Abstract
Since Kit Fine published his famous counter-examples to the modal account of essence, numerous modalists have proposed to avoid the counter-examples by revising the modal account. A sophisticated revision has been put forward by Fabrice Correia. Drawing on themes from Prior’s modality, Correia has introduced a nonstandard conception of metaphysical modality and has proposed to analyze essence in its terms. He has claimed that the analysis is immune to Fine’s counter-examples. In this paper, I argue that there are counter-examples supported by the very intuition underlying Fine’s counter-examples, which are not accommodated by Correia’s account. If my argument is sound, then Correia has not been successful in his defense of modalism. An important corollary of my argument will be that Fine’s consequential conception of essence needs to be modified if it is to capture his own intuitive notion of essence.
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Notes
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.
Fine distinguishes between what he calls the “constitutive” and the “consequential” conceptions of essence. According to him, a property of an object is a part of the constitutive essence of that object if it is not had in virtue of being a logical consequence of some more basic essential properties of the object; and otherwise it is a part of the consequential essence of the object (Fine 1995b, p. 57).
I use “x is present” as synonymous with the Priorean expression “there are facts about x” (see Correia 2007, p. 68).
Put in more detail, a globally possible world is a world where “there are facts about absolutely everything that is one of \({\upalpha }\)” (Correia 2007, p. 72). As Correia defines it, “\({\upalpha }\)” refers to “all the objects that there actually are” (Ibid, p. 71). So, a globally possible world is a world where there are facts about every actual object.
Correia’s own formulation of the analysis is slightly different from mine. He formulates it as “c is essentially such that A iff \(\Phi _{\mathrm{c}}\Rightarrow \hbox {A}\)” (Correia 2007, p. 79). However, since in his semantics \(\Phi _{\mathrm{c}}\) and \(\exists \)x (x = c) are equal, I prefer to use the latter to avoid unnecessary complications.
By “logical entities” I mean entities designated by logical constants and by “non-logical entities” I mean entities which are not logical entities.
For any pure logical property F and any non-logical entity e, that e is F trivially follows from logical truths. So, my claim can also be put in terms of triviality as follows: the Finean intuition implies that a pure property F is essential to a non-logical entity e only if it does not trivially follow from logical truths that e is F.
Fine himself has not argued so. In fact, there are passages in his work which suggest that pure logical properties are essential to non-logical entities. 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, p. 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. Given that pure logical properties are part of the consequential essential properties of any object, the foregoing passage suggests that pure logical properties are part of the essential properties of non-logical entities.
Although the universal quantifier and implication have not been explicitly introduced in Correia’s logic, they can be defined, in the usual way, as follows: \(\forall \hbox {x}, \hbox {Fx}\rightarrow \hbox {Fx}\equiv \lnot \exists \hbox {x}\, \lnot (\hbox {Fx}\rightarrow \hbox {Fx})\, \equiv \lnot \exists \hbox {x}\,\lnot (\lnot \hbox {Fx}\, \vee \, \hbox {Fx})\equiv \lnot \exists \hbox {x}\,(\hbox {Fx} \wedge \lnot \hbox {Fx})\).
For there are strictly locally possible worlds where Socrates is present but the Eiffel Tower is absent. At those worlds it is true that “\(\exists \)x (x = Socrates)”, whereas it is not true that “the Eiffel Tower is human if human.” For at those worlds the latter sentence lacks any truth value whatsoever.
Here I am following Fine (2000, p. 547) in taking the relation of ontological dependence to be reflexive.
I appreciate Alessandro Torza for attracting my attention to the consideration.
I appreciate an anonymous referee for attracting my attention to this line of defense. In stating the line of defense, I have used his/her own wording.
One might naturally read Wildman’s (2013) sparse modalism and Zalta’s (2006) account as attempts to demote certain properties into a second-class essence. Wildman distinguishes between two classes of necessary properties - sparse necessary properties and non-sparse necessary properties – and proposes to accommodate Fine’s counter-examples by saying that properties exploited in his counter-examples belong to the latter, and not the former, class. One might think of the former as a first-class essence and of the latter as a second-class. Similarly, Zalta distinguishes between what he calls “strongly essential properties” and “weakly essential properties”. According to Zalta, the strongly essential properties of an ordinary object are those that it has in all and only the worlds where it is concrete, and its weakly essential properties are those that it has in all worlds where it is concrete. He proposes to accommodate (some of) Fine’s counter-examples by saying that properties exploited in the counter-examples are only weakly essential properties. Here again, one might think of strongly essential properties as a first-class essence and of weakly essential properties as a second-class.
However, there is a crucial difference between Wildman’s and Zalta’s accounts on the one hand and Correia’s account on the other hand. Both Wildman and Zalta exploit independently motivated metaphysical frameworks to make the distinction between the two classes of essence. Wildman exploits Lewis’ sparse theory of properties, and Zalta exploits his theory of abstract objects. Using such independently motivated frameworks, they could make the distinction in a non-ad hoc manner. In contrast, there is no such independently motivated framework in Correia’s theory with the help of which he can make a distinction, in a non-ad hoc manner, between Socrates’ being a man and his pure logical properties. In his account, Socrates’ being a man and Socrates’ being human if human are equally local necessities. Therefore he cannot avoid my counter-examples by just making a distinction between a first-class essence and a second-class, and demoting pure logical properties to the latter, just as the proponent of the standard modal view cannot avoid Fine’s original counter-examples by this kind of move. Thanks to an anonymous referee for leading me to raise this point.
I appreciate an anonymous referee for attracting my attention to this line of defense. In stating the line of defense, I have used his/her own wording.
As pointed out in an earlier footnote, by “logic” I mean a minimal logic in which basic principles of classical logic hold but theorems of, say, set theory proper do not. Therefore, by saying that the worlds are logically possible, I do not mean that truths of set theory hold at the worlds.
See the last footnote.
References
Correia, F. (2007). (Finean) Essence and (Priorean) modality. Dialectica, 61, 63–84.
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(543), 84.
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 Hamid Vahid, Mahmoud Morvarid, Kit Fine, Bob Hale, Nathan Wildman, Fabrice Correia, Jessica Wilson, Kathrin Koslicki, Tuomas E. Tahko, Mahrad Almotahari, and three anonymous reviewers of this journal for their helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper.
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Morvarid, H. Finean essence, local necessity, and pure logical properties. Synthese 195, 4997–5005 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-017-1441-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-017-1441-9