Abstract
In this article I introduce a certain kind of anti-realist account of what makes a property essential to an object and defend it against likely objections. This account, which I call a ‘conferralist’ account, shares some of the attractive features of other anti-realist accounts, such as conventionalism and expressivism, but I believe, not their respective drawbacks.
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Notes
In this way, I wish to vindicate essentialism. My motivations are not unlike Martha Nussbaum’s in Nussbaum (1992) although the projects are in other ways quite different.
In accordance with their motivations, philosophers use the word ‘realist’ to mean many different things. I want to underscore that the real/anti-real distinction that I am working with is to capture the distinction between being independent and dependent upon human thought or practices.
It is not imperative that the reader agree with me about the interpretation of the baseball case. What is important is that it be clear what a conferred property is, even though we may disagree about the status of particular properties.
The relationship between the conferred property of being a strike and the physical property of having traveled trajectory T is that the umpire confers the property of being a strike on a pitch iff he judges that the ball has traveled trajectory T.
What if the audience were a bunch of unusually aesthetically challenged individuals who insisted on playing video games throughout the whole performance, yelling out periodically how many Martians they had killed?
Philosophers use the word ‘constructivist’ in many ways. What I have in mind here is that what does the conferring is a construction. In my case what does the conferring is constructed by idealizing us concept users along an epistemic dimension. This is a way to spell out the claim that essentiality is conferred by our conceptual commitments. This will become clearer shortly.
In my subsequent discussion I will talk of essentiality and the concept of essentiality, instead of the property of being an essential property of object x and the concept of the property of being an essential property of object x. Essentiality is really a relation holding between a property and an object, but for simplicity of exposition I will ignore that and use ’property’ in the non-technical sense to cover both properties and relations.
I am here explicitly interpreting Rawls constructivism in Rawls (1971) as a metaphysical position. In later works Rawls does not want to subscribe to metaphysical constructivism, but merely a political constructivism, lest his view itself incorporate a comprehensive view of the good. I take this to be a change in his view, rather than a clarification. In any case, the analogy with a metaphysical interpretation of Rawlsian constructivism should be clear. I should also note that the veil of ignorance also plays an epistemic function in Rawls’s work, such as to help the reader, but we can ignore that function now.
See e.g., Mark Johnston’s use of application conditions in (1993).
The notion of non-negotiable belief is borrowed from Johnston (1993, p. 103), with the modification, that like in the case of concept commitments, I want to allow that beliefs, even non-negotiable ones, need not be conscious.
Someone might object now that it is not a non-negotiable belief associated with the concept red that if something is red, then it is colored, and give the example of someone being described as being red because of her leftist political beliefs, as Rosa Luxemburg was (“Red Rosa”). To make the objection even crisper one might say that Rosa’s beliefs were red, though not colored. But clearly the correct response to such an objection is to insist that such usage of the term red involves a different concept from our ordinary color concept.
Consider, e.g., the case of the—at first metaphorical—use of the concept of being a bachelor as applied to male cats, a use that then starts over time to change the practice of applying the concept of being a bachelor. Over time, the belief that bachelors were human would then cease to be a non-negotiable belief.
This formulation of the point is due to Catherine Z. Elgin in (1997, p. 168). I have changed the example slightly so the focus is squarely on conventionalism about essentiality, as opposed to about other things.
Elgin’s constructive nominalism is also not a temporal position. Cf. Elgin (1997).
Here I follow Elgin (1997).
The locus classicus is Ayer (1946), where he offers an expressivist account of moral, aesthetic, and religious language.
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Acknowledgements
Many people have read previous versions of this article or discussed with me the ideas in it, although none of them should be blamed for the views expressed here—in fact, many of them disagree quite strongly with me—or any remaining shortcomings. I would like to thank Alex Byrne, Andy Egan, Iris Einheuser, Nathaniel Goldberg, Elizabeth Harman, Sarah McGrath, Ishani Maitra, Mary Kate McGowen, Laurie Paul, Adina Roskies, Robert Stalnaker, Christopher Sturr, Catherine Wearing, Ralph Wedgwood, Jessica Wilson, and Stephen Yablo. I owe a particular debt to Jennifer Church, Catherine Elgin, Sally Haslanger, Rebecca McLennan, and Judith Jarvis Thomson.
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Sveinsdóttir, Á. Essentiality conferred. Philos Stud 140, 135–148 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-008-9230-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-008-9230-4