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Metaphysical necessity: a skeptical perspective

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Abstract

Many people hold that there is a distinctive notion of metaphysical necessity. In this paper I explain why I am skeptical about the view. I examine the sorts of considerations that are adduced for it, and argue that they meet equal and opposite considerations.

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Notes

  1. For example, Kripke (1971) and Fine (1994). Many other people who hold this view are referenced in Robertson and Atkins (2016) and Kment (2017).

  2. If one wishes to invoke Ockham’s razor, in the form that the onus of proof in matters of existence is always on the proponent, I suppose that skepticism can turn into disbelief.

  3. The paper is based on a talk given at the Kripke Center, at the CUNY Graduate Center, in November 2017. I am grateful to the members of the audience for their helpful objections, comments, and suggestions, and especially to Michael Devitt, Hartry Field, Paul Horwich, Saul Kripke, Antonella Mallozzi, Stephen Neale, and Brian Porter. Thanks for written comments also go to Chris Daly and Justin Clarke-Doane. Thanks also go to three anonymous referees of this journal.

  4. For some discussion, see Priest (2008, 3.6).

  5. Sometimes people distinguish between a semantic (sometimes called—misleadingly—‘metaphysical’) notion of analytic necessity and an epistemic notion. (See Rey (2017)) To make it clear: I am using the semantic notion. There is, of course, a Quinean skepticism about such analyticity. I have never shared this. See Priest (1979).

  6. Of course, one might dispute which things are logical truths; but that is an issue that is not relevant here.

  7. Actually, I have my doubts about this. For reasons I won’t go into here, it seems to me that mathematical necessity is probably sui generis. That issue is not relevant here either.

  8. Note that any analytic necessity is a physical necessity. If the truth of something is determined by the meanings of worlds, it is determined by the meanings of words and laws of nature. The analytic necessities are simply limit cases of physical necessities, where the laws of nature required are zero. A referee said that ‘the actual most common element is the most common element’, might not be a physical necessity, even though it is analytic. They did not explain why, but I suspect that what they are thinking of is this. The actual most common element is hydrogen, and it is (perhaps) not physically necessary that hydrogen is the most common element. But of course this is not analytically necessary either. Analyticity is not closed under sameness of reference, but sameness of sense.

  9. Actually, this notion itself fragments, depending on the kind of norms in question—legal, moral, etc. Again, that is not relevant here.

  10. Some may hold the laws of nature themselves to be metaphysically necessary. (In Naming and Necessity (p. 170 of reprint) Kripke himself suggests that this might be the case). So if metaphysical necessity is to be distinct from physical necessity, there must be some things that are metaphysically necessary, but not physically necessary. Kripke, indeed, holds this view: ‘Hesperus \(=\) Phosphorus’ is a truth about identity, not about physics.

  11. Rosen (2006, p. 33).

  12. So when, according to Rosen, does A deliver a genuine notion of necessity? He says (p. 35) that for A to do so, \(\Box _{A}\) must be such that ‘the boundary it draws between the necessary and contingent is non-arbitrary or non-ad hoc from a metaphysical point of view’. I fail to see why a metaphysical point of view is intrinsically different from a New Jersey point of view, if one does not presuppose that metaphysical laws are necessary in a distinctive sense.

  13. On Aristotle’s metaphysics, see Cohen (2016).

  14. A number of ways in which one might try to do this are discussed in Robertson and Atkins (2016).

  15. Something like this view is to be found in Fine (1994a).

  16. See, further, Priest (2016, 2.4).

  17. A philosophical friend of mine once received a letter. The writer said that they had been trying to contact Richard Routley, without success. They wondered if they would have more success with ‘this bloke Sylvan’.

  18. Cf., Fine (1994b, p. 54): to say that ‘Socrates essentially thinks’ is to say that it is true in virtue of Socrates’ identity that Socrates thinks.

  19. See, further, fn 22.

  20. Kripke (1971).

  21. See Priest (2016, ch. 9). Indeed, I take everything to be conceivable. So if inconceivability is a kind of impossibility, it is a highly degenerate one!

  22. And I am not against saying that being \(H_{2}O\) is the essence of water. It seems to me that this is as good an example of a Lockean real definition as anything can be. But one can hold this view and take essences to be physical, not metaphysical. This does not, of course, imply that all physical necessities are essential in this sense. The most natural thought is the the physical necessities that are essential are those expressed by identity statements, such as ‘Water is \(H_{2}O\)’. Nor does it follow that such things deliver a sui generis notion of necessity, any more than the fact that some identity statemtents (e.g., \(a=a\)) are logically true implies that these deliver a sui generis notion of logical truth.

  23. A referee of an earlier draft of this paper found some of the thought experiments above problematic since they have fantastical elements. Some of these fantastical elements could be changed at the cost of making the examples less homely. None the less, I agree that they are bound to have a fantastical element. I do not see a problem with this. Think how much mileage has been made in recent philosophy of examples concerning twin earths, brains in vats, swamp men. These are equally fantastical.

  24. Full details of both can be found in Priest ( 2008, chs. 16 and 17). Systems of contingent identity are described and discussed by many modal logicians. For example, Kanger (1957), Hughes and Cresswell (1968, ch. 11), Parks and Smith (1974), Parks (1974).

  25. The semantics has a class of worlds. It might be thought that this presupposes a notion of metaphysical necessity. It does not—or at least, if one is to take the class to characterise metaphysical necessity, as opposed to some other kind—say, analytic necessity—one needs an independent argument for this. The point of the argument by SI is to establish that there is something that is necessary, and whose necessity can be of no other kind; in other words, it is an argument to force a certain kind of interpretation on the \(\Box \).

  26. For further discussion, see Priest (2008), 17.2.

  27. For further discussion of contingent identity in intensional contexts, see Priest (2016, ch. 2).

  28. Or even as \(a\equiv b,\Box a\equiv a\models \Box a\equiv b\). The soundness of the argument then requires S4.

  29. See, for example, Priest (2010).

  30. A referee of an earlier draft of the paper commented that one might well accept these examples, and merely conclude that the notion of metaphysical necessity is one of contingent identity. That is certainly compatible with the examples. However, it still leaves us wanting an argument for the existence of metaphysical necessity as a distinctive notion of necessity. Note the dialectic of this part of the paper. It is not an argument against the existence of a notion of metaphysical necessity. It is an objection to a standard argument that there are some things (identities) which are necessary in this distinctive sense, so that there must be such a sense.

References

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Priest, G. Metaphysical necessity: a skeptical perspective. Synthese 198 (Suppl 8), 1873–1885 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-018-1885-6

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