Abstract
I shall discuss some of the relations among metaphysical modality, essence, and explanation. Marion Godman, Antonella Mallozzi and David Papineau have recently argued that the essence of a kind consists in its super-explanatory property—a single property that is causally responsible for a multitude of commonalities shared by the instances of the kind. And they argue that this super-explanatory account of essence offers a principled account of aposteriori necessities concerning kinds. I shall examine their arguments and argue that they are fallacious. Along the way, a general problem will also emerge that applies to any account that tries to explicate the notion of essence in terms of an explanatory relation.
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Notes
I shall use modal terms, such as ‘modality’, ‘necessity’, ‘possibility’, etc., to mean metaphysical notions unless otherwise indicated.
More precisely, according to GMP’s terminology, a genuine Kind is one whose characteristic features have a unified causal explanation. So, a Kind may be genuine and yet have no super-explanatory property; e.g., when its characteristic features “cause each other, rather than stemming from some common cause” (ibid, p. 321). But this complication can be ignored for the purpose of this paper, for we shall solely be concerned with genuine Kinds with super-explanatory properties. I thank an anonymous referee from this journal for calling my attention to this issue.
See Fine (2002) for the distinction between natural and metaphysical necessities and some of the difficulties in trying to reduce one in terms of the other. The influence of Fine’s discussion on my view will become obvious in my critique of GMP’s account in the next section.
Here some might object that this way of meeting the metaphysical adequacy condition is hardly satisfactory. For counterfactual truth is itself a modal notion in some suitably broad sense of the term. Recall, however, that the metaphysical adequacy condition does not require that the notion of essence be reduced to a non-modal notion. Instead, it only requires that the notion of essence be explicated in terms that can plausibly be understood independently of the notion of metaphysical modality. And the point here is that it is not unreasonable to take counterfactual truth as primitive and understand metaphysical necessity and possibility as special cases thereof.
In response to this objection, it might be thought, GMP could retreat to necessitarianism about the laws of nature, i.e., the view that the laws of nature are metaphysically necessary. In fact, necessitarianism might be thought of as a consequence of the super-explanatory account of essence. The argument goes as follows. Physical objects appear to exhibit various non-trivial commonalities, which are all supposed to be explained by the laws of nature at the most basic level. Accordingly, physical objects may be said to constitute a genuine Kind, and the fundamental laws of nature to specify its super-explanatory essence. By (BPK), therefore, it is necessary that physical objects obey the fundamental laws of nature. (I am not sure what GMP would think of this argument for necessitarianism. As noted above, they seem to believe that they can remain neutral about the relation between metaphysical possibility and natural possibility.) However, it should be obvious that this argument does not address the objection at all. For, recall, the objection concerns why (BPK) should be accepted in the first place. Here GMP might seek to establish necessitarianism on another basis. But any such attempt would mean that super-explanatoriness does not by itself provide an explanatorily adequate account of Kind essence. In this connection, see my discussion of the notion of explanatory basis toward the end of this section.
I thank an anonymous referee from this journal for pressing me to do this.
To be precise, the relevant notion should be that of full metaphysical grounding where A fully explains B. Also, a truth may be grounded in any (potentially infinite) number of truths. For the sake of simplicity, we shall assume that the ground of a truth (if any) is unique.
A version of this idea has recently been propounded by De Rizzo (2020, pp. 641–643).
Here I do not intend to claim that the examples like the ones above show that the essentialist approach is logically incompatible with the coarse-grained view. For, as Rosen (2015, pp. 204–205) notes, one may hold the coarse-grained view and still coherently claim that the essentialist attribution of properties create hyper-intensional contexts. But he is still in agreement that the coarse-grained view is in some tension with the essentialist approach (ibid, pp. 203–204).
References
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Acknowledgements
This paper derives largely from chapter six of my dissertation Necessity, Essence, and Analyticity: Toward an Analytic Essentialist Account of Necessity delivered to the Graduate Faculty in Philosophy at the Graduate Center, City University of New York, 2022. I owe special thanks to Graham Priest, my advisor, and David Papineau for reading multiple versions of this paper and providing many insightful comments and discussions. I would also like to thank the other members of my dissertation committee, Michael Devitt, Kit Fine, and Melvin Fitting, for their helpful comments. This paper also benefitted from questions and comments from participants in the Logic and Metaphysics Workshop at the Graduate Center, City University of New York and in the Monthly Colloquium of the Institute of Philosophical Studies at Korea University. I would also like to express my sincerest gratitude to two anonymous reviewers from this journal; their constructive comments led to a significant improvement.
Funding
This work was supported by the Ministry of Education of the Republic of Korea and the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF-2022S1A5B5A17044347).
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Kim, D. Necessity, Essence, and Explanation. Erkenn (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-023-00691-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-023-00691-6