Abstract
In his influential article ‘Essence and Modality’, Fine proposes a definition of (conceptual, logical and metaphysical) necessity in terms of the primitive essentialist notion ‘true in virtue of the nature of’. Fine’s proposal is suggestive, but it admits of different interpretations, leaving it unsettled what the precise formulation of an Essentialist definition of necessity should be. In this paper, four different versions of the definition are discussed: a singular, a plural reading, and an existential variant of Fine’s original suggestion and an alternative version proposed by Correia which is not based on Fine’s primitive essentialist notion. The first main point of the paper is that the singular reading is untenable. The second that given plausible background assumptions, the remaining three definitions are extensionally equivalent. The third is that, this equivalence notwithstanding, Essentialists should adopt Correia’s version of the definition, since both the existential variant, which has de facto been adopted as the standard version of the definition in the literature, and the plural reading suffer from problems connected to Fine’s primitive essentialist notion.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
In this paper, I will presuppose that both the notions of essentiality and of modality are intelligible and have non-trivial applications. Sceptical worries about both notions will not be discussed, even though I believe that one may reasonably have them.
Mackie for example accepts the definiens of the definition as an adequate formalisation of the claim that x is essentially-F, given that x is a rigid designator. See Mackie (2006, p. 6). Salmon’s criterion of non-trivial essentialist import presupposes the definition. See Salmon (1979, p. 704). A logically equivalent formulation of the definition can also be found on p. 301 of Wiggins (1976).
Throughout the text, I will use angular brackets \(\langle \ldots \rangle\) to form names for the propositions corresponding to the sentences they enclose. \(\varPhi\) is used as a sentence-variable, where the sentence can be either logically simple or complex. I will mostly rely on the context to distinguish between use and mention, but will sometimes use regular quotes ‘...’ when needed to avoid confusion.
Note that Fine uses ‘nature’ and ‘essence’ interchangeably.
See Fine (1994, p. 5).
Note that a similar objection has earlier been raised in Dunn (1990, p. 89), using Tom and the set \(\lbrace\)Tom, Harry\(\rbrace\) as the example.
Note that Correia (2006) argues that an Essentialist definition of metaphysical necessity should take a generic notion of essence into account and that Fine (2015) registers agreement. I will not discuss this proposal in any detail in this paper, since it affects none of the main arguments. They could be straightforwardly adapted to versions of the discussed definitions which take generic essentiality into account.
Fine (1994, p. 10). Note that the focus of this paper is mostly on the notion of metaphysical necessity, but the main arguments are equally relevant for generalizations of Fine’s definition to other kinds of necessity.
See Correia (2012, p. 641).
Note that Fine’s proposal should not be understood to give us an analysis of essences in terms of natures. Fine simply treats ‘true in virtue of the nature of’, and also ‘true in virtue of the identity of’, as synonyms for ‘true in virtue of the essence’ of. See Fine (1995c, p. 69), endnote 2.
Standard examples of essential properties like the ones just given are notoriously controversial, but I will, for the sake of the argument, simply accept them as uncontroversial throughout the paper.
For more on plural logic, see e.g. Oliver and Smiley (2013). Note that Fine himself does not talk about pluralities. In his formal work on essence, claims about essentiality are represented by sentences involving the indexed operator \(\Box _F\), where a sentence of the form \(\Box _F \varPhi\) says that \(\varPhi\) is true in virtue of the nature of the Fs, i.e. of the objects to which F applies. Since Fine stipulates that F is rigid, i.e. applies to the same objects in any possible world and since he allows F to be any predicate, no matter whether meaningful or not, sentences involving \(\Box _F\) can straightforwardly be translated into claims about truth in virtue of the nature of pluralities. Note that Fine’s reliance on possible world is exclusive to his formal papers on essence, such as Fine (1995a) and that the most interesting and radical interpretation of his proposal for an Essentialist theory of modality does not rely on possible worlds at all.
Ignoring the asymmetry of the notion ‘true in virtue of the nature of’ in this manner would be problematic if I were to discuss cases in which a proposition were to be true in virtue of the nature of another proposition. Since no such cases will be discussed, my lenient use of the abbreviation should lead to no confusion about the object- and proposition-arguments of the tvn-relation. Also note that ‘relation’ in ‘tvn-relation’ is not meant to be taken ontologically seriously. Nothing in the paper requires that ‘true in virtue of the nature of’ stands for a genuine relation like ‘is north of’.
Note that in a contribution to the discussion of the possibility of unrestricted quantification (Fine 2006), Fine develops, but does not quite endorse, a view according to which quantifier domain extensions can be explained in modal terms, using a specific postulational modality. This might raise the question of whether this view is of any consequence for a Finean Essentialist definition of metaphysical necessity. However, since once again, the question whether the quantifiers in Essentialist definitions like (NS) should be read as unrestricted, or as relatively unrestricted as suggested by Fine, is orthogonal to the arguments made in this paper, I will not commit myself to any particular answer to this question and leave it at two brief remarks: First, according to Fine (2006, p. 33), footnote 12, postulational modality is not a genuine modality on a par with e.g. metaphysical modality. This means that it might not seriously threaten the reductiveness of an Essentialist definition of metaphysical necessity involving it. Second, a version of the definition using this non-standard view of quantification would have to face substantial questions about the essences of postulationally possible objects.
See again Fine’s example of Socrates and the Eiffel Tower in Fine (1994, p. 5).
Stated formally using Fine’s essence-operator \(\Box _F\): \(F \subseteq G \rightarrow (\Box _F \varPhi \rightarrow \Box _G \varPhi )\). See Fine (1995a, p. 247).
See Correia (2012, p. 640). The notion of containment is understood in the following way: The yy contain the xx if, and only if, for every object z, if z is among the xx, z is also among the yy. Note that the principle of monotonicity is not motivated in Correia (2012), but simply introduced as a part of Fine’s essentialist theory of modality.
Given this object-centric understanding of the Essentialist theory, cases of empty essential truth, cases in which a proposition is true in virtue of the nature of no objects at all, stick out as somewhat bizarre. Note however, that Fine allows these cases in the formal system defined in Fine (1995a) and in fact suggests that the empty case can be used to define conceptual necessity. While it does indeed make sense to allow cases in which the F in Fine’s ‘\(\Box _F\)’ operator applies to no objects at all in the context of a logic of essence, e.g. for technical reasons, or because the logic is supposed to cover all conceivable applications of the operator, it is hard to make intuitive sense of these cases if the focus in really just on the essences of objects, as just suggested. After all, it seems that if there are no objects, there are no essences and to assume otherwise would appear to amount to the mistake of objectifying nothing, the same mistake which Carnap (1959) famously attributed to Heidegger. I believe that standing their ground and denying the existence of cases of empty essential truth is the best response to the threat from empty essential truths to (PoM) available to object-centric Essentialists. Note that Essentialists who takes into account cases of generic essence, as suggested by Correia (2006), can give a less radical response to the problem. Based on a generic-friendly reformulation of (PoM) which takes into account the idea that propositions can be generically true in virtue of the nature of what F is, where F is a predicate, can simply argue that empty essential truths are propositions which are true in virtue of the nature of an empty predicate. The threat to (PoM) from empty essential truths can hence be defused by both an object-centric and a generic-friendly version of Essentialism based on (NP).
See Correia (2012, p. 649). I follow Correia’s use of the symbol \(\vdash\) for the notion of logical consequence at work in his theory.
Correia also relies on a notion of relativized logical consequence, but the notion of logical consequence involved in his definition of metaphysical necessity is unrelativized. See Correia (2012, p. 647) for the definition of the relativized notion.
See Correia (2012, p. 649).
See definitions (11) and (12), Correia (2012, p. 248).
Note also that all three remaining definitions are fully compatible with the assumption that possibility is the dual of necessity. The definition of possibility corresponding to (NE) for example is the following: A proposition \(\langle \varPhi \rangle\) is metaphysically possible if, and only if, there is no plurality of objects xx, such that \(\langle \lnot \varPhi \rangle\) is tvn-related to xx. This is noteworthy since according to Yates (2014, p. 415), naive powers or dispositional theories of modality, i.e. theories which explain the possibility of \(\langle \varPhi \rangle\) in terms of the existence of a power or disposition to bring about \(\varPhi\), entail that there are propositions which are both necessarily true and possibly false, given certain plausible background assumptions about powers and the assumption that possibility is the dual of necessity. Given the Essentialist definition of possibility matching (NE), a proposition cannot be possibly false and necessary at the same time, since this would require there to both be and not be a plurality to which the necessary proposition is tvn-related. The accounts of possibility based on (NC) and (NP \(+\) PoM) rule out these cases for similar reasons. This illustrates an interesting contrast between naive powers or dispositional theories and essentialist theories of modality.
See definition (12), Correia (2012, p. 648). The notion of relative logical consequence used here is defined on p. 647, ibid.
It should again be stressed that Correia treats ‘true in virtue of the nature of ...’ as a defined notion, while the notion is treated as a primitive in both (NP) and (NE). This means that the proof for the equivalence of (NC) and (NP \(+\) PoM) leaves some room for disagreement, since an Essentialist who accepts (NP \(+\) PoM) could, at least in principle, reject Correia’s definition of the notion and thereby also the proof.
See for example Livingstone-Banks (2017) and Teitel (2017). I believe that the focus on (NE) rather than on (NC) makes a difference regarding the arguments of both of these papers. I cannot go into details here, since this would take too much space and would lead me too far away from the main argument of this section. To give just one example, let me very briefly remark on one of Livingstone-Banks’s arguments from Sect. 4.1 of his paper. In this section, he argues, making a point not completely dissimilar to a point to be made later in this section, that Fine’s proposal for a restriction on the notion of consequential essence fails to rule out certain implausible essential truths, such as e.g. that Marie Curie is essentially such that she is human and \(2+2=4\). Livingston-Banks then argues that Essentialist who work with (NE) can avoid this problem by adopting a reinterpretation of Fine’s distinction between constitutive and consequential essence which he introduced earlier in his paper. An Essentialist theory of modality built around Correia’s (NC) does not face the same problem in the first place. Instead of relying on Fine’s distinction, it relies on one primitive, constitutively essentialist notion of basic nature and a notion of logical consequence. This allows Essentialists to argue that Livingstone-Banks’s example poses no problem, since the proposition saying that Marie Curie has the property of being such that she is human and that \(2+2=4\) is not part of her basic nature.
That the notion of consequence is the logical notion of consequence is clear from the context. See Fine (1995c, p. 56).
I.e. speaking, as Fine does, of logical consequence as a relation between property-instantiations, the claim is that a’s having property F trivially entails a’s having property F. Note that, as Fine (1995c, p. 57) points out, the reverse implication from expressing a consequentially essential truth to expressing a constitutively essential truth does not generally hold. Note furthermore that the two notions of essence would be mutually exclusive if we were to read ‘more basic’ as ‘strictly more basic’. I here adopt the non-strict reading since it simplifies the formulation of the consequential reading of (NE) and of (NP), which will be discussed shortly.
See Fine (1995c, pp. 57–58) for his arguments to one of which I will come back later.
Unless of course there were a notion of essence definable in terms of consequential essence which supported the relevant essentialist intuitions. The prospects for that are however dim, since both Fine (1995c, p. 58) and Koslicki (2012, pp. 193–195) argue that constitutive essence is not so definable and since there is no relevant alternative notion. Fine (1995c)’s own proposal to restrict the notion of consequential essence will be discussed later in this section.
See e.g. Roca-Royes (2011, p. 66).
Based on a view about the iterative conception of set developed in Incurvati (2012), Wildman (2013, pp. 775–781) does exactly this. He argues that Fine’s contrastive intuition is not, as one might assume, supported by the widely-accepted iterative conception of set, but rather presupposes a metaphysical priority-thesis about sets and their members. See Skiles (2015) for a critical discussion of Wildman’s argument.
It should be pointed out that the link between ontological dependence and relative fundamentality on which Wilson relies in her argument, while arguably part of the orthodoxy in the discussion of ontological dependence [see e.g. Bennett (2017), Schaffer (2010), Koslicki (2013)], is not entirely uncontroversial. Barnes (2017) argues that there are symmetric cases of ontological dependence, cases in which two objects mutually ontologically depend on each other. As a consequence, she rejects the idea that ontological dependence implies relative fundamentality, since the latter is asymmetric.
Note that, unlike its instances, Fine’s procedure leaves the corresponding universal generalizations untouched so that e.g. \(\forall xx (Fxx \vee \lnot Fxx)\) can remain a restricted consequentially essential truth about e.g. the logical concepts of universal quantification, negation, and disjunction, even after its instances are generalized away. This does however not address the problem at hand which specifically concerns the instances of these schematic logical truths.
Using propositional and second order quantification into the index of Fine’s essentialist operator, this can be stated more formally as follows: \(\forall p,q ((\exists F (\Box _F (p)) \wedge \exists G (\Box _G (q))) \rightarrow \exists H (\Box _H (p \wedge q)))\). Note that not all Essentialists might be prepared to adopt the sort of logic needed to state the logical form of this sentence.
References
Barnes, E. (2017). Symmetric dependence. In R. Bliss & G. Priest (Eds.), Reality and its structure. Oxford: Oxford University Press. (forthcoming).
Bennett, K. (2017). Making things up. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Carnap, R. (1959). The elimination of metaphysics through logical analysis of language. In A. J. Ayer (Ed.), Logical positivism, the library of philosophical movements (pp. 60–81). New York: Free Press. (Translated by Arthur Pap; originally published as ‘Überwindung der Metaphysik durch logische Analyse der Sprache’ in Erkenntnis, vol. 2 (1931), no. 1, pp. 219–241).
Correia, F. (2005). Existential dependence and cognate notions. Dordrecht: Philosophia.
Correia, F. (2006). Generic essence, objectual essence, and modality. Noûs, 40(4), 753–767.
Correia, F. (2007). (Finean) essence and (Priorean) modality. Dialectica, 61(1), 63–84.
Correia, F. (2012). On the reduction of necessity to essence. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 84(3), 639–653.
Cowling, S. (2013). The modal view of essence. Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 43(2), 248–266.
Denby, D. A. (2014). Essence and intrinsicality. In R. Francescotti (Ed.), Companion to intrinsic properties (pp. 87–109). Berlin: De Gruyter.
Dunn, J. M. (1990). Relevant predication 3: Essential properties. In J. M. Dunn & A. Gupta (Eds.), Truth or consequences (pp. 77–95). Dordrecht: Kluwer.
Fine, K. (1994). Essence and modality. Philosophical Perspectives, Logic and Language, 8, 1–16.
Fine, K. (1995a). The logic of essence. Journal of Philosophical Logic, 24(3), 241–273.
Fine, K. (1995b). Ontological dependence. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 95, 269–290.
Fine, K. (1995c). Senses of essence. In W. Sinnott-Armstrong (Ed.), Modality, morality, and belief. Essays in honor of Ruth Barcan Marcus (pp. 53–73). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Fine, K. (2000). Semantics for the logic of essence. Journal of Philosophical Logic, 29(6), 543–584.
Fine, K. (Ed.). (2002). The varieties of necessity. In Modality and tense. Philosophical papers, chapter 7 (pp. 235–260). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Fine, K. (2006). Relatively unrestricted quantification. In A. Rayo & G. Uzquiano (Eds.), Absolute generality (pp. 20–44). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Fine, K. (2015). Unified foundations for essence and ground. Journal of the American Philosophical Association, 1(2), 296–311.
Forbes, G. (1986). In defense of absolute essentialism. Midwest Studies in Philosophy, 11(1), 3–31.
Gorman, M. (2005). The essential and the accidental. Ratio, 18(3), 276–289.
Incurvati, L. (2012). How to be a minimalist about sets. Philosophical Studies, 159(1), 69–87.
Koslicki, K. (2012). Varieties of ontological dependence. In F. Correia & B. Schnieder (Eds.), Metaphysical grounding: Understanding the structure of reality (pp. 186–213). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Koslicki, K. (2013). Ontological dependence: An opinionated survey. In B. Schnieder, M. Hoeltje, & A. Steinberg (Eds.), Varieties of dependence: Ontological dependence, grounding, supervenience, response-dependence (pp. 31–64). Dordrecht: Philosophia.
Lewis, D. (1986). On the plurality of worlds. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.
Livingstone-Banks, J. (2017). In defence of modal essentialism. Inquiry, 60(8), 816–838.
Mackie, P. (2006). How things might have been. Oxford: Oxford Clarendon Press.
Oliver, A., & Smiley, T. (2013). Plural logic. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Roca-Royes, S. (2011). Essential properties and individual essences. Philosophy Compass, 6(1), 65–77.
Rosen, G. (2010). Metaphysical dependence: Grounding and reduction. In B. Hale & A. Hoffmann (Eds.), Modality: Metaphysics, logic, and epistemology (pp. 109–135). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Salmon, N. U. (1979). How not to derive essentialism from the theory of reference. Journal of Philosophy, 76(12), 703–725.
Schaffer, J. (2010). Monism: The priority of the whole. The Philosophical Review, 119(1), 31–76.
Skiles, A. (2015). Essence in abundance. Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 45, 100–112.
Teitel, T. (2017). Contingent existence and the reduction of modality to essence. Mind. https://doi.org/10.1093/mind/fzx001.
Wiggins, D. (1976). The de re ‘must’: A note on the logical form of essentialist claims. In G. Evans & J. McDowell (Eds.), Truth and meaning (pp. 285–312). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Wildman, N. (2013). Modality, sparsity, and essence. Philosophical Quarterly, 63(243), 760–782.
Wildman, N. (2016). How to be a modalist about essence. In M. Jago (Ed.), Reality making (pp. 177–196). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Wilson, J. M. (2016). Essence and dependence. In M. Dumitru (Ed.), Metaphysics, meaning, and modality. Themes from Kit Fine. Oxford University Press. http://individual.utoronto.ca/jmwilson/Wilson-Essence-and-Dependence.pdf
Yates, D. (2014). Dispositionalism and the modal operators. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 89(1), 411–424.
Zalta, E. N. (2006). Essence and modality. Mind, 115(459), 659–693.
Acknowledgements
Sections 2–4 of this paper are based on parts of a chapter of my dissertation ‘Metaphysical Modality and Essentiality’, which I defended in December 2013 at the University of Geneva. Thanks again to my supervisor Kevin Mulligan and the members of my Ph.D.-jury Fabrice Correia, Fraser MacBride, Peter Simons and Wolfgang Spohn. Parts of the paper were presented at the eidos seminar at the University of Geneva and at the Fine Conference in Varano Borghi. Thanks to everyone who discussed the paper with me on these occasions, especially to Kit Fine for his reply in Varano Borghi, to Philipp Blum, Peter Fritz, Olivier Massin, and Nathan Wildman for suggestions which led to important improvements, and to three anonymous referees for this and another journal. I gratefully acknowledge financial support by the European Community’s Seventh Framework Programme FP7/2007-2013 under Grant Agreement No. FP7-238128 and the Swiss National Science Foundation (Project ‘Indeterminacy and Formal Concepts’, Grant-No. 156554, University of Geneva, principal investigator: Kevin Mulligan).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Michels, R. On how (not) to define modality in terms of essence. Philos Stud 176, 1015–1033 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-018-1040-8
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-018-1040-8