Abstract
In a recent issue of this journal, Berit Brogaard and Joe Salerno presented a counterfactual theory of essence, designed to get around Kit Fine’s influential objections to the standard modal account of essence. I argue that Brogaard and Salerno’s theory does not avoid Fine’s objections. Then I propose a sequence of variations on their theory, and argue that none of them succeed either.
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Notes
I formulate each theory of essence in terms of properties rather than predicates. By the end of the paper, the views I consider will be much clearer in their property formulations, and I have formulated every view in the same way to be consistent. In this respect my formulations differ from Fine’s and Brogaard and Salerno’s. For stylistic reasons only, I will occasionally slip into the predicate formulation when I discuss these theories. Thanks to an anonymous referee for discussion.
This is Brogaard and Salerno’s theory of the philosophical use of the term ‘essence.’ Their theory of the ordinary use of ‘essence’ omits the necessity condition. I will not attempt to give an account of the ordinary concept of essence in this paper. They also give an alternative but equivalent formulation of their view, directly in terms of worlds: “an essential property \(F\) of \(x\) is such that \(x\) is \(F\) in every metaphysically possible world in which \(x\) exists, and in the closest possible or impossible worlds where \(F\) is not instantiated, \(x\) fails to exist” (Brogaard and Salerno, p. 648). They seem to be assuming that only existent things can have properties, and I assume that they intended condition (2) of the couldn’ta wouldn’ta theory to mean “if no existent thing had F....” I consider the consequences of rejecting these assumptions in the next section.
Alternatively, we might define an impossible world as a maximal inconsistent set of propositions, as Brogaard and Salerno (2013, n. 14) do. They do this to gain “the simplicity of a two-valued semantics”, but nothing in my paper turns on which way we define impossible worlds.
Fine’s argument seems fallacious on other grounds too. Even if a modal theory of essence is correct, people who agree on all the modal facts can disagree about the essentialist facts. If they do, then either they won’t both accept the same modal theory of essence, or one of them will have made a fallacious inference, but these situations are perfectly possible. In general, which disagreements are possible seems a poor guide to which views are true.
There are at least two reasons to think there is no possible world where nothing is distinct from the Tower: (i) the Tower is essentially composite, so, necessarily, if the Tower exist then some parts of it exist, and the Tower’s parts are distinct from the Tower; (ii) some beings exist and are distinct from the Tower necessarily (perhaps God or some abstracta). Even if the closest world where nothing is distinct from the Tower is an impossible world, I still think it is closer to the actual world than a world where you are identical to the Tower (though this intuition is admittedly fuzzy). However, there is still a possible world where there is no contingent concrete object disjoint from the Tower, and the couldn’ta wouldn’ta theory implies (implausibly) that you essentially have the property of being a contingent concrete object disjoint from the Tower.
Brogaard and Salerno offer their own account of closeness, but they are concerned with issues orthogonal to the ones concerning me here. They neither affirm nor deny Lewis’s account of closeness, though they cite it approvingly (Brogaard and Salerno 2013, p. 655). Lewis only gives extra weight to the laws of nature, but it is in the same spirit to treat the laws of set theory similarly.
I am assuming that both Socrates and his singleton actually exist, even though they are in the past. If this is false because only present objects exist, the same point can be made about you and your singleton.
It might appear that we can reject the individualistic theory out of hand because its second clause is implied by the couldn’ta wouldn’ta theory’s second clause. It is necessary that if nothing has F then x does not have F, so the antecedent of clause (2) of the couldn’ta wouldn’ta theory does imply the antecedent of clause (2) of the individualistic theory. However, clause (2) of the couldn’ta wouldn’ta theory does not really imply clause (2) of the individualistic theory, because strengthening the antecedent is invalid for subjunctive conditionals. Even though it is necessary that if nothing has F, x does not have F, the set of closest worlds where nothing has F may be further from the actual world than the set of closest worlds where x does not have F. For this reason, it might be true that if nothing had F then x wouldn’t exist, but false that if x did not have F, then x wouldn’t exist. For instance, it is true that if nothing had the ability to reproduce, I would not exist, but false that if I did not have the ability to reproduce, I would not exist. Thanks to an anonymous referee for discussion.
It also seems plausible to me that truth is preserved when disjunctions and biconditionals are commuted within constitutive essentialist claims, as well as when conjunctions are simplified. But these claims are not essential to my arguments in the text.
One might object that the world can be completely characterized without mention of sets, since the characterization may say which things are members of which, and the sets are all and only those things with members. This definition of ‘set’ implies that proper classes are sets and the empty set is not a set. We can properly classify proper classes as non-sets by adding the condition that sets must also be members of other things. And we could, with Lowe (2005, p. 87), accept the implication that the notion of a set without members is incoherent.
Thanks to an anonymous referee for discussion.
Skiles (forthcoming) raises a similar objection to Wildman (2013).
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Acknowledgments
This paper has benefitted from discussions with Yishai Cohen, Andre Gallois, Li Kang, Preston Werner, and especially Kris McDaniel and the anonymous referees at Synthese. Thanks also to an audience at the 2014 Issues on the (Im)Possible Conference in Bratislava, and my commentator there, Nathan Wildman.
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Steward, S. Ya shouldn’ta couldn’ta wouldn’ta. Synthese 192, 1909–1921 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-015-0663-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-015-0663-y