Two Sources of Interest in Metaphysical Modality (and Kripke in Light of Them)

Source 1: We want to know the vocabulary and syntax of being, or as Rosen puts it in 'The Limits of Contingency', 'the combinatorial essence of the world'. What are the basic elements and how may they be combined?

Source 2: We want to know, as it were in advance, whether various kinds of statements that are not put in terms of the basic elements count as high-level descriptions of any possible world. 

Many of Kripke's arguments that certain kinds of statements are necessary furnish considerations which purport to show that whatever the possibilities are exactly, none of them is correctly described as one in which '...'. 

This mode of argumentation on Kripke's part can make it look like his modal notions can ultimately be explicated along conceptual or semantic lines. But, as Putnam came to appreciate in between 'The Meaning of "Meaning"' and 'Is Water Necessarily H2O?', this is not so.

In this connection it is notable that all of Kripke's distinctive modal theses are negative as regards possibility. (His claims, in the course of arguing against descriptivism about names, that well-known facts about Aristotle etc. could have been different, are an exception, admittedly - but for those arguments, I don't see that he needs these alternative possibilities to be real, metaphysical possibilities. The modality used in those arguments could be deflated to conceptual or semantic without affecting the arguments, which are after all for a semantic conclusion - that names aren't synonymous with descriptions.) As far as I know, Kripke never seriously argues that such and such really is possible, really is a way the world could have been. Rather, he just works on the assumption that there are many quite various ways things could have been, but then seeks to draw some limits in high-level vocabulary.

But these Kripkean results, if that's what they are, only satisfy interest in metaphysical modality that derives from the second source. How we might satisfy our interest that derives from the second source is largely left untackled, and this is one reason why many have found Kripke's work frustrating. He elicits epistemic hopes, someone might complain, without giving us even so much as a roadmap for how so satisfy them.

His suggestion that metaphysical possibility may coincide more closely with physical possibility than has often been supposed may however be suggestive. On the other hand, he is against physicalism, so this couldn't be the whole story from his point of view.

Notes on Modality II - "Deserving the name", the grandeur of the idea of metaphysical modality, &c.

I want to explore a 'no clear best deserver' view of the - very inchoate - role that the distinction between (metaphysically) necessary vs. contingent truths is supposed to play.

The idea is that once you drill down in the borderlands, you see that there are different ways of going.

So no clear best deserver. But also: it's not clear that anything is a good enough deserver.

The 'no clear best deserver' hypothesis raises questions: why wouldn't everyone agree? Why would this be news?

One reason might be that there really is a best desever. Or that it seemed like there was a clear best but on further reflection there are competitors and it's not clear that any one has the edge. But I think there's more to say about why this might be news. There is something very natural about thinking that there is some single distinction here. There is a strong inclination to think that there some one major, fundamental distinction between the truths that could have been otherwise and the ones that couldn't. 

So if there is a sense in which this is not so - or if we want to be circumspect about it - we could try to tell a positive story about how this comes about.

Also, it is important to remind ourselves that the strong inclination I am speaking of may not be universal, or even normal. (Think of people who encounter this philosophical discourse, feel vaguely skeptical, maybe kind of interested but not particularly compelled, don't sign up for any view in particular, or flirt with some unusual view (an undergrad fellow student of mine defended the view that all truths are necessary in a course essay), and simply move on with their lives and don't ever really think about the matter, except as something some people are concerned with.)

But, at the same time: it's not just some specific problem in some particular subliterature. Versions of it, or closely related things, come up in philosophy at many times and places. And I have the feeling that it springs from a kind of root that also gives rise to certain philosophical thoughts and frames of mind that all sorts of people have.

So, how might it come about? Perhaps: Some kind of drive towards systematic understanding run rampant. Desire to see world as mechanism with discrete states. And the point isn't that that's naive, or probably not true after all, or something like that. But one issue here may be: why should there be one clear best way of seeing the world that way? 

It is possible to get into a frame of mind where it seems like there must in some sense be a single or primary set of facts about the possible states of the world, if there really is a world at all. It is like Wittgenstein's demand for substance, for eternal objects, in the Tractatus. It can seem like if the thing you're demanding weren't so, there would be no world at all, or nothing would be true.

There's something here I want to say in connection with this 'no clear best deserver' idea, along the lines of: how little is said when the idea of metaphysical modality is introduced! How could there be enough specific information there - in phrases like 'really could have been that way' - to narrow things right down to a particular, clear distinction!  It feels completely "lay", really quite free of theory (but of course you can theorise about 'really' or formulate it in terms of 'some fundamental sense' and then theorise about that).

But on the other hand, isn't that a bit fallacious? Can't specific, detailed things come out of arrangements of ordinary, quite general concepts? And don't, for example, specific seeds produce specific trees, despite being so small?

So this thought needs to be stated carefully. There's not some general rule here that's being appealed to. Still I think there's a point here, a way to see something  - a way to break the grip of something.

The words and associated ideas we're using here are quite flexible things, on reflection. 'Things', 'really', 'could'.

You might say there's a kind of naive level of "buying into" the idea of this one major distinction between contingent and necessary truths. Just not thinking about it too much. But then if you've thought about it and seen it threatened or scoffed at or considered uninteresting, but still want to pursue it - OK, now you're after something. Now you have a dream, I feel like saying.

I think, awkward as it is to talk about, there is really no getting away from the fact that there's something fantastic about the idea, something grand. '"How things really could have been" - what could be more interesting than that?!'

* * *

Consider Kripke's suggestive remark at the end of Naming and Necessity about leaving open the extent to which metaphysical modality will turn out to be closer to physical than suspected.

It's remarkable how little investigation or facing up there has been to the issue of how such a thing might be decided. (Williamson talks about 'detailed theoretical investigation' but I can't help but feeling that this is a kind of mirage, like how Russell and the early Wittgenstein palmed off the question of what the logical atoms will turn out to be.)

Decades later, we seem to just have different viewpoints - some rationalists who are far from thinking it coincides more with physical possibility than you might think, and others who are captured by the idea of empirical insight into hard limits (due to what seems to me a kind of misinterpretation of the necessary a posteriori, but working out where the stand offs there lie would be good).

The picture I have now is this: there's a certain inchoate role, inchoate requirement or job description for this idea of the ways things really could have been (metaphysically), and then it recedes into the background when we look at cases and theories. But this needs to be scrutinised more, and this will shed light on skepticism about the notion, and on different positive views.

I don't mind if you settle on a best deserver and are happy with it, but I will want to be clear that this is what is happening, and be wary of an alternative way of thinking about the matter as something which has been investigated and a view found correct. <-- Inadequate, but there is an important feeling here that I don't want any smoke and mirrors.

A large part of the worry is: that this process of coming to rest upon a choice of best deserver gets misrepresented as investigation into how things could have been. A failure to distinguish between getting to a concept and investigating what it applies to. But there are dangers with this hypothesis too.

'Philosophers framed the question of how things really could have been, and detailed philosophical research has led to a convergence on the view that this turns out to be a matter of ...'

In terms of what we want from the term, what gives it its life and feeling of importance - this is so easy to write off as a trifling, preliminary thing. Almost indecent to talk about. But it is very important. And it's amazing how far it reaches, so to speak. 

Old Account May Not Be False After All, But New One Still Better (and New Frontier: Relation to Two-Dimensionalism)

Last Thursday I gave a talk at Sydney University's philosophy department about Kipper's bombshell, my old account of necessity, and my new account involving counterfactual invariance deciders. I was asked many good questions and got a lot out of it.

In preparing the talk, I came to realise that I may have been too quick to assume that 'Air is airy' disproves my old account, according to which a proposition is necessarily true iff it is in the deductive closure of the set of propositions which are both true and inherently counterfactually invariant. Because 'There is nothing more to being air than being airy' is plausibly true and ICI, and it does - at least on a rich enough notion of impication - imply 'Air is airy'.

Now, if that's right, what follows? Are my new ideas about abandoning, in the analysis of necessity, the property of ICI for a relation of deciderhood, to be thrown out? I don't think so. Even if I was pushed towards them by the possibly wrong idea that my old account can't be defended from 'Air is airy', they still seem to give us an account which seems better. The old account now seems clumsy, so to speak. Maybe it can be understood in a way - with a rich notion of implication - so that it doesn't go wrong on 'Air is airy'. But this still seems like a kind of lucky break, and it's not clear to me that there aren't more threatening examples in the offing. The new account, on which a proposition is necessary iff it has a true positive counterfactual invariance decider, seems to reveal the notion's workings more faithfully, and seems less hostage to as-yet-unconsidered examples.

(Also note that, with the new account, you can use 'There's nothing more to being air than being airy' as your decider, but it seems like you can also use something like 'Air has no underlying nature' or 'Air is not a natural kind', and these do not seem to imply 'Air is airy' - they do not seem to contain that information. And since it seems you can plug these into the new account and conclude that 'Air is airy' is necessary, but cannot conclude the same on the same basis with the old account, that the new account is superior here, in enabling us to conclude necessity on a sometimes slenderer basis than we can using the old account.)

In the talk I gave, there were a number of questions and examples suggested which could look like they may disprove my account, but I was able to respond to all of them straightforwardly and to my account's credit. (With some elements of the new account, it's hard to see immediately why they're there and are as they are, but working through some examples clarifies things.) I also fielded a question (thanks to N.J.J. Smith) about how my account goes beyond what we already find in Kripke. There too I was able to give what I think is a satisfactory answer: the account isolates a plausibly a priori tractable, maybe broadly semantic, aspect to necessity. Kripke's work doesn't do this. He says a proposition is necessary if it holds in all the ways things could have been, and one of his main points is that we don't in general know a priori what these ways are. True, he also allows that we know by 'a priori philosophical analysis' (this occurs in 'Identity and Necessity') that 'Hesperus is Phosphorus' is necessarily true if true at all, but that isn't true of all examples. You might thus wonder, with respect to examples that don't work that way, what part 'a priori philosophical analysis' might play in our knowledge of their modal status. My account gives us an answer to this.

But another sort of question arose in the talk was how my account relates to two-dimensional semantics, and I was less satisfied with what I had to say on that. The true CI deciding proposition(s) in my account seem to play a role close to the role played by what world is actual in two-dimensional semantics.  I worry that some in the audience were beginning to suspect that I've just laboriously re-arrived at two-dimensionalism along a somewhat different path. (And I'm getting a bit suspicious myself.)

So, I think that now, the most pressing task is to clarify the relationship of my new account to two-dimensional semantics, rather than to defend it further from counterexample. (This has always been a background concern, even with my old account, but now it has become urgent.) The notions in my account come up in a different way, and most formulations of two-dimensionalism seem to bring up difficulties which I may be able to avoid. My account seems more minimal and focused on its topic, and thus potentially more instructive.

Such anyway is my hunch, but it remains to make this clear.

An Adventure in Linking Necessity to Apriority

[UPDATE: These ideas have led to a paper, 'Linking Necessity to Apriority', in Acta Analytica.]

There is an important link between necessity and apriority which can shed light on our knowledge of the former, but initially plausible attempts to spell out what it is fall victim to counterexamples. Casullo (2003) discusses one such proposal, argues that it fails, and suggests an alternative. In this post, I argue that Casullo’s alternative also fails, suggest another, argue that that fails too, and then suggest another which I hope is correct.

First proposal

Kripke (1980) showed that it is not always knowable a priori whether a proposition is necessarily true. But, you might think, perhaps it is always knowable a priori whether a proposition has whatever truth value it has necessarily or contingently. To use Casullo’s (2003) terminology, while Kripke showed that knowledge of specific modal status (necessarily true, contingently false, etc.) is not always possible a priori, this leaves open the possibility of apriori knowledge of general modal status (necessary or contingent - and on this usage of ‘necessary’ and ‘contingent’, truth value is left open). Perhaps that is the link we are after between necessity and apriority.

The claim that general modal status is always knowable a priori entails the following:

(1) If p is a necessary proposition and S knows that p is a necessary proposition, then S can know a priori that p is a necessary proposition.

(The second conjunct of (1)’s antecedent sidesteps the worry that some necessary propositions may be such that it is unknowable that they are necessary.)

Casullo, following Anderson (1993), argues convincingly that this is false. Consider:

(1X) Hesperus is Phosphorus or my hat is on the table.

This is a necessary proposition, but for all any S could know a priori, it could be necessarily true (if the first disjunct is true), contingently true (if the first disjunct is false but the second true), or contingently false (if both disjuncts are false). So (1) can’t be right.

Second proposal

In an interesting effort to avoid the problem affecting (1), Casullo introduces the notions of conditional modal propositions and conditional modal status:

Associated with each truth functionally simple proposition is a pair of conditional propositions: one provides the specific modal status of the proposition given that it is true; the other provides its specific modal status given that it is false. Associated with each truth functionally compound proposition is a series of conditional propositions, one for each assignment of truth values to its simple components. Each conditional proposition provides the specific modal status of the proposition given that assignment of truth values. Let us call these propositions conditional modal propositions and say that S knows the conditional modal status of p just in case S knows all the conditional modal propositions associated with p. (Casullo (2003), p. 197.)

His proposed link between necessity and apriority is as follows:

(2) If p is a necessary proposition and S knows the conditional modal status of p, then S can know a priori the conditional modal status of p.

Casullo dubs this ‘a version of the traditional account of the relationship between the a priori and the necessary that is immune to Kripke’s examples of necessary a posteriori propositions’ (Casullo (2003), p. 199). It handles (1X) nicely. Calling (1X)’s disjuncts ‘Hesp’ and ‘Hat’, its associated conditional modal propositions will run as follows:

If Hesp is true and Hat is true, (1X) is necessary.
If Hesp is true and Hat is false, (1X) is necessary.
If Hesp is false and Hat is true, (1X) is contingent.
If Hesp is false and Hat is false, (1X) is contingent.

These are plausibly knowable a priori, as required by (2).

But consider:

(2X) Everything is either such that it is either not Hesperus or is Phosphorus, or such that it is either on the table or not my hat.

While it contains connectives, this is not a truth functional compound in the relevant sense, since it does not embed any whole propositions. So on Casullo’s proposal, (2X) will be associated with just a pair of conditional modal propositions. Which ones? A problem here is that there is no very clear positive case for any pair (the account, after all, was probably not formulated with (2X) in mind), but I think it is clear that the only candidate pair which could stand a chance is:

If (2X) is true, it is necessary.
If (2X) is false, it is contingent.

(After all, (2X) is true and necessary, so the other available choice for first member couldn’t be right, and the second member of the pair seems true and knowable a priori.)

Instantiating Casullo’s proposal (2) on (2X), we get:

If (2X) is a necessary proposition and S knows the conditional modal status of (2X), then S can know a priori the conditional modal status of (2X).

But it seems clear that the first conditional modal proposition for (2X), i.e. that if (2X) is true, it is necessary, could not be known a priori. So (2) can’t be right either.

Third proposal

What strikes one initially about the disjunctive counterexample to the first proposal is that it has a component whose general modal status is knowable a priori. But this isn’t true of the counterexample to the second proposal; it has no component propositions at all. What is true about both counterexamples is, not that they have cromponent propositions whose general modal status is knowable a priori, but that they are implied by such propositions.

Let us say that a proposition p possesses a priori necessary character iff it can be known a priori that p is a necessary proposition, i.e. that p has whatever truth value it has necessarily.

Now, I submit that if a proposition whose general modal status is knowable at all is necessarily true, then it is in the deductive closure of a set of true propositions possessing a priori necessary character.

How, though, to generalize this so that it covers all necessary propositions (i.e. necessarily false propositions as well as true ones)? For a few weeks, I thought this would work:

If a proposition whose general modal status is knowable at all is necessary, then it is either in the deductive closure of a set of true propositions possessing a priori necessary character, or it is in the deductive closure of a consistent set of false propositions possessing a priori necessary character.

To cast the point in a form similar to (1) and (2) above:

(3) If p is a necessary proposition and S knows that p is a necessary proposition, then p is either in the deductive closure of a set of true propositions which S can know a priori to be necessary, or it is in the deductive closure of a consistent set of false propositions which S can know a priori to be necessary.

But I have just recently realised that this is false as well.

The problem lies with necessarily false propositions. Requiring consistency of the set of false propositions that implies a putative necessary proposition rules out necessarily false propositions that contradict themselves. E.g. 'It is both raining and not raining' is, and can be known to be, a necessary proposition, but it is not implied by any consistent set of false propositions of apriori necessary character. On the other hand, removing the consistency requirement causes the account to overgenerate, at least on a classical conception of implication; 'I had toast for breakfast' is implied by the set of false propositions of a priori necessary character {'2 + 2 = 4', 'not-(2 + 2 = 4)'}, since that set implies any proposition whatsoever.

Fourth proposal

Now, without wanting to rule out that we could specify a special implication-like relation which behaves as desired, I have nevertheless tentatively given up on bringing in consistency to get a general result which covers not only necessary true propositions but necessarily false ones as well. Instead, I think the thing to do is to exploit the idea that a necessarily false proposition's negation is necessarily true, giving us:

(4) If p is a necessary proposition and S knows that p is a necessary proposition, then either p or its negation is in the deductive closure of a set of true propositions which S can know a priori to be necessary.

Maybe this one is true! Please let me know, by comment or email, if you see a problem.

[UPDATE 31/08/2017: Trouble has arisen.] [UPDATE 2020: The trouble led to new ideas but on reflection does not threaten the core idea here. The paper that grew from this material discusses and deals with the examples that initially seemed to me to vitiate the core idea.]

Thanks to Albert Casullo for helpful and encouraging correspondence on this topic.

References

Anderson, C. Anthony (1993). Toward a Logic of A Priori Knowledge. Philosophical Topics 21(2):1-20.

Casullo, Albert (2003). A Priori Justification. Oxford University Press USA.

Kripke, Saul A. (1980). Naming and Necessity. Harvard University Press.

Caught in the Act of Confusing Subjunctive Necessity and Apriority: The Importance of the Sprigge Quote in Naming and Necessity

One of the big questions surrounding Kripke's innovations in Naming and Necessity is the extent to which, with his doctrines about necessity and the necessary a posteriori, Kripke corrected false views about necessity, as opposed to just emphasizing a neglected notion of necessity on which 'necessary a posteriori' is a non-empty category. Also unclear is the extent to which pre-Kripkean thinkers were confusing the Kripkean notion of subjunctive necessity with other notions, or just not giving that notion much attention. It's not clear, for instance, that Putnam in 'It Ain't Necessarily So' ever invoked subjunctive necessity.

This makes the following quote from Sprigge, which Kripke uses in N&N (p. 111), particularly interesting. It seems to provide a clear case of a philosopher confusing subjunctive necessity, on the one hand, with either indicative necessity or apriority on the other hand:

The anti-essentialist says that there would be no contradiction in a news bulletin asserting that it had been established that the Queen was not in fact the child of her supposed parents, but had been secretly adopted by them, and therefore the proposition that she is of Royal Blood is synthetic. In this way the anti-internalist parries the argument of the internalist by suggesting with regard to each proposed internal property of the particular in question, that we can quite well imagine that very same particular without the property in question. For a time he is winning. Yet there comes a time when his claims appear a trifle too far fetched. The internalist suggests that we cannot imagine that particular we call the Queen having the property of at no stage in her existence being human. If the anti-internalist admits this, admits that it is logically inconceivable that the Queen should have had the property of, say, always being a swan, then he admits that she has at least one internal property. If on the other hand he says that it is only a contingent fact that the Queen has ever been human, he says what it is hard to accept. Can we really consider it as conceivable that she should never have been human? (Sprigge (1962), p. 203.)

It seems pretty clear that here Sprigge takes the possibility of the bulletin - the possibility of finding out that Elizabeth II is not actually born of royal blood - as tantamount to it being the case that things could have gone such that she was not born of royal blood.

So, this quote makes it seem almost certain to me that someone - namely Sprigge - was actually confusing subjunctive necessity with either apriority or indicative necessity. Further questions are how widespread the confusion was around the time Sprigge wrote, and whether this was a relatively new thing at the time. Is it the case that, by the time Sprigge wrote the above but not for long before that, the notion of subjunctive or counterfactual necessity was "in the air", was salient, and so this sort of confusion is a relatively short term phenomenon occurring only in the lead-up to N&N (and shortly after, while people had yet to digest Kripke)? Or is the confusion something we can find much earlier evidence of?

References

Kripke, Saul A. (1980). Naming and Necessity. Harvard University Press.

Putnam, Hilary (1962). It ain't necessarily so. Journal of Philosophy 59 (22):658-671.

Sprigge, Timothy (1962). Internal and external properties. Mind 71 (282):197-212.

Does Kripke Really Have Obstinate Rigidity in Mind at All in Naming and Necessity?

Philosophers, in the wake of Naming and Necessity, have distinguished the main Kripkean notion of rigid designation, which applies to an expression when it designates the same object in all possible worlds (or counterfactual situations) in which that object exists, from a putative notion called 'obstinate rigidity', which applies to an expression when it designated the same object in every possible world whatever, including worlds where that object doesn't exist. (The term 'obstinate rigidity' was introduced by Nathan Salmon on page 34 of his 1981 book, Reference and Essence.)

I'm not even sure I can make sense of the notion of obstinate rigidity. My main purpose here is not to discredit it, however, but to do something more modest: I want to suggest that a line of interpretation of Kripke, which has him sometimes working with a notion of obstinate rigidity instead of his normal official notion of rigidity, is mistaken.

From the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article 'Rigid Designators':

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. Hence, he says, “If you say, ‘suppose Hitler had never been born’ then ‘Hitler’ refers here, still rigidly, to something that would not exist in the counterfactual situation described” (Kripke 1980, p. 78).

The interpretative suggestion before the quote seems wrong to me. I find it more natural to think that Kripke is saying that 'Hitler' actually refers, rigidly, to something that would not exist in another counterfactual situation - not that it refers to that thing in that situation.

Here we have to be careful to distinguish:

What does expression X refer to in counterfactual situation Y? (Which in turn must be carefully disambiguated, in a familiar Kripkean way, so that it does not get interpreted as asking about how language would be used in counterfactual situation Y.)

from

What does expression X actually refer to when it appears in this description of counterfactual situation Y?

You can answer 'Nothing' to the first and 'Hitler' to the second.

(Things may get even subtler when you consider definite descriptions. Suppose John is the tallest man in the world, but Paul might have been. Then if we say 'Paul might have been the tallest man in the world', should we still say that the actual referent of 'the tallest man in the world' in that sentence is John? To this, one wants to object that John isn't really involved. (But does that matter, when the question was about what the actual referent is?) Perhaps someone could find principled grounds for denying 'The actual referent of "the tallest man in the world" in that sentence is John' while accepting the 'Nothing'/'Hitler' pair of answers above. Perhaps Donnellan's distinction between referential and attributive uses of definite descriptions, or something like that distinction, should come into play here. Still, this complication - and it really is enough to do your head in - shouldn't impinge on the plausibility of what was said above.)

The Humphrey Objection to Modal Realism

The Humphrey objection to modal realism, due to Kripke, centres on counterpart theory, and alleges that this assigns counterintuitive truth-conditions to modal statements about individuals. It is historically important, as Kripke made the objection in his influential Naming and Necessity lectures, long before Lewis published his full defence of modal realism in 1986.

Kripke put the objection as follows:

Thus if we say "Humphrey might have won the election (if only he had done such-and-such)”, we are not talking about something that might have happened to Humphrey but to someone else, a "counterpart". Probably, however, Humphrey could not care less whether someone else, no matter how much resembling him, would have been victorious in another possible world. Thus, Lewis's view seems to me even more bizarre than the usual notions of transworld identification that it replaces. (Kripke 1980:45 note 13.)

It is by now, I think, pretty widely accepted that Kripke, while he may have been on to something here, did not put the point optimally. To the objection put this way, there is a cogent response: it is not correct to say that, according to counterpart-theoretic modal realism, we 'are not talking about something that might have happened to Humphrey'. What counterpart-theoretic says is that talk about 'what might have happened to Humphrey' is to be analyzed in terms of what does happen to his counterparts in other worlds. So according to the counterpart-theoretic modal realist, when we say 'Humphrey might have won the election', we are indeed talking about what might have happened to Humphrey. Their characteristic claim is to add that this thing we're talking about is to be analyzed in terms of what happens to counterparts. (Lewis drives this point home in On the Plurality of Worlds.)

Similarly, the second part of Kripke's objection – that 'Humphrey could not care less whether someone else, no matter how much resembling him, would have been victorious in another possible world' – can be convincingly argued to miss the mark. The counterpart-theoretic modal realist can agree that Humphrey could not care less about this. For the way they analyze talk about whether 'someone else' (a counterpart) 'would have been victorious in another possible world' is in terms of counterparts of that someone else – counterparts of Humphrey's counterparts. And it is compatible with Humphrey not being interested in what happens to the counterparts of some one of his counterparts, that he be interested in something which – upon analysis – turns out to be a question of what happens to his own counterparts.

This last point may be a bit pedantic, however. What if we simply reform the second part of Kripke's objection by changing the 'would have been' to an 'is'? This yields: 'Humphrey could not care less whether someone else, no matter how much resembling him, is victorious in another possible world?'

This is better, but there is still a strong reply. As Sider says in his unpublished 'Beyond the Humphrey Objection', this is 'just the paradox of analysis':

A reasonable person can care about a property under one description (“possibly winning”) while not caring about the same property under another description (“having a counterpart who wins”), provided it is not obvious that the descriptions pick out the same property. Correct analyses need not be obvious to competent language users. Obviousness may count for something, but theoretical virtues are important as well in determining which analyses we ought to accept (p. 2)

I endorse this as a response to the version of the Humphrey objection just considered. However, I want presently to register a difference with Sider about whether this response also works for another version of the objection.

This other version puts aside what Humphrey cares about, and appeals directly to our intuitions. Sider puts this version of the objection as follows: 'Look, it is just obvious that possibly winning is not the same as having a counterpart who wins' (pp. 1 – 2) And the response quoted above is put forward by Sider as a response to both the previously considered version and this one. (He explicitly prefaces the passage with 'Reply to ii) and iii)' (p. 2).)

Does Sider's response apply here too? On reflection, I think clearly not. The response makes the point that a correct analysis need not be obvious (while granting that obviousness may count for something). But the present version of the objection is alleging, not that it isn't obvious, but that it is obviously not the case. Sider, in putting the passage in question forward as a response to this, is sliding from '(~p) is obvious' to '~(p is obvious)' and thus failing to address the objection.

So we seem to have a version of the Humphrey objection which is stronger than the others so far considered. But we can improve it further by getting away from obviousness altogether, which is a red herring. Saying that possibly winning is obviously not the same as having a winning counterpart risks being too strong. The rhetorically wise thing to do is tone it down, and simply enter a plea that it doesn't intuitively seem that possibly winning is the same as having a winning counterpart. Or putting the point semantically: the truth-condition Lewis assigns to 'Humphrey could have won' is counterintuitive.

So, despite the availability of strong responses to the original and certain subsequent versions of the Humphrey objection, the core point remains that the truth-condition assigned by Lewis is counterintuitive.

(Incidentally, Lewis suggested that forms of ersatzism are no better on this score: in that case, what “gets into the act” is not another person, but 'some abstract whatnot' (Lewis 1986, p. 194.) This isn't a strong reply to the objection, of course, as ersatzism is far from the only other game in town when it comes to the semantics of modal attributions such as 'Humphrey might have won'. Nevertheless and for what it's worth: perhaps an abstract whatnot getting into the act is, from an intuitive point of view, not quite as bad as another person getting into the act. Bringing in another person, it seems to me, feels more like crowding out Humphrey, more like putting something in his place.)

So, there is a version of the Humphrey objection which has some force. However, modal realism with overlap, in contrast to counterpart-theoretic modal realism a la Lewis, is immune to the Humphrey objection. Lewis wasn't swayed by this, since he had reasons to think modal realism with overlap unpalatable. Since then, advocates of overlap have, as might have been predicted, emerged (most notably McDaniel in his (2004), 'Modal Realism with Overlap').

It may be that the considerations against overlap are quite compelling, in which case these together with the Humphrey objection (once it is freed from its initial faulty formulation) have significant force against modal realism in general. However, I do not want to get deep into comparing the relative merits of counterpart-theoretic modal realism and modal realism with overlap, and would prefer to have an objection along similar lines which applies to both. Therefore, I advocate that we take the Humphrey objection, not just as a self-sufficient objection which affects the dominant form of modal realism but not modal realism with overlap, but also as a clue: modal realism – in both flavours – may be counterintuitive on the semantic front, and this may be a good reason to reject it. Since the Humphrey objection itself fails to apply to modal realism with overlap, we should set it aside and go on to try for a more general semantic objection. I hope to develop this in a future post.

References

Kripke, Saul A. (1980). Naming and Necessity. Harvard University Press.

Lewis, David K. (1986). On the Plurality of Worlds. Blackwell Publishers.

McDaniel, Kris (2004). Modal realism with overlap. Australasian Journal of Philosophy 82 (1):137 – 152.

Sider, Theodore. unpublished. Beyond the Humphrey Objection.

Skepticism About Metaphysical Modality and Unclear Cases

Some philosophers are skeptical of the notion of metaphysical or subjunctive modality isolated by Kripke. They may think for instance that the notion of necessity de dicto is coherent but nothing falls under it, or they may think that isn't even a coherent or legitimate notion. This post is more about the latter.

One cause of such skepticism, I suspect, is that some of the canonical cases Kripke adduces in Naming and Necessity are not particularly clear cases. That is, they are borderline or disputable cases. In addition, the attitude Kripke seems to take to these cases may not be completely appropriate. With these cases, he sometimes gives the impression that the way to know how it is with them is to use intuition - and here the intuiting has a different character than in clear cases. It seems like a kind of hearkening or special receptivity is supposed to be needed. All this may seem, so to speak, occult. And if this doesn't put us off the notion altogether, it may yet mislead us about what sort of account we should look to give of it.

The sorts of cases I have in mind are those of the table - could it have been made of ice? (Kripke intuits that it couldn't.) And the Queen: could she have been born of different parents? (Kripke intuits that she couldn't.) 

(One thing about the Queen case which has troubled me for years is what I call the fish argument. This argument works by iterating the supposed necessity of origin; if the Queen is necessarily the child of her actual parents, and they are necessarily the children of their parents, then we seem to be forced to conclude that the Queen is necessarily the descendant of some fish which she is in fact descended from - call him Colin. That is, there is no possible world involving the Queen where Colin isn't also around. This seems dubious.)

To all this, my suggestion is that we shouldn't get hung up on such cases when it comes to the question of whether the notions of metaphysical or subjunctive modality are legitimate, and when it comes to understanding those notions. Just as, when trying to give someone a grasp of the notion of tallness, it is better to work with examples of people who are definitely tall, or definitely not tall. To start insisting on certain judgements about more borderline cases is not to the point, and may make the whole business seem dubious. I think that following my suggestion may help us both explain and legitimate the notions in question, and may help us account for them in the proper way.

An Account of Necessity as an Attribute of Propositions

I hope to say more about this in future, making the account more perspicuous and better defending it, but it is high time I made a blog post about it. My view that this account is correct has been stable since 2012. It fits with my account of propositions and could also be adapted to various other conceptions of propositions and meaning (but not all).

(Added October 2016: my most up-to-date treatment of this topic can be found in Chapters 1 and 5 of my PhD thesis. This is an early, undeveloped attempt.)

Some related posts:

What is Necessity De Dicto?
Skepticism about Metaphysical Modality and Unclear Cases
De Re Modality and Quantifying In
Propositions: A Neo-Wittgensteinian Approach

On A Semantic Account of the A Priori
An Account of the Analytic/Synthetic Distinction

A proposition is necessary iff it is, or is implied by, a proposition which is both inherently counterfactually invariant and true.

A proposition is inherently counterfactually invariant iff, if it is held true, it is held fixed across counterfactual scenario descriptions, i.e. its negation does not appear in any counterfactual scenario descriptions.

(I say 'its negation does not appear in any' rather than 'it appears in all' because counterfactual scenario descriptions don't normally deal with everything - are not normally maximal.)

Whether or not a proposition is inherently counterfactually invariant is a matter of the internal meaning of that proposition.

When I speak of 'counterfactual scenario descriptions', I mean not just those actually produced, but those which can be produced. Thus there is an unreduced modal element in my analysis of de dicto necessity.

Not everything which we could call a description of a scenario, where the scenario in question does not in fact obtain, counts as a counterfactual scenario description. If we say, for example, 'Perhaps things are actually such that ...', what goes in the blank is not to be counted as a counterfactual scenario description, even if it is a description of a scenario which does not obtain. Rather, I am talking about descriptions which, so to speak, describe a scenario as counterfactual - e.g. 'Things could have been such that ...'. This is like the distinction two-dimensional semanticists emphasize, between considering a scenario as actual vs. considering it as counterfactual. When a description is made of a scenario which is being considered as counterfactual, then that is a counterfactual scenario description.

We must distinguish between genuine and non-genuine counterfactual scenario descriptions. In the case of the latter, we may always say that the meaning of at least one of the expressions involved is being violated or departed from. For example, if we suppose that 'Cats are animals' is necessarily true, and yet speak loosely of a counterfactual scenario in which there are robot (and thus non-animal) cats. Here we can either say that we are using 'cat' in a different meaning entirely, in which case the counterfactual scenario description may be genuine, or are beginning with the primary meaning but, as it were, stretching it, in which case we have a non-genuine counterfactual scenario description. Another example: if Euler had squared the circle, he would have been famous for it. The description in the antecedent of what Euler does should be regarded as a non-genuine counterfactual scenario description. I take this notion as primitive, and think it is vague.

Note that it is not the case that a counterfactual scenario description is genuine iff the scenario it describes is metaphysically possible, and so it would be a mistake to think that counterfactual scenario descriptions play more or less the same role as "possible worlds" do in some other accounts. For instance, if I believe that Hesperus is not Phosphorus, then if I talk about a case in which 'Hesperus had been Phosphorus', this will be a non-genuine counterfactual scenario description, even though it is metaphysically possible, indeed actual, for Hesperus to be Phosphorus. Likewise, if I - again, believing Hesperus not to be Phosphorus - talk about a situation in which Hesperus and Phosphorus are distinct, this may be a genuine counterfactual scenario description, even though it is metaphysically impossible for Hesperus to be distinct from Phosphorus.

It cannot be denied that the notion of a genuine counterfactual scenario description, and in turn that of inherent counterfactual invariance, have much of the character of the notion of necessity de dicto. Still, as we have just seen, they behave quite differently. So it is anything but trivial to see that we can put these notions together with those of truth and implication to yield a statement of the conditions under which a proposition is necessary de dicto.

We may also delineate the inherently counterfactual scenarios in another way: they are those which are such that it is a priori that they are necessary if true. I do not think we should think of this as giving the content of the notion, however. It is another way to get a handle on the relevant class of propositions, which may help us to get the notion.

To see why closure under implication is required, consider any disjunction of a necessary truth with a contingently true or false proposition. Such a disjunction will of course be necessary, but it will not be inherently counterfactually invariant, since it can be held true by holding the contingent proposition true and the necessary one false.

My analysis gets the right answer on such a case, since the proposition will be implied by a proposition which is both inherently counterfactually invariant and true - in the simple disjunction case, the necessary disjunct. However, note that the relevant implier will not always be a part of the proposition in question: consider 'Everything is either such that it is either not a cat or is an animal, or such that it is either less than 100 kilograms in weight or not in my room'. This is in fact necessarily true, since all cats are animals and that is a necessary truth (or so I'll assume - the particular example doesn't matter). But you might hold it true if you disbelieve that all cats are animals, by believing that nothing in the speaker's room weighs more than 100 kilograms. If that is how you held it true, you would let its negation appear in counterfactual scenario descriptions - namely, descriptions of scenarios in which I have something heavy in my room.

Again, it is very important to see that counterfactual scenario descriptions do not act as "possible worlds" in my account. One easy way to see this is to consider someone who falsely believes a proposition whose negation is necessarily true a posteriori. Examples: 'Hesperus is not Phosphorus', 'Cats are robots', 'Hesperus is Mars'. Such a person will be in a position to produce counterfactual scenario descriptions involving these propositions, despite them being not only false but impossible. My account filters these out from being classed as necessary by means of the truth requirement.

To get a better grip on the role the notion of inherent counterfactual invariance plays in my account, compare Sider’s account on which there is something list-like and arbitrary at the core of the notion of necessity de dicto. The account is given in Writing the Book of the World, but is also rehearsed briefly in ‘Symposia of Writing the Book of the World’ (which has the benefit of being freely available at http://tedsider.org/papers/wbw_symposia.pdf):

According to this account, for a proposition to be necessary is roughly for it to be a logical consequence of a certain class of propositions, the “modal axioms”. Modal axioms come in different sorts, including mathematical truths, analytic truths (under a certain conception of analyticity), “laws of metaphysics”, and “axioms of a metaphysical semantics”. The account is a highly “defl ationary” one in that no metaphysically deep condition is given to unite all the modal axioms. They are given by a mere list (mathematical truths, analytic truths, …), which is selected, so to speak, “by us rather than by the world”—perhaps by linguistic convention.

Once you realize that the “modal axioms” Sider is talking about are all truths, you can see that his account shares a structure with mine: a proposition is necessary if it is or is a consequence of a true proposition fulfilling come condition C. Realizing that something of that form is correct is an important step. And I think my account is preferable to Sider’s because I have something more substantive to say about what the condition C is, such that it is in not in any relevant sense arbitrary whether a proposition has it or not: it is inherent counterfactual invariance. (Of course, if the notion of necessity de dicto seems arbitrary or conventional to you, you might prefer Sider’s account. I discuss that account and offer objections to it here.)

One of the attractive things about my account, I think, is that it does not try to reduce necessity de dicto to non-modal notions. For one thing, that may not be possible. For another, it seems it isn't necessary for an informative analysis of necessity de dicto. By not trying to reduce the modal to the non-modal, my account has more of a chance of being true and insightful. Also, it seems to me to be attractively simple and elegant, while still having enough structure, and involving the hitherto unfamiliar but natural notion inherent counterfactual invariance, so that it is understandable why it was not immediately obvious once the notion of necessity de dicto was clearly isolated by Kripke.

On Kripke's Intuitive Anti-Quinean Defence of De Re Modality

This is the second post in a series on de re modality and quantification into modal contexts. The first is here.

Immediately after the passage quoted at the beginning of the last post where Kripke introduces the problem of de re modality, he goes on to argue that de re subjunctive modal ascriptions, and the notion of necessary and contingent properties, have intuitive content. I will quote this influential passage in full, and make a criticism of it. I will then suggest a weaker argument from analogy which could be given in its stead, and finally indicate my own view on the matter.

Here is the passage:

It is even suggested in the literature, that though a notion of necessity may have some sort of intuition behind it (we do think some things could have been otherwise; other things we don't think could have been otherwise), this notion [of a distinction between necessary and contingent properties] is just a doctrine made up by some bad philosopher, who (I guess) didn't realize that there are several ways of referring to the same thing. I don't know if some philosophers have not realized this; but at any rate it is very far from being true that this idea [that a property can meaningfully be held to be essential or accidental to an object independently of its description] is a notion which has no intuitive content, which means nothing to the ordinary man. Suppose that someone said, pointing to Nixon, 'That's the guy who might have lost'. Someone else says 'Oh no, if you describe him as "Nixon", then he might have lost; but, of course, describing him as the winner, then it is not true that he might have lost'. Now which one is being the philosopher, here, the unintuitive man? It seems to me obviously to be the second. The second man has a philosophical theory. The first man would say, and with great conviction 'Well, of course, the winner of the election might have been someone else. The actual winner, had the course of the campaign been different, might have been the loser, and someone else the winner; or there might have been no election at all. So such terms as "the winner" and "the loser" don't designate the same objects in all possible worlds. On the other hand, the term "Nixon" is just a name of this man.' [Presumably the quote from the imagined "first" man should have ended one sentence ago, but this is how it is in the text. -TH] When you ask whether it is necessary or contingent that Nixon won the election, you are asking the intuitive question whether in some counterfactual situation, this man would in fact have lost the election. If someone thinks that the notion of a necessary or contingent property (forget whether there are any nontrivial necessary properties [and consider] just the meaningfulness of the notion) is a philosopher's notion with no intuitive content, he is wrong.

I do not want to be dogmatic about this, but I suspect that there may be a bit of a bait-and-switch going on here. Certainly, it seems everyday and intuitive for someone to point at Nixon and say 'That's the guy who might have lost'. But then what this 'first man' says in response to the 'unintuitive man' (the philosopher), is beginning to sound pretty philosophical itself, albeit sounder. It is true that what he says, especially if you're trained in philosophy, seems intuitively compelling. But I think it's quite arguably out of character for the first man.

One way of making good on this suspicion is to reflect that forms like 'could have' and 'might have' do not just signal talk about counterfactual scenarios and counterfactual possibility. They also commonly find a retrospective epistemic modal use. And it seems to me that this is the most natural way to interpret the everyday, non-philosophical remark of the 'first man' above, 'That's the guy who might have lost'. To say that Nixon might have lost, on this suggestion, means something like: at some former stage, things could have gone either way – it would have been unreasonable then to be convinced that he would win.

This seems to me like a fairly everyday thing to say. The meaning Kripke intends – where what is asserted means something like (ignoring the later Finean distinction between essential and necessary properties): it's not part of Nixon's essence that he won the election – seems less so.

We can also argue along Gricean lines that the first interpretation yields something which it might actually be good to say in the sort of conversation about contemporary events Kripke has in mind. But saying this thing about – speaking loosely – Nixon's essence seems pragmatically odd; if you know that, then presumably you know something stronger from which it follows (such as that winning some election can't be an essential property of anyone), rather than making it sound as if there's something special about Nixon here. (Consider an obscure bystander around Nixon's age: it seems, from an unabashedly philosophical point of view now, implausible that it is part of this bystander's essence that he didn't go into politics, get to run for Presidential office in the election in question, and lose. So it seems you could say of that guy too that he might have lost the election, in the sense in which Kripke has in mind.)

So, I find Kripke's story about the first man and the unintuitive, philosophical man unconvincing: if the first man were really not a philosopher, I'm inclined to think that his intuitive-sounding utterance of 'That's the guy who might have lost' is far more plausibly interpreted along epistemic lines. This is somewhat ironic, given Kripke's seminal insistence on carefully distinguishing epistemic modality and a priority on the one hand from subjunctive modality on the other.

We can get a better idea of how it might have happened by recalling the grammatical devices Kripke uses to isolate subjunctive modality: what could be the case for all we know a priori is to be distinguished from what could have been the case (given various things we know, and not always a priori). This may lead to an overconfidence in the subjunctive mood (or whatever you want to call it) as a signal of subjunctive modality proper, a signal of the thing Kripke isolated.

Still, this criticism doesn't imply that there is nothing in what Kripke says in this influential passage. Two things can be gleaned from the passage which do militate in favour of his main conclusion, which is that the notion of necessary and contingent properties makes sense.

One is a kind of argument from analogy: even when you interpret the first man's initial, everyday-sounding utterance along more appropriate, epistemic lines, it is clear that what is under discussion is not a statement: that is, de re epistemic modality makes sense. (For a recent study of that topic cf. Seth Yalcin's work.) And so, putting this consideration together with Kripke's compelling isolation of a concept of necessity applying to propositions which is distinct (intensionally and extensionally) from those of a priority and analyticity, we might naturally expect de re modal constructions where the modality is of this broad sort, having to do with alternative ways the world could have been in some non-epistemic sense, to be possible too.

Another is a direct philosophical appeal to our intelligence: forget guys on the street, forget questions about what they may or may not say without thereby becoming philosophers, and just think about it. What the first man is made to say in response to the unintuitive man, even though it just sounds like Kripke doing philosophy, seems awfully compelling. To quote it again: 'the actual winner, had the course of the campaign been different, might have been the loser, and someone else the winner; or there might have been no election at all. So such terms as "the winner" and "the loser" don't designate the same objects in all possible worlds'.

The situation, as I see it, is something like this: Kripke has clarified and isolated notions of necessity, contingency etc., which in the first instance apply to propositions and perhaps states of affairs. Now, by analogy with other expressions in our language, we are led to consider forms like 'a is necessarily F' and 'There is an x which is necessarily F' (or 'There is an x such that it is necessary that x is F'), where we have a vague idea that the terms 'necessarily' and 'necessary' here are, in some way, to express this same notion, which we know in the first instance in application to specific propositions. Consider the syntax of quantified modal logic, where modal operators are combined with first-order logic, in advance of any definite understanding of what these formulas are to mean.

Philosophers often behave like little children who scribble some marks on a piece of paper at random and then ask the grown-up "What's that?" — It happened like this: the grown-up had drawn pictures for the child several times and said "this is a man," "this is a house," etc. And then the child makes some marks too and asks: what's this then? C&V 17e

Our problem is, in a way, similar to that of making a game which is like an existing game, but different in some respects – but where the required similarities and differences are not completely spelt out (and how could they be, without thereby completing the task already?). For example, chess for three players, or with no queens.

In the present case, the task draws us in, since we feel we can already make some dim sense of these constructions. The question of whether this can be spelt out clearly, and the spelling out of it should this be possible, is of logico-philosophical interest. Furthermore, the issue is connected in many people's minds with difficult philosophical topics – with Aristotelian essentialism, with metaphysics, and with confused issues to do with whether modality is 'located' or 'grounded' in language and thought, or in other things.

Accordingly, in the next post in this series I will take up the challenge of de re modality, trying to adapt my account of necessity as an attribute of propositions so that it can be applied to de re modality. My main assumption in taking up this challenge is: there must be a connection here, and a tight one (e.g. not something you would have to describe using words like 'sometimes' or 'usually'), and we now have to make this clear. This will also take heat off the idea that de re modality makes no sense, but perhaps in a way which might look strange from the point of view of certain ways of thinking about analysis: the right hand sides of my analyses will in many ways be less simple, more problematic and more difficult than the left hand sides, the things to be analysed. But the problems are not the same ones as affect the left hand sides, and that is important. Roughly, I want to show that de re modal talk is not left hanging by itself, when we have a notion of necessity which applies to propositions. It may in a sense be more intelligible left as it is than when analysed along the lines I propose. But we must distinguish between the first-order intelligibility of a linguistic form on the one hand, and our philosophical conception of how that form works and what it does on the other. Connecting de re modal talk to de dicto can, I think, help a lot with the latter.

(Contrast, for example, Kit Fine's approach of taking essence as something basic – I get the sense of a wall having been erected to keep out trouble, but which also leaves us hapless and isolated. It is similar with his metametaphysical ideas: we must distinguish how things really or metaphysically are from how they are simpliciter, or something like that – and if you don't understand that, too bad: we're up against a wall. The difference, I think, is that in the first case the talk (essence talk) does make some sense, but has been walled off from things which may shed light on it in a way that can make this hard to believe, and hard to grasp, whereas in the second case, you have at most a degenerate, affect-charged sense, and the walls are merely there in a vain attempt to stop this from becoming glaringly apparent.)

De Re Modality and Quantifying In

This is the first in a series of posts about these issues, the plan for which is given below.

Followup posts

On Kripke's Intuitive Anti-Quinean Defence of De Re Modality

Toward an Account of De Re Modal Ascriptions

An Interpretation of Quantified Modal Logic Formulae

My account of subjunctive necessity treats subjunctive necessity, in the first instance, as an attribute of propositions. That is, it is in the first instance an account of de dicto subjunctive necessity, in the sense that it applies to attributions of necessity and other definable modal properties to propositions (dicta).

As it stands, this account does not apply to propositions which say, of some object, that it necessarily has some property. For example, 'John is necessarily not a number'. That is, the account does not deal with de re subjunctive necessity (assuming such a thing is to be recognized at all).

Now, 'John is necessarily not a number' may look like just another way of saying '“John is not a number” is necessary'. Of course, nothing is stopping us stipulating that it is to be read that way. But furthermore, it might seem to already, naturally, say something equivalent to that. Or it might not. This issue will be seen below to turn on the issue of whether extensionally identical atomic propositions can differ in counterfactual invariance, and in turn modal, status – or more strictly speaking, it will be seen to turn on that given a certain natural approach to the interpretation of de re modal ascriptions.

Unlike '”John is not a number” is necessary', which refers to a proposition and predicates necessity of it, 'John is necessarily not a number' refers to John, and seems to be open to quantification in a way that the de dicto attribution is not: we can seemingly infer from it that something is necessarily not a number, whereas existential generalization on the de dicto attribution yields only 'Something is necessary'. This suggests that de re modal attributions like 'John is necessarily not a number', at least on one natural reading, do not have corresponding de dicto attributions which say exactly the same thing (even if they are equivalent in some sense). It also raises the issue of the interpretation of quantification into modal contexts.

I will begin in this post with some further consideration of what the problems of de re modality and quantifying in amount to. 

In the next post in the series, I will discuss Kripke's criticism in Naming and Necessity of Quine's attempts to make genuine de re modal attributions look bizarre or unintelligible, including the discussion of Nixon, where Kripke argues that de re modal attributions make good intuitive sense.

In the next post after that, I will go in search of an account of de re modal attribution given in terms of de dicto modality, eventually lighting on one, but leaving certain complications undiscussed for the time being.

In the next post after that, I will address the problem of quantification into modal contexts by giving an interpretation of the formulae of quantified modal logic (in the form of a method of translation into natural language).

The Nature of the Problem of De Re Modality

Here is Kripke introducing the problem of de re modality in Naming and Necessity (first lecture):

There is one more question I want to go into in a preliminary way. Some philosophers have distinguished between essentialism, the belief in modality de re, and a mere advocacy of necessity, the belief in modality de dicto. Now, some people say: Let's give you the concept of necessity. A much worse thing, something creating great additional problems, is whether we can say of any particular that it has necessary or contingent properties, even make the distinction between necessary and contingent properties. Look, it's only a statement or a state of affairs that can be either necessary or contingent! Whether a particular necessarily or contingently has a certain property depends on the way it's described. This is perhaps closely related to the view that the way we refer to particular things is by a description.

It is important to separate three parts of what Kripke says 'some people say' here:

1. Given an understanding of de dicto necessity, the issue of de re modal attribution remains, and creates additional problems.
2. It's only a statement or state of affairs that can be necessary or contingent.
3. Whether a particular necessarily or contingently has a certain property depends on the way it is described.

I fully endorse (1), as the existence of this section would suggest. But that does not mean I endorse (2) or (3), both of which are curious and not altogether clear. I do not want to be overly pedantic about something which was said, in a fairly preliminary way, in a lecture delivered without notes, but separating these things and considering what (2) and (3) might mean will help us get clearer about the issue of de re modality. It will also help when we consider, in the next post, Kripke's intuitive defence of de re modality (which he gives right after the above quoted passage).

(2) needs finessing if it is not to be a trivial point of language. Someone – say, an Aristotelian essentialist, or Kit Fine – can hold that de re modal attribution makes perfect sense, and fully reject any (3)-like suggestions that the truth of these attributions is somehow description-dependent, and still agree with (2) as stated. They are not saying that an object (one which isn't a statement) can 'be necessary or contingent', but that it can have properties and stand in relations necessarily or contingently.

The real suggestion behind (2), I suggest, is that the notions of necessity and contingency – the notions of subjunctive or metaphysical modality clearly isolated by Kripke – only apply to statements (propositions) or states of affairs. And 'apply' here is understood in such a way that these notions are not automatically precluded from appearing in some other way than in predications of the form 'x is necessary', for example adverbially ('x is necessarily F').

(2), so understood, is not something I want to endorse. While I accept that de re modal attribution poses difficulties over and above de dicto, I think it may be possible to meet these difficulties. However, the meeting of these difficulties will be attempted here by accounting for de re modal attributions (and quantification into modal contexts) in terms of de dicto attributions. (But that doesn't mean there is no other way – I am giving an account, not the account.)

There is something potentially misleading about this talk of difficulties which may perhaps be met (rather than just cleared away, for instance) – as though there is some reason for us to hope that they may be. But that is not how I see the matter. This has to do with my doubts about whether there is any pre-existing intuitive understanding of de re modal attribution and quantifying-in, which I will elaborate in the next post.

So much for (2). What about (3): 'Whether a particular necessarily or contingently has a certain property depends on the way it's described'? This is very curious in a way. Far from being part and parcel of some attitude one might have on these questions consonant with (1) and (2), (3) seems incompatible with what we understood (2) to be getting at; if the relevant modal notions only apply to propositions or states of affairs, then, it would seem, we cannot speak of particulars necessarily or contingently having a certain property, and so we cannot say that their doing so depends on anything.

There is perhaps a way of interpreting what some skeptic about de re modality might mean by this, but there are also good reasons for them not to say it (not least of all that it is highly ambiguous and confusing).

There suggests that there is a danger that (3) is playing a straw man role, or a more subtle bait-and-switch role, in Kripke's influential arguments for the intuitive intelligibility of de re subjunctive modal attributions: trading on a charitable interpretation to make it a plausible attribution to philosophers (the bait), and then switching to an interpretation on which it couldn't possibly be right or even coherent (the straw man).

In light of this, I will now go into (3) at some length. I will do my best to make it easy to keep track of the argument, and its place in the bigger picture.

Something someone could say while maintaining (2) (as we have understood it) is this: the only clear, philosophically hygienic thing it could mean to say 'Nine is necessarily odd' is '”Nine is odd” is necessary', and all it could mean to say that 'The number of planets is necessarily odd' is '”The number of planets is odd” is necessary'. (Note however that I will not be advancing this view.)

Now, such a person would then face the issue: where does that leave the question of whether the referent of 'nine' and 'the number of planets', that particular number, possesses the property of oddness necessarily or contingently? What, if anything, does that mean?

It seems to me that the most consistent course for this person would be to say: this question just amounts to whether the proposition:

'The referent of “nine” and “the number of planets”, that particular number, possesses the property of oddness'

is necessary or contingent. Either that, or it has no clear meaning.

But Kripke has this person say that this question somehow depends on how we describe that particular number. But note carefully that this question, interpreted in the way I suggested was most consistent for the hypothetical person we are imagining, concerns a particular proposition. If someone asks something, and what their question really asks is whether some particular proposition is necessary or contingent, you can't respond by saying 'Well, that depends on how you describe …'. The describing has already taken place, in the proposition in question, and it is now time to proceed to actually answering the question.

Another thing this person could say which is similar to (3), but clearer, is this: that the truth of propositions which, superficially, designate an object somehow and say that it has some property necessarily or contingently, depends on how that object gets designated. But in this case, if we say that, surely we should say that these propositions have a misleading form. We should not go along with this form and say, as a kind of explanation of it, that whether some object has a property necessarily or contingently depends on how it is described. (The most deserving meaning for this expression here may still not be deserving enough.)

This can perhaps be seen better by comparing our case with one in which we might genuinely say something like this – i.e. that whether an object is some way or other depends on how you describe it. Consider these propositions: 'The number of planets is, in the subject-term of this proposition, being described as the number of planets', 'Nine is, in the subject-term of this proposition, being described as the number of planets'. The truth of these propositions patently does depend on how the referent of the subject-term is described (or, we might say more neutrally, designated). And we can say that whether that referent, that particular number, has the property of being described in some given proposition as the number of planets depends on how it is described by that proposition. Indeed this seems like a tautology. Or consider an object which naturally, whenever it is described as red, turns red if it is not already red (i.e., irrespective of whether the description was true, it becomes true), but turns another colour if it is described as non-red. Of such an object, we could say: whether it is red or not depends on how it is described.

The modal case is plainly not like this at all. Saying that whether a particular has a property necessarily or contingently depends on how it is described is, at best, a clumsy way of saying that the truth of (what superficially look like) de re modal attributions depends on how the object in question is designated. At worst, it is a tortuously confused piece of nonsense.

Another, perhaps more Quinean, thing someone might say which is along the lines of (3) is: de re modal discourse is confused, incoherent – in part because the truth of its claims of necessary or contingent property possession for an object would have to depend on how that object is described. This isn't really clearer than saying that the truth of such claims actually does depend on how the object is described, but the unclarity is less objectionable, since it is being asserted that de re modal discourse is incoherent, and so the thing about description-dependence can be regarded as an incoherent, absurd consequence – where the whole point of bringing it in is to argue that we are not able to make real sense of it.

So, (3) itself seems in danger of being a bit of a straw man for Kripke – it has little to recommend it, and doesn't obviously belong to anyone.

So, we have separated and examined three things involved in the position of the skeptic of de re modality as characterized by Kripke. The first, that given an understanding of de dicto necessity, the issue of de re modal attribution remains, and creates additional problems, is important and endorsed by me. The second, the idea that it is only a statement of a state of affairs that can be necessary or contingent, is something which I hope to undermine in subsequent posts. The third, the idea that whether something has a property necessarily or contingently depends on how you describe it, I have tentatively suggested to be a straw man.

Stay tuned for the next post, on Kripke's intuitive anti-Quinean defence of de re modality.