Modality de dicto and de re

I had a chat about my favorite topic in the pub the other day.  That's right, beer.  Shortly after that, I had another chat about modality.  What started off (as I recall) as chat about my research soon drifted off to a strange (but wicked cool) mid-point between my research and that of my friend, let's call him Schmomas.  Schmomas' research is into the nature of logical laws and structure, whether it is something worldly a la Sider, or something unworldly, a la Hirsch.  After apologising for what is probably a gross oversimplification of Schmomas' research, I'll get to the point.

Schmomas, I'm sorry for grossly oversimplifying your research. 

Having discussed the potential for essentialist accounts of modality, we started talking about how one might account for logical truth in particular.  Fine reckons that we can ground such things in the essences of logical concepts (though I'm guessing he doesn't really mean to say 'concepts'), but let's face it, that's kinda weird.  If we're going to be asking people to accept essences, let's at least try to slow down and not reify absolutely everything we can think of.  So Schmomas and I started to talk about the potential for an account that split modality in two. What would happen if you accounted for all the de re necessity in terms of the essences of things, but then turned to linguistic conventions when it came to things like logical truth and de dicto necessity?  This is a leap from a traditional essentialist picture which, as far as I can tell, takes the unconventional (excuse the pun) step of basically treating all de dicto necessity as just de re necessity about propositions or whatnot.  

So how about it?  It looks pretty weird at first.  Especially as it portrays a serious theoretical divide where folk don't often put one, and what's more it places necessity de re as the more real of the two, which bucks against the historical trend.  Now that's enough to get some hats spinning, but I think there's something to be said for it.  For a while now I've been wondering if modality de re and de dicto are just too different to be covered realistically by the same theory.  I remember making some slightly drunken midnight tweets about this a while ago (oh yeah, that's how I roll).  Imagine my joy to find that someone else actually had thoughts along the same lines!  It seems to me that modality de dicto and de re are really different, more so than most people acknowledge (at least publicly).  I'm beginning to wonder if it isn't a significant advantage of a theory if it accounts for the two in radically different ways.  Think about it.  Necessity de re is about stuff.  Could that thing be more like this other thing?  Did that thing have to be like that? etc.  Necessity de dicto just isn't like that.  It's about the way that we reason, the way that we think about the world.  The apparent overlap between the two doesn't really seem any more significant than the use of certain bits of vocabulary.  Normative claims involve the same kind of vocabulary, and we don't expect to cover those with the same account.  Of course there are de dicto claims that seem to overlap a lot more.  "It could have been the case that there was a dragon in my bathtub" seems to be talking about stuff (in a way) just as much as "My dragon can't get out of the bathtub!"  But let's look at that.  Whilst the latter is a modal claim about what's possible of the abilities of my dragon, the former just isn't.  It's a case of us reasoning about the world, and about the compatibility of properties.  The reason why we think there could have been a dragon in my bathtub is that we think the properties we associate with dragons are consistent, and that they are consistent with the mechanics of bathroom fixtures.  The only kind of stuff that the de dicto claims could be about are propositions, logical notions, properties, or the way we think about them.

Oh course, if you want a more unified account, but still don't want to go reifying things willy-nilly, then you could be a conventional essentialist.  You ground all modal facts in the essences of things, and you give essences to anything that you want there to be modal facts about.  This means just about everything.  Numbers, logical forms, the lot.  This can go along the lines of the Finean essentialist account of modality.  Then you just go and be a conventionalist about neo-Aristotelean essence and Bob's your uncle, you don't have to worry about reifying all those things you just gave essences to because those essences are conventional and don't commit you to much at all.  The advantage of this is that you get to talk about modality and think in modal terms without having to worry about any of the spooky stuff that us metaphysicians get bullied for not thinking of as being all that spooky.  A potential downside is this doesn't really seem to be the way we think.  It hangs on a fair few 'ifs', like the viability of a complete essentialist account of modality and a conventionalist account of essence (both of which I plan to write about in some depth), and also the slightly cringe worthy claim that all de dicto necessities are really just de re ones in disguise.

So there you go.  Some ramblings from the pub.  Feel free to digest and reject at your leisure.  

Essence, the next generation.

I've been thinking about essence some more (what with essentialism being the focus of my thesis I can imagine a lot of my posts starting this way).  Specifically I've been thinking about the new breed of essentialism, and how the thinkers involved think about it.  I've read a fair bit of the new literature on essence (the stuff post 1994 when Fine argued against the modal understanding of essence) and related notions, and I'm still rather confused as to just how I should formulate the main essentialist claim.  The thinkers I have in mind are folk like Fine, Lowe, Correia, and Shalkowski.  I've also discussed the topic with the last two but and with others like Dasgupta, and Divers (and grad students, notably Michael Bench-Capon and Thomas Brouwer).  The overwhelming impression I get from all this is that, whilst there is clearly some notion of essence that unifies all these people, it is by no means clear exactly how it should be exactly interpreted.  What is clear is how one might interpret essence in broad strokes.  On the 'new generation' conception of essence it is not necessity de re, but what it is for things to be the things that they are.  I describe this as an ontological interpretation as opposed to a modal one, as whatever essence is, it is linked closely with the identities of things.  However, once we accept this (rather vague) idea, it becomes quite tricky to agree on just about anything else, be it the nature of essence, or its role in modern metaphysics.  

Issues people can differ on include a bunch of tricky topics, but today I'm going to talk about the direction of explanation.  The question comes from two different and (seemingly) equally plausible ways that one might phrase a general essentialist claim.  The first claims that 'the essence of x is that in virtue of which x is the individual that it is'.  Alternatively one might say 'the essence of x is that which follows from what x is (in adherence with the tradition that italics make phrases more meaningful).  The end of this one can be rephrased as 'from x's identity', or even x's 'metaphysical identity' (apply italics to taste)'.  Both of these sound like pretty good ways of summing up what essence is, and both have precedents in the literature.  The problem is that each points the explanation in the opposite direction from the other.  In the first case it is the essence of x that makes it what it is.  The second makes x's essence something that follows from what x is.  

The former seems to be more in keeping with our intuitions, right?  I mean, if essence is to play a useful role in your metaphysics, it should be 'making you the thing that you are', or 'grounding your identity', or whatever.  Chaps like Lowe and Shalkowski seem more inclined this way (looks that way to me anyway, especially when you think about what Lowe wants essence to do for modal epistemology).  But it looks like folk like Fine and Dasgupta favour the latter option.  At least, this is how it looks when you think about Fine's stuff on real definition.  This claims that the essence of x is the real definition of x (Fine only offers this as a heuristic, but sometimes I wonder why he doesn't try to do more...  More on that when I'm less confused).  A real definition is supposed to be a metaphysical analogue to the way that we give nominal definitions of terms.  Fine identities the real definition of x with the collection of propositions that are true in virtue of its identity (or with the corresponding collection of essential properties).

A nice, easy way of seeing why this difference is significant is in the kinds of traditional essential predications that these interpretations support.  For instance, the former favours essential origins whilst the latter does not, and the latter favours essentially having such and such persistence conditions where it doesn't seem obvious (at least to me) that the former does.  Here's why I think this.  If we think of in virtue of (oh boy, here he goes with the italics again) as being grounds, then it seems pretty safe to think that x's identity is (at least in part) grounded in x's origins.  Conversely, to say that x having certain origins is grounded in x's identity is, well it's weird.  Likewise, it looks pretty safe to say that x's persistence conditions could be grounded in x's identity, but it looks less appetising to think the other way around (though I suppose it's not that weird...  Oh will you quit with the italics already!). 

It looks to me like one of several things might be going on.  Maybe I'm misinterpreting what Fine means by 'in virtue of'.  Maybe it is supposed to be more to do with what you can infer, in which case I can much more confidently infer the importance of x's origins from it's identity.  Maybe Fine just doesn't want essence to do what I'm thinking of, after all, it looks like his way makes essence a better candidate for providing the grounds to modal facts.  Maybe I've drank too much tea this year and I'm going loopy.  But maybe, just maybe I'm actually worried about something legitimate and this is a real problem for the essentialist camp.  After all, even if you follow Fine to the letter there is still something uncomfortable about reconciling the notion of essences as real definitions with Fine's desired direction of explanation.  Is that how we think of nominal definitions?  No, we think of them as telling us what a term means, not telling us what it true in virtue of the meaning of the term (Oi!).  Even if my intuitions are faulty on this one (perfectly possible for someone who attributes italics semantic content but refuses to specify what that content is), but even so, there appears to be a lack of unity in this generation of essentialists, even when it comes to the most basic aspects of the nature of essence.   

The problem gets even worse when you bring stuff like ontological dependence into the picture.  Maybe I'll talk about that next time, if I've had enough tea. 

An introduction to my thoughts on essentialism

I've been thinking about essence.  I've been thinking about essence for about a year and a half now.  Essentialism is usually understood as the claim that some de re modal predications are true (and indeed that they are sensible).  Fine reckons that they're wrong, and I reckon Fine's right.  Essence isn't a modal thesis, it's an ontological one.  Now, I'm a little confused on just how to formulate the thesis (more on that later), but for now let's just say that an individual's essence is tied in very closely with what that individual is in a mysterious metaphysical identity kind of a way that is somehow only conveyable through the use of italics.  There are two other important parts of Fine's view on essence.  He thinks that essences are to be understood as 'real definitions' analogous to the nominal definitions that help us to understand terms, and he thinks that facts about necessity are grounded in essential facts (stay tuned for bumbling monologues on these two points in the future).

Whitehead said that all philosophy is just footnotes on Plato.  He's wrong.  All philosophy is footnotes on Aristotle, essentialism doubly so.  As far as I can tell from my very limited readings of Aristotle on essence I think it sounds like he's talking about the latter option.  But really I don't care what he thought, or indeed what a lot of people thought of essence.  If what I'm talking about isn't what they're talking about, then I guess I'm not interested in essentialism, I'm interested in something else.  However, until someone comes up with a cooler name (preferably one whose puns haven't been worn out so terribly), I'll stick with 'essence'.

My original motivations for liking Fine's ideas about essence were threefold.  First, I really like 'Essence and Modality' (the paper he puts these views forward in), it's fun and clever and just generally cool in a way that's hard to do in sixteen or so pages.  Second, grounding modality in something that's not possible worlds is right up my alley (I don't like possible worlds.  I think they're cool and fun like every other metaphysician, but let's face it, they just aren't real).  Incidentally I originally thought that essentialism could provide an reductive analysis for modality but have since realised that grounding it is probably all one can hope for, but I'm cool with that.  Third, it felt fun to try to bring back some old school Aristotelian metaphysics and try to reconcile it with contemporary thought.

My current motivations for liking essentialism are just the above, but also that I'm starting to think that it's probably true.  But then again my view on this point does change quite often, so probably best not to assume that I'm an essentialist (certainly not until I'm actually sure of what I mean by that).

One problem that I'm currently trying to get my head around is just how I should consider the literature on essentialism that treats it merely as modality de re.  At first I thought that it was just irrelevant.  They're not talking about the same thing as me, and that's that.  Now I've come round to the idea that their discussion deals with many of the same intuitions that mine will.  If modal facts are grounded in essential ones then their discussion will give a good indication of what's going on at the essential level, just like the lumps in the lawn give an indication of the movements of the gophers beneath (at least this is what cartoons have led me to believe).  However, I still wonder just how good an indication this is, and whether I run the risk of conflating the two interpretations.

Okay, so that wasn't that insightful, but I'm tired.  I've been reading scores of undergraduate essays and it could take a few days before I recover.  Next time I'll get into what I think about Fine's real definitions and some stuff on direction of explanation.