The phrase "a designator" is correct and usable in written English.
It can be used in contexts where you are referring to a term or symbol that identifies or specifies something.
Example: "In programming, a designator is often used to refer to a variable or function."
Alternatives: "an identifier" or "a label".
Intuitively, rigid designation is needed on the part of both designators if there are to be true "theoretical identity statements": statements in which a designator designates by way of expressing explicitly in some manner one of the designatum's theoretically interesting essences.
The term Hinduism became familiar as a designator of religious ideas and practices distinctive to India with the publication of books such as Hinduism (1877) by Sir Monier Monier-Williams, the notable Oxford scholar and author of an influential Sanskrit dictionary.
'Watery stuff' just is a designator for stuff that is wet, drinkable, and so on.
Above all, though, "anti-war" as a designator makes little sense when there can be war without war.
Kripke (1980) famously argues that because a rigid designator designates the same object in all possible worlds, an identity statement in which the identity sign is flanked by two rigid designators must be necessarily true if it is true at all, even if the statement is not a priori.
A rigid designator designates the same object in all possible worlds in which that object exists and never designates anything else.
In other places, Kripke seems to have in mind another account of rigidity: one according to which a rigid designator designates its object in every possible world, whether or not the designatum exists in that world.
First, a rigid designator designates the same object in all possible worlds as it is used in the actual world, not as it is used in other possible worlds in which the object gets picked out: for although we identify objects in other worlds by our own names, natives of some of these worlds use other names (Kripke 1980, p. 77).
If 'H2O' is a rigid designator of a substance, and 'water' is a rigid designator of a substance, and 'Water = H2O' is true, then that statement is necessarily true.
"To even ask after the utility of philosophy shows the entrenchment of the technological understanding of being": A Rigid Designator posts a discussion of Heidegger's conception of philosophy.
The aircraft in question had been fitted with a laser designator, which illuminates a target and enables a missile (usually launched from another aircraft) to home in.
