Abstract
Realist essentialists face a prima facie challenge in accounting for our knowledge of the essences of things, and in particular, in justifying our engaging in thought experiments to gain such knowledge. In contrast, conferralist essentialism has an attractive story to tell about how we gain knowledge of the essences of things, and how thought experiments are a justified method for gaining such knowledge. The conferralist story is told in this essay.
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Notes
Recall, e.g. Quine (1966), where he objects to necessity de re on the grounds that it seems to him to commit one to Aristotelian essentialism and what he saw as the trappings of scholastic metaphysics. This seemed to Quine to be a wholly unacceptable commitment largely because the source of this de re necessity—what made the property necessary to an object—could not be accounted for in a way congenial to the empiricism of the day.
Sveinsdóttir (2008).
Kripke (1980, pp. 110 ff).
To cite an example from Parfit (1984).
Sveinsdóttir (2008).
Conceptual commitments are not quite application conditions, even if understood liberally. Application conditions are the conditions under which the concept applies, irrespective of whether we do or would apply it under those conditions. By focusing on conceptual commitments, we focus on our conceptual behavior, actual and hypothetical, but not some conditions under which such behavior would be correct. For what I take to be a standard understanding of application conditions see Johnston (1993).
Descartes is, of course, an example.
This he does by an appeal to two-dimensional semantics, which together with the rational modal notion of logical possibility and nonmodal facts are to yield such modal knowledge. The details of that aspect of Chalmers account do not concern us here.
See Lewis (1986, pp. 248–263).
Elder (2004, pp. 17–20).
See Lewis (1986, p. 252).
See, e.g. Wallace (1994).
Cf. Sorensen (1992 p. 4).
Aside from testing our own concept commitments, thought experiments can also serve the function of gathering all our knowledge of related matters together and enabling us to make an educated prediction of what the empirical findings may turn out to be, but I won’t dwell on that function here.
References
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Acknowledgement
I would like to thank Louise Antony, Alex Byrne, Jennifer Church, John Divers, Catherine Z. Elgin, Nathaniel Goldberg, Sally Haslanger, Aviv Hoffman, Daniel Nolan, Laurie Paul, Marion Smiley, Robert Stalnaker, Amie Thomasson, Judith Jarvis Thomson, Jessica Wilson, Charlotte Witt, and an anonymous reviewer for this journal for helpful comments on, or conversations related to, an earlier version of this essay. Of course, none of them is responsible for the views herein or any errors that remain.
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Sveinsdóttir, Á.K. Knowledge of essence: the conferralist story. Philos Stud 166, 21–32 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-012-0019-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-012-0019-0