Point-blank questions

Point-blank questions about modality are annoying and pointless:

1. Could Hubert Humphrey have been a poached egg?

(1) would never come up in ordinary conversation, and there is no ordinary-seeming answer to it. Perhaps the answer is hopelessly interest-relative, and hopelessly context-sensitive. Point-blank questions about persistence are equally annoying and pointless:

2. If a witch turns Humprey into a poached egg, is the egg still Humphrey?

Nonetheless, interesting questions about persistence and modality can still be asked, while avoiding these fruitless ones. (1) and (2) taken together suggest these hard (or bad) questions persistence and modality are intertranslatable. So if you think it's possible to do interesting work in modality, or to use modal concepts in various philosophical analyses, even if you can't answer (1), you ought to think the same about persistence. Likewise, if you think, as most do, that there is modality de re, there should be persistence de re.

Perhaps we can go further and try to say why we don't know the answer to (1). The nearest possible world where Humphrey is a poached egg is still very far away from the actual world. There is no simple experiment we could run to make such a world actual, no qualitatively similar event we could look to for precedent, etc. Thus it is reasonable to be modest about our ability to know such things: to possess knowledge regarding these modally ``distant" reaches of logical space.

What are the consequences of these (not very revolutionary) observations for the notion of a rigid designator? Assume, with orthodoxy, that ``Hubert Humphrey" is a rigid designator, meaning that it designates the same object in every possible world. Even if we do assume that, though, we do not know the answer to

3. Does ``Hubert Humphrey" denote a poached egg in some possible world?

(This is, of course, just a way of re-writing (1).) At the far reaches, we do not know what the qualitative properties of things denoted by ``Hubert Humphrey" are. Nonetheless, arguments can and have been advanced to the effect that ``HH" is a rigid designator, without having to explicitly take a stand on the unpromising (3).

The proposal that names are rigid designators puts us in mind of bare particulars and featureless substrates; since we can't think of any necessary properties Nixon has qua Nixon, if ``Nixon" is a rigid designator then the thing it rigidly designates hasn't got any necessary properties. (Is the fact that we can't think of any necessary properties of Nixon qua Nixon actually evidence for ``Nixon"'s being a rigid designator? I'm not sure.) The idea that there are no necessary properties of Nixon is actually a bit weird. Isn't Nixon necessarily alive? Isn't Nixon necessarily concrete (as opposed to abstract?) Also, is there a fixed number of bare particulars in every possible world? Isn't taking sides on this question also a bit fruitless?

But this irresolution concerning the substance of rigid designation shouldn't obscure the fact that the criterion of persistence same mereological sum of elementary particles is extremely implausible. So it is extremely implausible that mereological sums of atoms are the universe's (only) rigid designators. This is so even if it's true that there we can rigidly designate elementary particles (which is a bit odd, since they're all very much the same), and that it's ``ontologically harmless" to generalize to rigidly designating their fusions.

This relates to the options offered to us by Evans's proof that there are no vague objects (1987). The suggested way out is that one of the two singular terms appearing in the first line of the proof is a non-rigid designator. But if we take the atomist's interpretation, why should we conclude that even one of them is a rigid designator? Either way, the proof will fail.