Abstract
What is it for something to be essential to an item? For some time, it was standard to think that the concept of necessity alone can provide an answer: for something to be essential to an item is for it to be strictly implied by the existence of that item. We now tend to think that this view fails because its analysans is insufficient for its analysandum. In response, some argue that we can supplement the analysis in terms of necessity with a further condition. In this paper I argue that this view is untenable in its current form. I then provide a glimmer of hope to those who think that essence is at least partially analyzable in terms of necessity.
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Notes
A few remarks. First, unless I specify otherwise, talk of necessity is always of metaphysical necessity. See Kment (2012) and Fine (2005) on the varieties of necessity. Second, I use the ‘For it to be that … is for it to be that …’ locution to express reductive analyses. I take statements of this form to imply strict equivalences between analysandum and analysans. Third, I chose ‘necessity’ in ‘Necessity Analysis’ instead of ‘modal’ so as not to suggest that alternative theories of essence are non-modal. See Menzel (2015) and Teitel (2017).
By a ‘theory of essence’ I mean any answer to the question ‘What is it for something to be essential to an item?’. This includes the answer according to which essence is primitive.
Fine (1994a) considers other examples as well. Either those examples can be assimilated or they put further constraints on what shape a sufficiently fine-grained theory of essence should take. In any case, my focus is on the constraints imposed by Necessary Non-Essential and Discernibility.
In this paper I assume that ‘essence’ is univocal. As a result, I ignore (Zalta 2006). His view is not sensibly read as “adding a further condition to the Necessity Analysis”. Rather, Zalta adds a further form of predication, namely encoding, restricted to abstract items. I also ignore (Brogaard and Salerno 2013) for similar reasons: their account is counterfactual.
I avoid \(\lambda \)-abstraction. This is because \(\lambda \)-abstracts hold in virtue of that from which they are abstracted. For example, \([\lambda x. Fx]b\) holds in virtue of Fb. So I will say that it is essential to {Socrates} that Socrates is a member of {Socrates} and not that it is essential to {Socrates} that {Socrates} is an x such that Socrates is a member of x.
Why the possibility operator? First, the syntax of first-order logic allows us to take any n-ary predicate and n number of terms and form a sentence. We will not want any well-formed sentence to be an O-truth simply by virtue of the predicate involved being S. Second, this possibility operator relieves the O-operator from being factive: that \(O(R x_1 \ldots x_n)\) implies \(R x_1 \ldots x_n\). If factivity is desired, we simply drop the diamond.
What exactly it is for something to be part of the scientific understanding of the world is a legitimate question that has not yet been fully pursued by its proponents. For some further illumination, see Schaffer (2004, 93).
What about Necessary Non-Essential? The result above concerning Necessary Non-Essential—that to have a non-redundant analysis, the proponent of the Supplemented Necessity Analysis must accept that their preferred operator applies to some contingencies— will be revisited later on. But it will not be a claim of this paper that the Supplemented Necessity Analysis is inconsistent with Necessary Non-Essential. For example, the proponent of Intrinsicality might say that, although the existence of Socrates strictly implies his distinctness from 2, it is not intrinsic that Socrates is distinct from 2. Since Intrinsicality implies the Supplemented Necessity Analysis, it follows that the Supplemented Necessity Analysis is consistent with Necessary Non-Essential.
Fine (1995b) uses predicates instead of terms, but he interprets statements of essence using predicate extensions; and Correia (2005) uses plural terms over singular terms. This is why I said “consistent with”. In any case, informal statements of essence such as ‘It is essential to Socrates that Socrates is human’ implicitly have the syntax I describe here.
A few remarks. First, Livingstone-Banks (2017) may be construed as supplying a version of the Further Supplemented Necessity Analysis in terms of truth-making. However, he denies that there are essential relations, and so his view is inconsistent with Discernibility. Second, it is worth emphasizing that Intrinsicality and Naturalness cannot be straightforwardly amended to fit the Further Supplemented Necessity Analysis, since predicates are thought to be intrinsic or natural simpliciter, and not relative to items that satisfy them.
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Acknowledgements
Thanks to Louis deRosset, Kathrin Koslicki, Mike Raven, Riin Sirkel, and to an audience at the University of Vermont for helpful feedback.
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Zylstra, J. Essence, necessity, and definition. Philos Stud 176, 339–350 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-017-1018-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-017-1018-y