Not even your thought experiments are safe.
Saul Kripke resigned yesterday from his position as Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the CUNY Graduate Center. While similar allegations have been circulating in unpublished form for years, a team of philosophers from Oxford University has just released a damning report claiming that they were systematically unable to reproduce the results of thought experiments reported by Kripke in his groundbreaking Naming and Necessity.
(…) The report, forthcoming in Philosophical Studies, claims that 74% of the book’s thought-experimental results could not be reproduced using the standard philosophical criteria for inter-researcher agreement. A second version of the analysis, employing a generous application of the principle of charity, still left 52% of the results unverified.
That’s from fauxphilnews. Skullcap skip: Marciano Siniscalchi.
Cheap Talk 
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March 1, 2012 at 5:39 am
Michael Webster
Bertrand Russell just knew that Saul had never met the Present King of France in his alleged thought experiment.
March 4, 2012 at 2:31 am
Daniel Reeves
When I saw that I thought you’d think we’d think it was funny!
(That was my lame attempt at a modal logic joke. It’s even lamer to point out a joke but I just didn’t know how much you know about modal logic (I’m doing it again (same (recursive) problem).)