Abstract
The eighth lesson first examined attempts to rescue Kripkean analysis, aiming to treat EN terms as predicates rather than common nouns, and theoretical identities as universally quantified conditionals and biconditionals (Soames [1]), or to say that general terms are all analogous to logically proper nouns, maintaining an "imposition analogy" between proper nouns and EN terms (Salmon). It was shown that none of these attempts avoids the trivialization of general terms and EN terms, which renders doubtful Kripke's idea that there is indeed an asymmetry between species terms and other general terms, in that only the former would be rigid. Other recent arguments have been presented, which tend to go in the opposite direction [2] : EN terms do not refer to a particular semantic category of general term; the identification of this category depends on the development of sophisticated empirical theories, such as contemporary chemistry or the theory of evolution; the possible specificity of meaning that terms may have depends on the role they play in scientific explanation. The essential thing, then, is not the metaphysics of ENs, but the chosen model of scientific explanation.
