Abstract
Causal theories of reference for natural kind terms are widely agreed to play a central role in arguments for the claim that theoretical identity statements such as “Water is H2O” are necessary, if true. However, there is also fairly wide-spread agreement, due to the arguments of Nathan Salmon (in Reference and Essence), that causal theories of reference do not alone establish such essentialism about natural kinds: an independent, non-trivial essentialist premise is also needed. In this paper I will question this latter agreement. I will argue that there is an independently attractive explanation of why such identity statements are metaphysically necessary, if true: an explanation which relies on assumptions about the semantics of natural kind terms, general philosophical assumptions about reference, and straightforward empirical assumptions, but presupposes no non-trivial essentialist premises.
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Notes
Two clarifications are in order. First, (2)–(5) does not explicitly appeal to the rigidity of “H2O” (which I think is telling, cf. below), and the derivation is therefore not directly of the sort mentioned here. However, Kripke and Putnam clearly do assume that true identifications between rigid terms should be necessary, and some examples discussed in the literature (such as “Brontosaurus is Apatosaurus”) make explicit use of the assumption. Secondly, kind identities are sometimes (often by proponents of the notion of rigidity under discussion here, cf. LaPorte 2013) construed as identity statements between abstracta rather than as quantified biconditionals (cf. above). However, this involves taking kind terms to be singular terms denoting kinds, rather than general terms; moreover, on this understanding it is no longer obvious how a kind identity could be a straightforward empirical discovery, since we do not observe kinds, but only their instances (for more on this see Haukioja 2012).
See Haukioja (2012) for more details.
I remain neutral here with respect to questions of how the applicability role is represented by the speaker (if at all), and if it is represented, whether it deserves to be thought of as narrow content.
The two distinctions are elaborated in much more detail in Cohnitz and Haukioja (2013), although the connection to actuality-dependence is not explicitly made there.
I will write, in plural, of our dispositions, since I believe such dispositions are, as a matter of fact, widely shared by actual speakers. However, strictly speaking a meta-internalist view will claim that the semantics of a speaker's expressions, including whether and how the reference of the speaker's terms is dependent on his/her physical and social environment, is wholly determined by the individual psychology of the speaker.
Or, consider another version: suppose that we found that, say, 99.7 % of unmarried adult males have N, while 0.3 % do not; at the same time, we find N present in a tiny proportion of married females. Would we revise our categorisation of this small minority of men as bachelors and instead include the married females? Surely not. (Thanks to Daniel Cohnitz for this twist on the example). Were we to make a similar discovery about the golden stuff, say that we find some of the metal we categorised as gold to have a different atomic number than 99.7 % of the rest, while a small sample of a greenish looking metal turns out to have the same atomic number as the other 99.7 %, we would, I think, revise our categorisation of the 0.3 % and consider the greenish stuff as gold.
More precisely: what the ARRs of our actuality-dependent terms are, given a way the actual world is like.
In an interesting recent paper, Sarah-Jane Leslie (2013) argues that the kinds of intuitions elicited by Twin Earth-style thought experiments are, indeed, reflections of psychological essentialism, but that we should take them to be systematically false, given that findings in natural sciences such as biology and chemistry seem to conflict with such essentialism. We should note, however, that the kinds of essentialist intuitions we have (and which are manifested in thought experimentation) are remarkably flexible. “H2O” is, in Putnam's discussion, just as much a placeholder as “c-fibres” is in Kripke's—indeed, Putnam considers the epistemic possibility of “water” turning out to be a jade-like disjunctive kind. We have, in our ordinary usage of natural kind terms, a strong preference for unified underlying essences, but are willing to settle for something far less unified and even disjunctive, if that is the most that the actual world gives us. As long as we, as speakers, are disposed to let an underlying property determine the modal profile of a natural kind term, that property qualifies as a possible essence.
Note that such essentialist assumptions need not be (and in all likelihood are not) very specific at all, and definitely nothing as specific as Salmon's (4). Rather, the essentialist assumption is merely a preference for some explanatory unity underlying the observable characteristics of members of the kind (cf. previous footnote). The precise nature of the explanatory unity—whether it has to do with chemical structure or something completely different—is an empirical matter.
For an interesting recent discussion of what such an argument would have to look like, see Tahko (forthcoming).
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Acknowledgments
Earlier versions of this material were presented at conferences, seminars and workshops in Athens, Canberra, Dunedin, Auckland, Helsinki, and Tampere. I am grateful to audiences at these events for useful feedback. I also want to thank Daniel Cohnitz, Markku Keinänen, Erick Llamas, Daniel Nolan, Alexander Sandgren, and Tuomas Tahko, as well as an anonymous reviewer for the journal, for helpful comments on earlier written versions. Research on this paper was financially supported by the Norwegian Research Council grant 212841.
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Haukioja, J. On deriving essentialism from the theory of reference. Philos Stud 172, 2141–2151 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-014-0402-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-014-0402-0