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Soames’s Deflationism About Modality

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Abstract

One type of deflationism about metaphysical modality suggests that it can be analysed strictly in terms of linguistic or conceptual content and that there is nothing particularly metaphysical about modality. Scott Soames is explicitly opposed to this trend. However, a detailed study of Soames’s own account of modality reveals that it has striking similarities with the deflationary account. In this paper I will compare Soames’s account of a posteriori necessities concerning natural kinds with the deflationary one, specifically Alan Sidelle’s account, and suggest that Soames’s account is vulnerable to the deflationist’s critique. Furthermore, I conjecture that both the deflationary account and Soames’s account fail to fully explicate the metaphysical content of a posteriori necessities. Although I will focus on Soames, my argument may have more general implications towards the prospects of providing a meaning-based account of metaphysical modality.

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Notes

  1. See Tahko (2009) for an account of this metaphysical content.

  2. Lowe (2007b) continues the debate by building a case against Soames’s and the Kripkean analysis of a posteriori necessities based on a critique of the typical inference pattern concerning the logic of essence assumed by Soames. This is inspired by Kit Fine’s (e.g. 1994) work on the logic of essence. The Finean view is that essence is ontologically prior to modality and hence the essence of an object cannot be reduced to its de re modal properties. Accordingly, there are good reasons to think that Soames and Lowe are not in the same boat, since they seem to disagree about the relevant logic of essence. Lowe goes on to suggest that general essences of particular substances like water may in fact be knowable a priori. My critique of Soames’s account does not depend on these specifics, although I am sympathetic to the Finean analysis of essence and modality. I have discussed these issues in more detail in Tahko (2009).

  3. For further discussion on the essentiality of origin, see Ballarin (2011).

  4. I would like to thank an anonymous referee for bringing this issue regarding the scope of the paper to my attention. I discuss these matters in much more detail in Tahko (2012).

  5. See also Soames (2011).

  6. It should be noted here that Putnam (1990) later specified his views about how the Twin Earth scenarios should be understood. In fact, Putnam’s later views take him towards the sort of deflationary line that Soames is explicitly opposed to, but Putnam does attribute a type of metaphysical view to Kripke. I take it that Soames is sympathetic to the Kripkean picture rather than Putnam’s later view, and hence I will assume the Kripkean reading in my discussion of the Twin Earth scenarios, whether or not this is faithful to how Putnam intended them to be interpreted.

  7. I present a detailed analysis of related principles in Tahko (2012). Here I’m bracketing several important issues in the philosophy of chemistry (such as the case of isomers) to simplify matters, but I discuss these in more detail in the mentioned paper.

  8. I elaborate on this in Tahko (2012).

  9. This is the same as (1) in the first section.

  10. See also Sidelle (1989) for a much more detailed account, I cannot do full justice to his account here, but I hope to present a sufficient outline of it to be able to compare it with Soames’s account.

  11. See Barnes (2000: 283). I would like to thank an anonymous referee for pointing me towards this work, and for inviting me to explore the differences between the views of Soames and Sidelle in more detail.

  12. See also Soames (2010) for some relevant discussion.

  13. I have engaged in such an analysis in Tahko (2009, 2012). For further discussion on full-blooded natural kind essentialism, see Oderberg (2011) and Dumsday (2012).

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Acknowledgments

I am grateful to the anonymous referees for the journal for their helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper.

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Correspondence to Tuomas E. Tahko.

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Tahko, T.E. Soames’s Deflationism About Modality. Erkenn 78, 1367–1379 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-012-9428-x

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