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Explaining essences

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Abstract

This paper explores the prospects of combining two views. The first view is metaphysical rationalism (the principle of sufficient reason): all things have an explanation. The second view is metaphysical essentialism: there are real essences. The exploration is motivated by a conflict between the views. Metaphysical essentialism posits facts about essences. Metaphysical rationalism demands explanations for all facts. But facts about essences appear to resist explanation. I consider two solutions to the conflict. Exemption solutions attempt to exempt facts about essences from the demand for explanation. Explanation solutions attempt to explain facts about essences. I argue that exemption solutions are less promising than explanation solutions. I then consider how explanation solutions might be developed. I suggest that a “generative” approach is most promising. I tentatively conclude that the prospects for combining metaphysical rationalism and metaphysical essentialism turn on the viability of a generative approach. This sets the agenda for defending the combination as well as the more general project of explaining essences.

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Notes

  1. Still, it might prevent confusion to state my views. I have little inclination toward metaphysical rationalism. Curiosity led me to consider combining it with metaphysical essentialism, to which I am inclined. I am especially intrigued by the prospects of explaining essences.

  2. Della Rocca (2012), Dasgupta (2016), Levey (2016), Schnieder and Steinberg (2016) and Amijee (2018) may each (more or less plausibly) be read as formulating PSR with ground.

  3. See Raven (2015) for an overview and Raven (2020a) for a comprehensive survey of ground.

  4. Were we to interpret our PSR modally, it would concern metaphysical modality. This flows from the distinctively metaphysical kind of explanation at issue: ground.

  5. Della Rocca (2010, 2018) appeals to such considerations to defend an unrestricted PSR.

  6. The labelling is pernicious. For example, it can mask the invalidity of arguing against genders having essences by arguing that they do not have biological essences Witt (1995).

  7. The distinction is inspired by Locke (1689).

  8. If one were to recognize essences in some other sense, one might regard them as eliminable (Raven 2016, 2017).

  9. Detachment requires clarification. A natural idea is to associate it with abstracta. But the details are fraught and deserve more discussion than I can provide here (although I discuss it elsewhere). My main points do not turn on the exact characterization of detachment.

  10. Examples of such ill-fitting essences include social and artifactual essences. Elsewhere I discuss how a puzzle arises because these essences can seem at once embedded and detached.

  11. It is another matter whether the answer is correct. Glazier (2017, p. 2880) argues that it is incorrect. Roughly, his argument is that some essences are nonfundamental, but that this is so only if some essentialist facts have explanations.

  12. Exemption strategies have gone by other names. For instance, Della Rocca (2018) writes about strategies for taming the PSR. I think these are exemption strategies.

  13. Perhaps there is an exemption solution at work in Kant’s claim that “the principle of sufficient reason, therefore, is the basis for possible experience” Kant (1781/1997, B246). Facts about possible experience demand explanation. Other facts (if there are any) do not. If among these other facts are essentialist facts, then they will be exempt. But I am unsure whether it is plausible to interpret Kant as having anything like these considerations in mind.

  14. The label ‘substantive’ is apt to mislead. The usual contrast to substantive is insubstantial. This has the innuendo that facts which are not substantive are somehow insubstantial. The innuendo extends to essentialist facts if they are not substantive. This is congenial to those who say the project of discovering essences is insubstantial. But it is not congenial to those who say the project is substantive and central to philosophy. Perhaps a less misleading (but clunkier) label would have been ‘mootable’ (i.e. open for discussion or debate).

  15. The scaffolding metaphor recalls young Wittgenstein’s (1921, 6.124) remarks about how the “propositions of logic describe the scaffolding of the world, or rather they represent it”.

  16. The claim echoes Lewis (1986, p. 3). Dasgupta writes as if he endorses something like it.

  17. Glazier (2017) gives similar criticisms of autonomy.

  18. On another conception of analyticity, such an analytic truth will be taken to be grounded in further facts about concepts (or meanings, definitions, or whatever).

  19. This is compatible with the dialetheist’s allowance that ‘¬A’ also be true in those models.

  20. This might be related to Boghossian’s (1996)’s notion of epistemic analyticity.

  21. Almog (1989) discusses a related distinction between lordly and worldly perspectives on logical truths. See also Raven (2020b).

  22. Fine gives no indication of considering an exemption solution of this sort.

  23. Fine (2005) writes about transcendental truths, rather than facts. But the difference shouldn’t matter here. See Kuhn (2020) for further discussion of transcendence.

  24. Fine’s actual example is ‘Socrates is a man’. But it is clear he means human by ‘man’. I have adjusted Fine’s example accordingly. It is important that the predicate ‘human’ not be read as ‘existent human’, which is a worldly predicate (cf. Fine 2005, p. 337).

  25. Alleged cases of grounded essentialist facts are relevant to the discussion of autonomy (Sect. 4.1). Any such case will be a counterexample to the autonomy of essentialist facts.

  26. Some essays in Bliss and Priest (2018) consider whether such infinite regresses are vicious.

  27. Cf. Glazier (2017, p. 2879).

  28. Perhaps these linguistic facts are grounded in mental facts about the intentions of speakers, as suggested by the Gricean Program to explain sentence meaning by speaker meaning.

  29. Almog tends to prefer the term ‘natures’ over ‘essences’. But I will use ‘essences’.

  30. I do not attribute any of the claims I explore to Almog. This is in part because he does not discuss the PSR and also in part because I am not always sure how to interpret his views.

  31. Indeed, Almog (2010, p. 360) uses the term ‘re-embed’ when describing a similar view.

  32. This might puzzle those who think of sets as abstract but interpret ‘cosmic’ as implying concrete. But Almog (1999) seems to think that sets are no less cosmic than Socrates.

  33. For similar views on fictional entities, see Evnine (2016), Fine (1982), Kripke (2013), Salmon (2005), Schiffer (2003), Thomasson (1999) and van Inwagen (2001).

  34. For similar views on artifacts, see Baker (2008), Evnine (2016), Hilpinen (2011), Raven (2019) and Thomasson (2014).

  35. A view of this sort is developed and defended by Haslanger (2012).

  36. For similar views on social items, see Epstein (2015), Passinsky (2016), Ritchie (2015), Searle (1995), Smith (2001), Smith and Varzi (2000), Sveinsdóttir (2008) and Thomasson (2003).

  37. Views of this sort are discussed in some of the papers in Benacerraf and Putnam (1983).

  38. It might appear that there is a related difficulty of “meta-ground”. Suppose an essentialist fact E has certain grounds G. What, if anything, grounds the fact that G grounds E? Some have held the view that essentialist facts help ground such facts about ground (Rosen 2010; Dasgupta 2016). They might expect E to help ground the fact that G grounds E. One might think this implies that E helps ground itself, thereby violating the irreflexivity of ground. But there is no such implication. It does not follow from E’s helping ground G that E grounds itself. Much like necessity (□(A ∨ B)) does not distribute over disjunction (□A ∨ □B), so too grounds (E) do not distribute over connections of ground (G grounds E). Martin Glazier pointed out to me that there is a genuine difficulty if one thinks essentialist facts somehow “back” grounding explanations (without being among the grounds). For then it seems the essentialist fact will back its own explanation, which may seem illegitimate.

  39. The force of this worry depends on distinguishing between C explaining N (where C is contingent and N is necessary) and C explaining □N. Our focus is on the second case. Wildman (2018) argues that some contingencies can explain necessities in this sense.

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Acknowledgements

Thanks to anonymous referees, the participants and organizers of the Principle of Sufficient Reason: Then and Now conference at Simon Fraser University in April 2019, Louis deRosset, Martin Glazier, Eric Hochstein, Jon Litland, Colin Marshall, Conor Mayo-Wilson, Justin Zacek, and especially Fatema Amijee.

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    Michael J. Raven

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    Michael J. Raven

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Raven, M.J. Explaining essences. Philos Stud 178, 1043–1064 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-020-01483-2

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