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No Route to Material Origin Essentialism?

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Abstract

In the last 30 years repeated attempts have been made to develop a proof-sketch Kripke gave for essentialism about material origins into a cogent argument. I argue that there are general reasons that all such attempts have failed, and so we should likewise expect future attempts to fail.

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Notes

  1. For example, McGinn (1976), Salmon (1978, 1981), Forbes (1980, 1985), Noonan (1983) and Rohrbaugh and deRosset (2004, 2006).

  2. One prominent recent critic of arguments for origin essentialisms is Teresa Robertson. Robertson (1998) criticizes several Kripke-style arguments on the grounds that they conflict with intuitive metaphysical principles. Hawthorne and Szabo-Gendler (2000) give some defense of arguments for (EMO) from Robertson’s critique. Robertson (2000) is a response.

  3. Mackie (1987) and Robertson (1998) point out that a particular argument for essentialism about biological origins over-generalizes, namely Forbes’s (1985) argument. I hope to show that the over-generalization problem is a general and unavoidable one that often means the argument for (EMO) is self-undermining. For reasons of space, I will leave the discussion of Kripke-style arguments for biological origin essentialism for another occasion. But see Forbes (1980, 1985, 2002) as well as Mackie (2002).

  4. I here ignore the ‘branching futures’ approach that might also be attributed to Kripke and which has been developed by Mackie (1974, 1997). As McGinn (1976) and Mackie (1997) herself make clear, such arguments entail that all features of the origin of an object are essential to it, and so, like the arguments considered here, over-generalize.

  5. Part of Kripke’s strategy was also to remove an obstacle to accepting (EMO) by clearly distinguishing necessity from both a priority and analyticity. By distinguishing necessity from a priority, Kripke showed that there might be a necessary connection between a material thing and its material origins even if we cannot discover the origin of any particular object a priori. Richard Cartwright (1968: 626) had earlier pointed out that it was in part a confusion of the analytic with the necessary that had led some philosophers to be skeptical of essentialist claims. For some concerns about the truth of (EMO), see Barnett (2005). Barnett provides several counter-examples to various formulations of the necessity of material origin thesis.

  6. I’m following the convention of using‘ B is made from A’ to mean‘ B is originally made entirely from A, with none of A left over.’

  7. ‘Does not overlap’ just means ‘has no parts in common with’.

  8. In all the systems of worlds in this paper I assume that all worlds are as similar as possible to the actual world of that system consistent with the descriptions I give of the worlds.

  9. Thanks to Lloyd Humberstone for suggesting I present the parody argument in this form.

  10. Cameron and Roca (2006) argue that despite their attempts to give independent support to (T-IND) Rohrbaugh and deRosset’s argument still ultimately begs the question. I ignore these worries here.

  11. Rohrbaugh and deRosset actually first suggested a different principle, called (LOP), but then settled on (LOP*).

    LOP*. For any possible factor F, necessarily, if F prevents T 1’s production from H 1, then F either makes a difference in the locale of the original production of T 1 from H 1 or F is the production of a table from some hunk overlapping H 1. [2006: 380]

    (LOP*) is not the same as Locality of Prevention. However, Rohrbaugh and deRosset clearly see Locality of Prevention as justifying (LOP*), since (LOP*) spells out two ways in which a process can ‘operate in the locale of the prevented production’: namely by making a qualitative difference in that locale, or by being a process which makes a table from H 1 [2006: 381–382]. Because Locality of Prevention is the more fundamental intuition, and because I think the differences between Locality of Prevention, (LOP) and (LOP*) won’t matter, I shall focus on Locality of Prevention. Readers are hereby warned of this simplification.

  12. (LOP*) [see previous note] does not commit Rohrbaugh and deRosset to saying that building T 2 from H 1 at P 2 is compossible with building T 1 from H 1 at P 1, since it allows that a process which builds some table from H 1 may not be compossible with the process of building T 1 from H 1. But nor does (LOP*) imply that the two processes are not compossible, and, as I just argued, Locality of Prevention implies they are compossibile. Since Rohrbaugh and deRosset use Locality of Prevention to justify (LOP*), they are committed to (T-IND*) too.

  13. See, for example, Salmon (1978, 1981), Noonan (1983), and Hawthorne and Szabo-Gendler (2000). Forbes (1985, 2002) applies the sufficiency principle strategy to biological origin essentialism.

  14. For example, Salmon (1978, 1981), Noonan (1983), Robertson (1998, 2000), Hawthorne and Szabo-Gendler (2000). Mackay (1986) attacks constitutional sufficiency principles in general.

  15. The remainder of this section applies reasoning I have used elsewhere in considering Forbes’s arguments for biological origin essentialism. See Damnjanovic (2009).

  16. Strictly speaking, there is another way this stipulation could be problematic, and this is if the two determinate combinations of properties in the sufficient set entailed the instantiation of the same exclusive property outside the sufficient set. For example, perhaps there is some exclusive property P 1 which, of necessity, is instantiated by any table which instantiates either F 1, G 1, H 1 or F 2, G 1, H 1. For simplicity, I treat any such properties as part of the sufficient set and so they are dealt with in the paragraph after the next.

  17. We can not argue that all the properties in the sufficient set are essential, since we now have exclusives in that set and so it is not true that for any property, P, two determinate forms of the sufficient set that differ only in the determinate form of P are compossible.

  18. This style of argument is most apparent in Salmon (1978) and Forbes (1985). The general form of these arguments is explained in Hawthorne and Szabo Gendler (2000) and Robertson (1998, 2000).

  19. It won’t be necessary to use a sufficiency principle to identity T 1 and T 3 if the compossibility principle on its own guarantees that T 1 itself is compossible with a table made from H 2. For the sake of generality, I allow for arguments that use weaker compossibility principles that only guarantee that some table made from H 1 is compossible with some table made from H 2.

  20. In constructing this system I am taking my inspiration from Forbes’s 4-world argument for (EBO) in his (1980, 1985, 2002). For helpful discussions see Mackie (1987) and Robertson (1998).

  21. There is an extra level of complication that I am ignoring here. It could be that the property of being built from a certain hunk of matter is an element of some sub-set of the sufficient set, where the sub-set is exclusive and yet no members of the sub-set are. If so, it does not follow that all the other properties in the sufficient set are essential. But it does follow that all the elements of the exclusive sub-set are essential. Since I have argued that there is no property set that is exclusive and all of whose members are essential but not exclusive, this complication can be safely ignored.

  22. Salmon (1981: 229) and Robertson (1998: 735–736) consider a sufficiency principle that appeals directly to the property of being the only table with certain material origins.

  23. Forbes (2002) valiantly argues for such an order-essentialism in the case of biological entities. I am unconvinced, but even if he is right about biological entities, the thesis is surely so unintuitive in the case of material entities that anyone unsure of the truth of (EMO) would not be persuaded by an argument for it that relied on order-essentialism being true.

  24. That’s not quite true. There might be exclusive essentials on which material origins supervene which are the conjunction of material origins and other properties. But if there are such properties then the arguments of this section would show that either (a) all the properties in this set are essential or (b) at least one of them is an exclusive essential which would thereby foil the argument for (EMO). Alternatively, there is the property of being identical to table T 1 which is exclusive and essential. But to assume material origins supervene on that ‘identity property’ in an argument for (EMO) is to beg the question.

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Acknowledgments

Many thanks to David Barnett for helpful conversations and comments on an earlier draft, and to audiences at the University of Western Australia, the University of Melbourne and the Australasian Association of Philosophy Annual Conference 2007.

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  1. Philosophy M207, The University of Western Australia, 35 Stirling Highway, Crawley, WA, 6009, Australia

    Nic Damnjanovic

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Damnjanovic, N. No Route to Material Origin Essentialism?. Erkenn 72, 93–110 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-009-9182-x

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