A rigid designator refers to the same object with respect to every circumstance of evaluation at which that object exists, and never refers to anything else with respect to another circumstance of evaluation.
(Used in defining intension as a function from circumstances of evaluation to referents)
A possible world or situation relative to which the reference of an expression is assessed.
rigid designator(Term due to Kripke (1972); used to distinguish expressions whose reference is fixed across circumstances from those whose reference varies.)
An expression which, relative to a context of utterance, refers to the same object with respect to every circumstance of evaluation at which that object exists, and never refers to anything else with respect to another circumstance of evaluation.
Double-indexing explains how we can regard the reference of “the second-largest city in the United States” in (11) to be Chicago, without taking “the second-largest city in the United States” to be an indexical like “I”. On this view, “the second-largest city in the United States” does not vary in content depending on the context of utterance; rather, the content of this phrase is such that it determines a different reference with respect to different circumstances of evaluation. In particular