Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Kripke (1972) and Putnam (1975a; 1975b) have argued forcefully for the philosophical view of word meaning known as rigid designation. While certain psychological studies have appeared to offer this view support (Keil, 1986; Rips, 1989), we argue that these have not provided an exhaustive evaluation. In particular, the original discussions of Kripke and Putnam reveal that their view rests on an explicit appeal to intuition concerning word use in a range of different scenarios. The study reported here investigates word use under three such types of scenarios, for a variety of natural kind terms, by investigating subjects' judgements of truth or falsity for a range of statement types. W e argue that the results obtained indicate that the intuition on which rigid designation rests is not one which is generally true of agents' language use. Further, we obtam patterns of apparent contradiction which appear strictly inconsistent with rigid designation and which require an account of word meaning which allows that the sense of words may vary systematically with context (Franks & Braisby, 1990).