SEP is correct here: — Leontiskos

Indeed, and you might take a look at the associated sub-article, which addresses this issue in detail and concludes

Hence, it is not uncommon to acknowledge today that a speaker can use a word to express just the appropriate content even though that speaker “does not understand what he himself means when he utters his word” — Stipulating Identity Trans-world, Without Qualitative Criteria for a Designatum to Satisfy

Which is not very far at all from Quine's claim.

It's what we do,

The propaganda campaign is well established by now. — Leontiskos

It's been pointed out previously and by others that you tend to misrepresent folk and then critique what you want to see rather than what has been said. You are doing it again.

Yep. The Kripke threads were very helpful in articulating this.

Is believing in essences from Plato? Is that how we're supposed to be sorting out reference? We're contacting the ideal?
— frank
I don't see how that could be made to work. it would be up to others to present such an argument. — Banno

I was wrong about that. We all lean toward materialism, so I don't know what's meant by "essence.".

Quite right, as an explication of Kripke's causal views. There was another thread on Kripke's Identity and Necessity, an early paper.

I don't think we have much chance of progressing that, given the rejection of formal logic amongst some contributors.

Yeah, talk of essences is interesting. It's apparent that essentialism requires a distinctly divergent view of many of the details of how the world works. In particular, it seems to have appeal for those of a theistic bent. Perhaps a tiger is a tiger if god says so. But I don't know what god says, so it's no for me. I'll go with naturalism, like Quine.

The first two refutations are empirical, and defeasible. The third, of course, is not, should it be true. So, is that what Count T is saying, when he says that Socrates is a man, not a chimpanzee? The question you asked about essential properties vs. necessary properties is the same question, perhaps. — J

I can't really speak for Count. I don't quite understand what he means.

It's metaphysically possible for Socrates to have been a chimp. Where I think confusion might be arising is if we're limiting possibility to that possible world we call the actual world. This would be a type of actualism. If we embrace that, then Socrates would necessarily be a human. This view is also hard determinism.

. I'll go with naturalism, like Quine. — Banno

Me too, but with a big dose of skepticism about metaphysics. That bias thing again. :grin:

Quite odd. One does not have to be an essentialist to agree that these aren't the same sort of thing.

One wouldn't need to believe in essences to believe there are distinct sorts of things? That's all an essence is.

In one possible world, Socrates - that very individual - is a man, while in another he may be a robot. These sentences are both about Socrates. That is, they are both about the very same individual.

Maybe I can clear this up. It seems possible that our historical Socrates was an android sent down to Earth by aliens. It also seems possible, and far more likely, that he was just a man. Same historical Socrates, different things, different essences. That is, both are named "Socrates" and both are what produced the historical memory of Socrates.

However, it isn't possible that the same concrete particular is both man and not-man in different possible worlds. The claim that the same concrete particular can be man and not-man in different worlds while remaining the same particular isn't a counter example to essences, it's simply assuming that essences don't exist and that all properties are accidental. If all properties are accidental, then in virtue of what is any individual "the same individual" across any possible worlds?

That's not showing essences to be problematic, it's simple question begging.

It's metaphysically possible for Socrates to have been a chimp. — frank

But is it metaphysically possible for him to have been born of different parents? I don't think Kripke would agree (not that he's the boss).

One wouldn't need to believe in essences to believe there are distinct sorts of things? That's all an essence is. — Count Timothy von Icarus

No. One would not have to be an essentialist to agree that a robot is not a man. Socrates may have been a man. Socrates may have been a robot. Both those sentences are about Socrates. That very individual.

It is indeed possible for the very same individual to have different properties in different possible worlds. That's how modal talk is usually understood. We can consider a possible world in which Socrates - that very individual - was a robot.

What is not possible is that Socrates be both man and not-man in the very same possible world.

If all properties are accidental, then we may still refer to "the same individual" across any possible world by stipulation. What if Socrates, that very individual, were a robot?

I don't think Kripke would agree — J

Probably not. Kripke would presumably say something like that the name "Socrates" is joined by a causal chain to that individual, and part of that chain was his being born to a certain woman. On that account there may indeed be a contradiction in supposing that Socrates may have been a robot, since he was born of a woman.

Such considerations are apart from the logic of modality, in which the domain is stipulated.

There's a subtle point here, around whether when we say "Socrates", we are just stipulating that individual, or whether we are thereby participating in a broader, communal exercise. For me, either is possible, and they are of equal standing, and perhaps not problematic so long as we track which of these two games we are playing.

So if Socrates - that very individual - were a robot, then we would have to change a whole lot of other things we had assumed about him - including, presumably, that he was born of woman.

It's interesting how this parallels Quine's holism. If Socrates turned out to be a robot, then a large number of other entries in out web of belief would have to be changed.

@frank

If all properties are accidental, then we may still refer to "the same individual" across any possible world by stipulation. What if Socrates, that very individual, were a robot?

Yes, sure, that's what I said to Frank earlier. I am not sure what the point is supposed to be though. "If you assume all properties are accidental then no properties are essential." Well, of course.

I was trying to explain a particular notion of essences that comes up in Aristotle and which has been refined and applied until today. Obviously, if you assume that nothing is essential, nothing will be essential. How is that a problem for essences?

I'm not getting it. It seems to be a "problem" in the same sense that anyone can say to anything "no it isn't" by assuming the opposite of the thing in question.

It is indeed possible for the very same individual to have different properties in different possible worlds. That's how modal talk is usually understood. We can consider a possible world in which Socrates - that very individual - was a robot.

Of course, different individuals can have different properties in different possible worlds or even different times in the same world. When Socrates gets a haircut, he doesn't cease being Socrates. But the claim about Socrates being anything at all seems to require the more permissive: "the very same individuals can have any different properties in different possible worlds while remaining the very same individual."

That's only problematic for essential properties in that it simply assumes they don't exist.

Obviously, if you assume that nothing is essential, nothing will be essential. How is that a problem for essences? — Count Timothy von Icarus

Well, it makes sense. We can get by without essences. Hence, as it were, essences are not essential...

And recall that my conclusion was not, as you reported, to "dispatched any notion of essence" but to show that they are problematic. :brow:

That's only problematic for essential properties in that it simply assumes they don't exist. — Count Timothy von Icarus

What it shows is that we can make reference to Socrates without relying on some set of properties that fix the referent. We can reject the descriptivist theory of reference.

We do not need essences in order to fix the referent of a name.

Much of the work done by essences in mediaeval philosophy is now done using other mechanisms. While they are still discussed, they are far from central. That Quine rejects essentialism does not count agains Quine now, in the way it may have in the fourteenth century.

It's interesting how this parallels Quine's holism. If Socrates turned out to be a robot, then a large number of other entries in our web of belief would have to be changed. — Banno

Yes, nice observation. "Large number" hardly does it justice!

There's a fine essay by J. L. Mackie called "Locke's Anticipation of Kripke." It appears in his Problems from Locke but I can't find a link online. I'm thinking that @Count Timothy von Icarus might particularly appreciate it because it's all about Locke's views of essences. One highlight: Mackie gives Locke's view that "while it would be advantageous to use [substance-terms] to refer to real essences if we knew them, if we had clear and adequate ideas of them in our minds, it is a mistake, an abuse of words, to try to do this when we lack those ideas: we cannot 'remove that imperfection' [Locke] by merely intending to refer to a unknown real essence." Mackie believes this closely anticipates what Kripke will say about how reference actually works -- that we refer to designatable features rather than essences.

But is it metaphysically possible for him to have been born of different parents? I don't think Kripke would agree (not that he's the boss). — J

I think Kripke's concern would be about someone asking about an alternative Socrates who had different parents. To my mind, whether that question would make any sense depends on the context. Since it is metaphysically possible for Socrates to have had different parents, I would say there are contexts where it would make sense. And of course others where it wouldn't.

@Banno do you disagree with that?

Cheers. It may be at p.93 here. There seems to be a small industry in reinterpreting Lock in modern modal terms. I'll have a look.


I'd like to express my admiration for your even-handedness.

You'd have to define perfect I suppose. If it is the older usage of "having no privation" then yes, circleness cannot be deprived of any aspect of circleness. — Count Timothy von Icarus

So, on the "no privation" view the perfect form of a tiger would be 100% tigerness, just as the form of the perfect circle would be 100% circularity. Same for the Good, Justice, and Beauty. 'No deviation' might be a better term than 'no privation'.

I think it also pays to remember than when these terms were originally translated into English (which was not way back in the day) the English words chosen would reflect the presuppositions of the translators. So, it is translations we are working with, not the original texts.

Banno do you disagree with that? — frank

:grin:

It's complicated.

I had a go at addressing J. . I inadvertently did not add your name until after the post, so you would not have received notification.

The upshot is that you and @J are both right, but somewhat at cross-purposes.

In possible world semantics, "Socrates" just refers to Socrates, and how it refers is not part of the discussion. To that way of thinking, it is indeed possible that Socrates was a robot. That's your point.

But Kripke has an additional theory, not part of possible world semantics but a supplement to it, which holds that a name refers in virtue of a causal chain from speaker to referent. On that account, Kripke might well argue that since the name "Socrates" is causally linked to Socrates, if the thing we now call "Socrates" turned out to be a robot, that would not be a fact about Socrates, but about something else - the robot. This I take it is what J has in mind.

It's parallel to asking "What if Socrates had different parents?". On the one hand we may be asking what the world would be like if the chap Plato wrote about had had different parents - perhaps he would have been a painter instead of a sculptor, and not learned to be such an arse. Or we might be asking if that chap, who was indeed a philosopher, may have been mistaken as to who his parents were. We can ask either, but need to keep in mind that they are different questions.

Hope that clarifies it. It's pretty similar to what you said .

:up:

It may be at p.93 here. — Banno

. It is indeed, thanks for tracking it down. The whole book is very good.

I'd like to express my admiration for your even-handedness. — Banno

Oh, I'm just conflict-averse. :wink: Actually, it's a carry-over from a couple of teachers who stressed that understanding a position is far more important, and far more difficult, than taking sides. One of them (RJ Bernstein, in fact), used to caution about viewing argument as a winner-take-all affair in which one person is shown to be right, the other wrong. Which was interesting, coming from him, who could argue the pants off anyone. I think his idea was not that you couldn't do it, but you wouldn't learn anything.

This I take it is what J has in mind. — Banno

Yes.

Yes, Locke's real essences are at least arguably defined in terms of his nominal essences, so they are just "whatever really underlies whatever we use to identify something a certain sort of thing."

Locke's position is, of course, based on the early modern empiricist notion that we only experience mental representations, not things. If one removes this constraints, I am not sure if the distinction makes sense.

are problematic. :brow:

I don't see how you've shown that either. Philosophers do a lot of things with essential properties and essences. You've shown that given there are no essential properties, then there are no essential properties, and you can refer to the "very same" "Socrates" who is variously a skid mark on a road in Alabama in 2088, George Bush Sr., or a coconut.

I think it also pays to remember than when these terms were originally translated into English (which was not way back in the day) the English words chosen would reflect the presuppositions of the translators. So, it is translations we are working with, not the original texts.

Absolutely. Many of the common terms come from Latin translations of the Greek, but then words in English get used because they come from the Latin and yet their standard usage has changed dramatically. With Aristotle, there is the added problem of the same Greek word often being translated into different English words based on context, or different Greek words being translated into the same English word. "Essence" is just such a case, since ousia is also sometimes rendered as "essence," "actuality" is another, or dunamis as either potency or power. The choices aren't without their reasons (e.g. it may make sense to say Plotinus' One has "power" but not "potentiality") but they are confusing.

It's been pointed out previously and by others that you tend to misrepresent folk and then critique what you want to see — Banno

You always conflate your own opinions with the common opinion.

But pretty much everyone recognizes how silly and vain conversations with you are (or become). For example, from a moderator, "Treat this as an invitation to engage with the thread topic on its own terms... If you want to use this style of analysis, and see the thread through its terms entirely, you're going to remain confused." Many of the posters just ignore you, which I take to be the correct route.

As it happens, we do know both things, but if we knew as little about Socrates as Socrates himself knew about tables, we presumably could still refer to him, and be unconfused about him in possible worlds. — J

It seems to me that folks take a machination like "possible worlds" or "metaphysically possible" and then start throwing it around without any real sense of what they are doing. "There is a possible world in which Socrates is an alien." "It is metaphysically possible for Socrates to have been a chimp." Does the speaker have any sense of what he is saying with these sentences, uttered in isolation?

We can just pretend/stipulate that we can refer to Socrates without knowing anything about Socrates, but that is merely a promissory note. It begs the question in a discussion about reference.

• "I can refer to Socrates, and I need have no necessity-concept attached to my understanding of 'Socrates'."
• "Why do you think that."
• "For no special reason. Just because I say so. Just because I stipulate that I can."

That is not a real argument against modal essentialism. I don't think anyone talks about Socrates without involving their own essential and accidental properties of what constitutes Socrates. That is why in conversation some of the interlocutor's predications about Socrates will make one question whether the interlocutor is talking about Socrates, and some will not. Some claims about "Socrates" are thought to be incompatible with Socrates, and some are not.

"Possible worlds" is a necessity/possibility contrast. There is no such thing as making a possibility claim without also making necessity claims, at least in the background. And one cannot stipulate that their possibility claim involves no necessity premise.

(For a short defense of modal essentialism vis-a-vis Quine, see the first few pages of Paul Vincent Spade's, "The Warp and Woof of Metaphysics.")

-

• "For every property of Socrates there is some possible world where he does not have that property. Therefore Socrates has no essential or necessary properties."
• "If nothing necessarily attaches to Socrates, then in what does his continuation across possible worlds consist?"

Analytic philosophy characteristically caps off explanations of perennial topics with ad hoc appeals, in this case an appeal to stipulation. What is denied at the front door is snuck in the back door.

So, on the "no privation" view the perfect form of a tiger would be 100% tigerness, just as the form of the perfect circle would be 100% circularity. Same for the Good, Justice, and Beauty. 'No deviation' might be a better term than 'no privation'. — Janus

"Privation" is necessary because you are employing a Platonic version. Note that for Plato there is no "undeviated circle" among the realm of singulars, here below. The perfect Form is never found in a singular.

Therefore, the Platonic answer to the question of what this demonstration was about, namely, that it was about a perfect, ideal triangle, which is invisible to the eyes, but is graspable by our understanding, at once provides us with an explanation of the possibility of universal, necessary knowledge. By knowing the properties of the Form or Idea, we know all its particulars, i.e., all the things that imitate it, insofar as they imitate or participate in it. So, the Form itself is a universal entity, a universal model of all its particulars; and since it is the knowledge of this universal entity that can enable us to know at once all its particulars, it is absolutely vital for us to know what it is, what it is like, and exactly how it is related to its particulars. However, obviously, all these questions presuppose that it is at all, namely, that such a universal entity exists.

But the existence of such an entity seems to be rather precarious. Consider, for instance, the perfect triangle we were supposed to have in mind during the demonstration of Thales’ theorem. If it is a perfect triangle, it obviously has to have three sides, since a perfect triangle has to be a triangle, and nothing can be a triangle unless it has three sides. But of those three sides either at least two are equal or none, that is to say, the triangle in question has to be either isosceles or scalene (taking ‘isosceles’ broadly, including even equilateral triangles, for the sake of simplicity). However, since it is supposed to be the universal model of all triangles, and not only of isosceles triangles, this perfect triangle cannot be an isosceles, and for the same reason it cannot be a scalene triangle either. Therefore, such a universal triangle would have to have inconsistent properties, namely, both that it is either isosceles or scalene and that it is neither isosceles nor scalene. However, obviously nothing can have these properties at the same time, so nothing can be a universal triangle any more than a round square. So, apparently, no universal triangle can exist. But then, what was our demonstration about? Just a little while ago, we concluded that it could not be directly about any particular triangle (for it was not about the triangle in the figure, and it was even less about any other particular triangle not in the figure), and now we had to conclude that it could not be about a universal triangle either. But are there any further alternatives? It seems obvious that through this demonstration we do gain universal knowledge concerning all particulars. Yet it is also clear that we do not, indeed, we cannot gain this knowledge by examining all particulars, both because they are potentially infinite and because none of them perfectly satisfies the conditions stated in the demonstration. So, there must have been something wrong in our characterization of the universal, which compelled us to conclude that, in accordance with that characterization, universals could not exist. Therefore, we are left with a whole bundle of questions concerning the nature and characteristics of universals, questions that cannot be left unanswered if we want to know how universal, necessary knowledge is possible, if at all... — The Emergence of the Problem | Medieval Universals | SEP (italics omitted)

On an Aristotelian conception the form of a triangle is a matter of abstraction:

...For example, I can be mistaken if I form in my mind the judgment that a man is running, whereby I conceive a man to be somehow, but if I simply think of a man without attributing either running or not running to him, I certainly cannot make a mistake as to how he is.[12] In the same way, I would be mistaken if I were to think that a triangle is neither isosceles nor scalene, but I am certainly not in error if I simply think of a triangle without thinking either that it is isosceles or that it is scalene. Indeed, it is precisely this possibility that allows me to form the universal mental representation, that is, the universal concept of all particular triangles, regardless of whether they are isosceles or scalene. For when I think of a triangle in general, then I certainly do not think of something that is a triangle and is neither isosceles nor scalene, for that is impossible, but I simply think of a triangle, not thinking that it is an isosceles and not thinking that it is a scalene triangle. This is how the mind is able to separate in thought what are inseparable in real existence. Being either isosceles or scalene is inseparable from a triangle in real existence. For it is impossible for something to be a triangle, and yet not to be an isosceles and not to be a scalene triangle either. Still, it is not impossible for something to be thought to be a triangle and not to be thought to be an isosceles and not to be thought to be a scalene triangle either (although of course, it still has to be thought to be either-isosceles-or-scalene). This separation in thought of those things that cannot be separated in reality is the process of abstraction.[13] In general, by means of the process of abstraction, our mind (in particular, the faculty of our mind Aristotle calls active intellect (nous poietikos, in Greek, intellectus agens, in Latin) is able to form universal representations of particular objects by disregarding what distinguishes them, and conceiving of them only in terms of those of their features in respect of which they do not differ from one another. — Boethius’ Aristotelian Solution | Medieval Universals | SEP

Treat this as an invitation to engage with the thread topic on its own terms... — Leontiskos

Amusing, since this is a thread about Quine, yet you have tried your dammdest to make it a thread about Aristotle. And me.

Absolutely. Many of the common terms come from Latin translations of the Greek, but then words in English get used because they come from the Latin and yet their standard usage has changed dramatically. With Aristotle, there is the added problem of the same Greek word often being translated into different English words based on context, or different Greek words being translated into the same English word. "Essence" is just such a case, since ousia is also sometimes rendered as "essence," "actuality" is another, or dunamis as either potency or power. The choices aren't without their reasons (e.g. it may make sense to say Plotinus' One has "power" but not "potentiality") but they are confusing. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Yes, the concepts of substance, being, essence seem to be all closely associated. We could say that the essence of something is the archetypal idea of that thing, but then that could come down to recognition of form or pattern. We can all recognize a tiger when we see one, even though we cannot say what the essence of being a tiger is. Perhaps the essence of something, if we are thinking of essence as a kind of defining quality, is more like the 'feeling' of that thing, rather than anything determinate.

"Privation" is necessary because you are employing a Platonic version. Note that for Plato there is no "undeviated circle" among the realm of singulars, here below. The perfect Form is never found in a singular. — Leontiskos

Yes, that accords with my understanding.

We can all recognize a tiger when we see one, even though we cannot say what the essence of being a tiger is. Perhaps the essence of something, if we are thinking of essence as a kind of defining quality, is more like the 'feeling' of that thing, rather than anything determinate. — Janus

Then what need have we for essence? What do they do?