As science deals with invariants and history with dated events, the phrase “historical science” might be thought to be an oxymoron. However, the prevalence in the natural sciences and economics of differential equations filled with time derivatives should persuade us of the legitimacy of joining history with science. The combination can, in fact, take several forms. This paper examines some of the ways inwhich history and economics can be fashioned into economic history, and the reasons why they need to be so joined.A particularly important source of historicity in economics is that boundedly rational economic actors represent the economic scene in radically different ways from time to time, and these changes occur as a function of natural and social events, social influences on perception, and the molding of human motives by the social environment, which is itself time dependent. For these and other reasons, many of thembound closely to basic human characteristics, the dynamic movements of the economic system depend not only on invariant laws, but on continually changing boundary conditions as weIl.

A few aspects of the issue of realism are addressed in the context of a social science. The paper looks for adjustments needed in our conceptions of scientiflc realism to accommodate some peculiarities of economics. Ontologically speaking, economics appears to be closely linked to commonsense conceptions of the world, thus the problem of theoretical concepts does not emerge in the same form it is often taken to exist in physics. Theory formation is largely a matter of idealization and isolation among observables rather than postulation of unobservables. Given that isolative theories violate the truth in many ways, truth is more of a problem than existence in a realism pertaining to economics. The idea of significant truth -which is able to tolerare varieties of untruths in theories- is suggested to be based on the notion of the way the world works; this is a matter of the causal structure and functioning of the world. None of this is undermined by the acknowledgement that economist’s attittudes and decisions are shapped by rhetorical persuasion.

In this article, I want to focus on time and development in Kripke’s “Naming and Necessity” by considering two topics: (1) the evolution of scientific knowledge; (2) the evolution of biographies. In connection with (1) I suggest the introduction of a sentence operator for epistemic possibility and argue that some of Kripke’s strong metaphysical statements are finely counterbalanced by rather “Popperian” epistemological considerations. In connection with (2) I consider the idea of exploiting necessity of origin for a crossworld identity criterion.

Kripke’s opponents claim that gold, in all possible worlds, is a yellow metal. They believe that the atomic number can vary from world to world. Kripke inverts this, holding that while gold is, in all possible worlds, the element with atomic number 79, its surface properties may vary widely from world to world. Both views are flawed, but of the two, the rival is to be preferred. There is a better view. Gold is, in all possible worlds, the element with atomic number 79. And (given certain specifiable conditions) it is, in all possible worlds, a yellow meta!. Only insofar as they give rise to familiar and important surface properties is there reason to maintain that structural properties are at the essence or nature of things.

Gareth Evans (1973) adduces a case in which a proper name apparently undergoes a change in referent. ‘Madagascar’ was originally the name of a part of Africa. Marco Polo, erroneously thinking he was following native usage, applied the name to an island off the African coast. Today ‘Madagascar’ is the name of that island. Evans argues that this kind of case threatens Kripke’s picture of naming as developed in Naming and Necessity. According to this picture, the name, as used by Marco Polo, referred to a part of the African mainland, since he was connected to the latter by a historical chain of communication. Since we are historically connected to Marco Polo, the name, as it is used today, still refers to the African mainland. But it doesn’t. The aim of the present paper is to give a conclusive account of the phenomenon adduced by Evans, which is compatible with Kripke’s picture.

In Naming and Necessity Saul Kripke offers a number of arguments in order to show that no descriptivist theory of proper names is correct. We present here a certain version of descriptivist theory -we will characterize it as an individual-use reference-fixing descriptivist theory that appeals to descriptions regarding how a name is used by other speakers. This kind of theory can successfully answer all the objections Kripke puts forward in Naming and Necessity. Such sort of descriptivist theory is furthermore compatible with the picture about reference that Kripke presents. It also seems to be able to account for some phenomena that are difficult to explain on Kripke’s view (the existence of informative identity statements and true negative singular existential statements).

In this paper I discuss two approaches to rigidity. I argue that they differ in the general conception of semantics that each embraces. Moreover, I argue that they differ in how each explains the rigidity of general terms, and in what each presupposes in that explanation.

The paper has two objectives: to introduce the fundamentals of a triplet model of a concept, and to show that the main concept models may be structurally treated as its partial cases. The triplet model considers a concept as a mental representation and characterizes it from three interrelated perspectives. The first deals with objects (and their attributes of various orders) subsumed under a concept. The second focuses on representing structures that depict objects and their attributes in some intelligent system. The third concentrates on the ways of establishing correspondences between objects with their attributes and appropriate representing structures.

In the paper a theory of relevant properties is developed. The theory permits us to distinguish between properties that are relevant to an object and the properties that are irrelevant to it. Predication is meaningful only if a property is relevant to an object. On the base of introducing a special negative type of predication as opposed to usual sentential negation, a new notion of generalization for properties is defined. Context-free, as weIl as context-depended relevance of properties are considered.

The aim of this paper is to give one kind of internal proportional systems with general representation and without closure and finiteness assumptions. First, we introduce the notions of internal proportional system and of general representation. Second, we briefly review the existing results which motivate our generalization. Third, we present the new systems, characterized by the fact that the linear order induced by the comparison weak order ≥ at the level of equivalence classes is also a weIl order. We prove the corresponding representation theorem and make some comments on strong limitations of uniqueness; we present in an informal way a positive result, restricted uniqueness for what we call connected objects. We conclude with some final remarks on the property that characterizes these systems and on three possible empirical applications.