Saul Kripke defines a rigid designator as a term that refers to the same object in every world in which that object exists.^[1] The Morning Star (Phosphorus) and the Evening Star (Hesperus) both name the planet Venus, and the statement "Hesperus is Phosphorus" is a necessary a posteriori truth on Kripke's widely accepted account. Definite descriptions are typically non-rigid designators; for example, "The winner of the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize" is a non-rigid designator and a definite description. The assertion "The winner of the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize is María Corina Machado" is true, but it's not necessarily true. On a possible world semantics, there are many worlds in which Machado exists but someone else won the award in 2025; that she won is only a contingent fact about the world we live in.^[2] Rigid designators tag an object in every world in which that object exists whereas non-rigid designators can designate different objects across worlds. Turning now to the two questions motivating this post: Why think that questions can rigidly designate intentions? And what in the world does this have to do with aligning frontier models?

Why think that questions can rigidly designate intentions?

Imagine an organism with one intention: find food. Now suppose that organism--call it Fred--has to query its environment to achieve this goal.^[3] Fred must differentiate food from non-food and basically there are two methods for doing so: a direct query and a proxy query.

Direct query: Fred queries the environment for food itself. Questions like "what things have nutritional value to Fred?" or "is this food?", when given full scope over the objects in Fred's environment and answered accurately, partition that environment into edible and non-edible for Fred.

Proxy query: Fred queries the environment for a proxy for food. For example, suppose that all and only food is colored red where Fred is, and so the question "what things are red?" when answered accurately partitions the environment into red and non-red categories, and by stipulation into edible and non-edible for Fred.

These two methods closely approximate rigid and non-rigid designation as a relationship that holds between queries and intentions. Direct queries function like rigid designators and proxy queries function like non-rigid designators insofar as they bear on the intention find food. In every w...

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