Rigid Designators and Non-Fungible Tokens

Nassim Nicholas Taleb made a tweet comparing the NFTs (non-fungible tokens) to rigid designators, a concept introduced in Saul Kripke’s nominal work Naming and Necessity. In this article, I will explain what rigid designators are and what that might mean for the NFTs.

A rigid designator is when it “designates the same object” “in every possible world” (Kripke 1980, 48). The necessity means having an identity across all possible worlds. On the other hand, definite descriptions can be used to make contingent identity statements. For example, while the man who…