PERSON
Saul Kripke
The logician who gave modal logic its semantics, dismantled the descriptivist theory of reference, and—without writing a word about artificial intelligence—sharpened the four instruments that cut most precisely to the question of whether a machine can be said to mean, refer, follow a rule, or understand at all.
Saul Aaron Kripke (1940–2022) was the philosopher who proved, before anyone had a reason to worry about it, that the deepest problems of the AI era were philosophical before they were technical. Teaching himself ancient Hebrew at six, writing a completeness theorem for modal logic as a teenager, lecturing graduate logicians at MIT while still an undergraduate at Harvard—the legend has hardened into cliché, but the method behind it matters: Kripke trusted the argument over the authority and the structure over the story we tell about the structure, which is exactly the discipline a reader of
large language models needs. His three Princeton lectures of January 1970, transcribed as
Naming and Necessity, overturned a half-century consensus by showing that names reach their objects not through descriptions in the speaker’s head but through a causal-historical chain of actual events—a baptism and a long relay of use—and that some