Two-Dimensional Semantics and Counterfactual Invariance Deciders

For a long time I have wondered, with an uneasy feeling that there was something I couldn't see, about the relationship between two-dimensional semantics and my approach to analysing subjunctive necessity de dicto. As I flagged in the previous post, this has become even more urgent in light of my new, relational account involving the notion of a counterfactual invariance (CI) decider.

I think I've finally made a breakthrough here, and found a clear connection. There is more to say, but here it is briefly.

Recall that my account states that a proposition is necessary (i.e. necessarily true or necessarily false) iff it has a true positive counterfactual invariance (CI) decider.

(P is a positive counterfactual invariance decider for Q iff Q does not vary across genuine counterfactual scenario descriptions for which P is held true.)

A close analogue of this account can be stated in terms of two-dimensional semantics: a proposition Q is necessary iff there is a true proposition P such that for every scenario S in which P is true, Q's two-dimensional intension maps, for all W, <S, W> to the same truth-value.

And I think I can maintain, as CI deciderhood is plausibly a priori tractable and arguably a semantic matter, so too is the question whether, given some propositions P and Q, P is such that for every scenario S in which P is true, Q's two-dimensional intension maps, for all W, <S, W> to the same truth-value.

This makes clear one major way in which my analysis goes beyond the normal two-dimensional account of subjunctive necessity in terms of secondary (or C) intension - and this way can then be translated into two-dimensional terms. And looking at necessity this way, as opposed to with just the usual two-dimensional account of subjunctive necessity, gives us a finer grained picture of the role played by what Kripke called 'a priori philosophical analysis' in our knowledge of necessity. You don't have to know which scenario is actual to know that a proposition is necessary - you just need to know that you're in one of some range of scenarios such that, if they were actual, the proposition would be necessary. And such a range can be characterized by a proposition which you can know a priori to be a CI decider for the necessary proposition in question.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reflections on My Claim that Inherent Counterfactual Invariance is Broadly Semantic

This post presupposes knowledge of my account of subjunctive necessity de dicto as expressed in my thesis and in a paper derived from it which I have been working on. (I hope my self-criticism here doesn't cause any should-have-been-blind referees to reject the paper. A revise-and-resubmit verdict I could live with.) Here I try to take a next step in getting clear about the status and significance of the account.

In my thesis and derived paper, I propose that a proposition is necessary iff it is, or is implied by, a proposition which is both inherently counterfactually invariant (ICI) and true, and explicate this notion of ICI.

I claim that ICI is broadly semantic, and put this forward as a key motivation and virtue of the account. I don’t provide much argument for this claim - the intention, I suppose, was that this would just seem self-evident. But I have become increasingly aware of the importance of the fact that this could be challenged, and the importance of getting clearer about the underlying primitive notion of a genuine counterfactual scenario description (CSD).

I do provide one reason, near the end of my presentation of my account, for thinking that ICI is broadly semantic given my preferred approach to propositions and meaning. But there are two reasons for wanting more. One is that it may be hoped that my claim that ICI is broadly semantic could be justified independently of my particular approach to propositions and meaning, where I advocate understanding what I distinguish as the ‘internal’ component of meaning as role in language system. A second, perhaps more suggestive, reason for wanting more is that, even given my preferred approach, the argument I give is basically this: ICI is explained in terms of how a proposition - its negation, really - behaves in certain contexts - namely CSDs. But here of course I have to single out genuine CSDs.

And here’s the thing. (At least, the following seems to be right.) For my claim that ICI is broadly semantic to hold water, the notion of genuineness of a CSD had better be broadly semantic. For it is not enough for a notion to be broadly semantic that it can be characterized in terms of appearance in certain sorts of linguistic context C, where C-hood is blatantly extra-semantic. For instance, we may say a proposition has G iff it (or its negation, to make this more like the ICI case) doesn’t appear in any description which has the property of being written in some notebook I have in my room. In that case, it is plain that whether or not a proposition has G is not a matter of its meaning or nature.

So, I now think that the little argument I give at the end of my presentation of my account, about how my particular approach to propositions and meaning ‘fits well’ with the notion of ICI as broadly semantic only goes so far, and that as an argument that given my particular approach the notion of ICI is or should be seen as broadly semantic, it is weak, since it gives no reason to think that the all-important notion of genuineness of CSD is broadly semantic.

Further, I think it is clear that I want to put forward my account, and I think the account has theoretical value, independent of whether a case can be made that genuineness of CSD is broadly semantic. And so my whole presentation of why my account is interesting and of its motivation is somewhat crude. As a story about what caused it, and the specific things I was thinking, it may have some interest. But as a way of situating the theory and giving a sense of what its value (within philosophy) consists in, it is crude and not really to the point. I do of course hint at other sources of interest (e.g. that the account clarifies the relationship between the notion of necessity and those of truth and implication), and don’t rest everything on the ‘semantic hunch’, but I do perhaps give it too prominent a place - or at least, an incompletely justified place.

So, is the notion of a ‘genuine counterfactual scenario description’ broadly semantic? And what does it mean to be broadly semantic? I may follow up with a post addressing these questions more thoroughly, but for now a couple of remarks. Whatever it is to be broadly semantic, it is not to be conventional in any sense. The idea is perhaps better gotten at, in some ways, by saying that genuine CSD-hood is a conceptual matter. But really I need to roll up my sleeves and investigate this more closely - it is not merely a question of hitting on some formulation. Finally, I propose that the following passage from §520 of Wittgenstein’s Investigations seems very to-the-point when it comes to the questions and difficulties I find myself coming up against here, and may help me plumb the depths of the matter:

So does it depend wholly on our grammar what will be called (logically) possible and what not,—i.e. what that grammar permits?”—But surely that is arbitrary!—Is it arbitrary?—It is not every sentence-like formation that we know how to do something with, not every technique has an application in our life [...].

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

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

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

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

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

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

References

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

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

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

Skepticism About Metaphysical Modality and Unclear Cases

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

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

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

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

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

What is Necessity De Dicto?

I recently posted an account of necessity de dicto. The purpose of this post is to pin down exactly what this topic is. The notion in question of course looms large in contemporary analytic philosophy, but it will serve us well and keep us grounded to furnish in as clear a way as possible a basic characterization of it. In a future post, I will turn to specifying the problem or task which my account is addressed to with respect to the topic. In another future post, I will state some of my assumptions and guiding ideas.

The key source for the notion of necessity de dicto is of course Kripke's Naming and Necessity. It was there that our topic was (to the best of my knowledge) first clearly isolated and characterized. Priority aside, Kripke's characterization is not easily improved upon and has been very influential. (Regarding the notion itself, not its characterization: it is a very interesting historical question to what extent this notion was present in earlier thinking. Or to what extent similar notions were, and how they may relate to the present notion. I will make no attempt here to answer this.)

Kripke's starting-point in characterizing the notion of necessity de dicto is to remark that, while many (at the time he was speaking) seem not to differentiate between a priority and necessity, he certainly will not use 'a priori' and 'necessary' in the same way (p. 34). He then, after emphasizing that the notion of a priority is an epistemological one and mentioning some issues which might arise with that notion, gives the following characterisation of necessity:

The second concept which is in question is that of necessity. Sometimes this is used in an epistemological way and might then just mean a priori. And of course, sometimes it is used in a physical way when people distinguish between physical and logical necessity. But what I am concerned with here is a notion which is not a notion of epistemology but of metaphysics in some (I hope) nonpejorative sense. We ask whether something might have been true, or might have been false. Well, if something is false, it's obviously not necessarily true. If it is true, might it have been otherwise? Is it possible that, in this respect, the world should have been different from the way it is? If the answer is 'no', then this fact about the world is a necessary one. If the answer is 'yes', then this fact about the world is a contingent one. (pp. 35 – 36.)

This should go a long way to giving us an acceptable grasp of the notion of necessity de dicto. Kripke also says some things about the extension of the notion which may be of further help to this end. Before proceeding to that, however, I want to tighten up Kripke's characterization in a couple of ways, as well as emphasizing and de-emphasizing certain parts of it.

For one thing, note that Kripke moves freely here between talking of 'facts about the world' as well as things which can be called true or false, as the bearers of necessity. Later, he speaks also of 'states of affairs' and 'statements'. This is fine, but I want to make it clear that the topic I am addressing in my account is the notion of necessity as it applies to things which can be called true or false: statements – or as I say, propositions. This is what I mean by 'de dicto' in 'necessity de dicto'. To be still more precise about what propositions are – for a start, whether they are or involve sentences themselves, or just their meanings – is not necessary, but see this post for an approach I favour.

(At this point I should emphasize that that is all I mean by 'de dicto' in 'necessity de dicto'. The term 'de dicto', and the contrasting term 'de re', are used in various ways in philosophy. It it especially important to realize that I count all attributions of necessity to propositions as attributions of necessity de dicto, even when those propositions are “singular propositions” about individuals – i.e., propositions attributions of necessity to which David Lewis would deploy counterpart theory to understand.)

Something I want to emphasize in Kripke's characterization is the way it cashes out necessity in terms of counterfactual scenarios – to use the language of some two-dimensional semanticists, scenarios considered as counterfactual, rather than scenarios considered as actual. This could be emphasized by calling our topic 'counterfactual necessity de dicto' or 'subjunctive necessity dicto', but I avoid this for the sake of brevity.

(You may think that this is the same as the point that necessity is not to be understood epistemologically, but I'm not so sure. For one thing, I suspect there are notions of 'could actually be the case' and 'must actually be the case' which, even if 'a priori possible' and 'a priori true' may be good expressions for them, can be cashed out non-epistemologically. (Cf. this post.) For another thing, 'Could have been' talk can also be given an epistemological reading, along the lines of 'Was epistemically possible'. In any case, emphasizing that with the notion of necessity de dicto we are dealing with scenarios considered as counterfactual, can only help to avoid misunderstanding here.)

Something I want de-emphasize in Kripke's characterization, on the other hand, is the way he classifies the notion of necessity he wants to talk about as a notion belonging to metaphysics. I do not think this is essential to grasping the notion in question: that can be done without any recourse to a notion of metaphysics. Kripke's use of a category of metaphysics here may be slightly helpful in emphasizing that necessity de dicto is not an epistemological notion, but that point can be emphasized without a notion of metaphysics. Since we can easily get by here without invoking a notion of metaphysics, I think we ought to avoid doing so. I am not going to argue the point at length here, but I suspect that invoking a notion of metaphysics may lead to some unhelpful prejudice about how the notion is best to be understood and analyzed (if it is to be analyzed) – or more to the point, how it is not to be analyzed. In particular, I worry that it may cause prejudice against accounts which crucially involve semantic considerations, by promoting a vague idea that necessity de dicto is “all about” how things are in the world, as opposed to having anything to do with language and thought.

Finally, Kripke's characterization should be supplemented with something about the sense of 'necessary' being unrestricted or very broad. To see this, consider an utterance like 'It is true that I stayed home yesterday. This couldn't have been otherwise, as I had to be there to let the electrician in.' This utterance may be true, but in that case the 'couldn't have been otherwise' part is not about necessity de dicto in the sense I am interested in – we are dealing with a contextually restricted range of ways things could have been. For instance, we are probably ignoring ways things could have been in which I stop caring about having electricity, or in which I never made the appointment with the electrician, or in which the appointment was on a different day. This supplementation of the Kripkean characterization has become customary. Witness Timothy Williamson in an interview:

Something is metaphysically necessary if it couldn’t have been otherwise, in the most unrestricted sense. (Williamson & Antonsen 2010, p. 18.)

Or Daniel Stoljar, referring to:

(…) the completely unrestricted sense of possibility that philosophers sometimes call “logical” or “metaphysical” possibility (…) (Stoljar 2006, p. 34.)

Or this terminological stipulation made by van Invagen:

Modal terms will be used in their “metaphysical” or “unrestricted” sense (…). (van Invagen 2015, p. 35.)

There is a wrinkle here, however. For some things philosophers say may seem to go against the propriety of characterizing our topic in this way. On the way of speaking I have in mind, there are necessities in the sense of our topic which are not necessary in some other sense – 'logically' or 'mathematically' or 'epistemically' for example. See, for instance, this passage in Nathan Salmon (where he is arguing that an objection made to something he has proposed – the details of which don't matter here – does not hold water):

Metaphysical modality is definitely not an unrestricted limiting case. There are more modalities in Plato’s heaven than are dreamt of in my critics’ philosophy, and some of these are even less restrictive than metaphysical modality. One less restrictive type of modality is provided by mathematical necessity and mathematical possibility. […] Another type of modality less restrictive than metaphysical modality is provided by what is sometimes called ‘logical necessity’ and ‘logical possibility,’ to be distinguished from genuinely metaphysical necessity and possibility, or necessity and possibility tout court. A proposition is logically necessary if its truth is required on logical grounds alone […]. Although there is a way things logically could be according to which I am a credit card account, there is no way things metaphysically might have been according to which I am a credit card account. (Salmon 2005, p. 136)

But notice the contrast at the end of this passage between 'could be' and 'might have been'. Salmon is concerned here with what he calls 'the confusion between the generic notion of a way for things to be and the modal notion of a way things might have been'. According to Salmon, this confusion

is very probably the primary source of the idea that metaphysical modality is the limiting case of restricted modalities, that metaphysical necessity and possibility is the unrestricted, and hence the least restricted, type of necessity and possibility. For metaphysical necessity is indeed truth in all ways things might have been (modal, not generic), and metaphysical possibility is indeed truth in at least one way things might have been (modal, not generic). (ibid, p. 136.)

So, since we are explicitly talking about ways things might have been, it seems that Salmon would have no real disagreement after all with Williamson's succinct characterization of our topic, quoted above (except perhaps for some pragmatic disagreement about what to emphasize, or how best to use language to avoid potential confusions).

In any case, one thing that should be clear is that we are not dealing with a notion where certain contextually relevant matters of fact may be held fixed, as in the electrician example above.

So much for the intensional characterization of the notion of necessity de dicto. Another thing which may help us grasp the notion is consideration of its extension – cases, and what types of cases there are. Most instructive in this way are cases lying outside the overlap of necessity and a priority. After giving his intensional characterization of the notion, Kripke goes on to say that he will be arguing that, in addition to being conceptually different, the categories of necessity and a priority are extensionally different: 'I will argue below that in fact they are not even coextensive—that necessary a posteriori truths, and probably contingent a priori truths, both exist.' (Kripke 1980, p.38.)

An aspect of the character of the notion of necessity de dicto is captured vividly in some of Kripke's intuitive appeals regarding the necessary a posteriori, in particular with the use of the phrase 'given that', and similar language. For instance, if I think some object I have encountered empirically, a, is the same object as I have encountered empirically in other situations, b, then – while I might conceivably turn out to be wrong, i.e. while it might turn out to be the case that a is distinct from b – given that a is indeed b, then a couldn't have been distinct from b; 'a = b' is necessary.

Regarding the contingent a priori, perhaps the most straightforward and instructive type of case occurs when a name is stipulated to refer to whatever object satisfies some description, where the description is of a sort where an object satisfying it could have failed to satisfy it. So if I stipulate that 'a' is to refer to the inventor of the zip (if there was an inventor of the zip), then the proposition 'a, if there is an a, invented the zip' is a priori: in virtue of the way I have set 'a' up to work, it just can't turn out empirically that a exists and yet didn't invent the zip after all. Now suppose that there is an inventor of the zip. In that case, the proposition 'a, if there is an a, invented the zip', while a priori, is contingent: someone else could have invented the zip.

We have now characterized our topic, first intensionally, by taking and modifying slightly Kripke's famous characterization, and then extensionally, by pointing to two striking types of cases. The next question we must address is 'What is the problem or task in relation to the topic, to which your account is a response?' I will concentrate on this in a future post.  

References

Kripke, Saul A. (1980). Naming and Necessity. Harvard University Press. (First published 1971.)

Williamson, Timothy & Antonsen, Paal (2010). Modality & Other Matters: An Interview with Timothy Williamson. Perspectives: International Postgraduate Journal of Philosophy 3 (1):16-29.

Salmon, Nathan U. (2005). 'The Logic of What Might Have Been' in Metaphysics, Mathematics, and Meaning. Oxford University Press. Article originally published in 1989.

Stoljar, Daniel (2006). Ignorance and Imagination: The Epistemic Origin of the Problem of Consciousness. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

van Invagen, Peter (2015). 'Nothing is Impossible' in God, Truth, and other Enigmas, Szatkowski, Miroslaw (ed.),. De Gruyter.

An Account of Necessity as an Attribute of Propositions

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

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

Some related posts:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Toward an Account of De Re Modal Ascriptions

This is the third post in a series on de re modality and quantification into modal contexts. This one is quite exploratory and anything but final. The first two posts are here and here.

Let us begin by considering a simple proposal and two problems with it:

a is necessarily F iff 'a is F' is necessary.

The first problem may best be called a potential problem. It affects this approach if the question 'Can propositions which ascribe the same property (or relation) to the same object (or n-tuple of objects) differ in modal status?' is correctly answered in the affirmative.

If propositions can be ascriptionally identical and yet differ in modal status, then while my proposition 'a is F' may be necessary, someone else may have a proposition in another system, let us say using the sign 'b is G' (but of course it may also be the same sign as I use), which is ascriptionally identical but contingent. In such a case, we might not want to say that a, that object, is necessarily F, since some propositions which ascribe the property F'ness to the object a are not necessary – we might want to say, generally that an object fails to be necessarily F if there is any proposition which ascribes F to it and isn't necessary.

This gives rise to various terminological opportunities and options – e.g. we might want to distinguish 'weak' and 'strong' necessity, and may go different ways on questions like 'If something is F, but is not strongly necessarily F, is it contingently F?'. We will come back to this. For now, we will go along with saying that a thing fails to be necessarily F if some proposition says of it that it is F, and that proposition fails to be necessary.

Furthermore, we will go along with the idea, while actually remaining agnostic, that ascriptionally identical propositions can differ in (ICI, and in turn) modal status – that is, we will try to solve this potential problem, without actually deciding for sure that it is a problem.

The second problem, unlike the first (potential) problem, does not threaten the truth or validity of the account, but rather its power. Recall the simple proposal we began with:

a is necessarily F iff 'a is F' is necessary.

The second problem lies with generalizing this: the above, if it is not read as being about some specific proposition, is a schema. And getting a general statement, a universal quantification, about when an object x, say, is necessarily F (or necessarily has some property y), is still a non-trivial task given the above, since the schematic letters occur on the right hand side in a quotational context.

I will now pursue the first problem for a long and tortuous stretch (this will hopefully be instructive). In the end, it will emerge that by solving the second problem in a certain way, we can modify the result so that it solves the first problem (using, for this modification, what we will have learned by that point about the first problem). This solution is, in essentials, the solution we will offer in the next post to the problem of quantifying into modal contexts, although the success conditions there may be a bit different. Therefore in this section, at the end of the long and tortuous stretch, I will just briefly state the solution, and explain how it solves the second problem as well.

Again: the first problem is, roughly, that instances of the simple schema might come out false if, while my proposition 'a is F' is necessary, there are other propositions ascribing F'ness to a which are not.

This naturally suggests the following:

a is necessarily F iff all propositions ascribing F'ness to a are necessary.

One problem with this which is, I think, not hard to surmount, lies with the possibility of non-rigidly designating an object and ascribing a property to it, in the sense of: ascribing that property to whatever falls under the description. I mean, for example, propositions such as:

The number I have written on this piece of paper is odd.

This can certainly be read as a contingently true proposition. Suppose I have '3' written on a piece of paper. Now, we will want to say that the number three, that very object, is necessarily odd. But since I might have written a different number, the above proposition, on the reading I have in mind, is contingent. And yet we might say that this proposition, so construed, satisfies the condition 'is a proposition ascribing F'ness to a'. The solution is to add the condition that the proposition rigidly designates a.

So really, what we want to consider is:

a is necessarily F iff all propositions rigidly designating a and ascribing F'ness to it are necessary.

Another problem is that a proposition may rigidly designate a and ascribe F'ness to it, but also do a bunch of other things, such as designating b and ascribing G'ness to it. And this extra stuff may make them contingent. For example: '3 is odd and this piece of paper has a 3 on it'.

The solution to that problem is to add a “that's all” clause – e.g. to talk about propositions which just rigidly designate a and ascribe F'ness to it, and do nothing else.

These problems, then, are easily solved. In the discussion of more serious difficulties which follows, I will not incorporate these solutions in order to keep things simple.

So, what (besides the two problems we saw how to fix) is wrong with:

a is necessarily F iff all propositions ascribing F'ness to a are necessary?

The problem is: what if there just aren't enough relevant propositions around in the actual world? (Whether this is a problem depends on the view of propositions one takes.)

And that leads to the thought:

a is necessarily F iff all possible propositions ascribing F'ness to a are necessary.

Disambiguation of 'Possible Propositions'

There is an unfortunate ambiguity here in talking about 'possible propositions'. I will not try to fix the terminology, but only explain the ambiguity: this means 'a proposition which can exist'. By contrast, when I speak of a proposition being necessary, I mean being subjunctively necessary, necessarily true in the Kripkean sense. I don't mean a proposition which must exist. A subjunctively possible proposition, then, is one which is true and not necessary – but the talk here of 'possible propositions' does not mean this. Fortunately this ambiguity is, for me, largely confined to these modes of construction, rather than particular constructions, since I hardly ever speak of the property of being subjunctively possible, and I never – except in this note – speak of propositions which must exist: so 'possible proposition' always means 'proposition which can exist', and 'necessary proposition' means 'proposition which is necessarily true'.

The 'All Possible Propositions' Strategy

We were considering the thought: a is necessarily F iff all possible propositions ascribing F'ness to a are necessary

This raises two worries: (i) is there a circularity problem here?, and (ii) what about impossible propositions, or perhaps better: what about objects and properties such that no possible proposition can say of the object that it has the property?

Regarding the first worry, it is not obvious that there is a circularity. Recall that we are not trying to analyze all modal notions in terms of other notions (indeed, the very idea of doing that may, for all that is said in this book, be chimerical) – inherent counterfactual invariance, for instance, is characterized in terms of all counterfactual scenarios a system can produce. Furthermore, the use of 'possible' here doesn't on the face of it seem to be the sort of de re modal attribution we are concerned to analyze. It's not about properties or relations possibly holding of actual things, but about possible things (in this case propositions), things which might exist, and that is very different. Secondly, the modal space in question may best be regarded as broader and more inclusive in certain respects than subjunctive modal space.

Furthermore, even if there is a circularity here (which may be quite indirect and subtle – i.e. may be present even if the 'possible' here is not itself to be regarded as directly invoking subjunctive modality), perhaps it's not a vicious circularity – for instance, we could say that we have still reduced the mysteries of necessary property possession (de re modality) to the mysteries of logical space.

Regarding the second worry, about the possibility of things and states of affairs which no possible proposition can refer to or represent: perhaps this can be overcome by taking 'possible' in a very wide sense.

Accordingly, I think this analysis may not be without value, but these worries create difficulty enough that a somewhat different approach seems desirable.

I think something like the following: intuitively, part of what the truth of a proposition of the form 'a is necessarily F' reflects is an internal connection between a proposition's ascribing F'ness to a and its modal status. One strategy we might try for capturing this is two-pronged: semantically ascend and invoke a priority. As a first pass:

a is necessarily F iff 'All propositions ascribing F'ness to a are necessary' is a priori.

Or equivalently:

a is necessarily F iff 'If a proposition ascribes F'ness to a, it is necessary' is a priori.

But this cannot be quite right, for necessity implies truth, and some necessary propositions are a posteriori. If 'a is F', for example, is just such a necessary a posteriori proposition, then it can't be a priori that if a proposition ascribes F'ness to a, it is necessary. Just like with our main analysis of necessity, i.e. as a category of propositions, we have to separate truthmaking from necessity-making.

This suggests employing, as we did in the main analysis of necessity, the notion of inherent counterfactual invariance:

a is necessarily F iff (a is F and 'All propositions ascribing F'ness to a are inherently counterfactually invariant' is a priori).

This is a definite improvement, but now out analysis falls victim to the same type problem which motivated our holding that necessity is closed under implication. Recall that we can't say:

A proposition is necessary iff it is inherently counterfactually invariant and true.

Since a disjunction of a necessary a posteriori proposition and a contingent proposition, where the necessary disjunct makes it true, is not inherently counterfactually invariant (since if it is held true on the basis of the second disjunct only, it will be allowed to vary across counterfactual scenario descriptions), but this disjunction will be necessary in the case that its necessary disjunct makes it true, so that the above analysis undergenerates: it says that, e.g., 'All cats are animals or I had lunch today' is not necessary, when it is. And recall that this problem is avoided by the account advocated:

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

We get a similar problem with the above analysis of de re modal attribution, but involving disjunctive properties rather than truth-functional, propositional-level disjunction. Consider for example:

'Hesperus is either identical to Phosphorus or a common object of philosophical examples'

Or, to remove any possibility of a truth-functional construal:

'Hesperus has the property of either being identical to Phosphorus or being a common object of philosophical examples'.

(Instead of 'being identical to' I will just say 'being'. I will also abbreviate 'being a common object of philosophical examples' as 'being a comex'.)

Now, according to the rough, dimly seen intuitive meaning of de re modal attributions which we are trying to analyse, it would seem we should say, since Hesperus is Phosphorus and in view of Kripkean considerations:

'Hesperus necessarily has the property of either being Phosphorus or being a comex'.

But this doesn't come out true on the analysis we are now considering. Plugging it in, we get:

Hesperus necessarily has the property of either being Phosphorus or being a comex iff:

- Hesperus has the property of either being Phosphorus of being a comex, and

- 'All propositions ascribing being either Phosphorus or being a comex [or, more strictly uniformly, having the property of being either etc.] to Hesperus are inherently counterfactually invariant' is a priori.

And the second clause fails to be true – far from being true a priori, the proposition mentioned is not true at all, since it is possible to hold it true while disbelieving that Hesperus is Phosphorus but believing that Hesperus is a comex, in which case it would be allowed to vary across counterfactual scenario descriptions (since things could have been such that quite other objects were comexes). Indeed, the mentioned proposition is false a priori.

But if we close under implication, as in our main analysis of necessity:

- 'For all propositions ascribing either being Phosphorus or being a comex to Hesperus, there is some inherently counterfactually invariant proposition which implies that proposition' is a priori.

we get something true, as required. We are making progress, but while both clauses come out true in this case, the analysis will still not give intuitively right results. Now it will overgenerate in some cases. Consider, for example:

Hesperus necessarily has the property of either being Saturn or being a comex.

This is intuitively false, since Hesperus is, intuitively, necessarily not Saturn, and only contingently a comex.

But the following both hold:

- Hesperus has the property of either being Saturn or being a comex, and

- 'For all propositions ascribing the property etc., there is some inherently counterfactually invariant proposition which implies that proposition' is a priori.

The second clause comes out true, because 'Hesperus is Saturn', while false, is inherently counterfactually invariant and does imply 'Hesperus has the property of either being Saturn or a comex'. And presumably, for any other proposition which might also ascribe the property in question to Hesperus, there would be some proposition identifying it with Saturn which implies it.

This would be solved by somehow requiring the (possibly hypothetical) implying propositions to be true as well as ICI, without jeapoardizing a priority. But it is not clear to me how this could be done.

For if we just tack on 'and true' to 'some inherently counterfactually invariant' above, yielding this as a second clause:

- 'For all propositions ascribing the property etc., there is some inherently counterfactually invariant and true proposition which implies that proposition' is a priori.

We are back to our problem of the second clause failing to be true as required for the case of Hesperus necessarily either being Phosphorus or a comex: its not a priori that the implying proposition, 'Hesperus is Phosphorus', is true, even though it is true.

We want our second clause, in general, to say something like: for all propositions P ascribing F'ness to a, there is some true proposition Q such that it is a priori that Q implies P.

But if we say that we have forgone the semantic ascent part of our two-pronged strategy, taking us back to our problems of non-existent and impossible propositions (or things for which there are no possible propositions of the relevant kind).

I find it surprising that it is apparently impossible to solve all these problems at once. I am far from sure that I haven't overlooked a possibility (i.e. an analysis quite close to the last few above, involving the strategy of semantic ascent together with the invocation of a priority, or a similar strategy, but which doesn't face such blatant material adequacy problems).

Be that as it may, there is still a further issue with any account along these lines. And it happens that, by considering this further issue which would still arise and describing that issue in a natural way, a quite different strategy comes into view.

Would Semantically Ascending Achieve Anything, or Just Mask Something?

It may seem that our move from talking about, say, 'all possible propositions' (with all its attendant difficulties) to talking about whether a priority is possessed by a proposition which says that all propositions of a certain kind are a certain way (namely a priori) – even if it could surmount the difficulties found above – would be a silly move, merely complicating things and getting us nowhere.

It might seem that this is so, because the right hand side of the analysis involves mentioning a proposition about the object in question, and so we can only state it when dealing with an object which we can talk about. But note that this doesn't stop it from being the case that all instances of:

a is necessarily F iff <one of our last analyses' RHSs>

are true (although other things were seen to). What this does get us is a way of dealing with any 'a is necessarily F'-form proposition, as it comes a long. We cannot apply it to an object which we cannot speak about – or rather, 'applying it to an object which we cannot speak about' makes no sense here. But given that we have such a proposition, what the analyses were designed to do was avoid any problems pertaining to nonexistent (and perhaps in a sense impossible) propositions: if some of those ascribe (or would ascribe if they existed) F'ness to a and aren't (wouldn't be) necessary, we do not want to say that a is necessarily F.

This shows that the strategy was not totally idiotic. Better than that, the last sentence (especially the clauses in brackets) suggests another approach to the first problem: solve it by first solving the second problem along conditional lines, where the antecedent condition (which very arguably doesn't have to be possible) covers all the cases which might have caused the first problem. (This should become clearer along with the proposal.)

So, we will go back to our original simple schema, and propose a conditional approach to our second problem – the problem of generalizing it. The simple schema was:

a is F iff 'a is F' is necessary.

Now as we saw, if we go along with the first problem, not all instances of this will be true. Let us ignore this for the moment, and consider how we might generalize it along conditional lines. We might say the underlying point of this (faulty) schema is something like:

An object x possesses a property y necessarily iff: if you were to say of x that it possesses the property y, you would say something necessary.

Now, if we interpret this conditional on the right hand side in one way, we get the first problem again, just as we did with the simple, faulty schema. (And that is fitting, for a generalization of the schema.) But if we interpret it in another way (in broadly Lewisian terms, by widening the class of relevant A-worlds), it is no longer a generalization of the schema, and is no longer vulnerable to the first (potential) problem.

I will briefly explain this here, but leave discussion of certain further difficulties of interpretation to the discussion of quantification into modal contexts in the next post, where the approach taken to quantification is very much along the lines of this approach to de re modal attributions. I will first state two basic assumptions about counterfactual conditionals. (Not that they're absolutely required – see below.)

Two Basic Assumptions About Counterfactual Conditionals

I will take as a basic assumption about how counterfactuals work that they can be understood as requiring a set of A-scenarios (scenarios at which the antecedent is true) to all be C-scenarios (scenarios at which the consequent is true). This is not to commit to any particular story (for example, David Lewis's) about how the relevant A-scenarios are determined. It also doesn't commit us to only dealing with possible scenarios, as for example Lewis does. It also doesn't commit us to any particular story about the nature of scenarios.

The second basic assumption is that (and here I agree with Lewis) the relevant set of A-scenarios will not always be the same. And it isn't just that different forms of words induce different relevant sets – the counterfactual conditional in the analysis above, for example, can be intended and interpreted different ways, making different A-scenarios relevant. And in the present philosophical context, we need to explicitly specify and discuss different interpretations (that is, I know of no other way of inducing contexts in which they get the readings I am interested in, and have no reason to think there should be a way).

These assumptions can in principle be jettisoned, by trading in the counterfactual conditional form in the proposed analysis above (and in our special treatment of quantification below) for explicit talk about what 'all relevant scenarios' are like, and then specifying which they are (but this time not as a way of fixing a reading of some conditional). But making the assumptions serves a heuristic purpose, since they are very plausible and the counterfactual conditional form is highly familiar to us.

Two Interpretations of the Words of the Account

Now, recall that the account I propose, in its simplest (but in a sense ambiguous) form, runs:

An object x possesses a property y necessarily iff: if you were to say of x that it possesses the property y, you would say something necessary.

Now, we must ask, about the counterfactual on the right hand side: which A-scenarios (scenarios in which you say of x that it is y) are required to be C-scenarios (scenarios in which you say something necessary) here? Which facts about the actual world are to be held fixed, and which allowed to vary? Or briefly, what is the relevant set of A-scenarios?

The thing to see is that, if we take a “closest worlds” approach, or at least if we take such an approach in a natural and simple way, we will run into the (potential) problem which would stem from ascriptionally identical propositions being able to differ in modal status. If, on the other hand, we take an approach on which a wider set of A-scenarios must be C-scenarios, we may avoid it. (The propriety of doing this without departing from the natural meaning of counterfactuals can I think be defended, but again this is not absolutely essential, since regarding it as a technically modified sort of counterfactual, or going straight for talk about a relevant set of A-scenarios and abandoning the counterfactual form, are both options.)

Suppose, for example, that your proposition 'a is F' is necessary, but that some other proposition, in some other system, which ascribes the same property to the same object, is contingent. In that case, we will (according to the kind of usage I want to go with here) not want to say that a is necessarily F.

Nevertheless, the relevant counterfactual comes out true, if the relevant A-scenarios are to be kept close to the actual world: on this approach, we can say that, indeed, if you were to say of a that it possesses the property F, you would say something necessary – because if you were to do that, you would do it using your proposition 'a is F'!

This is a perfectly legitimate interpretation of that counterfactual, but it is not the one we want. We want to hold less things fixed, and allow more things to vary (which sounds like it amounts to the same thing, but it may not, since we may have to explicitly widen the overall space of scenarios in question, i.e. explicitly allowing impossible scenarios). In this way, for any (actual, possible, or maybe even impossible) proposition which might make trouble for a being necessarily F, by ascribing F to a and not being necessary, will be covered – it will be what you said in some relevant A-scenario – so that the conditional will be falsified as required.

We will return to the question of how to get a better grip on what our relevant sets of A-scenarios for instances of our proposed analysis must be like in the next post in this series, once we have our special interpretation of quantification on the table, since that will raise a similar question.

For now, our account may be regarded as partially but not wholly specified.