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Essence and the inference problem

Synthese 198 (2):915-931 (2021)

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  1. A World of States of Affairs.D. M. Armstrong - 1996 - New York: Cambridge University Press.
    In this important study D. M. Armstrong offers a comprehensive system of analytical metaphysics that synthesises but also develops his thinking over the last twenty years. Armstrong's analysis, which acknowledges the 'logical atomism' of Russell and Wittgenstein, makes facts the fundamental constituents of the world, examining properties, relations, numbers, classes, possibility and necessity, dispositions, causes and laws. All these, it is argued, find their place and can be understood inside a scheme of states of affairs. This is a comprehensive and (...)
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  • Nature's Metaphysics: Laws and Properties.Alexander Bird - 2007 - New York: Oxford University Press.
    Professional philosophers and advanced students working in metaphysics and the philosophy of science will find this book both provocative and stimulating.
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  • Essence and modality.Kit Fine - 1994 - Philosophical Perspectives 8 (Logic and Language):1-16.
    It is my aim in this paper to show that the contemporary assimilation of essence to modality is fundamentally misguided and that, as a consequence, the corresponding conception of metaphysics should be given up. It is not my view that the modal account fails to capture anything which might reasonably be called a concept of essence. My point, rather, is that the notion of essence which is of central importance to the metaphysics of identity is not to be understood in (...)
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  • Scientific Essentialism.Brian Ellis - 2001 - New York: Cambridge University Press.
    Scientific Essentialism defends the view that the fundamental laws of nature depend on the essential properties of the things on which they are said to operate, and are therefore not independent of them. These laws are not imposed upon the world by God, the forces of nature or anything else, but rather are immanent in the world. Ellis argues that ours is a dynamic world consisting of more or less transient objects which are constantly interacting with each other, and whose (...)
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  • Getting Causes From Powers.Stephen Mumford & Rani Lill Anjum - 2011 - Oxford, GB: Oxford University Press. Edited by Rani Lill Anjum.
    Causation is everywhere in the world: it features in every science and technology. But how much do we understand it? Mumford and Anjum develop a new theory of causation based on an ontology of real powers or dispositions. They provide the first detailed outline of a thoroughly dispositional approach, and explore its surprising features.
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  • (1 other version)A World of States of Affairs.D. M. Armstrong - 1993 - Philosophical Perspectives 7:429-440.
    In this important study D. M. Armstrong offers a comprehensive system of analytical metaphysics that synthesises but also develops his thinking over the last twenty years. Armstrong's analysis, which acknowledges the 'logical atomism' of Russell and Wittgenstein, makes facts the fundamental constituents of the world, examining properties, relations, numbers, classes, possibility and necessity, dispositions, causes and laws. All these, it is argued, find their place and can be understood inside a scheme of states of affairs. This is a comprehensive and (...)
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  • A Combinatorial Theory of Possibility.David Malet Armstrong - 1989 - Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press.
    David Armstrong's book is a contribution to the philosophical discussion about possible worlds. Taking Wittgenstein's Tractatus as his point of departure, Professor Armstrong argues that nonactual possibilities and possible worlds are recombinations of actually existing elements, and as such are useful fictions. There is an extended criticism of the alternative-possible-worlds approach championed by the American philosopher David Lewis. This major work will be read with interest by a wide range of philosophers.
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  • Real Essentialism.David S. Oderberg - 2007 - New York: Routledge.
    _Real Essentialism_ presents a comprehensive defence of neo-Aristotelian essentialism. Do objects have essences? Must they be the kinds of things they are in spite of the changes they undergo? Can we know what things are really like – can we define and classify reality? Many, if not most, philosophers doubt this, influenced by centuries of empiricism, and by the anti-essentialism of Wittgenstein, Quine, Popper, and other thinkers. _Real Essentialism_ reinvigorates the tradition of realist, essentialist metaphysics, defending the reality and knowability (...)
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  • XIV*—Ontological Dependence.Kit Fine - 1995 - Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 95 (1):269-290.
    Kit Fine; XIV*—Ontological Dependence, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 95, Issue 1, 1 June 1995, Pages 269–290, https://doi.org/10.1093/aristote.
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  • The Philosophy of Nature: A Guide to the New Essentialism.Brian David Ellis - 2002 - Chesham: Routledge.
    In "The Philosophy of Nature," Brian Ellis provides a clear and forthright general summation of, and introduction to, the new essentialist position. Although the theory that the laws of nature are immanent in things, rather than imposed on them from without, is an ancient one, much recent work has been done to revive interest in essentialism and "The Philosophy of Nature" is a distinctive contribution to this lively current debate. Brian Ellis exposes the philosophical and scientific credentials of the prevailing (...)
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  • (2 other versions)Ramseyan humility.David K. Lewis - 2008 - In David Braddon-Mitchell & Robert Nola (eds.), Conceptual Analysis and Philosophical Naturalism. Bradford. pp. 203-222.
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  • (1 other version)A World of States of Affairs.John Heil & D. M. Armstrong - 1999 - Philosophical Review 108 (1):115.
    Despite heroic efforts, philosophers have found it increasingly difficult to evade discussion of metaphysical topics. Take the philosophy of mind. Take, in particular, the mind-body problem in its latest guise: the problem of causal relevance. If mental properties are not reducible to physical properties, how can we reconcile the role such properties seem to have in producing bodily motions that constitute actions with the apparent fact that the very same motions are entirely explicable on the basis of purely physical properties (...)
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  • Two Conceptions of Sparse Properties.Jonathan Schaffer - 2004 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 85 (1):92–102.
    Are the sparse properties drawn from all the levels of nature, or only the fundamental level? I discuss the notion of sparse property found in Armstrong and Lewis, show that there are tensions in the roles they have assigned the sparse properties, and argue that the sparse properties should be drawn from all the levels of nature.
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  • Scientific Essentialism.Lenny Clapp - 2002 - Philosophical Review 111 (4):589-594.
    Scientific Essentialism defends the view that the fundamental laws of nature depend on the essential properties of the things on which they are said to operate, and are therefore not independent of them. These laws are not imposed upon the world by God, the forces of nature, or anything else, but rather are immanent in the world. Ellis argues that ours is a dynamic world consisting of more or less transient objects that are constantly interacting with each other, and whose (...)
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  • The logic of essence.Kit Fine - 1995 - Journal of Philosophical Logic 24 (3):241 - 273.
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  • Overpowering: How the Powers Ontology Has Overreached Itself.Alexander Bird - 2016 - Mind 125 (498):341-383.
    Many authors have argued in favour of an ontology of properties as powers, and it has been widely argued that this ontology allows us to address certain philosophical problems in novel and illuminating ways, for example, causation, representation, intentionality, free will and liberty. I argue that the ontology of powers, even if successful as an account of fundamental natural properties, does not provide the insight claimed as regards the aforementioned non-fundamental phenomena. I illustrate this argument by criticizing the powers theory (...)
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  • Two notions of being: Entity and essence.E. J. Lowe - 2008 - Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 62:23-48.
    s div class="title" a terTwo Notions of Being: Entity and Essence s /div a ter - Volume 62 - E. J. Lowe.
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  • Powerful Qualities, Not Pure Powers.Jonathan D. Jacobs - 2011 - The Monist 94 (1):81-102.
    I explore two accounts of properties within a dispositional essentialist (or causal powers) framework, the pure powers view and the powerful qualities view. I first attempt to clarify precisely what the pure powers view is, and then raise objections to it. I then present the powerful qualities view and, in order to avoid a common misconception, offer a restatement of it that I shall call the truthmaker view. I end by briefly defending the truthmaker view against objections.
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  • Against quidditism.Robert Black - 2000 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 78 (1):87 – 104.
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  • It is the Business of Laws to Govern.Jonathan Schaffer - 2016 - Dialectica 70 (4):577-588.
    Non-Humean accounts of lawhood are said to founder on the Inference Problem, which is the problem of saying how laws that go beyond the regularities can entail the regularities. I argue that the Inference Problem has a simple solution – the Axiomatic Solution – on which the non-Humean only needs to outfit her laws with a law-to-regularity axiom. There is a remaining Epistemic Bulge, as to why one should believe that the posit-so-axiomatized is to be found in nature, but the (...)
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  • Modality, Sparsity, and Essence.Nathan Wildman - 2013 - Philosophical Quarterly 63 (253):760-782.
    Rather infamously, Kit Fine provided a series of counter‐examples which purport to show that attempts to understand essence in terms of metaphysical necessity are ‘fundamentally misguided’. Here, my aim is to put forward a new version of modalism that is, I argue, immune to Fine's counter‐examples. The core of this new modalist account is a sparseness restriction, such that an object's essential properties are those sparse properties it has in every world in which it exists. After first motivating this sparseness (...)
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  • The essential and the accidental.Michael Gorman - 2005 - Ratio 18 (3):276–289.
    The distinction between the essential and the accidental characteristics of a thing should be understood not in modal terms (the received view) nor in definitional terms (Fine’s recent proposal) but as follows: an essential characteristic of a thing is one that is not explained by any other of that thing’s characteristics, and an accidental characteristic of a thing is one that is so explained. Various versions of this proposal can be formulated.
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  • The Ungrounded Argument.Stephen Mumford - 2006 - Synthese 149 (3):471-489.
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  • The Essence of Dispositional Essentialism.David Yates - 2013 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 87 (1):93-128.
    Dispositional essentialists argue that physical properties have their causal roles essentially. This is typically taken to mean that physical properties are identical to dispositions. I argue that this is untenable, and that we must instead say that properties bestow dispositions. I explore what it is for a property to have such a role essentially. Dispositional essentialists argue for their view by citing certain epistemological and metaphysical implications, and I appeal to these implications to place desiderata on the concept of essence (...)
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  • Essence and Intrinsicality.David Denby - 2014 - In Robert M. Francescotti (ed.), Companion to Intrinsic Properties. Boston: De Gruyter. pp. 87-109.
    In the first half of this paper, I argue that essential properties are intrinsic and that this permits a modal analysis of essence that is immune the sort of objections raised by Fine. In the second half, I argue that intrinsic properties collectively have a certain structure and that this accounts for some observations about essences: that things are essentially determinate; that things often have properties within a certain range essentially; and that the essential properties of things are their core (...)
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  • Essence in abundance.Alexander Skiles - 2015 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 45 (1):100-112.
    Fine is widely thought to have refuted the simple modal account of essence, which takes the essential properties of a thing to be those it cannot exist without exemplifying. Yet, a number of philosophers have suggested resuscitating the simple modal account by appealing to distinctions akin to the distinction Lewis draws between sparse and abundant properties, treating only those in the former class as candidates for essentiality. I argue that ‘sparse modalism’ succumbs to counterexamples similar to those originally posed by (...)
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  • The Ultimate Argument Against Dispositional Monist Accounts of Laws.Stephen Barker & Benjamin Smart - 2012 - Analysis 72 (4):714-722.
    Bird argues that Armstrong’s necessitarian conception of physical modality and laws of nature generates a vicious regress with respect to necessitation. We show that precisely the same regress afflicts Bird’s dispositional-monist theory, and indeed, related views, such as that of Mumford & Anjum. We argue that dispositional monism is basically Armstrongian necessitarianism modified to allow for a thesis about property identity.
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  • Essence and modality.Edward N. Zalta - 2006 - Mind 115 (459):659-693.
    Some recently-proposed counterexamples to the traditional definition of essential property do not require a separate logic of essence. Instead, the examples can be analysed in terms of the logic and theory of abstract objects. This theory distinguishes between abstract and ordinary objects, and provides a general analysis of the essential properties of both kinds of object. The claim ‘x has F necessarily’ becomes ambiguous in the case of abstract objects, and in the case of ordinary objects there are various ways (...)
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  • Dispositional essentialism and the grounding of natural modality.Siegfried Jaag - 2014 - Philosophers' Imprint 14.
    Dispositional essentialism is a non-Humean view about the essences of certain fundamental or natural properties that looms large in recent metaphysics , not least because it promises to explain neatly the natural modalities such as laws of nature, counterfactuals, causation and chance. In the current paper, however, several considerations are presented that indicate a serious tension between its essentialist core thesis and natural “metaphysical” interpretations of its central explanatory claims.
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  • Quid Quidditism Est?Deborah C. Smith - 2016 - Erkenntnis 81 (2):237-257.
    Over the last decade or so, there has been a renewed interest in a view about properties known as quidditism. However, a review of the literature reveals that ‘quidditism’ is used to cover a range of distinct views. In this paper I explore the logical space of distinct types of quidditism. The first distinction noted is between quidditism as a thesis explicitly about property individuation and quidditism as a principle of unrestricted property recombination. The distinction recently drawn by Dustin Locke (...)
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  • Semantics for the logic of essence.Kit Fine - 2000 - Journal of Philosophical Logic 29 (6):543-584.
    This paper provides a possible worlds semantics for the system of the author's previous paper 'The Logic of Essence '. The basic idea behind the semantics is that a statement should be taken to be true in virtue of the nature of certain objects just in case it is true in any possible world compatible with the nature of those objects. It is shown that a slight variant of the original system is sound and complete under the proposed semantics.
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  • Rescuing dispositionalism from the ultimate problem: reply to Barker and Smart.Matthew Tugby - 2012 - Analysis 72 (4):723-731.
    Barker and Smart have argued that dispositional monism is just as susceptible to the ultimate regress problem as Armstrong’s contingent necessitation view of laws. In this response, I consider what implications this conclusion has for the dispositional essentialist project more generally. I argue that it is the monistic aspect of dispositional monism, rather than the dispositional essentialist aspect, which is the source of the problem raised by Barker and Smart. I then outline a version of dispositional essentialism which avoids the (...)
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  • How to be a modalist about essence.Nathan Wildman - 2016 - In Mark Jago (ed.), Reality Making. Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford University Press UK.
    Rather infamously, Kit Fine provided a series of counter-examples which purport to show that the modalist program of analysing essence in terms of metaphysical necessity is fundamentally misguided. Several would-be modalists have since responded, attempting to save the position from this Finean Challenge. This paper evaluates and rejects a trio of such responses, from Della Rocca, Zalta, and Gorman. But I’m not here arguing for Fine’s conclusion – ultimately, this is a fight amongst friends, with Della Rocca, Zalta, Gorman, and (...)
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  • Speaking of Essence.Alessandro Torza - 2015 - Philosophical Quarterly:754-771.
    Classical modalism about essence is the view that essence can be analysed in modal terms. Despite Kit Fine's influential critique, no general refutation of classical modalism has yet been given. In the first part of the paper, I provide such a refutation by showing that the notion of essence cannot be analysed in terms of any sentential operator definable in the language of standard quantified modal logic. As a reaction to Fine's critique, some have defended sophisticated modalism, which attempts to (...)
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  • The ultimate argument against Armstrong's contingent necessitation view of laws.Alexander Bird - 2005 - Analysis 65 (2):147-155.
    I show that Armstrong’s view of laws as second-order contingent relations of ‘necessitation’ among categorical properties faces a dilemma. The necessitation relation confers a relation of extensional inclusion (‘constant conjunction’) on its relata. It does so either necessarily or contingently. If necessarily, it is not a categorical relation (in the relevant sense). If contingently, then an explanation is required of how it confers extensional inclusion. That explanation will need to appeal to a third-order relation between necessitation and extensional inclusion. The (...)
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  • What Do Powers Do When They Are Not Manifested?Stathis Psillos - 2006 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 72 (1):137-156.
    In the present paper, I offer a conceptual argument against the view that all properties are pure powers. I claim that thinking of all properties as pure powers leads to a regress. The regress, I argue, can be solved only if non-powers are admitted. The kernel of my thesis is that any attempt to answer the title question in an informative way will undermine a pure-power view of properties. In particular, I focus my critique on recent arguments in favour of (...)
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  • (1 other version)The Causal Theory of Properties.David Malet Armstrong - 1999 - Philosophical Topics 26 (1-2):25-37.
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  • (1 other version)What is a Law of Nature?[author unknown] - 1985 - Philosophical Books 26 (2):120-120.
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  • Armstrong and the modal inversion of dispositions.Toby Handfield - 2005 - Philosophical Quarterly 55 (220):452–461.
    D. M. Armstrong has objected that the Dispositionalist theory of laws and properties is modally inverted, for it entails that properties are constituted by relations to non-actual possibilia. I contend that, if this objection succeeds against Dispositionalism, then Armstrong's nomic necessitation relation is also modally inverted. This shows that at least one of Armstrong's reasons for preferring a nomic necessitation theory is specious.
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  • Dispositional Essentialism and the Nature of Powerful Properties.William A. Bauer - 2013 - Disputatio 5 (35):1-19.
    Dispositional essentialism maintains that all sparse properties are essentially powerful. Two conceptions of sparse properties appear compatible with dispositional essentialism: sparse properties as pure powers or as powerful qualities. This paper compares the two views, criticizes the powerful qualities view, and then develops a new theory of pure powers, termed Point Theory. This theory neutralizes the main advantage powerful qualities appear to possess over pure powers—explaining the existence of powers during latency periods. The paper discusses the relation between powers and (...)
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  • The structure–in–things: Existence, essence and logic.Joseph Almog - 2003 - Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 103 (2):197–225.
    It has been common in contemporary philosophical logic to separate existence, essence and logic. I would like to reverse these separative tendencies. Doing so yields two theses, one about the existential basis of truth, the other about the essentialist basis of logic. The first thesis counters the common claim that both logical and essential truths-in short, structural truths-are existence-free. It is proposed that only real existences can generate essentialist and logical predications. The second thesis counters the common assumption that logic (...)
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  • The Dretske–Tooley–Armstrong theory of natural laws and the inference problem.Joan Page`S. - 2002 - International Studies in the Philosophy of Science 16 (3):227-243.
    In this article I intend to show that the inference problem, one of the main objections raised against the anti-Humean theory of natural laws defended by Dretske, Tooley and Armstrong (?DTA theory? for short), can be successfully answered. First, I argue that a proper solution should meet two essential requirements that the proposals made by the DTA theorists do not satisfy. Then I state a solution to the inference problem that assumes a local immanentistic view of universals, a partial definition (...)
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  • The Dretske–Tooley–Armstrong theory of natural laws and the inference problem. Pag&Grave & Joan S. - 2002 - International Studies in the Philosophy of Science 16 (3):227-243.
    In this article I intend to show that the inference problem, one of the main objections raised against the anti-Humean theory of natural laws defended by Dretske, Tooley and Armstrong (“DTA theory” for short), can be successfully answered. First, I argue that a proper solution should meet two essential requirements that the proposals made by the DTA theorists do not satisfy. Then I state a solution to the inference problem that assumes a local immanentistic view of universals, a partial definition (...)
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  • The Causal Theory Of Properties: Properties According To Shoemaker, Ellis And Others.David Armstrong - 2000 - Metaphysica 1 (1).
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