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Necessary Properties And Linnaean Essentialism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Berent Enç
Berent Enç*
Affiliation:
University of Wisconsin, Madison
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Extract

Quine's arguments against the attribution of essential properties de re to individuals have been the motivation for attempts at reinstating essentialism as a respectable metaphysical thesis and at defending the coherence of modal logic in general.

I shall argue here along somewhat different lines, that the particular version of essentialism Quine objects to is in fact untenable but that this conclusion is far from entailing a commitment to some version of conventionalism, and in particular that it does not entail the view that the only kind of necessity that is coherent is de dicto necessity.

In what follows, I shall assume, without arguing for it, that de re essentialism and subjunctive conditionals are intimately related, and in particular, that any version of de re essentialism which conflicts with our basic intuitions about subjunctive conditionals is untenable.

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Philosophy , Volume 5 , Issue 1 , September 1975 , pp. 83 - 102
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 1975

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References

* I am indebted to Profs. Terrence Penner and Linda Foy for their invaluable criticisms of an earlier version of this paper.

1 See, for example, “Grades of Modal Involvement” in Quine, Ways of Paradox.

2 See, for example, Plantinga, “De dicto et de re” Nous 1969Google Scholar; “World and Essence“ Philosophical Review 1970; Marcus, Barcan “Essential Attribution” Journal of Philosophy 1971CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Parsons, “Grades of Essentialism in Quantified Modal Logic” Nous 1967CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 S. Kripke, “Naming and Necessity” in Semantics for Natural Languages, Davidson and Harman (eds.)

4 I shall also ignore those properties, like being a squid or not a squid, or being self identical, which are necessarily true of all individuals.

5 Kripke, S. op. cit., pp. 266–267Google Scholar.

6 R. Causey has suggested that the explanation involved here is a causal one (“Uniform Microreductions” Synthese (1972)) and “Attribute-identities in Microreductions” The Journal of Philosophy (1972)). Brody, B. (“Towards an Aristotelian Theory of Scientific Explanation” Philosophy of Science (1972))CrossRefGoogle Scholar, more carefully, denies that the molecular structure of sugar is the cause of its dissolving in water, but this denial, he notes, does not entail that the molecular structure is not an essential part of the cause of its dissolving (p. 24).

7 B. Brody, Op. cit.

8 This is a controversial issue in the discussions of intertheoretic reduction. Some philosophers (e.g. R. Causey, Opera cit.) have argued that the relation between some of these properties is one of identity. However, it seems clear to me that whatever the relation is between the molecular structure of sugar and its solubility in water, the same relation holds between the weight of an object on earth and the gravitational force exerted on the object by the earth. For a defense of this view and a dicsussion of property identity in reductions, see my, “Identity Statements and Microreductions” (forthcoming).

9 This move may appear to be an attempt at reducing the metaphysical problem of essential attributes to the purely epistemological problems of explanation. But as I point out at the end of the paper, I suspect that both of these problems will ultimately be reduced to the more fundamental issue of the laws of nature and of the truths about the structure of the universe.

10 Quine, Word and Object p. 199.Google Scholar

11 Hull, D. “The Effect of Essentialism on Taxonomy” The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 1965CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

12 I am grateful to a referee of this Journal for suggesting this distinction.

13 I am indebted to Prof. Linda Foy for this example.

14 The alchemists who wanted to transform lead into gold were not being irrational because they believed that gold and lead were composites, and that the ultimate constituents of the universe were earth, water, air and fire. They would have been irrational if they had hoped to transform, say, pure fire into pure earth. Their efforts only seemed misguided in the Nineteenth Century when the chemical elements were believed to be the ultimate constituents.

15 Such an assumption seems to be a direct consequence of the thesis of the Indeterminacy of Translation.

16 For an attempt at such criteria see my “Numerical Identity and Objecthood“ Mind (forthcoming).

17 The sortal dependent analysis of individual identity as exemplified by the Strawson-Geach-Wiggins approach is a good case for the theses that are incompatible with my proposal. On the other hand, it seems to me that such sortal dependent analyses render most versions of essentialism vulnerable to Quinean objections.

18 Cf. the example of microbial strains above.

19 We may also say, pointing to a crab which has shed its, shell that it is a crustacean (or a shell-fish); or pointing to Smith who has lost a leg that he is a biped; or pointing to a piece of gold which has been painted green that it is essentially yellow.

20 A historical hint to these characterizations can be found in the following passage from Linnaeus: In a preface to Genera Plantarum, Linnaeus states that there are three kinds of characters for plant genera: factitious, essential and natural.

The factitious character fixes one mark on a genus by which it is distinguished from the rest, arranged under the same order, but not from others … If… all the genera which exist in nature were discovered this would be easier than others [kinds of generic characters], but since they are not discovered, nor can be, it becomes itself erroneous …. for when at any time a new genus is detected, those in its vicinity become wrong…

The essential character furnishes a single and best adapted mark to the genus, to which it is affixed, hence it excells by its brevity and certainty…. But can this ever be obtained in all the I greatly doubt…

Here therefore I deliver the natural characters which exhibit clearly all the marks …

Linnaeus then offers parts of the fructification of plants as the natural generic characters. One might conjecture that part of the reason for the choice was that Linnaeus hoped these features to be the key to the essence of genera. What after all is more plausible than to assume that the key to the question, “What makes a genus the genus it is?” is to be found in the reproductive mechanism of the plants of that genus? (Carl Linnaeus, The Families of Plants with their Natural Characters according to Number, Figure, Situation, and Proportion of all the Parts of Fructification, 1787, translated from General Plantarum and Mantissae Plantarum of the elder Linnaeus and from Supplementarum Plantarum of the younger Linnaeus by the Botanical Society (conjectured translator: Erasmus Darwin) pp. lxx-lxxi).

21 Strictly speaking, the two requirements form a sufficient condition for the truth of (3), but neither requirement is necessary. I think the counterfactual would also be true when the subject term is mistakenly used to refer to a piece of rock-salt and solubility in water is a necessary property of rock-salt. In such a situation the utterer of (3) may not be justified in asserting the counterfactual, but the counterfactual would still be true.

22 S. Kripke, op. cit.

23 Stampe, D. “On the Meaning of Nouns” University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Symposium on Limiting the Domain of Linguistics, David Cohen (ed.) 1972.Google Scholar