Essence and Logical Properties

Synthese, 2018

Since Kit Fine published his famous counter-examples to the modal account of essence, numerous modalists have proposed to avoid the counter-examples by revising the modal account. A sophisticated revision has been put forward by Fabrice Correia. Drawing on themes from Prior’s modality, Correia has introduced a nonstandard conception of metaphysical modality and has proposed to analyze essence in its terms. He has claimed that the analysis is immune to Fine’s counter-examples. In this paper, I argue that there are counter-examples supported by the very intuition underlying Fine’s counter-examples, which are not accommodated by Correia’s account. If my argument is sound, then Correia has not been successful in his defense of modalism. An important corollary of my argument will be that Fine’s consequential conception of essence needs to be modified if it is to capture his own intuitive notion of essence.

Metaphysics, 2020

According to the simple modal account of essence, an object has a property essentially just in case it has it in every world in which it exists. As many have observed, the simple modal account is implausible for a number of reasons. This has led to various proposals for strengthening the account, for example, by adding a restriction to the intrinsic or sparse properties. I argue, however, that these amendments to the simple modal account themselves fail. Drawing on lessons from these failures, I propose a new version of a modal account, inspired by Ruth Barcan Marcus's defense of the coherence of quantified modal logic, according to which an object has a property essentially just in case (i) it has it in every world in which it exists, (ii) the property is discriminating (or non-trivial), and (iii) the property is qualitative. The resulting account of essence does not face any of the standard objections other accounts face, and I defend it from other potential objections. * I would like to thank Julia Langkau and Nathan Wildman for very helpful feedback on an earlier version of the paper. 1 Essences have been important also for accounts that forgo possible worlds. For instance, Kit Fine argues that modality is reducible to essence; see e.g. (Fine, 1994). 2 Brody develops a separate account of essence, which he also dubs 'Aristotelian', in (Brody, 1980). I will not discuss that account here.

A review of Bob Hale's Necessary Beings.

Analysis

I provide a case-by-case definition of essential truths based on the notions of metaphysical necessity and ontological dependence. Relying on suggestions in the literature, I adopt a definition of the latter notion in terms of the notion of ground. The resulting account is adequate in the sense that it is not subject to Kit Fine’s famous counterexamples to the purely modal account of essence. In addition, it provides us with a novel conception of truths pertaining to the essence of objects, which might help to dispel doubts on the legitimacy of the notion of essence itself.

Logic and Logical Philosophy, 2022

It is commonplace to formalize propositions involving essential properties of objects in a language containing modal operators and quantifiers. Assuming David Lewis's counterpart theory as a semantic framework for quantified modal logic, I will show that certain statements discussed in the metaphysics of modality de re, such as the sufficiency condition for essential properties, cannot be faithfully formalized. A natural modification of Lewis's translation scheme seems to be an obvious solution but is not acceptable for various reasons. Consequently, the only safe way to express some intuitions regarding essential properties is to use directly the language of counterpart theory without modal operators.

Philosophy Compass, 2011

Pace Necessitism—roughly, the view that existence is not contingent—essential properties provide necessary conditions for the existence of objects. Sufficiency properties, by contrast, provide sufficient conditions, and individual essences provide necessary and sufficient conditions. This paper explains how these kinds of properties can be used to illuminate the ontological status of merely possible objects and to construct a respectable possibilist ontology. The paper also reviews two points of interaction between essentialism and modal logic. First, we will briefly see the challenge that arises against S4 from flexible essential properties; as well as the moves available to block it. After this, the emphasis is put on the Barcan Formula (BF), and on why it is problematic for essentialists. As we will see, Necessitism can accommodate both (BF) and essential properties. What necessitists cannot do at the same time is to continue to understanding essential properties as providing necessary conditions for the existence of individuals; against what might be for some a truism.

Synthese (2018), 2018

During the last quarter of a century, a number of philosophers have become attracted to the idea that necessity can be analyzed in terms of a hyperintensional notion of essence. One challenge for proponents of this view is to give a plausible explanation of our modal knowledge. The goal of this paper is to develop a strategy for meeting this challenge. My approach rests on an account of modality that I developed in previous work, and which analyzes modal properties in terms of the notion of a metaphysical law (which is a generalization of the concept of an essential truth). I discuss what information about the metaphysical laws (including essential truths) is required for modal knowledge. Moreover, I describe two ways in which we might be able to acquire this information. The first way employs inference to the best explanation. The metaphysical laws, including the essential truths, play a crucial role in causal and grounding explanations and we can gain knowledge of these laws by abductive inferences from facts of which we have perceptual or a priori knowledge. The second way of gaining information about the metaphysical laws rests on knowledge that is partly constitutive of competence with the concepts that are needed to express the relevant information. Finally, I consider how knowledge of the metaphysical laws can be used to establish modal claims, paying special attention to the much-discussed connection between conceiving and possibility.

2015

Bob Hale’s distinguished record of research places him among the most important and influential contemporary analytic metaphysicians. In his deep, wide ranging, yet highly readable book Necessary Beings, Hale draws upon, but substantially integrates and extends, a good deal his past research to produce a sustained and richly textured essay on — as promised in the subtitle — ontology, modality, and the relations between them. I’ve set myself two tasks in this review: first, to provide a reasonably thorough (if not exactly comprehensive) overview of the structure and content of Hale’s book and, second, to a limited extent, to engage Hale’s book philosophically. I approach these tasks more or less sequentially: Parts I and 2 of the review are primarily expository; in Part 3 I adopt a somewhat more critical stance and raise several issues concerning one of the central elements of Hale’s account, his essentialist theory of modality.

Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 2012

In his influential paper ‘‘Essence and Modality’’, Kit Fine argues that no account of essence framed in terms of metaphysical necessity is possible, and that it is rather metaphysical necessity which is to be understood in terms of essence. On his account, the concept of essence is primitive, and for a proposition to be metaphysically necessary is for it to be true in virtue of the nature of all things. Fine also proposes a reduction of conceptual and logical necessity in the same vein: a conceptual necessity is a proposition true in virtue of the nature of all concepts, and a logical necessity a proposition true in virtue of the nature of all logical concepts. I argue that the plausibility of Fine's view crucially requires that certain apparent explanatory links between essentialist facts be admitted and accounted for, and I make a suggestion about how this can be done. I then argue against the reductions of conceptual and logical necessity proposed by Fine and suggest alternative reductions, which remain nevertheless Finean in spirit.

This dissertation provides an account of essentiality that satisfies two main desiderata: (1) The account should offer an explanation as to why the following two intuitions are true: (i) It is essential to the set {Socrates} to have Socrates as a member. (ii) It is not essential to Socrates to be a member of that set. (2) The account should do justice to the sense of philosophical significance that has traditionally been attached to the notion of essence. The two intuitions mentioned in (1) together form what I call ‘Fine’s asymmetry’, after Kit Fine, whose paper ‘Essence and Modality’ has persuasively undermined the traditional modal account of essentiality by pointing out (among other worries) that this account cannot plausibly accommodate both of those intuitions. The account of essentiality proposed in this dissertation offers an alternative to the modal account. It is reductive, in the sense that it provides truth-conditions for essentialist claims without in turn relying on any fundamental notions of an entity’s ‘nature’ or ‘identity’; nor does it rely on any concepts of metaphysical modality. Instead, it is based on a framework of sets, attributes, and states of affairs, which is introduced in chapters 2 and 3. The account itself is then developed in chapters 4 to 7. The first major step in this direction is the introduction, in chapter 4, of the concept of an individuational ontology, which results from a generalization and modification of Peter Aczel’s approach to the theory of non-well-founded sets. On this basis, chapter 5 introduces relativized concepts of essence and essentiality, where the relativization in question is to individuational ontologies. The question of what conditions an individuational ontology O has to satisfy in order for essences-relative-to-O to count as essences simpliciter is the topic of chapters 6 and 7. Chapter 6 sets out to develop a fairly straightforward approach, but this is quickly seen to face apparently insuperable difficulties. Chapter 7 develops a fundamentally different approach, which turns out to be more successful. In chapter 8, it is shown how the resulting account of essentiality manages to accommodate Fine’s asymmetry, and in the final chapter, the account is applied to an elucidation of de re modal discourse.