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the evidence [Smith] presented established that Marcus was a primary founder of the New Theory of Reference, even though Soames does not agree with all of the points [Smith] made about her primacy” (Smith 1995b, 243).

      Since this APA session predictably created a great deal of discussion and controversy, all three of these papers were published in Synthese in August 1995. Roughly a year later, Soames’ colleague, John Burgess, joined the discussion with his October 1996 paper “Marcus, Kripke, and Names.” Here, Burgess joins the side of both Kripke and Soames, arguing against Marcus’ “claim, which has subsequently been stated more explicitly by others . . . that certain remarks on names in her colloquium talk “Modalities and Intensional Languages” anticipate in an important but unacknowledged way Saul Kripke’s discussion of names in his lecture series “Naming and Necessity”” (Burgess 1996, 1). In 1998, all of the papers mentioned so far were gathered together—along with new contributions from Burgess, Smith, and Soames, as well as some pieces providing historical context—in the book The New Theory of Reference: Kripke, Marcus, and Its Origins. This controversy was not limited to specialists, either, receiving popular coverage by Jim Holt (friendly to Smith’s original) in the January/February 1996 issue of Lingua Franca and Stephen Neale (falling squarely in the Burgess/Soames camp) in the February 2001 Times Literary Supplement. As if to put in his last word on the matter, Soames then published his two-volume history of analytic philosophy in 2003 with Kripke as the culmination and primary hero (and almost no mention of Marcus) (Soames 2003a, 2003b).²

      Not only has little agreement been made on the substantive issues, there was significant controversy over whether or not the debate should have even happened in the way it did in the first place. Within a year of the initial session, Anscombe, Davidson, Geach, and Nagel published a letter to the editor in the APA Proceedings stating their “dismay” due to the fact that “a session at a national APA meeting is not the proper forum in which to level ethical accusations against a member of our profession, even if the charges were plausibly defended.” Furthermore, while it has not featured as prominently in the published literature, my personal experience evidences the fact that the matter has not left philosophers’ minds. At my very first departmental gathering in graduate school in 2010, it became one of the significant topics of conversation—and this was not the only departmental event that involved such a conversation. Since then, I have also been a part of multiple conversations on the dispute at various conferences on the history of analytic philosophy. When I gave earlier versions of this chapter as talks at conferences, I also had responses ranging from laughter and scoffing to invitations to contribute my work.

      For these reasons, I believe it is time to reopen the debate in the published literature. In doing so, I will defend a more middling position than was gotten from either the Smith or Soames side of the debate. In particular, I will be trying to flesh out what Jaakko Hintikka might have meant when he said,

      I’ve no doubt that Kripke has acted in good faith . . . he’s not appropriating anyone else’s ideas, at least consciously. . . . The real blame in all this lies with the philosophical community—which, owing to its uncritical, romantic view of this prodigy, is far too quick to give him credit for new ideas while neglecting the contributions of others. Kripke probably got his results independently, but why should he get all the credit? (Holt 2018, 328)

      Focusing more on Marcus not getting credit than Kripke getting credit, again, I will argue that this mistake made by the philosophical community was perpetrating sexist discursive injustice against a woman in a field dominated by men, which implicitly expects genius to be masculine. Toward this end, we will discuss a section each on:

      (1) Smith’s claims from the original APA session, as well as Soames’ and Burgess’ responses to them,

      (2) oddities that can be found in Soames’ and Burgess’ responses to Smith,

      (3) the general background for Kukla’s notion of discursive injustice,

      (4) an argument that discursive injustice is the best explanation for what went on in the Kripke/Marcus dispute, and

      (5) gesturing at how we might proceed with our investigations into the history of philosophy with this case in mind.

      §1.2 Scott Soames and John Burgess Respond to Quentin Smith

      As has been alluded to, Smith’s original APA paper has as primary thesis that there is a combination of six main theses associated with the New Theory of Reference (NTR), which originated in Ruth Barcan Marcus’ work. A subsidiary claim is that this has been missed because Kripke originally misunderstood Marcus’ work and, as a result, did not cite it. The works discussed by Smith, which he thinks Kripke should have cited, include her pioneering works on quantified modal logic from 1946 to 1947 (Marcus 1946a, 1946b, 1947) and, more importantly, her “Modalities and Intensional Languages” (Marcus 1961). This last paper is most relevant to the central pieces of NTR and Kripke was present at the February 1962 Boston Colloquium for the Philosophy of Science where it was read and discussed. According to Smith, if Kripke and those following him had properly read, understood, and cited Marcus, they would have found a picture with all of the following theses of NTR:

      [T1] Proper names are directly referential, rather than being strongly equatable with, or disguised, definite descriptions.

      [T2] Just because a definite description has been used to fix the referent of a name, this does not mean that the name goes on to carry the meaning of that description.

      [T3] The modal argument refutes descriptivist theories of proper names.

      [T4] Statements of identity express necessary propositions (i.e., the necessity of identity).

      [T5] Proper names are rigid designators.

      [T6] There exist necessary a posteriori truths. (Smith 1995a, 182–86)

      From here, we should also survey Soames’ and Burgess’ responses in Soames (1995) and Burgess (1998). Soames’ (1995) primary issues with Smith (1995a) can be broken down into general worries and specific concerns with each of T1–T6. On the more general side, he says that “[Marcus’] entire discussion of the meaning and reference of names, as well as their relations to descriptions, covers only five or six pages [. . .] and defenses of the various doctrines of the so-called ‘new theory’ would not fit into such a small space” (Soames 1995, 193). With respect to T1–T6, individually, Soames says something different about each that he believes should make us question each one of Smith’s attributions to Marcus. In particular, insofar as T1 and T3 are to be found in work by Marcus, they are also to be found in works by Smullyan (1947, 1948) and Fitch (1949). So, all three of them provided “significant anticipations of some of the central theses of contemporary non-Fregean theories of reference,” but nothing that would single out Marcus as a founder of such theories (Soames 1995, 208).

      Something similar can be said for Soames’ response to Smith’s claims about T4 and T5—there is a sense in which they contain a kernel of truth, but ultimately need to be qualified significantly. In particular, Marcus can be attributed with an implicit step along the way toward T4 and T5, but she does not anticipate the full-blown theses that Kripke argued for in the arena. To see this, lets first look at T4—the necessity of identity. Here, Soames rightly points out that this is an ambiguous phrase which can mean that:

      

      (1) statements of identity involving variables express necessary propositions (i.e., (∀x) (∀y) (x = y→ x = y)),

      (2) statements of identity involving proper names express necessary propositions, or

      (3) statements of identity involving singular terms express necessary propositions.

      This is important because the necessity of identity with respect to variables and proper names—(1) and (2)—seem correct, while the necessity of identity with respect to singular terms (n.b. contingent definite descriptions) is false (Soames 1995, 202). Furthermore, while Marcus (1947) proved that the necessity of identity with respect to variables is true, she does not discuss the necessity of identity with respect to proper names—the view that Kripke (1980) got to. Given this, we can no more attribute to her the true view—(2)—that there is a necessity

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