Aboutness helps illustrate issues which arise in the notion of transworld identities. These transworld identities have been seen as highly controversial and as a pseudo-problem. Humphreys objection concludes modal realism and counterpart theory together fail to capture our ordinary attitudes about modal statements. …show more content…
The counterpart reading of saying that ‘Humphrey could have won’ does not include any particular one counterpart of Humphrey. This means without one particular counterpart the possibility of being a “man” resembling Humphrey is eliminated. The question which then comes to mind is what an existentially quantified statement is truly about, which is difficult to conclude about in Yablo’s Aboutness. Secondly, there is a distinction between the defining conditions of ‘Humphrey has a winning counterpart’ is discussing people other than Humphrey or properties different than possibly having won. It is another story to state that ‘Humphrey could have won’ is about people or properties which are not …show more content…
According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Kripke seems to have an issue with transworld identity which rests on one of the three claims: the epistemological assumption, the security of reference assumption, and the intelligibility assumption. The epistemological assumption says that we have to have specific transworld identity criterion to understand that in another world some individual ‘A’ is identical with the actual ‘A.’ The security of reference assumption states we have to have criterion of transworld identity to know that when we reference someone in another concrete world that we are talking about who was intended, rather than some other individual. Lastly, the intelligibility assumption states we must have some criteria of transworld identity in order to understand it completely. Kripke believes out of these three assumptions, none of them survive under scrutiny. ‘If these assumptions exhaust the grounds for supposing that there is a problem of transworld identity, the alleged problem may be dismissed as a pseudo-problem’ (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2017: p.