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Scientific Essentialism

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

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  1. The problem of chemical laws.Hernan Lucas Accorinti - forthcoming - Foundations of Chemistry:1-11.
    In this paper, we will address a recurring problem in the field of the general philosophy of science but one that takes on particular relevance in the context of chemistry: the problem surrounding scientific laws. The main challenge is that the laws of chemistry are not universal; moreover, in practice, they are stated alongside numerous exceptions. Given that there are exceptions, we could argue that what the laws assert is neither universally true nor necessary. But if that's the case, are (...)
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  • Madhyamaka and Ontic Structural Realism.Toby Friend - 2024 - Asian Journal of Philosophy 3 (1):1-22.
    I’ll argue that one particular argument of Nāgārjuna’s against causation in the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā deserves careful consideration from the perspective of contemporary western metaphysics. To show why this is the case, I’ll offer an interpretation of the key passages which differs from at least one popular reading. I’ll then aim to show that a whole swathe of metaphysical views about causation are problematic in light of Nāgārjuna’s argument, so interpreted. I’ll conclude, however, that one contemporary view in metaphysics has the means (...)
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  • Why use generic language in science?Olivier Lemeire - forthcoming - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science.
    Scientists often communicate using generic generalizations, which are unquantified generalizations such as ‘Americans overestimate social class mobility’ or ‘sound waves carry gravitational mass’. In this paper, I explain the role of such generic generalizations in science, based on a novel theory about their characteristic meaning. According to this theory, a scientific generalization of the form ‘Ks are F’ says that F is one property based on which category K qualifies as a scientific kind. Because what it takes to qualify as (...)
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  • An Inverted Qualia Argument for Direct Realism.Justin Donhauser - 2024 - Topoi 43 (1):211-219.
    This essay extends my “invisible disagreement” argument for Color Realism (2017) to formulate an argument for Direct Realism. It uses a variation of an “inverted qualia” thought experiment to show that successes in intersubjectively validating empirical claims about colors is proof that a nuanced version of Direct Realism is correct.
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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 - forthcoming - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy.
    In this paper I argue against Simion’s (Citation2018) 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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  • 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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  • What Does it Mean to be an Ontological Naïve Realist?Ícaro M. I. Machado - 2023 - Philosophia 51 (4):2035-2063.
    Although meritorious, Naïve Realism faces theoretical issues stemming from the lack of clarity in the concepts forming its propositions and the relevant (but not usually acknowledged) diversity of its theses. In this paper, my goal is to provide a groundwork that mitigates these theoretical complications. One such distinction concerns its subject matter, in particular, whether it deals with the nature of perceptual episodes or their phenomenology. My first goal is to acknowledge such distinctions by delimiting the former option, which I (...)
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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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  • On the Philosophy of Unsupervised Learning.David S. Watson - 2023 - Philosophy and Technology 36 (2):1-26.
    Unsupervised learning algorithms are widely used for many important statistical tasks with numerous applications in science and industry. Yet despite their prevalence, they have attracted remarkably little philosophical scrutiny to date. This stands in stark contrast to supervised and reinforcement learning algorithms, which have been widely studied and critically evaluated, often with an emphasis on ethical concerns. In this article, I analyze three canonical unsupervised learning problems: clustering, abstraction, and generative modeling. I argue that these methods raise unique epistemological and (...)
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  • Coordination and Coming to Be.Lisa Leininger - 2021 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 101 (1):213-227.
    ABSTRACT The following are purported to be common-sense features of the world: time’s passage, the unreality of the future, the existence of ‘genuine’ change. All of these common-sense features are accommodated by accepting the phenomenon of absolute becoming, a view of temporal passage in which the unreal future comes into existence in the present. Indeed, most philosophers who lay claim to common-sense views of time accept absolute becoming. I argue that absolute becoming has deeply unintuitive consequences. Specifically, proponents of absolute (...)
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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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  • Natural Kind Semantics for a Classical Essentialist Theory of Kinds.Javier Belastegui - 2024 - Review of Symbolic Logic 17 (2).
    The aim of this paper is to provide a complete Natural Kind Semantics for an Essentialist Theory of Kinds. The theory is formulated in two-sorted first order monadic modal logic with identity. The natural kind semantics is based on Rudolf Willes Theory of Concept Lattices. The semantics is then used to explain several consequences of the theory, including results about the specificity (species–genus) relations between kinds, the definitions of kinds in terms of genera and specific differences and the existence of (...)
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  • (1 other version)New powers for Dispositionalism.Giacomo Giannini - 2021 - 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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  • Natural kinds, chemical practice, and interpretive communities. [REVIEW]Clevis Headley - 2023 - Foundations of Chemistry 25 (1):167-187.
    Many philosophers attribute extraordinary importance to the idea of natural kinds seemingly intimating that the very possibility of certain kinds of activity are ontologically beholden to the existence of kinds. Specifically, regarding chemistry, Brian Ellis intimated that the success of any plausible metaphysical essentialism depends upon its “reliance on examples from chemistry.” Ellis’s view is representative of a tradition in analytic philosophy that has utilized chemical examples as paradigmatic natural kinds. In this regard, Kripke and Putnam emerge as the architects (...)
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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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  • Events and the regress of pure powers: Reply to Taylor.Ashley Coates - 2022 - Analysis 82 (4):647-654.
    Taylor has recently argued that adopting either the standard Kimian or Davidsonian approaches to the metaphysics of events quite directly solves the regress of pure powers. I argue, though, that on closer inspection Taylor’s proposal does not succeed, given either the Kimian or the Davidsonian account of events.
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  • Can Causal Powers Cause Their Effects?Andrea Raimondi - 2022 - Metaphysica 23 (2):455-473.
    Causal Dispositionalism provides an account of causation based on an ontology of causal powers, properties with causal essence. According to the account, causation can be analysed in terms of the interaction of powers and its subsequent production of their effect. Recently, Baltimore, J. A. has raised a challenge against two competing approaches, the compositional view and the mutual manifestation view, to explain what makes powers interactive – the interaction gap. In this paper, we raise the challenge of explaining what makes (...)
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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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  • Process epistemology in the COVID-19 era: rethinking the research process to avoid dangerous forms of reification.John Dupré & Sabina Leonelli - 2022 - European Journal for Philosophy of Science 12 (1):1-22.
    Whether we live in a world of autonomous things, or a world of interconnected processes in constant flux, is an ancient philosophical debate. Modern biology provides decisive reasons for embracing the latter view. How does one understand the practices and outputs of science in such a dynamic, ever-changing world - and particularly in an emergency situation such as the COVID-19 pandemic, where scientific knowledge has been regarded as bedrock for decisive social interventions? We argue that key to answering this question (...)
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  • The laws of modality.Matthew Tugby - 2022 - Philosophical Studies 179 (8):2597-2618.
    Nomic realists have traditionally put laws to work within a theory of natural modality, in order to provide a metaphysical source for causal necessitation, counterfactuals, and dispositions. However, laws are well-suited to perform other work as well. Necessitation is a widespread phenomenon and includes cases of categorial, conceptual, grounding, mathematical and normative necessitation. A permissive theory of universals allows us to extend nomic realism into these other domains. With a particular focus on grounding necessitation, it is argued that the sorts (...)
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  • Laws, melodies, and the paradox of predictability.Dorst Chris - 2022 - Synthese 200 (1):1-21.
    If the laws of nature are deterministic, then it seems possible that a Laplacean intelligence that knows the initial conditions and the laws would be able to accurately predict everything that will ever happen. However, it would be easy to construct a counterpredictive device that falsifies any revealed prediction about its future behavior. What would then occur if a Laplacean intelligence encountered a counterpredictive device? This is the paradox of predictability. A number of philosophers have proposed solutions to it, though (...)
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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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  • Varieties of dispositional essentialism about natural laws.Salim Hirèche - 2021 - European Journal for Philosophy of Science 11 (3):1-28.
    An important task for metaphysicians and philosophers of science is to account for laws of nature – in particular, how they distinguish themselves from ‘mere’ regularities, and the modal force they are endowed with, ‘natural necessity’. Dispositional essentialism about laws is roughly the view that laws distinguish themselves by being grounded in the essences of natural entities. This paper does not primarily concern how essentialism compares to its main rivals – Humeanism and Armstrongeanism. Rather, it distinguishes and comparatively assesses various (...)
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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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  • 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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  • Pure Powers Are Not Powerful Qualities.Joaquim Giannotti - 2021 - European Journal of Analytic Philosophy 17 (1):(A2)5-29.
    There is no consensus on the most adequate conception of the fundamental properties of our world. The pure powers view and the identity theory of powerful qualities claim to be promising alternatives to categoricalism, the view that all fundamental properties essentially contribute to the qualitative make-up of things that have them. The pure powers view holds that fundamental properties essentially empower things that have them with a distinctive causal profile. On the identity theory, fundamental properties are dispositional as well as (...)
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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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  • (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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  • 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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  • The modal status of the laws of nature. Tahko’s hybrid view and the kinematical/dynamical distinction.Salim Hireche, Niels Linnemann, Robert Michels & Lisa Vogt - 2021 - European Journal for Philosophy of Science 11 (1):1-15.
    In a recent paper, Tuomas Tahko has argued for a hybrid view of the laws of nature, according to which some physical laws are metaphysically necessary, while others are metaphysically contingent. In this paper, we show that his criterion for distinguishing between these two kinds of laws — which crucially relies on the essences of natural kinds — is on its own unsatisfactory. We then propose an alternative way of drawing the metaphysically necessary/contingent distinction for laws of physics based on (...)
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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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  • Tropes, Unmanifested Dispositions and Powerful Qualities.Ashley Coates - 2022 - Erkenntnis 87 (5):2143-2160.
    According to a well-known argument, originally due to David Armstrong, powers theory is objectionable, as it leads to a ‘Meinongian’ ontology on which some entities are real but do not actually exist. I argue here that the right conclusion to draw from this argument has thus far not been identified and that doing so has significant implications for powers theory. Specifically, I argue that the key consequence of the argument is that it provides substantial grounds for trope powers theorists, but (...)
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  • (1 other version)VI—Panpsychism and Free Will: A Case Study in Liberal Naturalism.Philip Goff - 2020 - Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 120 (2):123-144.
    There has been a resurgence of interest in panpsychism in contemporary philosophy of mind. According to its supporters, panpsychism offers an attractive solution to the mind–body problem, avoiding the deep difficulties associated with the more conventional options of dualism and materialism. There has been little focus, however, on whether panpsychism can help with philosophical problems pertaining to free will. In this paper I will argue (a) that it is coherent and consistent with observation to postulate a kind of libertarian agent (...)
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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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  • (1 other version)Explaining the modal force of natural laws.Andreas Bartels - 2018 - European Journal for Philosophy of Science 9 (1):1-15.
    In this paper, I will defend the thesis that fundamental natural laws are distinguished from accidental empirical generalizations neither by metaphysical necessity (e.g. Ellis 1999, 2001; Bird in Analysis, 65(2), 147–155, 2005, 2007) nor by contingent necessitation (Armstrong 1983). The only sort of modal force that distinguishes natural laws, I will argue, arises from the peculiar physical property of mutual independence of elementary interactions exemplifying the laws. Mutual independence of elementary interactions means that their existence and their nature do not (...)
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  • Varieties of Power.Jesse M. Mulder - 2021 - Axiomathes 31 (1):45-61.
    Power enthusiasts are engaged in two projects: developing a decent metaphysical account of powers, and applying that account in order to make progress on various other philosophical issues, ranging from narrowly related topics such as causality to further removed ones such as free will, reasoning, or perception. I argue that an intermediate step may be taken, one that explores ‘varieties of power’ while still staying within the realm of, of ‘pure’ powers metaphysics. Taking this intermediate step provides a much more (...)
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  • The gap problem made easy?Tien-Chun Lo - 2020 - Analysis 80 (3):486-492.
    Byerly recently developed a new solution to the gap problem for cosmological arguments. His idea is that the best explanation for why the necessary being is found to have necessary existence is that it is a perfect being. I raise an objection to Byerly’s solution on the ground that there is some rival naturalistic explanation that is as good as Byerly s theistic explanation.
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  • On metaphysically necessary laws from physics.Niels Linnemann - 2020 - European Journal for Philosophy of Science 10 (2):1-13.
    How does metaphysical necessity relate to the modal force often associated with natural laws? Fine argues that natural necessity can neither be obtained from metaphysical necessity via forms of restriction nor of relativization — and therefore pleads for modal pluralism concerning natural and metaphysical necessity. Wolff, 898–906, 2013) aims at providing illustrative examples in support of applying Fine’s view to the laws of nature with specific recourse to the laws of physics: On the one hand, Wolff takes it that equations (...)
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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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  • (1 other version)Can a Single Property Be Both Dispositional and Categorical? The “Partial Consideration Strategy”, Partially Considered.Robert Schroer - 2013 - Metaphysica 14 (1):63-77.
    One controversial position in the debate over dispositional and categorical properties maintains that our concepts of these properties are the result of partially considering unitary properties that are both dispositional and categorical. As one of its defenders (Heil 2005, p. 351) admits, this position is typically met with “incredulous stares”. In this paper, I examine whether such a reaction is warranted. This thesis about properties is an instance of what I call “the Partial Consideration Strategy”—i.e., the strategy of claiming that (...)
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