Abstract
Kripke’s thesis of the essentiality of biological origin (Kripke [1972), pp. 312–4) maybe written
That is, for any possible objects x and y, if y originates from x in some world, then y originates from x in every world in which y exists. This thesis strikes an intuitive chord with many, and a number of proposed justifications for it have been advanced.2 My own argument for (EBO) is based on a principle about identity, namely, that for things which in some good sense come from or are composed of or constructed from other things (“composite” objects), ungrounded identities and ungrounded non-identities are to be abjured.
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Notes
Assume that x is restricted to organisms which originate from a single entity.
See, for example, Mackie [1974], McGinn [1976] and Salmon [1982]. Kripke himself gave “something like a proof” of a related thesis about the matter of which a table is composed, in endnote 56 of Kripke [1972], where it is printed in “inexplicably garbled” form (Kripke [1980], p.1). An erratic reader of endnotes, I was unaware of it until it appeared, corrected, in Salmon [1979]. By then I had already devised a similar argument about acorns and oak trees, which appeared in print in Forbes [1980a,b].
For a defense of such primitive identities, see Chisholm [1970].
Exclusion of extrinsic grounding follows from Wiggins’ slightly stronger Only a and b principle (Wiggins [1980], p. 96): “[...] if identity is what we want to elucidate, [we need] a criterion which will stipulate that for a relation R to be constitutive of the identity of a and b, a’s having R to b must be such that objects distinct from a or b are irrelevant to whether a has R to b.” So R could not include an “absence of a better candidate” provision. Wiggins and I would both disagree with Mr. Justice Otton of the Scottish High Court, in the celebrated case of Middlebridge Scimitar Ltd versus Edward Hubbard. “Mr. Hubbard [...] was granted a court order enforcing an agreement under which Middlebridge [...] agreed to buy [the Bentley racing car Old No.1 from him] [...] for £6.8 million [...]. The case centred on whether Mr. Hub-bard’s car was the one which sped the diamond heir Capt Wolf Barnato to victory at Le Mans in 1929 and 1930 or whether it had undergone so much rebuilding it was no longer the genuine article. Middlebridge [...] said it had been promised the Le Mans winner — and the [Hubbard] Bentley was not that car because it had been completely rebuilt by a master mechanic” (The Scotsman, 28 July 1990). The crucial consideration in his finding against Middlebridge, according to Otton, was that “there is no other Bentley, extinct or extant, which could legitimately lay claim to the title of Old No 1 […]” And they say analytic metaphysics has no practical application.
Humberstone refers to intrinsic properties in this wider sense as interior. See Humberstone [1996], p.239–40 for discussion of this sense, attributed to Dunn [1990], and the whole paper more generally for an instructive discussion of the intrinsic/extrinsic distinction.
Fine [1994] identifies the asymmetry in this case with essential/accidental, and rejects the modal account of essential property on the grounds that it does not discriminate qAz.z∈ {x}(x) and qaz.x∈z({x}). But if the fundamental asymmetry is intrinsic/extrinsic, we need a further argument that all essential properties must be intrinsic before this difference can overturn the modal definition.
Yablo ([1999], p.486) says that “on almost anybody’s account,” the zygote z from which he (Yablo) developed stopped existing before he started, so descending from z is extrinsic to him. Perhaps it is well to separate persons and their bodies, in which case we can still say that it is intrinsic to Yablo’s body to develop from z, since Yablo’s body came into existence with z, even if it took a while for Yablo to occupy it. Yablo goes on to say that since part of what it takes to be Yablo is to descend from z, being Yablo is extrinsic to him as well. This is a sense of extrinsic on which I have no secure grip (though Schoenberg once said that, since no-one else wanted the job of being Schoenberg, he had to take it on).
A counterexample which might be thought to survive the addition of relational elements to intrinsic natures involves Felix, a cat which exists in u, and Felix-minus, that portion of Felix inu which lacks a tail. Let y be a world in which Felix is just as in u except for not growing a tail. Then Felix-minus@u and Felix@v are numerically identical, thus by (1), so are their satisfiers. But Felix-minus and Felix are distinct entities in the domain of u, since only one has a tail. To this I would reply that Felixminus@u and Felix@v are not numerically identical. For one thing, Felix@v includes being a cat, while Felix-minus is no cat. Still, some would regard being a cat as extrinsic to each cat (Yablo, Ibid.). But there is still an intrinsic difference between a natural entity and one which is a mereological abstraction from a natural entity; it is not clear that Felix-minus is even an organism.
The causal isolation is clear enough in this case, since there is no reason why an organism originating from a propagule p must causally interact with one originating from a different propagule q. It is a further problem to give a precise account of causal isolation that is of use in harder cases. Also, something with a certain origin cannot be made the best candidate for identity with a certain entity simply by throwing in some causal interaction with its rivals: the causal interaction would have to be somehow in the nature of the case.
Robertson’s actual example is essentiality of leaf-color. However, if we choose a non-exclusive property, insisting on its essentiality as an alternative to (EBO) will not block every counterexample to (1). For example, we can suppose that the colors of a, x and y in the argument for (EBO) are all the same; we still get a counterexample to (1). (I assume that growing b is exclusive.)
Monovular twinhood is not a counterexample to this assumption. Pace Robertson ([1998], p.735, n.11) I would say that the propagules from which identical twins originate are the two daughter cells resulting from the non-standard mitotic division of the zygote.
Despite the obvious echoes of the Ship of Theseus, I think that organisms contrast with artifacts in important relevant ways. An organism can persist through a complete change of its matter. But while a ship may undergo repairs at certain times, so that ultimately there is a ship whose matter is entirely different from the original ship’s matter, I have never seen a good reason to hold that a single ship persists through such a process, Justice Otton notwithstanding. Fear of vagueness is often the main motivation; see the discussion of the Mac of Forbes in Forbes [1987].
However, it is not so clear that an appropriate causal isolation condition is met in this case (cf. note 9). So some might try to defend this kind of extrinsic determination, as is familiar from the Ship-of-Theseus literature; see, e.g., Garrett [1988], and the response in Mackie [1989].
For example, it seems possible that I might have been an identical twin. But reflecting on the symmetry of mitotic division, the hypothesis that there is a world where I am one and not the other of a pair of twins seems no better than the hypothesis that O is identical to Lefty or else to Righty. See (Forbes [1980a], pp.353–5) for further discussion of twinning.
Is it also crucial that the zygote the Queen could not originate from is someone else’s, the Trumans’ child’s? Even if it were a merely possible zygote, I doubt that that weakens the pull of Kripke’s claims. Hawthorne and Gendler [2000] offer an origin essentialism “lite” (their (21)) which says that there is no world where the actual Queen comes from the actual Trumans’ daughter’s actual zygote and the actual Trumans’ daughter comes from the actual Queen’s actual zygote. But this is very much weaker than the intuition which Kripke’s discussion promotes, at least in me.
Mackie [1987] endorses extra-strength haecceitism, though without the benefit of supporting examples like McKay’s. She seems to agree with my verdict about the Lefty/Righty case, but argues that there is no reason to insist on parallel treatments of transtemporal and transworld identity (Ibid. pp.197–8). But I would say that identity is identity. If the thing which is F is identical to the thing which was G (wide-scope tense) requires grounds, then the thing which is F is identical to the thing which would have been G if... (wide-scope modal) must also require grounds.
Exactly one is too strong, since one bare difference can give rise to others, if the primitively distinct entities are parts of other entities. I ignore this complication.
Hawthorne and Gendler [2000] raise the interesting and complicated question of what happens to the defense of (EBO) in a counterpart-theoretic framework, where it seems that a two-candidate world would just be a world with two counterparts of some actual entity, which is relatively unproblematic. But the new argument for (EBO) just given does not use two-candidate worlds, and in a counterpart-theoretic framework, shows that the counterpart relation would have to hold in some instances and fail in others even though there is no difference between these instances with respect to the factors that ground or determine (degree of) counterparthood. This is no improvement on ungrounded identity. I hope to pursue these issues, including the Faith-Hope-Charity/Peter-Paul-Mary case from (Hawthorne and Gendler [2000], p.293), in another paper.
See further Forbes [1994a]. Another proposal is that in certain cases there is no fact of the matter about transworld identity. But this position does not seem to change the issues in any significant way (though it does complicate the possible-worlds semantics).
Hawthorne and Gendler ([2000], p.293) argue that “[...] the intuitive strength of the necessity of origins thesis surpasses that of [predecessor essentialism], so if the project is to generate arguments in favor of the former, it seems best not to invoke the latter”. This might be so if we were trying to explain why (EBO) is intuitive and thought that a successful non-debunking explanation would have to access explicit reasons for holding (EBO) and portray (EBO) as inheriting its intuitiveness from those reasons. But in general, explaining why something plausible is true may require us to call upon non-obvious lemmas.
I interpret not the first to mean the second or later, excluding not at all. Certainly, if p is not an m-c propagule, contraction will not turn it into one.
Here I am assuming that at least for a range of intrinsic properties, if the constituting matter of p has them, so does p (the primary exceptions would be properties involving p itself).
Vallentyne bites the bullet on this issue ([1997], pp.216–7). Yablo modifies (4) to get round the problem. According to (4) it is the truth-value of Pxw -* Pxw’ that is criterial; in the revised version (Yablo [1999], p.492) it is the truth-value of Pxw -* Px’w’ that is criterial, where x’ is whatever is constituted in w’ by the basic elements of w that make up x (in w). But this makes the criterion harder to apply. For example, the new notion of part (p.491) allows w to be a part of w’ so long as there is some concept of sum such that w’ is the sum of certain basic elements and w is the sum of a subset of those elements. It is not obvious that this will keep the shape of x the same in w and w’ unless we make an ad hoc stipulation that only those notions of sum that do not allow basic elements to arrange themselves into a different shape and still be the same sum are to be used. Since Yablo wants shape to be intrinsic (p. 480), such stipulations are apparently needed. And constituting matter m will still come out intrinsic to the entity e it constitutes, contra Yablo’s intentions, unless the same basic elements can configure themselves as they are in e without thereby forming m. We will need a special notion of sum to justify this.
This is (c*) of (Francesconi [1999], p.604) except that I have used a second-order variable X for a function from worlds to sets in place of the rigid class-term `C’ in (c*), which renders the possibly pointless.
Francescotti’s final version of his criterion says that P is intrinsic to x iff there are non-d-relational properties such that x’s having P consists in its having those properties. This does not affect the overgeneration problem.
It will not help to restrict Y to those values such that necessarily, any Y is an X and vice versa. Some would say this means Y = X anyway. And it takes us quite far from the original intuition behind d-relationality.
There is a problem with Francescotti’s account of consists in (p. 599), which makes it symmetric, a view perhaps associated with Hegel: a nation consists in its people, and vice versa.
Excluding infinite regresses, essentialism about number of predecessors determines identity in a recycling sequence so long as we are not given two primitively different starting entities.
An exception is the rather special case of spatio-temporal point of origin. My most recent discussion of this is in (Forbes [1999], §2). I think this special case has to be ruled out by independent considerations.
There are ways of disputing this, but these workarounds are costs of the view under discussion.
This paper includes some parts of a lecture given at the 22nd International Wittgenstein Symposium (Forbes [1999]). For discussion on that occasion, I thank David Chalmers, Kevin Mulligan, Peter Simons and Peter Van Inwagen. In preparing this paper, I have also been helped by Tamar Szabo Gendler, John Hawthorne, Kathrin Koslicki, Tom McKay, Teresa Robertson, Nathan Salmon and Stephen Yablo.
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Forbes, G. (2002). Origins and Identities. In: Bottani, A., Carrara, M., Giaretta, P. (eds) Individuals, Essence and Identity. Topoi Library, vol 4. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-1866-0_16
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