Meaning: is linguistic meaning exhausted by reference?
Position: Semantic distributionalism
It is now time to reach the last step on the semantic ladder, one that is essential to many of the disciplines and concepts we shall consider. Essential, in fact, to any thought we think, any sentence we utter. That piece is our theory of meaning. Let’s first remind ourselves of the building blocks we’ve presented so far in the "abstract realm" section:
Carnap’s modal semantics describes meaning in terms of intensions: functions from possible worlds to extensions. “Macron” and “the French president” have the same extension (or referent) but different intensions: “Macron” could only be the same human, in any possible world, whilst “the French president” could have been Alain Juppé. Hence these singular terms have different meanings.
Russell’s structural semantics is more fine-grained. It helps explain our intuition that co-intensional terms like “\(28 + 32\)” and “\(60\)” appear to have different meanings nonetheless. It posits that complex expressions have meanings derived from their syntactic structures: their meaning is not the intension of the sentence, but a function of its elementary units’ intensions.
The semantics of names hopes to explain why co-referential, co-intensional terms with no underlying structure may have different meanings, like “Superman” and “Clark Kent”.
Frege assumed that meanings are carried by senses, which determine reference. Although they point to the same referent in every world, “Superman” and “Clark Kent” would have different senses in virtue of the speaker or thinker’s being in a different cognitive state.
Russell thought that most names were disguised descriptions rather than elementary units in an expression. If Superman is a disguised way to say “the flying, Kryptonian protector of Metropolis”, it is naturally different in meaning from “Clark Kent”.
Kripke denied that a more fine-grained theory was possible: since "Superman" and "Clark Kent" co-refer in every world (to be precise, in every world where they refer at all), then they have the same meanings. The clear cognitive difference between "Superman is Clark Kent" and "Clark Kent is Clark Kent" must then find a ground outside of semantics — most likely in pragmatics or psychology.
Now, if one ponders these options for the first time, it is tempting to dismiss Kripke’s contribution. It appears to impose an arbitrary cut-off on the granularity of meaning. Intuitively it’s an attractive proposition that meaning, what we mean, is individuated by some descriptive or mental load that’s intrinsic to the language user’s intention. The notion that "Superman" and "Clark Kent" may have the exact same semantic value is enough to separate Kripke’s idea from layman notions of meaning as a sort of dictionary definition.
It is then important to re-state Kripke’s argument as clearly as possible, showing in simple terms why there’s no escaping it.