Abstract
It is often thought that a notion of general term rigidity could help explain the particular behavior of natural kind terms in modal contexts. An influential strategy for developing a non-trivial account of general term rigidity appeals to essential properties of the things to which such terms apply. I show that essentialism cannot underpin a notion of rigidity that can play the expected explanatory roles. Essentialists are committed to presuppositions that themselves play those roles without implying essentialism.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
Gómez-Torrente (2006) refines the definition and distinguishes different types of essentialist predicates. As far as I can tell, the distinctions matter little for the arguments in this article.
That is, as should be familiar, ☐∀x(Fx → Gx) does not entail ∀x(Fx → ☐Gx). (The reverse entailment does not hold either; it is compatible with ∀x(Fx → ☐Gx) that ⋄∃y(Fy ∧ ¬Gy). We will return below to the extent to which such possibilities create a problem for the essentialist position.)
Precisely what the objection here is supposed to be is sometimes missed in the literature. I am grateful to an anonymous referee for pressing me on this point.
Once again, talk of properties is not supposed to carry very substantial metaphysical commitments. A commitment to property identities means a commitment to truths of the form “water = H 2 O” expressing genuine identity statements, regardless of whether we take properties to be platonic entities or simply that the predicates “water” and “H2O” pick out the same functions from worlds to functions from objects to truth values. That water and H 2 O are different but necessarily coinstantiated properties is supposed to mean that claims on the form “water is necessarily H2O” must be understood, e.g., as universally quantified statements rather than identity statements. In Sect. 1.2, I generally talk about water and H 2 O as different properties, but the idea that water and H 2 O are different properties may be understood as the idea that the predicates “water” and “H2O” take functional entities as semantic values that differ, e.g., in terms of complexity (along the lines of for instance King 1995 or Soames 2007). And, when I claim that such views must have a metaphysical story to tell about the relationship between the properties, I do not wish to exclude the possibility of this story being ultimately a story about, say, conceptual roles or language game rules.
A counterpart theorist may, perhaps, insist on a slight modification of this claim, but if modal claims are to make sense at all, at least “water” has to pick out the closest counterpart of water in any relevant world of assessment (although what counterpart this is may be interest relative).
Of course, the predicate “water” could have meant something different. We are interested in what the case is given a certain interpretation of the predicate, however, not whether other interpretations are possible.
We may, in principle, even restrict ourselves to an even weaker claim: At least the essentialist position defended by Devitt requires a commitment to something like the foregoing. If we did not assume something like the foregoing, it is very, very hard to see what RA would amount to. If “water” or “clear stuff that fills lakes and rivers” could fail to pick out water or clear stuff that fills lakes and rivers, respectively, then I cannot see why the former and not the latter should satisfy RA—or what argument or even intuition could decide the matter. It would, for instance, be entirely beside the point whether being water is an essential property or not if we had no guarantee that “water” picked out water in other possible worlds (if “water” suddenly picked out, say, salt in some possible world, “water” would not satisfy RA even if all samples of water were essentially water).
It could, consistent with what has been said, of course be the case that “water” indirectly picks out H2O in the actual world and other properties elsewhere. In that case, however, the relationship between water and H 2 O is not property identity but perhaps a matter of satisfaction or instantiation. We discuss views that reject the property identity hypothesis in Sect. 1.2.
Of course, the epistemic problem—that the necessary truth is a posteriori—still needs an answer, but it is hard to see how rigid application is going to help us tackle this problem.
To be sure, in the end, essentialists probably need to tell us a story about what grounds the fact that being water and being H 2 O are essential properties and being clear stuff … a contingent one, but such a story will not tell us why XYZ is not water—XYZ is an essential property as well.
Although it is often pointed out that Twin Earth is a location in the actual world, not a different possible world, the point is also sometimes overlooked in practice. Neo-descriptivist explanations of the behavior of natural kind terms that appeal to actually rigidified descriptions (“water,” for instance, is equivalent to a rigid description along the lines of “the stuff that actually fills lakes and rivers”), will for instance do exactly nothing to address Putnam’s original challenge, since Putnam’s challenge is precisely supposed to show that “water” is actually not equivalent to “clear stuff that fills lakes and rivers.” At the very least, such accounts would need to add further indices (e.g., a center) as well to their worlds.
References
Devitt, M. (2005). Rigid application. Philosophical Studies, 125, 139–165.
Gómez-Torrente, M. (2006). Rigidity and essentiality. Mind, 115, 227–260.
King, J. (1995). Structured propositions and complex predicates. Noûs, 29, 516–535.
Kripke, S. (1972). Naming and Necessity. In Davidson, D. and Harman, G. (eds.), Semantics of Natural Language (pp. 253–355, 763–769). Dordrecht: Reidel.
LaPorte, J. (2000). Rigidity and kind. Philosophical Studies, 97, 293–316.
Martí, G. (2004). Rigidity and General Terms. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 104, 131–148.
Martí, G., & Martínez-Fernández, J. (2010). General terms as designators: a defence of the view. In H. Beebee & N. Sabbarton-Leary (Eds.), The semantics and metaphysics of natural kinds. New York: Routledge.
Putnam, H. (1973). Meaning and reference. Journal of Philosophy, 70, 699–711.
Salmon, N. (2005). Are general terms rigid? Linguistics and Philosophy, 28, 117–134.
Soames, S. (2002). Beyond rigidity. Oxford University Press.
Soames, S. (2007). What are natural kinds? Philosophical Topics, 35(1/2), 329–342.
Acknowledgments
The research behind this article was made possible in part through a grant from the SASPRO Mobility Programme (grant no. 0086/01/03/-b). I would like to thank Robin Neiman and an anonymous referee for helpful comments and insights on earlier versions of the article.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Haraldsen, F. Essence, Application, and Explanation. Acta Anal 31, 179–189 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12136-015-0272-x
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12136-015-0272-x