Abstract
In recent years attacks on the Kripke-Putnam approach to natural kinds and natural kind terms have proliferated. In a recent paper, Häggqvist and Wikforss (The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 1–23, 2017) attack the once-dominant essentialist account of natural kinds. Häggqvist & Wikforss also suggest that it is time to return to some sort of cluster-based descriptivist semantics for natural kind terms, thus targeting both the metaphysical and semantic tenets that underpin the Kripke-Putnam approach. In our paper we want to challenge both parts of Häggqvist and Wikforss’ project. We will argue that the anti-essentialist considerations and arguments they raise against the Kripke-Putnam view are far from compelling in some cases, and certainly not decisive against a reasonable form of the view. On the semantic side, although Häggqvist and Wikforss give few details about what a viable cluster-based descriptivist theory should look like, we will argue that one can already see the approach to be a non-starter. Ignorance and error arguments of the kinds provided by Kripke and Putnam continue to be decisive objections. The only way we can see to save the cluster descriptivist approach is to make the essential properties postulated by Kripke and Putnam become essential features of the descriptive cluster. But this makes the success of the approach parasitic on the correctness of the Kripke-Putnam view.
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Notes
Here we mean classical descriptivism. Our discussion does not extend to causal descriptivism, a view that incorporates part of the mode of determination of the extension postulated by Kripke and Putnam into the reference-fixing description.
We will restrict our discussion to the case of water, as it has been the chemical substance-kind about which the strongest challenges to K&P have been mounted. Gold and most other stable elements and compounds will surely be tractable if water can be brought back into line. Interesting questions may arise, however, about certain elements and compounds whose instantiations are extremely unstable and short-lived. For example, Beebee and Sabbarton-Leary (2010) discuss the highest elements in the periodic table and how their names may fail to fit the mold of K&P semantics. For reasons of space we will not address such kinds, but we do not feel they constitute a serious challenge to the K&P view, since the latter does not require that its semantic and metaphysical theses be applicable to every element of the periodic table or molecular compound.
These are the arguments from ignorance and error, also known as semantic arguments, against descriptivism offered by Kripke. Kripke presented also other powerful, modal and epistemic, arguments against descriptivism.
For an in depth analysis of how these terms are typically introduced and an exploration of the metaphysical and epistemic consequences, see Nimtz (2017).
This is why raising doubts about the applicability of the approach to, say, biological kind terms or terms for unstable elements does not constitute, in and of itself, a challenge to the K&P story about kinds such as iron and water, nor a defense of descriptivism.
According to H&W the appeal to microstructure is part of an attempted solution to the qua problem (H&W: 5–6). The bulk of H&W’s paper does not focus on the discussion of the details of the qua problem, and thus we do not make it a central feature of our argument. Nevertheless we wish to note that we are sceptical about some of the assumptions that generate the qua problem and about its attempted solutions; but a full discussion of this issue is beyond the scope of this paper.
However, it’s not far from being one: the proportion of all dissociative products (ions) and non-standard water molecules (e.g. D2O, where D stands for the deuterium isotope of hydrogen) taken together is less than 0.03%.
Or rather, nothing can be isopropanol without being predominantly composed of molecules with composition-structure C3H8O. The discussion of the complexity of water’s composition and structure below will clarify the need for this sort of qualification.
Similar remarks apply to isotopic variants where the oxygen atom has more neutrons, e.g. H217O. We say “arguably not H2O” because it depends on whether one considers deuterium and tritium atoms to be hydrogen atoms (this being in accord with the standard practice of individuating elements by number of protons in the nucleus), and whether one takes the ‘H’ in ‘H2O’ to stand only for ordinary hydrogen, or instead to represent ordinary hydrogen and its isotopes.
Since the settling-down phase would involve considerable amounts of chemical reaction, we suppose that you should handle this bucket of water with care; but we are not sure how much heat would be given off in the settling-down phase, nor how quickly!
Hendry (2006), who also defends the existence of a microstructural essence for water against the attacks of Needham and others, puts it like this: “My proposal, then, is that water is the substance formed by bringing together H2O molecules and allowing them to interact spontaneously.” (p. 872)
The use of the word ‘necessarily’ in this specification of the essential microstructure of water would seem to cover all possible worlds. As Putnam noted in (1990), if one considers all metaphysically possible worlds, including ones in which the laws of nature (if any!) are different – perhaps minutely different, perhaps greatly different – it can be difficult to hold on to any clear intuitions concerning, e.g., whether a certain molecular substance even counts as a sample of (predominantly) H2O molecules. To avoid a complicated discussion that is not necessary for our purposes in this paper, we suggest the reader interpret the modal claim as restricted to possible worlds that have the same physical laws as our universe (which is what Putnam did in 1990). This restriction does not affect the semantic issues to which we will turn in sections 5 and 6. (It is worth noting, in passing, that almost all of the counterfactual scenarios used by Kripke and Putnam in establishing their semantical claims can be understood as set in worlds with the same laws as those of our universe).
Notice that the well-worn example of jade is not a plausible example of the phenomenon we are concerned with here. Nephrite and jadeite are readily distinguishable by simple observational tests, including having different characteristic color, hardness and so on. The microstructure of jadeite explains jadeite’s stereotypical properties, and the microstructure of nephrite explains nephrite’s stereotypical properties, and both the explanans and explananda are distinct between the two cases, despite the fact that both of the explanans plausibly include ‘is a greenish hard stone-like substance’ or something like that.
The semantic lesson of the case is then brought home by considering the time before 1750 when neither Earthians nor Twin-Earthians could determine the microstructure of anything. Back then, Putnam maintains, Earthians and Twin-Earthians meant different things when referring to their respective liquids, even if, at that time their psychological states, including everything they believed about the world that surrounded them, was the same. We discuss the semantic point below.
The reaction as presented here arises from a combination of comments made on separate occasions by John Dupré and Catherine Elgin. We thank them both for pressing us on this issue.
And in the pre-1750 scenario to which Putnam turns a couple of pages later, the supposition is that the totality of observed properties of the two liquids, up until that moment, are the same. The pre-1750 scenario is compatible with the future Earthians and Twin-Earthians observing that the microstructure of the liquids in question are respectively, and to simplify, H2O and XYZ.
Subsequent results are reported in a more recent review article by Fanelli et al. (2016).
It should be noted that (i) is not a new tenet specific to sophisticated cluster descriptivism, as most discussions of cluster descriptivism in the literature take the view to involve appeal to a weighted majority, or a weighted sufficient number of definite descriptions. See Zvolenszky (2012) for discussion and interpretation of the view proposed by John Searle.
Although we reject the application of LaPorte’s considerations in the defense of descriptivism, this is not to deny the plausibility of some of LaPorte’s conclusions.
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Acknowledgments
We wish to thank Helen Beebee, Alexander Bird, Catherine Elgin, Robin Hendry, and an anonymous reviewer for very helpful comments on the first version of this paper.
Funding
The research for this paper was supported by projects FFI2016-76799-P and FFI-2015-70707-P of the Spanish MEIC, and the DIAPHORA project (H2020-MSCA-ITN-2015-675415.
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This article belongs to the Topical Collection: EPSA17: Selected papers from the biannual conference in Exeter
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Hoefer, C., Martí, G. Water has a microstructural essence after all. Euro Jnl Phil Sci 9, 12 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13194-018-0236-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13194-018-0236-2