Abstract
Since Kit Fine presented his counter-examples to the standard versions of the modal view, many have been convinced that the standard versions of the modal view are not adequate. However, the scope of Fine’s argument has not been fully appreciated. In this paper, I aim to carry Fine’s argument to its logical conclusion and argue that once we embrace the intuition underlying his counter-examples, we have to hold that properties obtained, totally or partially, by application of logical operations are not essential to non-logical entities. I also demonstrate that most of the post-Finean versions of the modal view, which were developed to accommodate Fine’s counter-examples, entail that such properties are essential to the entities, and so fail to capture the notion of essence at issue in Fine’s counter-examples. Additionally, I explore the consequence of my argument for Fine’s proposed logic of essence. The logic turns out to be inadequate in its present shape as it represents such properties to be essential to the entities. I conclude by developing a modification to the logic to overcome the shortcoming.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
This objection applies to other versions of the logic as well, such as the one developed in Correia (2000).
One thing that helps conflate these two claims is the form of expression of essential facts that has become popular due to Fine’s influential work. Thus, it has become popular to express the fact that Secretes is essentially a man with the locution “it is true in virtue of Socrates’ nature that he is a man” or, more formally, “□Socrates Socrates is a man.” Although Fine (1995b: 54, c: 242) introduced it as a form of expression of the essential fact that being a man is essential for Socrates, the locution has connotations about the ground of the necessity that Socrates is a man.
Purely logical properties are themselves divided into (1) properties which are purely qualitative such as the property of being such that everything is either red or not red, and (2) properties which are not purely qualitative such as the property of being such that Socrates is red or not red. I will formulate my argument in terms of the former purely logical properties. But, as shall become clear below, my argument will have significant implications for the latter purely logical properties.
Logical entities have essential properties other than logical properties. Disjunction, for instance, is essentially a function, or is essentially an abstract entity. So, we should distinguish between the essential properties that logical entities have as a result of their logical nature and the essential properties that they have a result of their non-logical nature (cf. Correia 2012: §5).
The foregoing cases involved logically complex necessities. But if the essentialist account of the ground of logic is correct, then even logically complex contingencies are partly grounded in the essences of logical entities. For instance, the contingent truth that Socrates was stub-nosed or tall is grounded in the truth of the first disjunct and the rule of disjunction, which is itself grounded in the essence of disjunction. Contrast this view with the received view according to which a contingent truth is fully grounded in the truth of its true disjunct (see Fine 2012: §7; Rosen 2010: §6).
As Fine (1995b: 55) has pointed out, the essence of an object can be construed as the class of its essential properties or as the class of propositions that are true in virtue of what the object is. In this paper, I liberally switch between these two construals.
I owe this line of response to Alan Sidelle.
Here one can be a bundle theorist and say that all of the parts of an object are properties, or one can be a substratum theorist and hold that in addition to its properties, an object also has a substratum as a part.
I think that predicate conjunction reduces to sentential conjunction, and so one single entity is involved in both cases. However, even if one says that what is involved in predicate conjunction is different from what is involved in sentential conjunction, what is involved in predicate conjunction will still be a logical entity whose involvement in a property makes the property non-essential to a non-logical entity taken alone.
Notice that if this response is correct, then the essence of non-logical entities is mereologically structured, or mereology is built into their essence, so to speak. Thus, not only being male and having human parents are each individually essential to Socrates, but their composition, i.e. being male + having human parents, is essential to Socrates as well. In other words, the essence of Socrates is constituted by such properties as being male, having human parents, etc. plus the composition function. The last part is shared by all non-logical objects. This is not a novel idea because, as mentioned earlier, some have already proposed, for independent reasons, a mereological analysis of the ontological structure of objects. According to them, the essence of an object is the composition of the object’s essential parts (Paul 2002: 588).
This seems to have significant implications for the ground of logic as well. As mentioned earlier, some people hold that the Finean intuition motivates us to say that logic is solely grounded in the essence of logical entities. According to them, even if Socrates, or any other non-logical entities, didn’t exist logic would still hold. But if we take the intuition that conjunctive properties are essential to non-logical entities seriously, then maybe we should say that the essences of non-logical entities collectively ground the rule of conjunction. For, the intuition suggests that it is part of their nature that the conjunction rule holds.
It is not entirely clear whether Fine meant the distinction between constitutive and consequential essence to be a distinction within the essential properties of a thing, or he meant to introduce the notion of consequential essence merely as a technical notion with theoretically useful applications. There are passages in his writing which suggest the former. For instance, when introducing the constitutive/consequential distinction he says “An essential property of an object is a constitutive part of the essence of that object if it is not had in virtue of being a consequence of some more basic essential properties of the object; and otherwise it is a consequential part of the essence.” [emphasis mine] (Fine 1995b: 57) This passage, particularly its opening, suggests that the division between constitutive and consequential essential properties is a division of the essential properties of a thing. So, at least in such passages, he seems not to be faithful to the intuition underlying his own counter-examples.
By “logic” I mean a minimal logic in which basic principles of classical logic (e.g. for any x, x is human if human) hold but theorems of, say, set theory proper (e.g. for any x, x belongs to {x}) do not.
Correia has also provided a world-semantics for the notions of local and global possibility/necessity, and has formulated his account of essence in terms of the semantics. For a detailed review and assessment of his account see Morvarid (2017).
Tclta defines two notions of essential here: weakly essential and strongly essential. According to him, the weakly essential properties of an ordinary object are those that it has in all worlds where it is concrete, and its strongly essential properties are those that it has in all and only the worlds where it is concrete. However, Zalta seems to hold that it is the strongly essential properties of an ordinary object that are, intuitively speaking, essential to it.
Steward (2015) has argued that Brogaard and Salerno’s account does not even accommodate Fine’s own counter-examples. If Steward is right, then their account is in even worse condition.
I appreciate the anonymous reviewer of this journal for attracting my attention to this possible objection.
I owe the last counter-example to Mahmoud Morvarid.
For a criticism of sparse modalism see Skiles (2015).
In private correspondence, Fine confirmed that the worlds countenanced in his logic are logically possible.
As noted earlier, the second condition has been simplified. The original formulation is:
Condition (2): A is true at every world v which is compatible with the nature of F’s.
Thus, existence does not turn out, in his account, to be essential to contingent beings like Socrates. For there are worlds compatible with Socrates’ nature in which he does not exist. (Fine 2000: 543).
It also follows by the above rule that any singular logical truth is true in virtue of the objects which occur in its objectual content. Thus, it is, by the above rule, true in virtue of the nature of Socrates that Socrates is either red or not red.
References
Brogaard, B., & Salerno, J. (2007). A counterfactual account of essence. The Reasoner, 4, 4–5.
Brogaard, B., & Salerno, J. (2013). Remarks on counterpossibles. Synthese, 190, 639–660.
Christensen, R. (2014). Essence, essence, and essence. Studia Philosophica Estonica, 7(2), 72.
Correia, F. (2000). Propositional logic of essence. Journal of Philosophical Logic, 29, 295–313.
Correia, F. (2007). (Finean) Essence and (Priorean) modality. Dialectica, 61, 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, 248–266.
Della Rocca, M. (1996). Essentialism: Parts 1 & 2. Philosophical Books, 37(1–13), 81–89.
Denby, D. (2014). Essence and intrinsicality. In R. Francescotti (Ed.), Companion to Intrinsic Properties (pp. 87–109).
Fine, K. (1994). Essence and modality. Philosophical Perspectives, 8, 1–16.
Fine, K. (1995a). Ontological dependence. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society New Series, 95, 269–290.
Fine, K. (1995b). Senses of essence. In W. Sinnott-Armstrong (Ed.), Modality, morality, and belief (pp. 53–73). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Fine, K. (1995c). The logic of essence. Journal of Philosophical Logic, 24, 241–273.
Fine, K. (2000). Semantics for the logic of essence. Journal of Philosophical Logic, 29(6), 543–584.
Fine, K. (2001). The question of realism. Philosophers’ Imprint, 1, 1–30.
Fine, K. (2012). A guide to ground. In F. Correia & B. Schnieder (Eds.), Metaphysical grounding: Understanding the structure of reality (pp. 37–80). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Fine, K. (2015). Unified foundation for essence and ground. Journal of the American Philosophical Association, 1(2), 296–311.
Gorman, M. (2005). The essential and the accidental. Ratio, 18, 276–289.
Hale, B. (2013). Necessary beings: An essay on ontology, modality, and the relations between them. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Morvarid, H. (2017). Finean essence, local necessity, and pure logical properties. Synthese. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-017-1441-9.
Paul, L. A. (2002). Logical parts. NOÛS, 36(4), 578–596.
Rosen, G. (2010). Metaphysical dependence: Grounding and reduction. In R. Hale & A. Hoffman (Eds.), Modality: Metaphysics, logic, and epistemology (pp. 109–136). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Schaffer, J. (2009). On what grounds what. In D. Manley, D. J. Chalmers, & R. Wasserman (Eds.), Metametaphysics: New essays on the foundations of ontology (pp. 347–383). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Skiles, A. (2015). Essence in abundance. Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 45(1), 100–112.
Steward, S. (2015). Ya shouldn’ta couldn’ta wouldn’ta. Synthese, 192, 1909–1921.
Wildman, N. (2013). Modality, sparsity, and essence. Philosophical Quarterly, 63, 760–782.
Zalta, E. (2006). Essence and modality. Mind, 115, 659–693.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Bob Hale, Alan Sidelle, Mahrad Almotahari, William D'Alessandro, Stephen Steward, Fabrice Correia, and a referee of this journal for their helpful comments on earlier drafts of the paper. I am especially indebted to Mahmoud Morvarid and Nathan Wildman whose detailed, insightful comments greatly improved the paper.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Morvarid, H. Essence and logical properties. Philos Stud 176, 2897–2917 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-018-1156-x
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-018-1156-x