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Scientific Essentialism

Philosophical Review 111 (4):589-594 (2002)

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  1. Dispositionalism as Hyperintensional Metaphysics.Lorenzo Azzano - forthcoming - Philosophia:1-23.
    According to dispositionalism, objects possess genuine powers. This paper argues that the signature claim of dispositionalism can only be articulated with the help of intensionally opaque linguistic resources. This bears a twofold consequence. Firstly, standard non-humility arguments against modal quidditism support too weak of a conclusion to be of use for the dispositionalist. Secondly, if the dispositionalist wishes their position about the powerful nature of properties to be a metaphysically substantive one, they will have to endorse the claim that at (...)
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  • Less Work for Theories of Natural Kinds.Matthew H. Slater - forthcoming - Philosophical Quarterly.
    What sort of philosophical work are natural kinds suited for? Scientific realists often contend that they provide the ‘aboutness’ of successful of scientific classification and explain their epistemic utility (among other side hustles). Recent history has revealed this to be a tricky job — particularly given the present naturalistic climate of philosophy of science. As a result, we’ve seen an explosion of different sorts of theories. This phenomenon that has suggested to some that philosophical theorizing about natural kinds has reached (...)
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  • Primitive Governance.Noga Gratvol - forthcoming - Noûs.
    Laws of nature are sometimes said to govern their instances. Spelling out what governance is, however, is an important task that has only recently received sustained philosophical attention. In the first part of this paper, I argue against the two prominent reductive views of governance—modal views and grounding views. Ruling out the promising candidates for reduction supports the claim that governance is sui generis. In the second part of this paper, I argue that governance is subject to a contingency requirement. (...)
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  • Powers, persistence, and the problem of temporary intrinsics.Sophie R. Allen - forthcoming - Philosophical Studies:1-30.
    David Lewis uses the problem of temporary intrinsics to motivate a perdurantist account of persistence in which four-dimensional individuals consist of temporal parts. Other philosophers use his argument to conclude that apparently persisting individuals are collections of temporal stages. In this paper, I investigate whether this argument is as effective in an ontology in which properties are causal powers and thus how seriously the problem should be taken. I go back to first principles to examine the ways in which individuals (...)
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  • Panpsychism and the mind-body problem in contemporary analytic philosophy.Emmett L. Holman - 2024 - Intellectual History Review 34 (1):251-269.
    Not so long ago, the idea that analytic philosophers would be taking panpsychism seriously would have been hard to believe. That is because in its early, logical positivist, stage, the analytic movement earned the reputation of being militantly anti-metaphysical. But analytic philosophy has come a long way since the heyday of logical positivism; and, in fact, the dialectic of recent debates on the mind–body problem among analytic philosophers has pushed many of them in the direction of panpsychism. In this paper, (...)
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  • Ameliorating at the joints. A permissive normative framework for conceptual engineering.Iñigo Valero - 2024 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 67 (10):3728-3749.
    In this paper I argue against Simion’s (2018) Epistemic Limiting Procedure for conceptual engineering and put forward a more permissive alternative, according to which epistemic losses do not systematically block amelioration, but merely provide reasons against it. On this less restrictive view, epistemic losses will be permissible, provided that they are compensated by the non-epistemic gains of the amelioration. After fleshing out the details of my proposal, I discuss two case studies in relation to which Simion’s restrictive procedure seems to (...)
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  • (1 other version)Are Acids Natural Kinds?Pieter Thyssen - 2024 - Foundations of Chemistry 26 (2):225-253.
    Are acids natural kinds? Or are they merely relevant kinds? Although acidity has been one of the oldest and most important concepts in chemistry, surprisingly little ink has been spilled on the natural kind question. I approach the question from the perspective of microstructural essentialism. After explaining why both Brønsted acids and Lewis acids are considered functional kinds, I address the challenges of multiple realization and multiple determination. Contra Manafu and Hendry, I argue that the stereotypical properties of acids are (...)
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  • Are all laws of nature created equal? Meta-laws versus more necessary laws.Salim Hirèche, Niels Linnemann & Robert Michels - 2023 - Erkenntnis:1-19.
    Two approaches to elevating certain laws of nature over others have come to prominence recently. On the one hand, according to the meta-laws approach, there are meta-laws, laws which relate to laws as those laws relate to particular facts. On the other hand, according to the modal, or non-absolutist, approach, some laws are necessary in a stricter sense than others. Both approaches play an important role in current research, questioning the ‘orthodoxy’ represented by the leading philosophical theories of natural laws—Humeanism, (...)
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  • A defense of placeholder essentialism.Safia Bano - 2023 - Foundations of Chemistry 25 (3):393-404.
    Kripke-Putnam argument for natural kind essentialism can be said to depend on placeholder essentialist intuitions. But some argue that such philosophical intuitions are merely preschooler cognitive biases which are not supported by scientific knowledge of natural kinds. Chemical substances, for instance, whether elements or compounds do not have such privileged set of underlying properties (‘same substance’ relation) which are present in all members of the kind and which provide necessary and sufficient condition for kind membership. In this paper, I argue (...)
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  • Explanationism versus Modalism in Debunking (and Theory Choice).Harjit Bhogal - 2023 - Mind 132 (528):1005-1027.
    At the core of the recent debate over moral debunking arguments is a disagreement between explanationist and modalist approaches. Explanationists think that the lack of an explanatory connection between our moral beliefs and the moral truths, given a non-naturalist realist conception of morality, is a reason to reject non-naturalism. Modalists disagree. They say that, given non-naturalism, our beliefs have the appropriate modal features with respect to truth -- in particular they are safe and sensitive -- so there is no problem. (...)
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  • William Whewell, Cluster Theorist of Kinds.Zina B. Ward - 2023 - Hopos: The Journal of the International Society for the History of Philosophy of Science 13 (2):362-386.
    A dominant strand of philosophical thought holds that natural kinds are clusters of objects with shared properties. Cluster theories of natural kinds are often taken to be a late twentieth-century development, prompted by dissatisfaction with essentialism in philosophy of biology. I will argue here, however, that a cluster theory of kinds had actually been formulated by William Whewell (1794-1866) more than a century earlier. Cluster theories of kinds can be characterized in terms of three central commitments, all of which are (...)
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  • Dispositional essentialism and the necessity of laws: a deflationary account.Alan Sidelle - forthcoming - Philosophical Studies:1-22.
    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 (...)
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  • Against relationalism about modality.Carlos Romero - 2023 - Philosophical Studies 180 (8):2245-2274.
    On a highly influential way to think of modality, that I call ‘relationalism’, the modality of a state is explained by its being composed of properties, and these properties being related by a higher-order and primitively modal relation. Examples of relationalism are the Dretske-Tooley-Armstrong account of natural necessity, many dispositional essentialist views, and Wang’s incompatibility primitivism. I argue that relationalism faces four difficulties: that the selection between modal relations is arbitrary, that the modal relation cannot belong to any logical order, (...)
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  • Exploring the Metaphysics of Hegel's Racism: The Teleology of the ‘Concept’ and the Taxonomy of Races.Daniel James & Franz Knappik - 2022 - Hegel Bulletin 44 (1):99-126.
    This article interprets Hegel's hierarchical theory of race as an application of his general views about the metaphysics of classification and explanation. We begin by offering a reconstruction of Hegel's hierarchical theory of race based on the critical edition of relevant lecture transcripts: we argue that Hegel's position on race is appropriately classified as racist, that it postulates innate mental deficits of some races, and that it turns racism from an anthropological into a metaphysical doctrine by claiming that the division (...)
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  • New powers for Dispositionalism.Giacomo Giannini - 2020 - Synthese 199 (1):2671-2700.
    Establishing Dispositionalism as a viable theory of modality requires the successful fulfilment of two tasks: (i) showing that all modal truths can be derived from truths about actual powers, and (ii) offering a suitable metaphysics of powers. These two tasks are intertwined: difficulties in one can affect the chances of success in the other. In this paper, I generalise an objection to Dispositionalism by Jessica Leech and argue that the theory in its present form is ill-suited to account for de (...)
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  • How to be a powers theorist about functional laws, conservation laws and symmetries.Samuel Kimpton-Nye - 2022 - Philosophical Studies 180 (1):317-332.
    This paper defends an account of the laws of nature in terms of irreducibly modal properties (aka powers) from the threat posed by functional laws, conservation laws and symmetries. It thus shows how powers theorists can avoid ad hoc explanations and resist an inflated ontology of powers and governing laws. The key is to understand laws not as flowing from the essences of powers, as per Bird (2007), but as features of a description of how powers are possibly distributed, as (...)
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  • Relational Troubles Structuralist Worries for an Epistemology of Powers-Based Modality.Giacomo Giannini & Tom Schoonen - 2022 - Philosophical Quarterly 73 (4):1162-1182.
    Dispositionalism is the theory of modality that grounds all modal truths in powers: all metaphysically possible and necessary truths are to be explained by pointing to some actual power, or absence thereof. One of the main reasons to endorse dispositionalism is that it promises to deliver an especially desirable epistemology of modality. However, so far this issue has not be fully investigated with the care it is due. The aim of this paper is to fill this gap. We will cast (...)
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  • Extended Dispositionalism and Determinism.Jonas Werner - 2022 - Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 9.
    Modal dispositionalists hold that dispositions provide the foundation of metaphysical necessity and possibility. According to the kind of modal dispositionalism that can be found in the present literature, a proposition p is possible just in case some things are disposed to be such that p. In the first part of this paper I show that combining this classic form of dispositionalism with the assumptions that the laws of nature are necessary and deterministic and that all dispositions are forward-looking in time (...)
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  • (1 other version)World enough and form: why cosmology needs hylomorphism.John G. Brungardt - 2021 - Synthese 198 (11):2795-2827.
    This essay proposes a comprehensive blueprint for the hylomorphic foundations of cosmology. The key philosophical explananda in cosmology are those dealing with global processes and structures, the regularity of global regularities, and the existence of the global as such. The possibility of elucidating these using alternatives to hylomorphism is outlined and difficulties with these alternatives are raised. Hylomorphism, by contrast, provides a sound philosophical ground for cosmology insofar as it leads to notions of cosmic essence, the unity of complex essences, (...)
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  • New Foundations of Dispositionalism - introduction.Andrea Raimondi & Lorenzo Azzano - 2022 - Synthese 200 (5):1-26.
    As Price (2009) famously mused, if a philosopher were to be magically transported, perhaps through means of time travel, from the 1950s to the modern day, they would indeed be shocked by the resurgence of metaphysics in the analytic tradition. Most of all, perhaps, they would be shocked by the popularity of power metaphysics. What a strange item to have in a philosopher’s curriculum, they might think: after all, didn’t David Hume claim that “[t]here are no ideas which can occur (...)
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  • On being a lonely brain‐in‐a‐vat: Structuralism, solipsism, and the threat from external world skepticism.Grace Helton - 2024 - Analytic Philosophy 65 (3):353-373.
    David Chalmers has recently developed a novel strategy of refuting external world skepticism, one he dubs the structuralist solution. In this paper, I make three primary claims: First, structuralism does not vindicate knowledge of other minds, even if it is combined with a functionalist approach to the metaphysics of minds. Second, because structuralism does not vindicate knowledge of other minds, the structuralist solution vindicates far less worldly knowledge than we would hope for from a solution to skepticism. Third, these results (...)
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  • Nominalist dispositional essentialism.Lisa Vogt - 2022 - Synthese 200 (2).
    Dispositional Essentialism, as commonly conceived, consists in the claims that at least some of the fundamental properties essentially confer certain causal-nomological roles on their bearers, and that these properties give rise to the natural modalities. As such, the view is generally taken to be committed to a realist conception of properties as either universals or tropes, and to be thus incompatible with nominalism as understood in the strict sense. Pace this common assumption of the ontological import of Dispositional Essentialism, the (...)
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  • On Unexplained (Modal) Patterns.Harjit Bhogal - 2022 - Erkenntnis:1-18.
    Some patterns call out for explanation, in the sense that we have a pro tanto reason to reject theories that do not give them an appropriate explanation. I argue that certain modal patterns call out for explanation in this way—and this provides a reason to reject certain theories of modality that fail to explain such patterns. However, I also consider a response to this argument, which claims that the modal patterns do not need explanation. This response might be viable but (...)
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  • The dynamical essence of powers.Andrea Roselli & Christopher Austin - 2021 - Synthese 199 (5):14951-14973.
    Powers are properties defined by what they do. The focus of the large majority of the powers literature has been mainly put on explicating the (multifaceted) results of the production of a power in certain (multifaceted) initial conditions: but all this causal complexity is bound to be—and, in fact, it has proved to be—quite difficult to handle. In this paper we take a different approach by focusing on the very activity of producing those multifaceted manifestations themselves. In this paper, we (...)
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  • Two approaches to natural kinds.Judith K. Crane - 2021 - Synthese 199 (5-6):12177-12198.
    Philosophical treatments of natural kinds are embedded in two distinct projects. I call these the philosophy of science approach and the philosophy of language approach. Each is characterized by its own set of philosophical questions, concerns, and assumptions. The kinds studied in the philosophy of science approach are projectible categories that can ground inductive inferences and scientific explanation. The kinds studied in the philosophy of language approach are the referential objects of a special linguistic category—natural kind terms—thought to refer directly. (...)
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  • Humean nomic essentialism.Harjit Bhogal & Zee R. Perry - 2021 - Noûs 57 (1):81-99.
    Humeanism – the idea that there are no necessary connections between distinct existences – and Nomic Essentialism – the idea that properties essentially play the nomic roles that they do – are two of the most important and influential positions in the metaphysics of science. Traditionally, it has been thought that these positions were incompatible competitors. We disagree. We argue that there is an attractive version of Humeanism that captures the idea that, for example, mass essentially plays the role that (...)
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  • The strong arm of the law: a unified account of necessary and contingent laws of nature.Salim Hirèche, Niels Linnemann, Robert Michels & Lisa Vogt - 2021 - Synthese 199 (3-4):10211-10252.
    A common feature of all standard theories of the laws of nature is that they are "absolutist": They take laws to be either all metaphysically necessary or all contingent. Science, however, gives us reason to think that there are laws of both kinds, suggesting that standard theories should make way for "non-absolutist" alternatives: theories which accommodate laws of both modal statuses. In this paper, we set out three explanatory challenges for any candidate non-absolutist theory and discuss the prospects of the (...)
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  • The Distinct Existences Argument Revisited.Wolfgang Barz - 2021 - Synthese (3-4):1-21.
    The aim of this paper is to take a fresh look at a discussion about the distinct existences argument that took place between David Armstrong and Frank Jackson more than fifty years ago. I will try to show that Armstrong’s argument can be successfully defended against Jackson’s objections (albeit at the price of certain concessions concerning Armstrong’s view on the meaning of psychological terms as well as his conception of universals). Focusing on two counterexamples that Jackson put forward against Hume’s (...)
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  • Powers: The No-Successor Problem.John Pemberton - 2021 - Journal of the American Philosophical Association 7 (2):213-230.
    This essay considers the implications for the powers metaphysic of the no-successor problem: As there are no successors in the set of real numbers, one state cannot occur just after another in continuous time without there being a gap between the two. I show how the no-successor problem sets challenges for various accounts of the manifestation of powers. For powers that give rise to a manifestation that is a new state, the challenge of no-successors is similar to that faced on (...)
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  • The nomological argument for the existence of God.Tyler Hildebrand & Thomas Metcalf - 2021 - Noûs 56 (2):443-472.
    According to the Nomological Argument, observed regularities in nature are best explained by an appeal to a supernatural being. A successful explanation must avoid two perils. Some explanations provide too little structure, predicting a universe without regularities. Others provide too much structure, thereby precluding an explanation of certain types of lawlike regularities featured in modern scientific theories. We argue that an explanation based in the creative, intentional action of a supernatural being avoids these two perils whereas leading competitors do not. (...)
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  • The Priority of Natural Laws in Kant’s Early Philosophy.Aaron Wells - 2021 - Res Philosophica 98 (3):469-497.
    It is widely held that, in his pre-Critical works, Kant endorsed a necessitation account of laws of nature, where laws are grounded in essences or causal powers. Against this, I argue that the early Kant endorsed the priority of laws in explaining and unifying the natural world, as well as their irreducible role in in grounding natural necessity. Laws are a key constituent of Kant’s explanatory naturalism, rather than undermining it. By laying out neglected distinctions Kant draws among types of (...)
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  • (1 other version)Powers, Processes, and Time.Giacomo Giannini - 2021 - Erkenntnis (6):1-25.
    In this paper I argue that even the most radical metaphysics of powers (such as that adopted by Mumford & Anjum, Cartwright, or Groff) are compatible with eternalism. I first offer a taxonomy of powers ontologies, and attempt to characterise the difference between moderate and radical powers ontologies – the latter are characterised by an emphasis on production and dynamicity. I consider an argument by C. Friebe to the effect that the productive character of powers is inconsistent with Eternalism and (...)
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  • Essence, Potentiality, and Modality.Barbara Vetter - 2021 - Mind 130 (519):833-861.
    According to essentialism, metaphysical modality is founded in the essences of things, where the essence of a thing is roughly akin to its real definition. According to potentialism (also known as dispositionalism), metaphysical modality is founded in the potentialities of things, where a potentiality is roughly the generalized notion of a disposition. Essentialism and potentialism have much in common, but little has been written about their relation to each other. The aim of this paper is to understand better the relations (...)
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  • What Can Armstrongian Universals Do for Induction?William Peden - 2020 - Philosophia 49 (3):1145-1161.
    David Armstrong argues that necessitation relations among universals are the best explanation of some of our observations. If we consequently accept them into our ontologies, then we can justify induction, because these necessitation relations also have implications for the unobserved. By embracing Armstrongian universals, we can vindicate some of our strongest epistemological intuitions and answer the Problem of Induction. However, Armstrong’s reasoning has recently been challenged on a variety of grounds. Critics argue against both Armstrong’s usage of inference to the (...)
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  • What does the world look like according to superdeterminism.Augustin Baas & Baptiste Le Bihan - 2023 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 74 (3):555-572.
    The violation of Bell inequalities seems to establish an important fact about the world: that it is non-local. However, this result relies on the assumption of the statistical independence of the measurement settings with respect to potential past events that might have determined them. Superdeterminism refers to the view that a local, and determinist, account of Bell inequalities violations is possible, by rejecting this assumption of statistical independence. We examine and clarify various problems with superdeterminism, looking in particular at its (...)
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  • No laws and (thin) powers in, no (governing) laws out.Stavros Ioannidis, Vassilis Livanios & Stathis Psillos - 2021 - European Journal for Philosophy of Science 11 (1):1-26.
    Non-Humean accounts of the metaphysics of nature posit either laws or powers in order to account for natural necessity and world-order. We argue that such monistic views face fundamental problems. On the one hand, neo-Aristotelians cannot give unproblematic power-based accounts of the functional laws among quantities offered by physical theories, as well as of the place of conservation laws and symmetries in a lawless ontology; in order to capture these characteristics, commitment to governing laws is indispensable. On the other hand, (...)
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  • Non‐Humean theories of natural necessity.Tyler Hildebrand - 2020 - Philosophy Compass 15 (5):e12662.
    Non‐Humean theories of natural necessity invoke modally‐laden primitives to explain why nature exhibits lawlike regularities. However, they vary in the primitives they posit and in their subsequent accounts of laws of nature and related phenomena (including natural properties, natural kinds, causation, counterfactuals, and the like). This article provides a taxonomy of non‐Humean theories, discusses influential arguments for and against them, and describes some ways in which differences in goals and methods can motivate different versions of non‐Humeanism (and, for that matter, (...)
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  • The reality of autism: On the metaphysics of disorder and diversity.Robert Chapman - 2020 - Philosophical Psychology 33 (6):799-819.
    Typically, although it’s notoriously hard to define, autism has been represented as a biologically-based mental disorder that can be usefully investigated by biomedical science. In recent years, ho...
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  • Complexity begets crosscutting, dooms hierarchy.Joyce C. Havstad - 2021 - Synthese 198 (8):7665-7696.
    There is a perennial philosophical dream of a certain natural order for the natural kinds. The name of this dream is ‘the hierarchy requirement’. According to this postulate, proper natural kinds form a taxonomy which is both unique and traditional. Here I demonstrate that complex scientific objects exist: objects which generate different systems of scientific classification, produce myriad legitimate alternatives amongst the nonetheless still natural kinds, and make the hierarchical dream impossible to realize, except at absurdly great cost. Philosophical hopes (...)
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  • Necessitarianism and Dispositions.Simone Gozzano - 2020 - Metaphysica (1):1-23.
    In this paper, I argue in favor of necessitarianism, the view that dispositions, when stimulated, necessitate their manifestations. After introducing and clarifying what necessitarianism does and does not amount to, I provide reasons to support the view that dispositions once stimulated necessitate their manifestations according to the stimulating conditions and the relevant properties at stake. In this framework, I will propose a principle of causal relevance and some conditions for the possibility of interference that allow us to avoid the use (...)
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  • Platonic Laws of Nature.Tyler Hildebrand - 2020 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 50 (3):365-381.
    David Armstrong accepted the following three theses: universals are immanent, laws are relations between universals, and laws govern. Taken together, they form an attractive position, for they promise to explain regularities in nature—one of the most important desiderata for a theory of laws and properties—while remaining compatible with naturalism. However, I argue that the three theses are incompatible. The basic idea is that each thesis makes an explanatory claim, but the three claims can be shown to run in a problematic (...)
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  • Etiological Kinds.Muhammad Ali Khalidi - 2021 - Philosophy of Science 88 (1):1-21.
    Kinds that share historical properties are dubbed “historical kinds” or “etiological kinds,” and they have some distinctive features. I will try to characterize etiological kinds in general terms and briefly survey some previous philosophical discussions of these kinds. Then I will take a closer look at a few case studies involving different types of etiological kinds. Finally, I will try to understand the rationale for classifying on the basis of etiology, putting forward reasons for classifying phenomena on the basis of (...)
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  • A causal Bayes net analysis of dispositions.Alexander Gebharter & Florian Fischer - 2021 - Synthese 198 (5):4873-4895.
    In this paper we develop an analysis of dispositions by means of causal Bayes nets. In particular, we analyze dispositions as cause-effect structures that increase the probability of the manifestation when the stimulus is brought about by intervention in certain circumstances. We then highlight several advantages of our analysis and how it can handle problems arising for classical analyses of dispositions such as masks, mimickers, and finks.
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  • (1 other version)A New Task for Philosophy of Science.Nicholas Maxwell - 2019 - Metaphilosophy 50 (3):316-338.
    This paper argues that philosophers of science have before them an important new task that they urgently need to take up. It is to convince the scientific community to adopt and implement a new philosophy of science that does better justice to the deeply problematic basic intellectual aims of science than that which we have at present. Problematic aims evolve with evolving knowledge, that part of philosophy of science concerned with aims and methods thus becoming an integral part of science (...)
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  • Kinds of Tropes without Kinds.Markku Keinänen, Jani Hakkarainen & Antti Keskinen - 2018 - Dialectica 72 (4):571-596.
    In this article, we propose a new trope nominalist conception of determinate and determinable kinds of quantitative tropes. The conception is developed as follows. First, we formulate a new account of tropes falling under the same determinates and determinables in terms of internal relations of proportion and order. Our account is a considerable improvement on the current standard account (Campbell 1990; Maurin 2002; Simons 2003) because it does not rely on primitive internal relations of exact similarity or quantitative distance. The (...)
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  • The Identity Theory of Powers Revised.Joaquim Giannotti - 2021 - Erkenntnis 86 (3):603-621.
    Dispositionality and qualitativity are key notions to describe the world that we inhabit. Dispositionality is a matter of what a thing is disposed to do in certain circumstances. Qualitativity is a matter of how a thing is like. According to the Identity Theory of powers, every fundamental property is at once dispositional and qualitative, or a powerful quality. Canonically, the Identity Theory holds a contentious identity claim between a property’s dispositionality and its qualitativity. In the literature, this view faces a (...)
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  • (1 other version)A New Task for the Philosophy of Science.Nicholas Maxwell - 2019 - Metaphilosophy (3):316-338.
    We philosophers of science have before us an important new task that we need urgently to take up. It is to convince the scientific community to adopt and implement a new philosophy of science that does better justice to the deeply problematic basic intellectual aims of science than that which we have at present. Problematic aims evolve with evolving knowledge, that part of philosophy of science concerned with aims and methods thus becoming an integral part of science itself. The outcome (...)
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  • Essence and the inference problem.Ashley Coates - 2021 - Synthese 198 (2):915-931.
    Discussions about the nature of essence and about the inference problem for non-Humean theories of nomic modality have largely proceeded independently of each other. In this article I argue that the right conclusions to draw about the inference problem actually depend significantly on how best to understand the nature of essence. In particular, I argue that this conclusion holds for the version of the inference problem developed and defended by Alexander Bird. I argue that Bird’s own argument that this problem (...)
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  • Fine-Tuned of Necessity?Ben Page - 2018 - Res Philosophica 95 (4):663-692.
    This paper seeks to explicate and analyze an alternative response to fine-tuning arguments from those that are typically given—namely, design or brute contingency. The response I explore is based on necessity, the necessitarian response. After showing how necessity blocks the argument, I explicate the reply I claim necessitarians can give and suggest how its three requirements can be met: firstly, that laws are metaphysically necessary; secondly, that constants are metaphysically necessary; and thirdly, that the fundamental properties that determine the laws (...)
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  • Hegel and Arguments for Natural Kind Essentialism.Franz Knappik - 2021 - Hegel Bulletin 42 (3):368-394.
    Natural Kind Essentialism is the view that the objects of sciences like physics, chemistry and biology fall into natural kinds, and that such kinds have essences—sets of properties possession of which is necessary and sufficient for kind-membership. Since Putnam and Kripke brought NKE back onto the philosophical agenda, it has found many advocates. But comparatively little attention has been paid to the question of how this view can be positively motivated. After illustrating the current need for an argument for NKE (...)
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