The objection (different example this time, Kripke's own): Suppose that "Richard Nixon" is equivalent to "the winner of the 1968 U.S. Presidential election." Now consider a question about possibility. (Questions about possibility and necessity are called modal questions.) Could Richard Nixon have lost the 1968 election? The answer seems unequivocally to be "Yes," assuming that "could" here expresses merely theoretical, logical or metaphysical possibility rather than something about the state of our knowledge. But according to the Description theories, our question means the same as
(1) Is it possible that: one and only one person won the 1968 election and whoever won the 1968 election lost the 1968 election?,the answer to which is clearly "No."
Searle's Cluster theory may seem to offer an improvement, because it is possible that a person who satisfies a SBVAUN of the description cluster associated with "Richard Nixon" nonetheless does not satisfy the particular description "winner of the 1968 election." But, Kripke points out, human possibility extends further than that: Nixon the individual person might not have done any of the things generally associated with him. (Remember the time machine argument.) He might have apprenticed himself at age twelve to a sandal-maker and gone on to make sandals all his life, never going anywhere near politics or public life at all and never once getting his name in any newspaper. Yet, obviously, it is not possible that a person who satisfies a SBVAUN of the description cluster associated with "Richard Nixon" nonetheless does not satisfy any at all of the descriptions in that cluster. On Searle's view, the character who went into sandal-making would not have been the referent of "Richard Nixon" and for that matter would not have been Richard Nixon. And that seems wrong.
Michael Dummett protested that this objection is simply invalid as it stands; at least, it rests on a hidden assumption which is false. We may infer that our modal question is synonymous with (1) only if we assume that "Richard Nixon" is equivalent to a description at all, it is equivalent to one that has narrow scope, that is, what Russell calls a "secondary" occurrence with respect to "It is possible that." What if the relevant description has wide scope? Then our original question is synonymous, not with (1), but with
(2) One and only one person won the 1968 election, and, concerning whoever won the 1968 election, is it possible that that person lost?(2) is clumsy; also, there are other, irrelevant disambiguations of our question due to the fact that the interrogative operator itself has scope, so let me make the point more simply using just the indicative versions of the two readings. The sentence
(3) It is possible for Richard Nixon to have lost the 1968 election,(presuming that "Richard Nixon" is equivalent to "the winner of the 1968 election") is ambiguous as between the narrow-scope reading
POSSIBLE: One and only one person won the 1968 election, and, concerning whoever won the 1968 election, that person lost,which corresponds to (1) and is false, and the wide-scope reading
One and only one person won the 1968 election, and, concerning whoever won the 1968 election, POSSIBLE: that person lost,which presumably is true. Colloquially, (3) means that one and only one person won the election and whoever won it is such that s/he could have lost.
So what Russell can do is specify that
names abbreviate wide-scope descriptions. So long as names
always take wide scope over modal operators, Kripke's Modal Objection fails.
(Kripke himself does not accept this, but has not clearly said why not.)