Abstract
Two related claims have lately garnered currency: dispositional essentialism—the view that some or all properties, or some or all fundamental properties, are essentially dispositional; and the claim that laws of nature (or again, many or the fundamental ones) are metaphysically necessary. I have argued elsewhere (On the metaphysical contingency of laws of nature, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2002) that the laws of nature do not have a mind-independent metaphysical necessity, but recent developments on dispositions have given these ideas a new vibrancy and made them the topic of more focused discussion. So I would like to revisit this, arguing that the new work, as interesting and important as it is to our understanding of fundamental properties, powers and dispositions, should not change our minds about metaphysical necessity. One should still think necessity is conceptually or conventionally grounded. I do not argue that laws of nature are not necessary, nor that properties do not have dispositional essences, but only that if these are the case, then, like other de re or empirical necessities, they have no metaphysical weight and are based in our rules or decisions about how to talk about the world. We may have excellent reasons to talk and think in this way—but these reasons do not include, require or provide evidence of mind-independent metaphysical necessity or essences.
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Notes
Anti-conventionalists frequently suggest that acknowledging that there are good reasons for carving the world as we do—for having terms governed by certain sorts of criteria (e.g. interesting causal joints)—completely undermines the conventionalist position. This is a mistake. The combining of conventionalism with this sort of ‘concession’ is at least as old as Locke (e.g. 1689, Book III, chapter 6 Section 39). There would be a problem only if the reasons required, or implicitly committed one to, mind-independent essences or de re necessities, which they palpably do not. (See the next section if this is not sufficiently obvious.)
My ‘conventionalism’ has always been about mind-dependence, rather than requiring conventions in the more full-blown sense. So when I say something is conventional, or that we make a ‘decision’, I am speaking loosely for ease of exposition. It is perfectly compatible with my view that we are predisposed to carve up the world in certain ways and so do not really ‘choose’ the modal application conditions for (many of) our terms. But I emphasize the absence of any metaphysical mistake were one to, say, apply ‘water’ to XYZ, even in the face of all the actual facts.
Of course, if a Humean account is correct, there cannot be worlds that agree in all their facts, but not their laws. Whether or not this is a strike against such views (see Carroll, 1994), contingency is easy for the Humeans just by altering the facts in the right ways. I am not aware of any Humeans who believe the laws are necessary.
Sometimes we will need a P*, different from P. For instance, for the necessity of original matter, what is necessary is plausibly ‘o (if it exists) originates mostly in m’, while the empirical premise is that o originates (entirely) in m. I ignore this in what follows.
Additionally, the antecedent may include more than just ‘p’. For instance, in our judgments about water and gold, we take for granted that microstructure plays a particular explanatory role in the behavior of these things. But as Chalmers has emphasized (2012), insofar as our judgments here are not entirely a priori, but have further empirical assumptions, we can build them into the antecedent and generate an a priori conditional which is being judged—that is, rather than ‘if p then necessarily p,’ it is ‘if p and q and r… then necessarily p’.
Even if such ‘empirically neutral’ imagining (as opposed to explicitly hypothesizing the actual truth of p) is not the best way to establish this. It is fine, though, when the claim is purportedly a priori, as traditional proposed philosophical accounts have been.
Indeed, as highlighted in his arguments against mind–body identities, Kripke insists upon it (though here, what we can ‘assume’, about actuality, is not that pain = C-fiber firing (that would beg the question), but any facts relevant to that, e.g. their law-like co-extension and seemingly identical causal roles).
Notice that this has the P* structure above, from note 6.
Again, for further argument for this, see my 1989 chapter 3, as well as Chalmers (1996, 2002). The rule for ‘water’ might be: ‘something counts as water (in any scenario) just in case it has the same deep explanatory structure as the substance (enough/most of the samples) to which we apply ‘water’ actually has’.
As Dennis Stampe pointed out to me, the meaning of ‘the Morning Star’ is trickier than the usual ‘the last star (sic) visible in the morning’; sometimes Mars has that honor, but it is not, on those days, ‘the morning star’.
Indeed, Kripke emphasizes the need to account for these, and famously offers his own account, which then plays a crucial role in his argument against materialism. Yablo (2000) calls this ‘textbook Kripkeanism,’ and challenges it, as have others. To my mind, David Chalmers has responded quite adequately to all such challengers. See, for instance, his (2001), and more recently (2014).
Not to get ahead of myself, Bird (2007b) argues that chemists who treat fool’s gold as gold, or XYZ as water, are making a mistake. But in his view, the mistake comes from the fact that chemistry is the science of substances, and our alternative speakers would not be referring to substances with their terms. I won’t quibble about the term ‘substance’ here (which to my mind obviously just pushes the bump in the rug), but I note simply that the referential work is then being done precisely by the intention to refer to, or to govern counterfactual uses of chemical terms by, the ‘substantial’ properties of the instances to which the term is applied. One makes no metaphysical mistake by not doing chemistry, nor has one made a mistake about what is mind-independently essential—any more than one would be making a metaphysical mistake if one insisted on using the deep structure in contexts where functional role is ‘stipulated’ as guiding modal application (as, perhaps, with a term like ‘poisonous’). The ‘discoveries of essence’ are simply the non-modal findings that in fact, these samples have this sort of structure. See note 2.
Of course, it can also be the case that it follows a priori from some other necessary truths, as with theorems. But then we have to account for the necessity of that from which it is derived. This is more the pattern we find in some of Bird’s examples, discussed below.
While I put ‘essentially’ in quotes, to emphasize the contrast with the supposed mind-independent nature of the essentiality of dispositions, I am happy enough in first order metaphysics to use ‘essence’ and indeed, to agree with Fine that not everything necessary is essential. For instance, while it is necessary that what is Socratoon is such that 2 + 2 = 4, it is not essential to it. Fine proposes that what is essential is what is in something’s definition. I am happy to agree—but the definitions, on my view, are conceptual/conventional rather than real.
Throughout this paper, I mean to be neutral about whether laws actually ‘govern’ events in any meaningful sense. While most dispositional essentialist necessitarians think laws do not govern, there is disagreement, and my discussion does not depend on one understanding or another. For not governing, see Mumford (2004), Ellis (2006), Bird (2007c) and Demarest (2017). For a governing option, see Tugby (2016), Dumsday (2013).
For a characteristically creative sense of the range of possible dispositions, see Unger (2005).
One more related argument, which I will not pursue here, is that we cannot understand the ‘weaker’ sort of necessity and counterfactual support supposedly represented in causation and natural law, and so if we think they have modal force, it must be full blown metaphysical necessity. I address this argument in 2002; roughly, the postulation is too strong for the phenomena it is supposed to explain, and is not really compatible with all the modal data, like the real possibilities left open even after the postulation of the metaphysical necessity of the laws.
It would, however, be very surprising if it were possible for p not to be a law, but also impossible for p to be false. After all, if there are worlds where it is not a law (and not just because there are no F’s—see below), it would seem to be up for grabs, in those worlds, whether all F’s turned out to be G or not.
Roberts (forthcoming) makes use of this when wondering whether Bird should be understood as committed to nomological possibility being the broadest sort of possibility (p. 18).
As we will see, it still depends on the claim that certain properties would not exist if certain laws failed to obtain, so presumably, it is essential to them that the laws do obtain, and therefore, that they have the dispositions the correspond to the laws. See Bird (2001, p. 267) (and elsewhere in Bird’s various discussions of these arguments) for his claim that this argument is independent of dispositional essentialism. I take it that by ‘dispositional essentialism’ in these claims, he means something stronger than these necessities on which the argument relies.
The choice of salt dissolving in water is just meant to be illustrative. But our response will apply equally to any argument of this sort.
Though I am much more skeptical about his quite different assertion that the Mona Lisa would not exist with significantly different molecules of oil and pigment. That relies on quite a different sort of intuition.
The view, and my discussion of it, may be usefully compared to what the world of individuals, and our discovery and understanding of it is like, when employing Leibniz’s notion of complete individual concepts.
Well, maybe. There is the threat of a vicious regress if all (basic) properties are dispositional, though Bird (2007c) has argued, borrowing an idea from Dipert (1997), that the regress can be avoided if the world can be represented as an asymmetric graph. See Oderberg (2014) for a reply, and Hildebrand (2014) for a different reason for thinking some fundamental properties must be categorical.
And, as concerns the more general theme of this volume, this will apply as well to any purported neo-Aristotelian essences. After all, whatever else essences are, they are had necessarily, and the epistemology of essence has to be adequate to justifying claims of metaphysical necessity, and dealing with apparent contrary possibilities. So versions of the problems and arguments presented here can easily be applied to any supposedly substantive proposals of such essence.
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Sidelle, A. Dispositional essentialism and the necessity of laws: a deflationary account. Philos Stud (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-023-01967-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-023-01967-x