ABSTRACT
How can we explain the commonalities Kripke brings out in the third lecture of Naming and Necessity (NN, 1972) between proper names and natural kind terms? Since Kripke has, in his second lecture, already given what he regards as decisive arguments against the Frege-Russell ‘description theory’ of proper names, he sees his observations about natural kind terms as merely providing more grist to his mill-that is, his more-Millian-thanMill rejection of the application of any notions of connotation, sense, or descriptive meaning, not only to proper names, but also to certain Millian ‘general names’. However, for someone like me, unconvinced by Kripke’s arguments, the question arises how these commonalities can be explained consistently with some form of the Frege-Russell account. Specifi cally, for me, the question is how to explain the features of natural kind terms that Kripke describes from a Fregean perspective.
