Zylstra's work shows that, if we are going to try to analyze essence in terms of necessity and intrinsicality and deliver the goods on Fine's celebrated Socrates/{Socrates} example (Socrates does not belong essentially to {Socrates}, but {Socrates} essentially contains Socrates), we had better understand intrinsicality as term-relative, at least in the case of relations. That is, we can't just say that some relations are intrinsic and others are extrinsic and that's it - rather, some two-place relations are, so to speak, intrinsic on one side but extrinsic on the other.
But can we really explicate such a concept of intrinsicality? Or is this really just going to be the concept of essence which we end up explicating? If we can do the job, then we should get something that, when supplemented with necessity, yields the notion of essence. This suggests that we should be able to find contingent cases of such asymmetric intrinsicality. And so that now seems to be the big question, if we're wondering whether essence should be accounted for in terms of necessity and something else, or the other way around. (Or at least whether intrinsicality should be involved if we pursue the first strategy.)
Thinking about parts of things, where those things could nevertheless have had different parts, may be one way of looking. For instance, perhaps 'My laptop contains the chip C' provides such an example. If the chip is intrinsic to the laptop, then we can say that the laptop intrinsically contains the chip, but that the chip is not intrinsically inside the laptop. But the laptop could have had another chip or perhaps no chip in that place, so it does not contain the chip necessarily.
I wonder how solid and convincing this sort of example is, though, and I wonder if there are other sorts available.
Showing posts with label essence. Show all posts
Showing posts with label essence. Show all posts
Monday, 11 December 2017
Saturday, 9 December 2017
Sticking Up for 'Essence = Necessity + Intrinsicality' in the Face of Zylstra's Argument
Followup: Contingent Examples of Term-Relative Intrinsicality?
UPDATE 11/12/2017: The more I think about Zylstra's argument, the more I think I've been overly critical, and not sufficiently open to changing my views. I have moderated some of the worst excesses by editing the below a little bit. I continue to think about the lessons which we should draw from Zylstra's argument, and may come back to the matter in a future post. One thing which has just begun to bother me is that, if we try to take the lesson to show that we'd better make intrinsicality term-relative when it comes to relations, is that the stuff which comes to mind when trying to explicate the resulting notion of "intrinsicality" - I found myself thinking things like 'x bears R to y intrinsically if part of what it is to be x is to be R-related to y' - just ends up sounding like a characterisation of essence; the necessity-ish bit seems to come of its own accord. So maybe there are grounds here for serious doubt about the overall E = N + I approach to essence.
An interesting new paper by Justin Zylstra attempts to cast doubt on the project of analyzing essence in terms of necessity plus something else. As Fine famously pointed out, it is plausible that the set {Soctrates} essentially contains Socrates but that Socrates does not essentially belong to {Socrates}. Being a member of that set does not have enough to do with Socrates as he is in himself, we might say, to count as an essential property of Socrates. Nevertheless, Socrates necessarily belongs to {Socrates}; in no possible world do we find Socrates but not the set containing him.
So essential properties aren't just the necessarily-possessed properties, or so it seems. Fine makes the further proposal that we give up trying to analyze essence in terms of necessity and instead go the other way around. But others have accepted that the essential properties aren't just the necessarily-possessed ones, but sought to supplement the analysis of essence in terms of necessity. I am sympathetic to this approach, and particularly to the idea - prominently defended by Denby - that essence = necessity + intrinsicality. Let's call this the E = N + I approach.
(Denby, it is important to note, favours an account of intrinsicality on which the property of containing Soctrates is not intrinsic, but extrinsic, to {Socrates}. This leads him to push back against the prima facie plausible Finean thesis that containing Socrates is essential to {Socrates}. In my view, this was a mistake on Denby's part, and we should instead try to understand 'intrinsic' in such a way that it does come out true that the property of containing Socrates is intrinsic to {Socrates}.)
You can imagine my interest in Zylstra's paper, which is supposed to cast serious doubt on this approach. Here I want to explain why I think it does no such thing. I won't reconstruct Zylstra's detailed and technically sophisticated argument in full. To fully assess what I'm saying, in particular to verify that I speak the truth about what Zylstra does in his paper, you'd have to look at the paper.
To understand why Zylstra's argument goes as wrong as I think it does, it helps to note that he aims his criticisms more generally at any attempt to supplement a necessity-based analysis of essence so that it delivers the goods on Fine's celebrated examples, provided it is of a certain general form. He intends this form to cover the E = N + I approach. The trouble is, it is very easy to formulate a version of that approach which does not take general form in question.
The central problem with Zylstra's handling of the E = N + I approach is that he considers only Denby's version, which proceeds as if the relevant notion of intrinsicality can be treated as a sentential operator. It is intrinsic that p. But no friend of the E = N + I approach should want to do that.
The whole point of bringing in intrinsicality, I would have thought, is that it is plausibly intrinsic to {Socrates} that it contains Socrates, but not intrinsic to Socrates that he is contained by {Socrates}. But if we represent our idea of intrinsicality as a sentential operator, all we can say is:
It is intrinsic that Socrates is a member of {Socrates}.
or
It is intrinsic that {Socrates} contains Socrates.
or whatever.
Now, this doesn't really even make sense without explanation, but putting that aside, and assuming that such claims will either be true or be false, Zylstra is able to show that an analysis of essence in terms of necessity and this weird intrinsicality sentential operator can't deliver the goods.
But so what? This just shows that the relevant notion of intrinsicality can't be captured as a sentential operator! Indeed, in his last section, entitled 'A glimmer of hope', Zylstra suggests that instead of supplementing a necessity-based analysis of essence with a notion that can be expressed as a sentential operator, we might be able to use an operator that takes a sentence and a noun phrase and produces a sentence:
I conclude that Zylstra's new paper poses no real threat at all to the E = N + I approach to understanding essence. Rather, the lesson that the friend of the E = N + I approach should draw is that intrinsicality is not to be expressed using a monadic sentential operator. Nor will it do to think of it, in general, as something which relations possess or fail to possess tout court. A relation like the set-membership relation is, so to speak, extrinsic on Socrates’s end but intrinsic on {Socrates}’s end.
In a way, this is really just a criticism about emphasis. Rather than presenting his argument as if it were a serious threat to the E = N + I approach, and then offering a 'glimmer of hope', Zylstra should, in my view, have just presented his argument as showing something instructive about how a friend of the E = N + I should, and should not, try to formulate it.
References
Denby, David A. (2014). Essence and Intrinsicality. In Robert Francescotti (ed.), Companion to Intrinsic Properties. De Gruyter. pp. 87-109.Author-archived version currently available open-access at http://philpapers.org/rec/DENIAE-3.
Fine, Kit (1994). Essence and modality. Philosophical Perspectives 8:1-16.
Zylstra, Justin (forthcoming). Essence, necessity, and definition. Philosophical Studies:1-12. Currently available open-access at the author's Academia.edu page, the URL of which is currently http://vermont.academia.edu/JustinZylstra.
UPDATE 11/12/2017: The more I think about Zylstra's argument, the more I think I've been overly critical, and not sufficiently open to changing my views. I have moderated some of the worst excesses by editing the below a little bit. I continue to think about the lessons which we should draw from Zylstra's argument, and may come back to the matter in a future post. One thing which has just begun to bother me is that, if we try to take the lesson to show that we'd better make intrinsicality term-relative when it comes to relations, is that the stuff which comes to mind when trying to explicate the resulting notion of "intrinsicality" - I found myself thinking things like 'x bears R to y intrinsically if part of what it is to be x is to be R-related to y' - just ends up sounding like a characterisation of essence; the necessity-ish bit seems to come of its own accord. So maybe there are grounds here for serious doubt about the overall E = N + I approach to essence.
An interesting new paper by Justin Zylstra attempts to cast doubt on the project of analyzing essence in terms of necessity plus something else. As Fine famously pointed out, it is plausible that the set {Soctrates} essentially contains Socrates but that Socrates does not essentially belong to {Socrates}. Being a member of that set does not have enough to do with Socrates as he is in himself, we might say, to count as an essential property of Socrates. Nevertheless, Socrates necessarily belongs to {Socrates}; in no possible world do we find Socrates but not the set containing him.
So essential properties aren't just the necessarily-possessed properties, or so it seems. Fine makes the further proposal that we give up trying to analyze essence in terms of necessity and instead go the other way around. But others have accepted that the essential properties aren't just the necessarily-possessed ones, but sought to supplement the analysis of essence in terms of necessity. I am sympathetic to this approach, and particularly to the idea - prominently defended by Denby - that essence = necessity + intrinsicality. Let's call this the E = N + I approach.
(Denby, it is important to note, favours an account of intrinsicality on which the property of containing Soctrates is not intrinsic, but extrinsic, to {Socrates}. This leads him to push back against the prima facie plausible Finean thesis that containing Socrates is essential to {Socrates}. In my view, this was a mistake on Denby's part, and we should instead try to understand 'intrinsic' in such a way that it does come out true that the property of containing Socrates is intrinsic to {Socrates}.)
You can imagine my interest in Zylstra's paper, which is supposed to cast serious doubt on this approach. Here I want to explain why I think it does no such thing. I won't reconstruct Zylstra's detailed and technically sophisticated argument in full. To fully assess what I'm saying, in particular to verify that I speak the truth about what Zylstra does in his paper, you'd have to look at the paper.
To understand why Zylstra's argument goes as wrong as I think it does, it helps to note that he aims his criticisms more generally at any attempt to supplement a necessity-based analysis of essence so that it delivers the goods on Fine's celebrated examples, provided it is of a certain general form. He intends this form to cover the E = N + I approach. The trouble is, it is very easy to formulate a version of that approach which does not take general form in question.
The central problem with Zylstra's handling of the E = N + I approach is that he considers only Denby's version, which proceeds as if the relevant notion of intrinsicality can be treated as a sentential operator. It is intrinsic that p. But no friend of the E = N + I approach should want to do that.
The whole point of bringing in intrinsicality, I would have thought, is that it is plausibly intrinsic to {Socrates} that it contains Socrates, but not intrinsic to Socrates that he is contained by {Socrates}. But if we represent our idea of intrinsicality as a sentential operator, all we can say is:
It is intrinsic that Socrates is a member of {Socrates}.
or
It is intrinsic that {Socrates} contains Socrates.
or whatever.
Now, this doesn't really even make sense without explanation, but putting that aside, and assuming that such claims will either be true or be false, Zylstra is able to show that an analysis of essence in terms of necessity and this weird intrinsicality sentential operator can't deliver the goods.
But so what? This just shows that the relevant notion of intrinsicality can't be captured as a sentential operator! Indeed, in his last section, entitled 'A glimmer of hope', Zylstra suggests that instead of supplementing a necessity-based analysis of essence with a notion that can be expressed as a sentential operator, we might be able to use an operator that takes a sentence and a noun phrase and produces a sentence:
Recall that the Supplemented Necessity Analysis involved an existentially bound variable O that functions syntactically as a monadic sentential operator. But nothing prohibits us from introducing a further type of variable Xt that functions syntactically as a binary term-sentence operator. (Zylstra (forthcoming), Section 5.)Considering as he is all analyses of the relevant, sentential-operator form, rather than just the weird instrinsicality-as-a-sentential-operator instance, he never comes back to consider that maybe the E = N + I approach should be pursued with a binary term-sentence operator. (Another reason for Zylstra's neglecting to do this, perhaps, is that it is Denby's version of the approach that Zylstra considers, and that version - ill-advisedly, as I suggested in a parenthesis near the beginning of this post - fails to deliver the intuitive Finean verdict that containing Socrates is essential to {Socrates}.) But really, that's just the natural view when you think about this. The weird sentential-operator form is just an especially bad version of the E = N + I approach which no one sympathetic to that approach should allow.
I conclude that Zylstra's new paper poses no real threat at all to the E = N + I approach to understanding essence. Rather, the lesson that the friend of the E = N + I approach should draw is that intrinsicality is not to be expressed using a monadic sentential operator. Nor will it do to think of it, in general, as something which relations possess or fail to possess tout court. A relation like the set-membership relation is, so to speak, extrinsic on Socrates’s end but intrinsic on {Socrates}’s end.
In a way, this is really just a criticism about emphasis. Rather than presenting his argument as if it were a serious threat to the E = N + I approach, and then offering a 'glimmer of hope', Zylstra should, in my view, have just presented his argument as showing something instructive about how a friend of the E = N + I should, and should not, try to formulate it.
References
Denby, David A. (2014). Essence and Intrinsicality. In Robert Francescotti (ed.), Companion to Intrinsic Properties. De Gruyter. pp. 87-109.Author-archived version currently available open-access at http://philpapers.org/rec/DENIAE-3.
Fine, Kit (1994). Essence and modality. Philosophical Perspectives 8:1-16.
Zylstra, Justin (forthcoming). Essence, necessity, and definition. Philosophical Studies:1-12. Currently available open-access at the author's Academia.edu page, the URL of which is currently http://vermont.academia.edu/JustinZylstra.
Thursday, 21 September 2017
A Dialogue on Mathematical Propositions
I wrote the following dialogue as an antidote to the dogmatism I felt myself falling into when trying to write a paper about a priori propositions. The characters A and B are present-day analytic philosophers. Roughly, A represents the part of me which wanted to write the paper I was working on, and B represents the part which made trouble for the project.
A: I've got a view about a priori propositions I'd like to discuss with you. I don't think you're going to like it.
B: Intriguing! I'll try to put up a good fight.
A: Good. Still, you won't just defend the opposite view no matter what, will you? I'm certainly going into this ready to modify my view, if not to completely relinquish it.
B: Sure. No, I won't just set myself up as an opponent debater. Let's try to give each other as much ground as our philosophical consciences allow, and see if we can agree on some things.
A: OK, great. So, here's the view: what is special about a priori propositions, which enables them to be known independently of experience, is that they have their truth values essentially. They do not reach outside themselves to get their truth values, but carry them within as part of their nature.
B: OK. Interesting use of the notion of essence. I'm used to associating views which tie a priori propositions' truth or falsity closely to meaning with more deflationary attitudes, not with philosophers who make positive use of metaphysical notions like that of essence.
A: Exactly. That's one of the exciting things about my view, I think. It brings out the fact that that sort of tight connection between meaning and truth value can be posited without embracing any problematic conventionalist or deflationary attitudes about essence or meaning.
B: I think you have a point there. A meaning-based view of a priori truth doesn't need to be deflationary or conventionalist. Still, I think it's wrong. Your view overlooks the fact that a priori propositions, or many of them at least, are about something, and we often have to inquire into that something to know them. When mathematicians discover new truths, they don't sit and try to get insight into the essences of the propositions they are wondering about. They try to get insight into the things that the propositions are about, like numbers, or sets, or graphs.
A: That is true, but does not affect what I am saying. Look, the a priori truths of mathematics either have their truth essentially, or accidentally. And if they really had to reach outside themselves for their truth, then they would only be true accidentally. And in that case it should be possible to depict those very propositions reaching out but getting the opposite truth value. But you can't even begin to imagine a situation where someone has expressed what is actually an a priori truth, but which in that situation is a false proposition. And it's not like the case of propositions whose instantiation vouchsafes their truth, like 'Language exists'. Instead, their truth is of their very essence. Now, we all agree that an a priori truth can have its actual truth value, but what would it look like for it to have the other one? The onus is on you to flesh out an answer here, and it seems to me that nothing you could say on this point would satisfy.
B: I do not dispute that I couldn't really flesh out a description of a situation where the same a priori proposition gets the opposite truth value, but I don't think I have to be able to. I can still maintain that these a priori truths do not have their truth off their own bat, due to meaning alone. The source of their truth lies in what they are about. However, unlike with empirical truths, what they are about is rigid and unmoving - necessarily the way it is. So it is no real objection that I cannot depict a situation in which their source of truth or falsity yields them a different truth value, since that is just because their source is necessarily the way it is. That doesn't make their source any less of a source.
A: So you are saying that the meanings of these a priori propositions are out there in a rigid, unmoving space of possible meanings, and that they get their truth or falsity from an equally rigid, unmoving space of mathematical objects. But since all this stuff is rigid, unmoving, and necessarily the way it is, it seems to me that your talk of sourcing is just empty talk. The very idea of sourcing seems dubious here. Granted, you may seem to have an advantage in the fact that our knowledge of these truths must have some source. But the sourcing you are talking about is all going on in Plato's Heaven. It does nothing to explain how we get the knowledge. So you might as well not posit it.
B: You are trying to cast aspersions on my talk of sourcing, but I want to suggest that what you are saying is, on examination, more dubious than what I am saying. You are no nominalist, no denier of the independent existence of mathematical objects. Right?
A: Sure. I mean, I think when people object to claims like 'Mathematical objects exist independently', they are perhaps bothered by something that really should bother them. But I do think that understood properly, such claims do make a sound and correct point.
B: OK, fine. And so, it seems to me that if you are saying that a priori truths about these objects have their truth essentially and off their own bat, you are positing a kind of harmony between the meanings and what they carry inside them on the one hand, and the mathematical objects on the other. But this harmony seems dubious. It cries out for explanation. Why should it exist? Coming around to the proper view, that the propositions are about the mathematical objects, and therefore the mathematical objects' being the way they are is the source of these propositions' truth values, the difficulty disappears.
A: I don't see how the harmony you complain about is particularly strange or objectionable. Don't parts of mathematics mirror and reflect each other in weird and wonderful ways? Since we accept that, it seems that it's not particularly costly to acknowledge that the meanings of mathematical truths are also part of this crystalline structure. Crucially, it seems less dubious than your sourcing talk - more of a piece with things we already acknowledge. And it seems to me that your view overdoes the analogy between mathematical and empirical truths, leading to confusion.
B: Do you see any positive value in your view? Or is it all about stopping that over-assimilation?
A: Well, perhaps my view helps with the problem of how we get mathematical knowledge. It seems to me an easier problem to say how we get in touch with meanings, than to say how we get in touch with things like numbers and sets. Our talk and thought instantiates meanings, I want to say, even if the meanings themselves are abstract, like numbers and sets.
B: But there are also "instantiation relationships", arguably more straightforward, between, say, numbers and piles of apples.
A: Hmm. Well, I don't know, I'll have to think more about that - but perhaps stopping the over-assimilation is enough. What value do you see in your view, anyway?
B: When I think about what is fundamentally wrong with your view, apart from my complaints about it being mysterious and ill-motivated, it seems to me that, in your effort to block the over-assimilation of mathematical and empirical propositions, you bring about another over-assimilation. Namely, between mathematical propositions which can be hard to discover the truth about, and what you might call paradigmatically analytic propositions - propositions where it really does seem that the way to know the truth about them is just to have insight into their meanings. Those propositions may perhaps be said to have their truth values essentially, since they don't seem to say anything substantial about anything, whether their subject matter be empirical or mathematical. And your view wrongly depicts substantial mathematical propositions as being like them. My view has the virtue of avoiding that over-assimilation. It may be that the over-assimilation you worry about is also a problem, but it should be combated in a different way.
A: Well, I am - or at least have been, up to having this conversation - inclined to think the corresponding thing about the over-assimilation that you are worried about. Positing a mysterious sourcing relationship between mathematical propositions and mathematical objects seems like a crude expedient. But I must acknowledge that the over-assimilation that bothers you is also a problem.
B: OK. So, it seems we can both agree that our respective views may have some power to prevent a certain over-assimilation, a different one in each case. And perhaps we can also agree that each of our respective views, when adopted, may increase the danger of falling into the over-assimilation targeted by the opposite view.
A: Hmm. I suppose we can both agree about that.
B: Now, isn't this worrying? I mean, where does it leave us? We have a question: Do mathematical propositions have their truth values essentially, intrinsically, inherently, off their own bat - or do they not? And it seems like our opposing answers have opposing strengths and opposing weaknesses. I feel the weakness of your view much more acutely, but I can't deny that your feeling that my view might be a somewhat crude expedient makes some sense as well.
A: I'm glad you're staying true to your intention of not just defending your view tooth and nail. Now it's starting to look like both our views have some merit, but that these merits crowd each other out. I am beginning to think that perhaps both our views can be said to suffer from crudeness on that score. We are both inclined to use a certain picture to ward off the over-assimilation which has most bothered us. And the pictures conflict, or at least seem to. Now, could it be that if our views were made clearer, these pictures could be seen to apply in different ways, so that there is no inconsistency in using one in its way, and the other in its way? The task then would be to clarify the difference between these two ways of using what appear to be conflicting pictures.
B: That is sounding more and more reasonable to me as a diagnosis of what's going on in this case. How Wittgensteinian! And to be honest, the Wittgensteinian-ness of this view worries me a bit, since this sort of approach, to this sort of problem, seems like it will turn many people off right away. If we are to try to resolve our difficulties this way, and if we expect the resolution to be given a fair hearing, I suppose we will also have to be careful to defend our resolution from objections which lump it together with features of Wittgenstein's views which people don't like.
A: I agree that is a worry. And it may be even worse than you are suggesting. What if the things people don't like and have turned their back on include this very power to resolve our difficulties!
B: Well, I see what you're saying. People are invested in a certain way of doing things, and in defending views of a certain type. And those ways of doing things may come naturally, at least to people with a certain background (including us), so that one slides back into them. But I think we may just have to try to give the naysayers about this method plenty of credit, and allow that there are serious problems with the sort of resolution we're talking about now. After all, why wouldn't there be? It could be that it's very promising, and still ultimately our best hope, but that there are serious difficulties with it which, in our desire to resolve our present issue, we aren't currently alive to.
A: I suppose I'm on board with what you're saying. As exciting and powerful as this approach may seem now, we must beware of coming off as if we think there's a silver bullet, a simple solution we've already got here. And I think that comes out more clearly when we come back from talking about pictures and consider the question, framed in terms of 'essence' or 'intrinsic' or what have you. Something about the idea of pictures makes us quite willing to allow different applications. Ambiguities, if you like. But it seems as though people, ourselves included, may be inclined to take a certain attitude to words like 'essence' and 'intrinsic', such that the word analogue of the move where we say 'These pictures appear to conflict, but if you look at their application, you see it's only an apparent conflict' seems less appealing. There is a feeling that with such words that for each there is a big, important, single job that they should be doing.
B: I think you're right. But again, I think you may be overplaying people's resistance. Yes, there will be people who just get turned off at the suggestion that such words should be understood as having various quite important roles to play. But probably, with many of the sort of people you have in mind, you must admit that they are willing to countenance such things as long as you keep things relatively clear and definite. I mean, if you start banging on about how complex and multifaceted it all is with these words, then yes, that will turn people off, because it sounds defeatist. It sounds like shirking hard and maybe very interesting work. But these sorts of people - and let's face it we're among them a lot of the time when we aren't just talking but trying to write papers - are quite willing to distinguish certain senses of weighty-seeming words, using little subscripts for example. So we shouldn't be too discouraged.
A: Yes, I suppose that's right. So, we should be ready to float the idea that our different pictures each having a role to play, but that just giving the picture and saying 'That's how things are' is a bit crude until we clarify and distinguish the application of the picture in each case. And we should be ready to try to take exactly this approach when it comes to our difficulties as posed in philosophical jargon, but be on guard against defeatist or wishy-washy sounding attitudes. I confess I'm worried about the extent to which this is possible. I mean, maybe once we try, we will find that the distinctions we might want to make by putting little subscripts on words like 'essence' tend to fall apart in our hands, or that possibilities multiply very quickly. But on the other hand, I must admit we haven't seriously tried yet. And maybe there is some progress to be made in that way, even if it does give out and get confusing again in a way similar to our original disagreement. So we should keep working on this.
B: Agreed.
A: I think I'm pretty worn out for now, though. And I suspect there are further problems with your view that I haven't brought out.
B: Same here, on both counts.
A: I hope we can find what it takes to continue soon.
B: So do I.
A: I've got a view about a priori propositions I'd like to discuss with you. I don't think you're going to like it.
B: Intriguing! I'll try to put up a good fight.
A: Good. Still, you won't just defend the opposite view no matter what, will you? I'm certainly going into this ready to modify my view, if not to completely relinquish it.
B: Sure. No, I won't just set myself up as an opponent debater. Let's try to give each other as much ground as our philosophical consciences allow, and see if we can agree on some things.
A: OK, great. So, here's the view: what is special about a priori propositions, which enables them to be known independently of experience, is that they have their truth values essentially. They do not reach outside themselves to get their truth values, but carry them within as part of their nature.
B: OK. Interesting use of the notion of essence. I'm used to associating views which tie a priori propositions' truth or falsity closely to meaning with more deflationary attitudes, not with philosophers who make positive use of metaphysical notions like that of essence.
A: Exactly. That's one of the exciting things about my view, I think. It brings out the fact that that sort of tight connection between meaning and truth value can be posited without embracing any problematic conventionalist or deflationary attitudes about essence or meaning.
B: I think you have a point there. A meaning-based view of a priori truth doesn't need to be deflationary or conventionalist. Still, I think it's wrong. Your view overlooks the fact that a priori propositions, or many of them at least, are about something, and we often have to inquire into that something to know them. When mathematicians discover new truths, they don't sit and try to get insight into the essences of the propositions they are wondering about. They try to get insight into the things that the propositions are about, like numbers, or sets, or graphs.
A: That is true, but does not affect what I am saying. Look, the a priori truths of mathematics either have their truth essentially, or accidentally. And if they really had to reach outside themselves for their truth, then they would only be true accidentally. And in that case it should be possible to depict those very propositions reaching out but getting the opposite truth value. But you can't even begin to imagine a situation where someone has expressed what is actually an a priori truth, but which in that situation is a false proposition. And it's not like the case of propositions whose instantiation vouchsafes their truth, like 'Language exists'. Instead, their truth is of their very essence. Now, we all agree that an a priori truth can have its actual truth value, but what would it look like for it to have the other one? The onus is on you to flesh out an answer here, and it seems to me that nothing you could say on this point would satisfy.
B: I do not dispute that I couldn't really flesh out a description of a situation where the same a priori proposition gets the opposite truth value, but I don't think I have to be able to. I can still maintain that these a priori truths do not have their truth off their own bat, due to meaning alone. The source of their truth lies in what they are about. However, unlike with empirical truths, what they are about is rigid and unmoving - necessarily the way it is. So it is no real objection that I cannot depict a situation in which their source of truth or falsity yields them a different truth value, since that is just because their source is necessarily the way it is. That doesn't make their source any less of a source.
A: So you are saying that the meanings of these a priori propositions are out there in a rigid, unmoving space of possible meanings, and that they get their truth or falsity from an equally rigid, unmoving space of mathematical objects. But since all this stuff is rigid, unmoving, and necessarily the way it is, it seems to me that your talk of sourcing is just empty talk. The very idea of sourcing seems dubious here. Granted, you may seem to have an advantage in the fact that our knowledge of these truths must have some source. But the sourcing you are talking about is all going on in Plato's Heaven. It does nothing to explain how we get the knowledge. So you might as well not posit it.
B: You are trying to cast aspersions on my talk of sourcing, but I want to suggest that what you are saying is, on examination, more dubious than what I am saying. You are no nominalist, no denier of the independent existence of mathematical objects. Right?
A: Sure. I mean, I think when people object to claims like 'Mathematical objects exist independently', they are perhaps bothered by something that really should bother them. But I do think that understood properly, such claims do make a sound and correct point.
B: OK, fine. And so, it seems to me that if you are saying that a priori truths about these objects have their truth essentially and off their own bat, you are positing a kind of harmony between the meanings and what they carry inside them on the one hand, and the mathematical objects on the other. But this harmony seems dubious. It cries out for explanation. Why should it exist? Coming around to the proper view, that the propositions are about the mathematical objects, and therefore the mathematical objects' being the way they are is the source of these propositions' truth values, the difficulty disappears.
A: I don't see how the harmony you complain about is particularly strange or objectionable. Don't parts of mathematics mirror and reflect each other in weird and wonderful ways? Since we accept that, it seems that it's not particularly costly to acknowledge that the meanings of mathematical truths are also part of this crystalline structure. Crucially, it seems less dubious than your sourcing talk - more of a piece with things we already acknowledge. And it seems to me that your view overdoes the analogy between mathematical and empirical truths, leading to confusion.
B: Do you see any positive value in your view? Or is it all about stopping that over-assimilation?
A: Well, perhaps my view helps with the problem of how we get mathematical knowledge. It seems to me an easier problem to say how we get in touch with meanings, than to say how we get in touch with things like numbers and sets. Our talk and thought instantiates meanings, I want to say, even if the meanings themselves are abstract, like numbers and sets.
B: But there are also "instantiation relationships", arguably more straightforward, between, say, numbers and piles of apples.
A: Hmm. Well, I don't know, I'll have to think more about that - but perhaps stopping the over-assimilation is enough. What value do you see in your view, anyway?
B: When I think about what is fundamentally wrong with your view, apart from my complaints about it being mysterious and ill-motivated, it seems to me that, in your effort to block the over-assimilation of mathematical and empirical propositions, you bring about another over-assimilation. Namely, between mathematical propositions which can be hard to discover the truth about, and what you might call paradigmatically analytic propositions - propositions where it really does seem that the way to know the truth about them is just to have insight into their meanings. Those propositions may perhaps be said to have their truth values essentially, since they don't seem to say anything substantial about anything, whether their subject matter be empirical or mathematical. And your view wrongly depicts substantial mathematical propositions as being like them. My view has the virtue of avoiding that over-assimilation. It may be that the over-assimilation you worry about is also a problem, but it should be combated in a different way.
A: Well, I am - or at least have been, up to having this conversation - inclined to think the corresponding thing about the over-assimilation that you are worried about. Positing a mysterious sourcing relationship between mathematical propositions and mathematical objects seems like a crude expedient. But I must acknowledge that the over-assimilation that bothers you is also a problem.
B: OK. So, it seems we can both agree that our respective views may have some power to prevent a certain over-assimilation, a different one in each case. And perhaps we can also agree that each of our respective views, when adopted, may increase the danger of falling into the over-assimilation targeted by the opposite view.
A: Hmm. I suppose we can both agree about that.
B: Now, isn't this worrying? I mean, where does it leave us? We have a question: Do mathematical propositions have their truth values essentially, intrinsically, inherently, off their own bat - or do they not? And it seems like our opposing answers have opposing strengths and opposing weaknesses. I feel the weakness of your view much more acutely, but I can't deny that your feeling that my view might be a somewhat crude expedient makes some sense as well.
A: I'm glad you're staying true to your intention of not just defending your view tooth and nail. Now it's starting to look like both our views have some merit, but that these merits crowd each other out. I am beginning to think that perhaps both our views can be said to suffer from crudeness on that score. We are both inclined to use a certain picture to ward off the over-assimilation which has most bothered us. And the pictures conflict, or at least seem to. Now, could it be that if our views were made clearer, these pictures could be seen to apply in different ways, so that there is no inconsistency in using one in its way, and the other in its way? The task then would be to clarify the difference between these two ways of using what appear to be conflicting pictures.
B: That is sounding more and more reasonable to me as a diagnosis of what's going on in this case. How Wittgensteinian! And to be honest, the Wittgensteinian-ness of this view worries me a bit, since this sort of approach, to this sort of problem, seems like it will turn many people off right away. If we are to try to resolve our difficulties this way, and if we expect the resolution to be given a fair hearing, I suppose we will also have to be careful to defend our resolution from objections which lump it together with features of Wittgenstein's views which people don't like.
A: I agree that is a worry. And it may be even worse than you are suggesting. What if the things people don't like and have turned their back on include this very power to resolve our difficulties!
B: Well, I see what you're saying. People are invested in a certain way of doing things, and in defending views of a certain type. And those ways of doing things may come naturally, at least to people with a certain background (including us), so that one slides back into them. But I think we may just have to try to give the naysayers about this method plenty of credit, and allow that there are serious problems with the sort of resolution we're talking about now. After all, why wouldn't there be? It could be that it's very promising, and still ultimately our best hope, but that there are serious difficulties with it which, in our desire to resolve our present issue, we aren't currently alive to.
A: I suppose I'm on board with what you're saying. As exciting and powerful as this approach may seem now, we must beware of coming off as if we think there's a silver bullet, a simple solution we've already got here. And I think that comes out more clearly when we come back from talking about pictures and consider the question, framed in terms of 'essence' or 'intrinsic' or what have you. Something about the idea of pictures makes us quite willing to allow different applications. Ambiguities, if you like. But it seems as though people, ourselves included, may be inclined to take a certain attitude to words like 'essence' and 'intrinsic', such that the word analogue of the move where we say 'These pictures appear to conflict, but if you look at their application, you see it's only an apparent conflict' seems less appealing. There is a feeling that with such words that for each there is a big, important, single job that they should be doing.
B: I think you're right. But again, I think you may be overplaying people's resistance. Yes, there will be people who just get turned off at the suggestion that such words should be understood as having various quite important roles to play. But probably, with many of the sort of people you have in mind, you must admit that they are willing to countenance such things as long as you keep things relatively clear and definite. I mean, if you start banging on about how complex and multifaceted it all is with these words, then yes, that will turn people off, because it sounds defeatist. It sounds like shirking hard and maybe very interesting work. But these sorts of people - and let's face it we're among them a lot of the time when we aren't just talking but trying to write papers - are quite willing to distinguish certain senses of weighty-seeming words, using little subscripts for example. So we shouldn't be too discouraged.
A: Yes, I suppose that's right. So, we should be ready to float the idea that our different pictures each having a role to play, but that just giving the picture and saying 'That's how things are' is a bit crude until we clarify and distinguish the application of the picture in each case. And we should be ready to try to take exactly this approach when it comes to our difficulties as posed in philosophical jargon, but be on guard against defeatist or wishy-washy sounding attitudes. I confess I'm worried about the extent to which this is possible. I mean, maybe once we try, we will find that the distinctions we might want to make by putting little subscripts on words like 'essence' tend to fall apart in our hands, or that possibilities multiply very quickly. But on the other hand, I must admit we haven't seriously tried yet. And maybe there is some progress to be made in that way, even if it does give out and get confusing again in a way similar to our original disagreement. So we should keep working on this.
B: Agreed.
A: I think I'm pretty worn out for now, though. And I suspect there are further problems with your view that I haven't brought out.
B: Same here, on both counts.
A: I hope we can find what it takes to continue soon.
B: So do I.
Friday, 21 April 2017
Explaining the A Priori in Terms of Meaning and Essence
UPDATE (Nov 2019): A descendent of this post, 'Apriority and Essential Truth', has been published in Metaphysica.
It wasn't just the positivists who thought there was a tight connection between meaning and truth in the case of a priori propositions:
Noteworthy in this connection is that Kripke was not altogether gung ho about his severance of necessity from apriority:
Now, in Chalmers' epistemic two-dimensionalist framework, indicative necessity is itself explained in epistemic terms. But if we try for a more full-bloodedly semantic conception of it, we may get something more explanatory of the special epistemic status of a priori truths. The notion we are after is something like: a proposition is indicatively necessary iff, given its meaning, it cannot but be true. And the modality here is not supposed to be epistemic.
But what aspect of its meaning? Sometimes 'meaning' covers relationships to things out in the world, and even the things out there themselves. What we are interested in is internal meaning. Putnam's Twin Earth thought experiment - though this is not how he used it - lets us see the distinction we need here. We want to talk about meaning in the sense in which Earth/Twin Earth pairs of propositions mean the same. This can be articulated using the middle-Wittgenstein idea of the role an expression plays in the system it belongs to (see Wittgenstein (1974, Part I)).
So, what if we say that a proposition is indicatively necessary iff any proposition with its internal meaning must, in a non-epistemic sense, be true? Can indicative necessity in this sense be used to explain apriority?
Maybe not, since there are indicatively necessary truths which are indicatively necessary only because their instantiation requires their truth. Example: language exists. (Language is here understood as a spatiotemporal phenomenon.) This is indicatively necessary, because any proposition with its internal meaning must be true, if only because the very existence of that proposition requires it to be true. Its truth comes about from the preconditions for its utterance, but - you might think - not from the internal meaning itself. It is interesting to note that it is indicatively necessary, but it lacks the special character of a priori propositions whereby they, in some sense, don't place specific requirements on the world.
This situation pattern-matches with Fine's celebrated (1994) distinction between necessary and essential properties. Socrates is necessarily a member of the set {Socrates}, but that membership is not part of his essence, since it doesn't have enough to do with Socrates as he is in himself. Likewise, he is necessarily distinct from the Eiffel Tower, but this is no part of his essence. So let us throw away the ladder of indicative necessity and instead hone in on the notion of essential truth. A proposition is essentially true iff it is of its internal meaning's essence to be true (i.e. to be the internal meaning of a true proposition).
Thus, with encouragement from Gödel and Kripke, we can develop ideas from Chalmers, Putnam, Wittgenstein, and Fine, to yield:
To say that a proposition is a priori is to say that it can, in some sense, be known independent of experience. (You may need experience to get the concepts you need to understand the proposition, but you don't need any particular further experience to know that the proposition is true.) What is distinctive about these propositions which explains their being knowable in that peculiar way? It is that their internal meanings - their roles in language - are, of their very essence, the internal meanings of true propositions; any proposition with that internal meaning must be true, and not for transcendental reasons relating to the pre-conditions of the instantiation of the proposition, but as a result of that internal meaning in itself.
So we can have an account of apriority which explains it in terms of a tight connection between meaning and truth, freed of its accidental associations with conventionalist and deflationary views about meaning, modality and essence.
This is not to say that a priori propositions' truth is to be explained in a case by case way by considerations about meaning and essence. That would be to crowd out the real mathematical justifications of non-trivial mathematical truths. But explaining apriority in general in this way wards off misunderstandings which come from treating a priori truths too much like empirical truths. And that is what makes it an explanation.
References
Chalmers, David J. (1998). The tyranny of the subjunctive. (unpublished)
Fine, Kit (1994). Essence and modality. Philosophical Perspectives 8:1-16.
Kripke, Saul A. (1980). Naming and Necessity. Harvard University Press.
Putnam, Hilary (1973). Meaning and reference. Journal of Philosophy 70 (19):699-711.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig (1974). Philosophical Grammar. University of California Press.
It wasn't just the positivists who thought there was a tight connection between meaning and truth in the case of a priori propositions:
However, it seems to me that nevertheless one ingredient of this wrong theory of mathematical truth [i.e. conventionalism] is perfectly correct and really discloses the true nature of mathematics. Namely, it is correct that a mathematical proposition says nothing about the physical or psychical reality existing in space and time, because it is true already owing to the meaning of the terms occurring in it, irrespectively of the world of real things. What is wrong, however, is that the meaning of the terms (that is, the concepts they denote) is asserted to be something man-made and consisting merely in semantical conventions. (Gödel (1951/1995), p. 320.)Perhaps we should try to recover some insight from the idea, nowadays highly unfashionable within philosophy (but alive and well in the broader intellectual culture, I think), that a priori truths like those of mathematics are in some sense true owing to their meanings. Philosophers often used to express this by calling such propositions 'necessarily true', but since Kripke that sort of usage has been crowded out by another.
Noteworthy in this connection is that Kripke was not altogether gung ho about his severance of necessity from apriority:
The case of fixing the reference of ‘one meter’ is a very clear example in which someone, just because he fixed the reference in this way, can in some sense know a priori that the length of this stick is a meter without regarding it as a necessary truth. Maybe the thesis about a prioricity implying necessity can be modified. It does appear to state some insight which might be important, and true, about epistemology. In a way an example like this may seem like a trivial counterexample which is not really the point of what some people think when they think that only necessary truths can be known a priori. Well, if the thesis that all a priori truth is necessary is to be immune from this sort of counterexample, it needs to be modified in some way. [...] And I myself have no idea it should be modified or restated, or if such a modification or restatement is possible. (Kripke (1980), p. 63.)This may make it sound like the required modification would consist in somehow ruling out the problematic contingent a priori truths from the class of truths whose epistemic status is to be explained. But Chalmers' idea of the tyranny of the subjunctive suggests another route: try instead to find a different notion of necessity - indicative, as opposed to subjunctive, necessity; truth in all worlds considered as actual, rather than truth in all worlds considered as counterfactual - better suited to the explanation of apriority.
Now, in Chalmers' epistemic two-dimensionalist framework, indicative necessity is itself explained in epistemic terms. But if we try for a more full-bloodedly semantic conception of it, we may get something more explanatory of the special epistemic status of a priori truths. The notion we are after is something like: a proposition is indicatively necessary iff, given its meaning, it cannot but be true. And the modality here is not supposed to be epistemic.
But what aspect of its meaning? Sometimes 'meaning' covers relationships to things out in the world, and even the things out there themselves. What we are interested in is internal meaning. Putnam's Twin Earth thought experiment - though this is not how he used it - lets us see the distinction we need here. We want to talk about meaning in the sense in which Earth/Twin Earth pairs of propositions mean the same. This can be articulated using the middle-Wittgenstein idea of the role an expression plays in the system it belongs to (see Wittgenstein (1974, Part I)).
So, what if we say that a proposition is indicatively necessary iff any proposition with its internal meaning must, in a non-epistemic sense, be true? Can indicative necessity in this sense be used to explain apriority?
Maybe not, since there are indicatively necessary truths which are indicatively necessary only because their instantiation requires their truth. Example: language exists. (Language is here understood as a spatiotemporal phenomenon.) This is indicatively necessary, because any proposition with its internal meaning must be true, if only because the very existence of that proposition requires it to be true. Its truth comes about from the preconditions for its utterance, but - you might think - not from the internal meaning itself. It is interesting to note that it is indicatively necessary, but it lacks the special character of a priori propositions whereby they, in some sense, don't place specific requirements on the world.
This situation pattern-matches with Fine's celebrated (1994) distinction between necessary and essential properties. Socrates is necessarily a member of the set {Socrates}, but that membership is not part of his essence, since it doesn't have enough to do with Socrates as he is in himself. Likewise, he is necessarily distinct from the Eiffel Tower, but this is no part of his essence. So let us throw away the ladder of indicative necessity and instead hone in on the notion of essential truth. A proposition is essentially true iff it is of its internal meaning's essence to be true (i.e. to be the internal meaning of a true proposition).
Thus, with encouragement from Gödel and Kripke, we can develop ideas from Chalmers, Putnam, Wittgenstein, and Fine, to yield:
To say that a proposition is a priori is to say that it can, in some sense, be known independent of experience. (You may need experience to get the concepts you need to understand the proposition, but you don't need any particular further experience to know that the proposition is true.) What is distinctive about these propositions which explains their being knowable in that peculiar way? It is that their internal meanings - their roles in language - are, of their very essence, the internal meanings of true propositions; any proposition with that internal meaning must be true, and not for transcendental reasons relating to the pre-conditions of the instantiation of the proposition, but as a result of that internal meaning in itself.
So we can have an account of apriority which explains it in terms of a tight connection between meaning and truth, freed of its accidental associations with conventionalist and deflationary views about meaning, modality and essence.
This is not to say that a priori propositions' truth is to be explained in a case by case way by considerations about meaning and essence. That would be to crowd out the real mathematical justifications of non-trivial mathematical truths. But explaining apriority in general in this way wards off misunderstandings which come from treating a priori truths too much like empirical truths. And that is what makes it an explanation.
References
Chalmers, David J. (1998). The tyranny of the subjunctive. (unpublished)
Fine, Kit (1994). Essence and modality. Philosophical Perspectives 8:1-16.
Gödel, Kurt (1951/1995). Some basic theorems on the foundations of mathematics and their implications. In Solomon Feferman (ed.), Kurt Gödel, Collected Works. Oxford University Press 290-304. (Originally delivered on 26 December 1951 as the 25th annual Josiah Willard Gibbs Lecture at Brown University.)
Kripke, Saul A. (1980). Naming and Necessity. Harvard University Press.
Putnam, Hilary (1973). Meaning and reference. Journal of Philosophy 70 (19):699-711.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig (1974). Philosophical Grammar. University of California Press.
Saturday, 13 August 2011
Essence, Belief and Epistemic Modality (Part 2 of Sketch)
This is part 2 of a Sketch of a Way of Thinking about Modality. In this part we shall consider:
- Essences and the de re/de dicto distinction,
- The indefiniteness of necessity,
- Intentional contexts ("propositional attitudes"), and
- Epistemic modality.
The first topic is really the main one. What I say about the remaining topics will be very scant - a rough indication of how these issues are to be approached according to the way of thinking being sketched out here, rather than an attempt to really deal with them. (I hope to really deal with them in my book.) They fit quite naturally here, since intentional contexts come into the more substantial discussion of the first topic. If nothing else, the brief discussion here should prevent readers from thinking that I have given no consideration to such issues, or that my account of modality is straightforwardly unable to deal with them.
Three Interpretations of Modal Claims about Individuals
As a preliminary, it should be noted that epistemic modal claims are not counted in this taxonomy. Consider, to begin with, sentences of the form 'a is necessarily F'. I distinguish the following three interpretations of such statements:
(1) The contextual interpretation. The locus classicus for this interpretation is Lewis in On the Plurality of Worlds, who expresses it better than I can:
(2) The "unrestricted" interpretation. In contrast to the above, we are now beginning to enter the realm of what could more legitimately be called 'essence'1, and are looking at proper metaphysical (or subjunctive) modality. On this interpretation, something like the following holds: 'a is necessarily F' is true iff 'a is F' is satisfied by all configurations of the host system of these propositions, and the concepts involved are adequate to their objects with respect to 'a is F'. (This form of account is introduced more generally in part 1.)
Thus, in this case, we might say that the necessity, as opposed to contingent truth, of 'a is F' stems from the nature of the individual concept of a, rather than any contextual restrictions placed on our representations. Why, then, are there scare-quotes around 'unrestricted'? This is because the present way of looking at things may over-dramatize the difference between the contextual restrictions of Lewis's account, and the constitution of concepts in the relevant fine-grained sense. We might think of the nature of these concepts as being at least partly determined by more-or-less invariant restrictions of some more general apparatus. This more general apparatus can be used to understand epistemic modality (and epistemic space).
On this interpretation, to say that a is necessarily F is to say something like: according to the way I think of a - and this way is adequate - it could not have failed to be F. (This isn't meant to be a proper analysis.) But we will probably want to recognize the possibility of slightly different concepts in other systems which have a as their object, and are adequate. Thus while we might think of John in such a way that we may say, intending the present "unrestricted" interpretation, that he is necessarily F, we might recognize that other people might legitimately think of John in such a way that they may say that he is contingently F. (This could be called 'adequacy pluralism about concepts'.)
(3) The generalized "unrestricted" interpretation. Clearly, we will want an interpretation of modal claims about individuals which does not tie their truth to one particular conceptualization (namely, that embodied in the host system of the modal claim). This interpretation gives us that. On this interpretation, something like the following holds: 'a is necessarily F' is true iff all configurations of all systems containing an adequate concept of a represent a as being F. (Another, less natural interpretation would be to substitute 'at least one system' for 'all systems'. This interpretation would be natural for 'a is possibly F'.)
A Simplification
I have simplified the above by concentrating on subject terms and ignoring different construals of the role of the predicate. One might distinguish interpretations analogous to (2) and (3) above, i.e. an evaluation involving a particular F-concept in a system, versus one involving all systems with some concept of the property F. An analogous simplification will be made below in the discussion of ascriptions of intentional content.
The Indefiniteness of Necessity
The account of necessity given here, based on the notion of all configurations of a conceptual system, may give the impression that I think a sharp boundary can be drawn between necessary and contingent truths. It is important to realize that this is not the case. (I probably should have emphasized this already in part 1.)
One way of responding to this would be to try to modify our picture of modality - instead of picturing a conceptual system as being like a mechanical apparatus which can be put into a definite set of configurations, one might imagine a device with an indefinite set of configurations; one might, for example, imagine growing resistance as one manipulates the apparatus into further out configurations (i.e. further from what we think is actually the case).
This sort of response has its place, but we needn't respond like that. We can also hold on to our simpler, more definite picture, but with due regard to the indefiniteness of its application.
Either way, it is important to note that there are clear cases. Some propositions are clearly necessary, and some are clearly contingent, and the distinction between them is of fundamental importance.
The following analogies from Wittgenstein are very helpful in connection with this theme:
The De Re/De Dicto Distinction(s)
This is widely acknowledged to be a confusing topic. The pair of terms 'de re' and 'de dicto' appear to get employed in philosophy to mark several important distinctions (or sorts of distinction). Complete clarification of this will have to wait for another time, but for now I want to characterize two basic sorts of distinction for which these terms can be used:
(1) De re: Generalization (universal or existential) over dicta involving a particular object vs. De dicto: specification of a particular dictum. (Dicta here are contents, propositions - something like that.) The distinction above between the "unrestricted" and generalized "unrestricted" interpretations of modal claims about individuals is an instance of this. It echoes, at least in part, Quine's distinction between believes-notional and believes relational.
In intentional contexts (for example, belief-reports), the distinction appears in the following way. The name 'Hesperus' in a belief report like:
(A) Ralph believes that Hesperus is F.
can be read as doing two things at once. (1) specifying the object of Ralph's belief, and (2) specifying the concept (or mode of presentation) via which he has it. On such a reading, (1) could be expanded to:
(B) Ralph believes, of Hesperus, via his Hesperus-concept, that it is F.
(A similar thing could be done for the 'F'.) Some belief reports, on the other hand - purely de re belief-reports - may be read as only specifying the object. (A) read this way could be expanded to:
(C) Ralph believes, of Hesperus, via some concept(s), that it is F.
(Cases such as 'John believes that Santa Claus exists' suggest that there are also readings where the name just functions to indicate an individual concept or intension involved in the propositional attitude, i.e. does not specify any real extension.)
Substitution of co-referring terms salva veritate (i.e. without change in truth-value) will fail in modal and intentional contexts which are de dicto in this sense.
(2) De re: Involvement of a dictum featuring a rigid (or rigidified) designator vs. De dicto: Involvement of a dictum featuring a non-rigid, unrigidified designator. This distinction most clearly makes its appearance with definite descriptions.
To illustrate: as a result of these two distinctions together, a sentence like 'The winner could have been shot' - once we rule out salient epistemic readings and Lewis-style contextually restricted readings - still has three readings left:
De dicto in both senses (1) and (2): true iff the non-rigid dictum 'The winner was shot' is satisfied by at least one configuration of the host system. (In this configuration (so to speak), the winner might be someone else.)
De dicto in sense (1) and de re in sense (2): using 'The winner' to indicate an individual concept - the concept of the actual winner, that very person - i.e. as a rigidified description, and true iff that dictum is satisfied by at least one configuration of its host system.
De re in sense (1) and therefore neither de re nor de dicto in sense (2): using 'The winner' purely to indicate a particular object, and then making a claim about all dicta which are rigidly about that object and which fulfil certain conditions (in this case: saying that the object was shot, or saying that the object was shot using some particular concept of being shot). It is only on this sort of reading, I submit, that substitution of co-referring terms salva veritate will be valid.
Clarifying and separating these distinctions helps to clarify Quine's skepticism about de re modality, and Kripke's famous arguments against Quine's attitude, as well as making it clearer why this debate is so confusing. Below is a lengthy quote of an important passage of Naming and Necessity. The above discussion can help us disambiguate the ensuing talk of particulars having modal properties independently of how they are described: this may be indicating de re-ness of the second kind (involvement of an individual concept rather than a non-rigid, unrigidified designator), or the first (generalizing over concepts of a particular object, rather than fixing on a particular concept).
For the purposes of understanding metaphysical or subjunctive modality, I have been talking about conceptual systems in a fine-grained sense such that changing one's mind about an empirical identity statement involving individual concepts, for example, constitutes a change in the system itself. Since we believe that Hesperus is Phosphorus, there is no configuration of our fine-grained system which satisfies 'Hesperus is not Phosphorus'. And yet we can truly say things like 'It could turn out that Hesperus is not Phosphorus after all', and even (despite worries of Kripke's) 'It could have turned out that Hesperus was not Phosphorus'.
This is connected with the idea of 'two spaces of possible worlds' in other approaches. (Cf. Chalmers' 'The Nature of Epistemic Space'.) When we say that it could be that Hesperus isn't Phosphorus, we are not considering a configuration of our existing system in the sense we have been talking about, but are rather considering a change in our system. But in another sense, of course, making this change would constitute a reconfiguration of some "wider" system - the system relevant to epistemic modality. Making various abstractions and idealizations, we can imagine a space of possible ways things could be for all we know a priori - epistemic space. Moving from that to the space of ways things could have been involves getting rid of epistemic possibilities which are not metaphysically possible (the lesson of the necessary a posteriori), but also adding epistemic impossibilities which are metaphysically possible (the lesson of the contingent a priori), i.e. things which couldn't be the case, but could have been, such as this room being bigger than it is. (This latter thing will occupy us in part 3.)
So, we can configure our systems in the wide sense to represent ways things might be, and the way we think things are. But, speaking roughly, such a configuration of the wide system yields a system in the fine-grained sense, of ways things could have been. Sometimes, when we change our beliefs, this can be understood as simply moving to another configuration in the fine-grained system (and thus not directly changing any of our metaphysical modal judgements), whereas other times this must be regarded as involving change of the fine-grained system itself (e.g. going from believing that Hesperus is not Phosphorus to believing that it is).
(Note that I am not saying that the ways things really could be all have corresponding configurations in some system of ours, nor that the ways things really could have been all have corresponding configurations in our fine-grained system - not only may we be wrong, there will be possibilities we haven't dreamt of. Clearly much more needs saying here about these notions of 'the ways'. Some speculations can be found here.)
The Metaphysical Possibility of Metaphysically Impossible Thoughts
Hesperus could be distinct from Phosphorus after all, if we're radically deceived, but given that it is Phosphorus, it could not have been distinct from Phosphorus. So 'Hesperus is not Phosphorus' is not satisfied by any configurations of our fine-grained system. And yet 'John believes that Hesperus is not Phosphorus' is metaphysically possible, is satisfied by configurations of our fine-grained system.
This may be quite puzzling given a certain way of visualizing the fine-grained system and its relation to the wider epistemic system which gives rise to it. For a while it seemed like a real problem to me, and I called it 'the containment problem'. The bothersome thing is the way in which epistemic modal space seems to be contained in metaphysical modal space via our machinery for ascribing intentional states and propositional attitudes - our machinery for representing the thoughts and representations of others - despite epistemic modal space outrunning the metaphysical in the well-known Kripkean way.
It is very tempting to try to "fix" this "problem" by going metalinguistic. I.e. saying something like: 'When we say that John believes that Hesperus is not Phosphorus, we aren't really simulating, constructing, or dealing directly with a thought that Hesperus is not Phosphorus. Rather, we are simply employing our concepts of Hesperus, the Hesperus-concept and the Phosphorus-concept, and forming an idea of a proposition in another system which has the relevant properties.' That may be a good view of what we do sometimes (especially with very foreign thoughts), but it seems wrong - gratuitous, even - to suppose that this is always how we do it. After all, we naturally and frequently envisage epistemic possibilities which fall outside our current fine-grained system. We step outside it all the time. So, when we think something like 'John believes that Hesperus is not Phosphorus', we can think of this as employing - in tandem - our fine-grained system together with a configuration of our wider system which falls outside it, but which is "pointed to": to give ourselves the thing John believes, we step outside our fine-grained system and construct the thought directly, so to speak - and all of this in a sense just constitutes a configuration of our fine-grained system, but of a special kind.
Compare Russell's treatment in the Logical Atomism lectures of 'propositions with more than one verb', and his remark about Wittgenstein's 'discovery' that propositions like 'A believes that p' are 'a new beast for our zoo' (p. 226, Logic and Knowledge).
A Desultory Postscript about Water
Contrary to plan, I haven't included a proper section on 'Water is H20' and related examples (or apparent examples) of the necessary a posteriori. I don't have much to say about such examples for now, except that it is very difficult to avoid dogmatism when treating them; specifically, in the move from the fact that water is H20 - something we've all learned - to a particular interpretation and logical explication of 'Water is H20'.
One might regard this sentence as expressing a 'theoretical identity' as in Kripke. Scott Soames critically examines this way of going in detail in his book Beyond Rigidity. Alternatively, one might regard the 'is' here as being "the 'is' of constitution", and this in turn might be construed as a (non-symmetric) relation. Or one might simply interpret 'is H20' as a predicate. On the 'water' side, one may construe this as being tied to a concept of water in the Kripke-Putnam way (i.e. such that 'Water is H20' is necessary), or it may be construed functionally or phenomenologically, such that 'Water is H20' is contingent.
All these contents seem to exist, so to speak, and all seem like natural ways of interpreting 'Water is H20'. So we must be wary not to fall into holding views which might implicitly suggest otherwise; we can and should develop simplified, systematic, abstract views of logic and language, but we hinder and discredit this very development if we neglect the underlying variety of language use. Among other things, this may give the false appearance that the whole logico-philosophical enterprise depends on there not being this variety.
(Part 1, recently edited, is here.)
(See this paper for a newer presentation of the basic ideas of part 1.)
1. For present purposes, I pass over Kit Fine's contention that not all necessary properties are essential in an intuitive sense (roughly because they are not all intrinsic to the thing in question). The classic example of a necessary property which is arguably not an essential property is Socrates' membership in his singleton set {Socrates}. There may be something important which distinguishes the essential properties from the merely necessary ones, but they will still be necessary properties, and hence will be amenable to my view.
- Essences and the de re/de dicto distinction,
- The indefiniteness of necessity,
- Intentional contexts ("propositional attitudes"), and
- Epistemic modality.
The first topic is really the main one. What I say about the remaining topics will be very scant - a rough indication of how these issues are to be approached according to the way of thinking being sketched out here, rather than an attempt to really deal with them. (I hope to really deal with them in my book.) They fit quite naturally here, since intentional contexts come into the more substantial discussion of the first topic. If nothing else, the brief discussion here should prevent readers from thinking that I have given no consideration to such issues, or that my account of modality is straightforwardly unable to deal with them.
Three Interpretations of Modal Claims about Individuals
As a preliminary, it should be noted that epistemic modal claims are not counted in this taxonomy. Consider, to begin with, sentences of the form 'a is necessarily F'. I distinguish the following three interpretations of such statements:
(1) The contextual interpretation. The locus classicus for this interpretation is Lewis in On the Plurality of Worlds, who expresses it better than I can:
I suggest that those philosophers who preach that origins are essential are absolutely right - in the context of their own preaching. They make themselves right: their preaching constitutes a context in which de re modality is governed by a way of representing (as I think, by a counterpart relation) that requires match of origins. But if I ask how things would be if Saul Kripke had come from no sperm and egg but had been brought by a stork, that makes equally good sense. I create a context that makes my question make sense, and to do so it has to be a context that makes origins not be essential.' (p. 252)There is one ruffle here: Lewis (who is notorious for playing fast and loose with ordinary modal language) talks of 'how things would be if Saul Kripke had...', rather than how things would have been. This might suggest a kind of epistemic reading, concerning what it would be like if it turned out that Saul Kripke actually had such-and-such an origin. But the range of possibilities in this sense - the things which could turn out to be true of an individual, for all we know (or all we know a priori) - is something quite different from what we are discussing here. In two-dimensional semantics, this corresponds roughly to the difference between A- and C-intensions.
(2) The "unrestricted" interpretation. In contrast to the above, we are now beginning to enter the realm of what could more legitimately be called 'essence'1, and are looking at proper metaphysical (or subjunctive) modality. On this interpretation, something like the following holds: 'a is necessarily F' is true iff 'a is F' is satisfied by all configurations of the host system of these propositions, and the concepts involved are adequate to their objects with respect to 'a is F'. (This form of account is introduced more generally in part 1.)
Thus, in this case, we might say that the necessity, as opposed to contingent truth, of 'a is F' stems from the nature of the individual concept of a, rather than any contextual restrictions placed on our representations. Why, then, are there scare-quotes around 'unrestricted'? This is because the present way of looking at things may over-dramatize the difference between the contextual restrictions of Lewis's account, and the constitution of concepts in the relevant fine-grained sense. We might think of the nature of these concepts as being at least partly determined by more-or-less invariant restrictions of some more general apparatus. This more general apparatus can be used to understand epistemic modality (and epistemic space).
On this interpretation, to say that a is necessarily F is to say something like: according to the way I think of a - and this way is adequate - it could not have failed to be F. (This isn't meant to be a proper analysis.) But we will probably want to recognize the possibility of slightly different concepts in other systems which have a as their object, and are adequate. Thus while we might think of John in such a way that we may say, intending the present "unrestricted" interpretation, that he is necessarily F, we might recognize that other people might legitimately think of John in such a way that they may say that he is contingently F. (This could be called 'adequacy pluralism about concepts'.)
(3) The generalized "unrestricted" interpretation. Clearly, we will want an interpretation of modal claims about individuals which does not tie their truth to one particular conceptualization (namely, that embodied in the host system of the modal claim). This interpretation gives us that. On this interpretation, something like the following holds: 'a is necessarily F' is true iff all configurations of all systems containing an adequate concept of a represent a as being F. (Another, less natural interpretation would be to substitute 'at least one system' for 'all systems'. This interpretation would be natural for 'a is possibly F'.)
A Simplification
I have simplified the above by concentrating on subject terms and ignoring different construals of the role of the predicate. One might distinguish interpretations analogous to (2) and (3) above, i.e. an evaluation involving a particular F-concept in a system, versus one involving all systems with some concept of the property F. An analogous simplification will be made below in the discussion of ascriptions of intentional content.
The Indefiniteness of Necessity
The account of necessity given here, based on the notion of all configurations of a conceptual system, may give the impression that I think a sharp boundary can be drawn between necessary and contingent truths. It is important to realize that this is not the case. (I probably should have emphasized this already in part 1.)
One way of responding to this would be to try to modify our picture of modality - instead of picturing a conceptual system as being like a mechanical apparatus which can be put into a definite set of configurations, one might imagine a device with an indefinite set of configurations; one might, for example, imagine growing resistance as one manipulates the apparatus into further out configurations (i.e. further from what we think is actually the case).
This sort of response has its place, but we needn't respond like that. We can also hold on to our simpler, more definite picture, but with due regard to the indefiniteness of its application.
Either way, it is important to note that there are clear cases. Some propositions are clearly necessary, and some are clearly contingent, and the distinction between them is of fundamental importance.
The following analogies from Wittgenstein are very helpful in connection with this theme:
The use of the words 'proposition', 'language', etc. has the haziness of the normal use of concept-words in our language. To think this makes them unusable, or ill-adapted to their purpose, would be like wanting to say 'the warmth this stove gives is no use, because you can't feel where it begins and where it ends'.from Philosophical Grammar, Part 1. p. 120.
It is essential to logic to draw boundaries, but no such boundaries are drawn in the language we speak. But this doesn’t mean that logic represents language incorrectly, or that it represents an ideal language. Its task is to portray a colourful, blurred reality as a pen-and-ink drawing.from The Big Typescript, p. 144.
The De Re/De Dicto Distinction(s)
This is widely acknowledged to be a confusing topic. The pair of terms 'de re' and 'de dicto' appear to get employed in philosophy to mark several important distinctions (or sorts of distinction). Complete clarification of this will have to wait for another time, but for now I want to characterize two basic sorts of distinction for which these terms can be used:
(1) De re: Generalization (universal or existential) over dicta involving a particular object vs. De dicto: specification of a particular dictum. (Dicta here are contents, propositions - something like that.) The distinction above between the "unrestricted" and generalized "unrestricted" interpretations of modal claims about individuals is an instance of this. It echoes, at least in part, Quine's distinction between believes-notional and believes relational.
In intentional contexts (for example, belief-reports), the distinction appears in the following way. The name 'Hesperus' in a belief report like:
(A) Ralph believes that Hesperus is F.
can be read as doing two things at once. (1) specifying the object of Ralph's belief, and (2) specifying the concept (or mode of presentation) via which he has it. On such a reading, (1) could be expanded to:
(B) Ralph believes, of Hesperus, via his Hesperus-concept, that it is F.
(A similar thing could be done for the 'F'.) Some belief reports, on the other hand - purely de re belief-reports - may be read as only specifying the object. (A) read this way could be expanded to:
(C) Ralph believes, of Hesperus, via some concept(s), that it is F.
(Cases such as 'John believes that Santa Claus exists' suggest that there are also readings where the name just functions to indicate an individual concept or intension involved in the propositional attitude, i.e. does not specify any real extension.)
Substitution of co-referring terms salva veritate (i.e. without change in truth-value) will fail in modal and intentional contexts which are de dicto in this sense.
(2) De re: Involvement of a dictum featuring a rigid (or rigidified) designator vs. De dicto: Involvement of a dictum featuring a non-rigid, unrigidified designator. This distinction most clearly makes its appearance with definite descriptions.
To illustrate: as a result of these two distinctions together, a sentence like 'The winner could have been shot' - once we rule out salient epistemic readings and Lewis-style contextually restricted readings - still has three readings left:
De dicto in both senses (1) and (2): true iff the non-rigid dictum 'The winner was shot' is satisfied by at least one configuration of the host system. (In this configuration (so to speak), the winner might be someone else.)
De dicto in sense (1) and de re in sense (2): using 'The winner' to indicate an individual concept - the concept of the actual winner, that very person - i.e. as a rigidified description, and true iff that dictum is satisfied by at least one configuration of its host system.
De re in sense (1) and therefore neither de re nor de dicto in sense (2): using 'The winner' purely to indicate a particular object, and then making a claim about all dicta which are rigidly about that object and which fulfil certain conditions (in this case: saying that the object was shot, or saying that the object was shot using some particular concept of being shot). It is only on this sort of reading, I submit, that substitution of co-referring terms salva veritate will be valid.
Clarifying and separating these distinctions helps to clarify Quine's skepticism about de re modality, and Kripke's famous arguments against Quine's attitude, as well as making it clearer why this debate is so confusing. Below is a lengthy quote of an important passage of Naming and Necessity. The above discussion can help us disambiguate the ensuing talk of particulars having modal properties independently of how they are described: this may be indicating de re-ness of the second kind (involvement of an individual concept rather than a non-rigid, unrigidified designator), or the first (generalizing over concepts of a particular object, rather than fixing on a particular concept).
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. What is Quine's famous example? If we consider the number 9, does it have the property of necessary oddness? Has that number got to be odd in all possible worlds? Certainly it's true in all possible worlds, let's say, it couldn't have been otherwise, that nine is odd. Of course, 9 could also be equally well picked out as the number of planets. It is not necessary, not true in all possible worlds, that the number of planets is odd. For example if there had been eight planets, the number of planets would not have been odd. And so it's thought: Was it necessary or contingent that Nixon won the election? (It might seem contingent, unless one has some view of some inexorable processes....) But this is a contingent property of Nixon only relative to our referring to him as 'Nixon' (assuming 'Nixon' doesn't mean 'the man who won the election at such and such a time'). But if we designate Nixon as 'the man who won the election in 1968', then it will be a necessary truth, of course, that the man who won the election in 1968, won the election in 1968. Similarly, whether an object has the same property in all possible worlds depends not just on the object itself, but on how it is described. So it's argued.Epistemic Modality and Ascriptions of Intentional Content
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 campaigner 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. 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. (Kripke, Naming and Necessity, first lecture.)
For the purposes of understanding metaphysical or subjunctive modality, I have been talking about conceptual systems in a fine-grained sense such that changing one's mind about an empirical identity statement involving individual concepts, for example, constitutes a change in the system itself. Since we believe that Hesperus is Phosphorus, there is no configuration of our fine-grained system which satisfies 'Hesperus is not Phosphorus'. And yet we can truly say things like 'It could turn out that Hesperus is not Phosphorus after all', and even (despite worries of Kripke's) 'It could have turned out that Hesperus was not Phosphorus'.
This is connected with the idea of 'two spaces of possible worlds' in other approaches. (Cf. Chalmers' 'The Nature of Epistemic Space'.) When we say that it could be that Hesperus isn't Phosphorus, we are not considering a configuration of our existing system in the sense we have been talking about, but are rather considering a change in our system. But in another sense, of course, making this change would constitute a reconfiguration of some "wider" system - the system relevant to epistemic modality. Making various abstractions and idealizations, we can imagine a space of possible ways things could be for all we know a priori - epistemic space. Moving from that to the space of ways things could have been involves getting rid of epistemic possibilities which are not metaphysically possible (the lesson of the necessary a posteriori), but also adding epistemic impossibilities which are metaphysically possible (the lesson of the contingent a priori), i.e. things which couldn't be the case, but could have been, such as this room being bigger than it is. (This latter thing will occupy us in part 3.)
So, we can configure our systems in the wide sense to represent ways things might be, and the way we think things are. But, speaking roughly, such a configuration of the wide system yields a system in the fine-grained sense, of ways things could have been. Sometimes, when we change our beliefs, this can be understood as simply moving to another configuration in the fine-grained system (and thus not directly changing any of our metaphysical modal judgements), whereas other times this must be regarded as involving change of the fine-grained system itself (e.g. going from believing that Hesperus is not Phosphorus to believing that it is).
(Note that I am not saying that the ways things really could be all have corresponding configurations in some system of ours, nor that the ways things really could have been all have corresponding configurations in our fine-grained system - not only may we be wrong, there will be possibilities we haven't dreamt of. Clearly much more needs saying here about these notions of 'the ways'. Some speculations can be found here.)
The Metaphysical Possibility of Metaphysically Impossible Thoughts
Hesperus could be distinct from Phosphorus after all, if we're radically deceived, but given that it is Phosphorus, it could not have been distinct from Phosphorus. So 'Hesperus is not Phosphorus' is not satisfied by any configurations of our fine-grained system. And yet 'John believes that Hesperus is not Phosphorus' is metaphysically possible, is satisfied by configurations of our fine-grained system.
This may be quite puzzling given a certain way of visualizing the fine-grained system and its relation to the wider epistemic system which gives rise to it. For a while it seemed like a real problem to me, and I called it 'the containment problem'. The bothersome thing is the way in which epistemic modal space seems to be contained in metaphysical modal space via our machinery for ascribing intentional states and propositional attitudes - our machinery for representing the thoughts and representations of others - despite epistemic modal space outrunning the metaphysical in the well-known Kripkean way.
It is very tempting to try to "fix" this "problem" by going metalinguistic. I.e. saying something like: 'When we say that John believes that Hesperus is not Phosphorus, we aren't really simulating, constructing, or dealing directly with a thought that Hesperus is not Phosphorus. Rather, we are simply employing our concepts of Hesperus, the Hesperus-concept and the Phosphorus-concept, and forming an idea of a proposition in another system which has the relevant properties.' That may be a good view of what we do sometimes (especially with very foreign thoughts), but it seems wrong - gratuitous, even - to suppose that this is always how we do it. After all, we naturally and frequently envisage epistemic possibilities which fall outside our current fine-grained system. We step outside it all the time. So, when we think something like 'John believes that Hesperus is not Phosphorus', we can think of this as employing - in tandem - our fine-grained system together with a configuration of our wider system which falls outside it, but which is "pointed to": to give ourselves the thing John believes, we step outside our fine-grained system and construct the thought directly, so to speak - and all of this in a sense just constitutes a configuration of our fine-grained system, but of a special kind.
Compare Russell's treatment in the Logical Atomism lectures of 'propositions with more than one verb', and his remark about Wittgenstein's 'discovery' that propositions like 'A believes that p' are 'a new beast for our zoo' (p. 226, Logic and Knowledge).
A Desultory Postscript about Water
Contrary to plan, I haven't included a proper section on 'Water is H20' and related examples (or apparent examples) of the necessary a posteriori. I don't have much to say about such examples for now, except that it is very difficult to avoid dogmatism when treating them; specifically, in the move from the fact that water is H20 - something we've all learned - to a particular interpretation and logical explication of 'Water is H20'.
One might regard this sentence as expressing a 'theoretical identity' as in Kripke. Scott Soames critically examines this way of going in detail in his book Beyond Rigidity. Alternatively, one might regard the 'is' here as being "the 'is' of constitution", and this in turn might be construed as a (non-symmetric) relation. Or one might simply interpret 'is H20' as a predicate. On the 'water' side, one may construe this as being tied to a concept of water in the Kripke-Putnam way (i.e. such that 'Water is H20' is necessary), or it may be construed functionally or phenomenologically, such that 'Water is H20' is contingent.
All these contents seem to exist, so to speak, and all seem like natural ways of interpreting 'Water is H20'. So we must be wary not to fall into holding views which might implicitly suggest otherwise; we can and should develop simplified, systematic, abstract views of logic and language, but we hinder and discredit this very development if we neglect the underlying variety of language use. Among other things, this may give the false appearance that the whole logico-philosophical enterprise depends on there not being this variety.
(Part 1, recently edited, is here.)
(See this paper for a newer presentation of the basic ideas of part 1.)
1. For present purposes, I pass over Kit Fine's contention that not all necessary properties are essential in an intuitive sense (roughly because they are not all intrinsic to the thing in question). The classic example of a necessary property which is arguably not an essential property is Socrates' membership in his singleton set {Socrates}. There may be something important which distinguishes the essential properties from the merely necessary ones, but they will still be necessary properties, and hence will be amenable to my view.
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