Abstract
In the last 30 years much philosophical discussion has been generated by Kripke’s proof of the necessity of origin for material objects presented in footnote 56 of ‘Naming and Necessity’. I consider the two most popular reconstructions of Kripke’s argument: one appealing to the necessary sufficiency of origin, and the other employing a strong independence principle allegedly derived from the necessary local nature of prevention. I argue that, to achieve a general result, both reconstructions presuppose an implicit Humean atomistic thesis of recombination, according to which any two (non-overlapping) possible objects can simultaneously coexist in one and the same world. Yet recombination ill accords with the other assumptions of the proofs. I also argue that the locality of prevention does not entail strong independence.
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Notes
Kripke (1980: 91).
Though he should have known better: ‘Of course, some philosophers think that something’s having intuitive content is very inconclusive evidence in favor of it. I think it is very heavy evidence in favor of anything, myself. I really don’t know, in a way, what more conclusive evidence one may have about anything, ultimately speaking’ (Kripke 1980: 42).
As it is claimed in deRosset (2009).
Kripke (1980: 114, fn. 56).
To facilitate the exposition, throughout the paper I assume that C and A are completely non-overlapping. This is a standard assumption, suggested by Kripke’s remark that ‘there is no relation between A and C which makes the possibility of making a table from one dependent on the possibility of making a table from the other.’ Some of the literature on this subject has focused on the questions raised by degrees of overlapping between the original blocks A and C. See for example Noonan (1983), Salmon (1986), and Robertson (1998).
Something like Salmon’s principle (P1) in Salmon (1979: 708).
Salmon (1979: 711). I ignore Salmon’s subsequent qualifications of the principle, which are irrelevant to the central topic of this paper.
This is a simplified version of Salmon’s Principle (P5) in (1979: 114–115, fn. 11).
This is a simplified version of Salmon’s Principle (P6). The principle must be at work also in the sufficiency proof, to rule out the identity of B and D in W2. In general, I leave out of the explicit formulation of all principles the qualifications that (1) distinct blocks of wood do not overlap; (2) the tables are originally constructed out of the blocks; (3) the tables are entirely constructed out of the blocks, both in the sense that each table is made up of the entire block it is made from, and that it is made up of no other matter.
Notice that the extra requirement of simultaneity has been dropped.
LOP is first introduced in its canonical form in Rohrbaugh and deRosset (2006), but is implicit in their (2004) paper. For simplicity, I ignore here the revised version LOP* of the Locality of Prevention Thesis given in Rohrbaugh and deRosset (2006) in reply to criticisms in Cameron and Roca (2006) and Robertson and Forbes (2006).
Rohrbaugh and deRosset (2006) contains a revision of LOP to accommodate haecceitistic switches.
This is NLONP in Rohrbaugh and deRosset (2006: 377).
A careful reading of Naming and Necessity reveals that the properties of an object that Kripke deems necessary are indeed all required to bring the object into existence. Once the object is given it is too late for necessary properties to be acquired.
Ori Simchen suggested the case of a clash in laws.
I borrow the evocative ‘prevention’ versus ‘exclusion’ terminology from Cameron and Roca (2006), though I use it somewhat differently. In their usage ‘prevention’ makes something impossible tout-court, ‘exclusion’ only rules out co-possibilities. Instead I am after the distinction between (causally) making something not happen and a neutral notion of modal incompatibility.
That this would be Rohrbaugh and deRosset’s preferred line of defense is suggested by the following passage in (2004: 702, fn. 2): ‘Many cases of prevention cannot be thought of as strictly causal … Consider the following case. T1 fails to eventuate because life failed to evolve and there are no trees and, thus, no H1. Here there is no identifiable causal process involving H1 or the production process, but ‘because’ expresses a relation of responsibility nonetheless.’
Rohrbaugh (2005) extends the locality proof from the necessity of origin of material objects to the necessity of authorship for works of art. Rohrbaugh acknowledges the possibility of non-local preventing factors for works of art. His examples do not appear to me as genuinely non-local, yet what matters to us is Rohrbaugh’s acknowledgement that when such factors are present, the Locality of Prevention Thesis cannot ground fully unqualified Independence/Compossibility principles.
This move must be unwelcome to Rohrbaugh and deRosset who intend their proof to be independent from any particular view of modality. See Rohrbaugh and deRosset (2004: 723): ‘[T]he independence approach is distinct from both branching and sufficiency approaches and does not rely on their primary assumptions.’ Emphasis added.
Cf. Rohrbaugh and deRosset (2006: 380–381). I am ignoring the previously considered objection that just switching the final product of a process does not count as a change in the locale of production.
Damnjanovic (2010) also argues that the sufficiency and the locality proofs share a common shortcoming and that there are reasons to think that all sensible reconstructions of footnote 56 will suffer from the same problem. According to Damnjanovic all such proofs will inevitably prove too much, for example that the place of origin is essential too.
Lewis (1986: 87–88). Ultimately, Lewis does not literally hold that parts of different worlds can really be patched together, since in his view no individual exists in more than one world. So, he has to reformulate the principle in terms of duplicates. This issue is marginal to the main point under scrutiny. For Lewis the possibility that A and C coexist is captured by the existence of a world in which a duplicate of A coexists with a duplicate of C.
Lewis (1986: 89).
And I bet they will fall in a Lewisian position.
deRosset (2009) argues for the Humean character of the Locality of Prevention and still claims that Table-Independence is one of its consequences. Here I have argued against both of these claims.
References
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I started thinking on this topic some years ago when attending a UCLA seminar on Lecture III of Naming and Necessity led by David Kaplan and Joseph Almog. More recently, conversations with Ori Simchen have been pivotal to the development of this paper. I thank Kaplan, Almog, and Simchen, and also Sylvia Berryman, Louis deRosset, Eric Margolis, Sonia Roca, and Guy Rohrbaugh for comments to previous versions of this paper.
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Ballarin, R. The Necessity of Origin: A Long and Winding Route. Erkenn 78, 353–370 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-011-9354-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-011-9354-3