The a priori, possible worlds, de re modality,and origin

essentialism

PHIL UA-78 Metaphysics

Prof. Cian Dorr
16th September 2024

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Necessity and a priority
The concept of a priori knowability

Some philosophers writing in the earlier part of the twentieth century seem to equate
claims of metaphysical necessity with claims about a priori knowability—things that
can be known “without relying on sense-experience”.

▶ The question what it even means to know something ‘without relying on

sense-experience’, and whether it’s even possible to know anything in this way, is
an interesting one, but one for epistemology rather than metaphysics—we are only
mentioning the idea because we want to set it aside.

A basic point from Lecture 1 of N&N is that these are different notions: the claim that
something is metaphysically necessary has nothing to do with knowledge or thought.

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The concept of a priori knowability

Some philosophers writing in the earlier part of the twentieth century seem to equate
claims of metaphysical necessity with claims about a priori knowability—things that
can be known “without relying on sense-experience”.

▶ The question what it even means to know something ‘without relying on

sense-experience’, and whether it’s even possible to know anything in this way, is
an interesting one, but one for epistemology rather than metaphysics—we are only
mentioning the idea because we want to set it aside.

A basic point from Lecture 1 of N&N is that these are different notions: the claim that
something is metaphysically necessary has nothing to do with knowledge or thought.
A less basic point is that that either of ‘It is metaphysically necessary that P’ and ‘It is
knowable a priori that P’ can be true without the other being true!
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The necessary a posteriori and contingent a priori

▶ It is metaphysically necessary that Hesperus is Phosphorus TRUE (by NI)

▶ It is knowable a priori that Hesperus is Phosphorus SEEMS FALSE
▶ It is knowable a priori that if anything is one metre long, the standard metre is
one metre long SEEMS TRUE
▶ It is metaphysically necessary that if anything is one metre long, the standard
metre is one metre long SEEMS FALSE

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The a priority of identity?

Worry: Last week we gave an argument for the claim that it is necessary that Hesperus
is Phosphorus. What will happen when when we re-run this argument, substituting ‘it
is knowable a priori that’ everywhere where we had ‘it is necessary that’?
Will we be forced to say that it is, in fact, knowable a priori that Hesperus is
Phosphorus, that being golden is being composed of atoms with 79 protons, etc.?

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The a priority of identity?

Well, let’s consider. The argument went in three main stages:

1. NSI: For any object x, it is necessary that x = x (premise).
2. NI: For any object x and object y, if x = y, it is necessary that x = y (by 1 and
LL).
3. It is necessary that Hesperus = Phosphorus (from 2 and ‘Hesperus =
Phosphorus’).

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The a priority of identity?

Well, let’s consider. The argument went in three main stages:

1. NSI: For any object x, it is necessary that x = x (premise).
2. NI: For any object x and object y, if x = y, it is necessary that x = y (by 1 and
LL).
3. It is necessary that Hesperus = Phosphorus (from 2 and ‘Hesperus =
Phosphorus’).
So the argument we need to consider will have corresponding stages:
1. NSI: For any object x, it is knowable a priori that x = x (premise).
2. NI: For any object x and object y, if x = y, it is knowable a priori that x = y (by 1
and LL).
3. It is knowable a priori that Hesperus = Phosphorus (from 2 and ‘Hesperus =
Phosphorus’).
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We might worry about premise 1. Maybe there are some objects (particles? points?
ghosts?) which no-one could know a priori to be self-identical, because no-one could
even think about them at all.
But, we don’t need the full strength of NSI to run this argument—it would be enough
if we said ‘for every planet in the solar system’ rather than ‘for every object’. And it
seems clear that each of those can be known a priori to be self-identical.

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We might worry about premise 1. Maybe there are some objects (particles? points?
ghosts?) which no-one could know a priori to be self-identical, because no-one could
even think about them at all.
But, we don’t need the full strength of NSI to run this argument—it would be enough
if we said ‘for every planet in the solar system’ rather than ‘for every object’. And it
seems clear that each of those can be known a priori to be self-identical.
The best place to push back is in the step from 2 to 3.
▶ ‘Know’ is an attitude verb, and takes part in the same strange behavior we noted
last week for ‘want’. The truth or falsity of a sentence of the form ‘X knows that
P’ turns not only on what state of affairs we refer to with ‘P’, but on what form
of words we use to refer to it. And this is also true for ‘X knows a priori that P’,
‘Someone could know a priori that P’, etc.

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We might worry about premise 1. Maybe there are some objects (particles? points?
ghosts?) which no-one could know a priori to be self-identical, because no-one could
even think about them at all.
But, we don’t need the full strength of NSI to run this argument—it would be enough
if we said ‘for every planet in the solar system’ rather than ‘for every object’. And it
seems clear that each of those can be known a priori to be self-identical.
The best place to push back is in the step from 2 to 3.
▶ ‘Know’ is an attitude verb, and takes part in the same strange behavior we noted
last week for ‘want’. The truth or falsity of a sentence of the form ‘X knows that
P’ turns not only on what state of affairs we refer to with ‘P’, but on what form
of words we use to refer to it. And this is also true for ‘X knows a priori that P’,
‘Someone could know a priori that P’, etc.
▶ By contrast, the truth or falsity of ‘It is metaphysically necessary that N is F’
depends just on what object we refer to with ‘N’ and what property we refer to
with ‘F’. 6
Epistemic modals

Many modal words in English have an epistemic use which can be roughly paraphrased
with ‘know’.

▶ ‘Class might be cancelled today’ ≈ ‘For all I know, class is cancelled today’
▶ ‘There must be something wrong with the heater’ ≈ ‘We know (based on this
salient evidence) that there is something wrong with the heater’.

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Epistemic modals

Many modal words in English have an epistemic use which can be roughly paraphrased
with ‘know’.

▶ ‘Class might be cancelled today’ ≈ ‘For all I know, class is cancelled today’
▶ ‘There must be something wrong with the heater’ ≈ ‘We know (based on this
salient evidence) that there is something wrong with the heater’.

On the epistemic reading, it seems like ‘Samuel Clemens must be Mark Twain’ could
be false even if ‘Samuel Clemens is Mark Twain’ is true. Does that mean that if Kripke
is right that ‘It is metaphysically necessary that Samuel Clemens is Mark Twain’ is
true, we have to give up on our characterization of metaphysical necessity as the
‘broadest’ necessity?

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Epistemic modals

I suggest that the answer is no. Epistemic ‘must’ is like ‘know’, sensitive to what words
are used as well as to what objects/properties/states of affairs they refer to.
So, when we say ‘It is not the case that Clemens must be Twain’ or ‘It is not
epistemically necessary that Clemens is Twain’ we are not saying that this state of
affairs—that Clemens is Twain, i.e. that Clemens is Clemens—lacks a certain status we
are calling ‘epistemic necessity’.
What we are saying is compatible with the claim that this state of affairs is necessary
in every sense.

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Possible worlds
Possible worlds talk

Thanks largely to Kripke, analytic philosophers love to express claims about necessity
and possibility using the expression ‘possible world’, initially introduced by Leibniz.
They assume the Leibniz biconditionals:
It is possible for it to be the case that P if and only if at some possible world, P.
It is necessary that P if and only if at every possible world, P.

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Possible worlds talk

Thanks largely to Kripke, analytic philosophers love to express claims about necessity
and possibility using the expression ‘possible world’, initially introduced by Leibniz.
They assume the Leibniz biconditionals:
It is possible for it to be the case that P if and only if at some possible world, P.
It is necessary that P if and only if at every possible world, P.
P if and only if at the actual world, P.
This turns out to be a useful way of talking—very helpful for tracking the logical
relationships between modal claims!
▶ In his earlier work, Kripke pioneered something called possible worlds model
theory inspired by the Leibniz biconditionals, which had a revolutionary impact on
modal logic.
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Possible worlds talk

Note that this is not limited to metaphysical possibility and necessity: one can treat ‘It
is physically necessary that P’ as equivalent to ‘At every physically possible world, P’,
and so on.

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Possible worlds as parallel universes?

It is easy to slip into talking about possible worlds as if they were other planets, or
parallel universes just as real as the universe we live in.
If you do this, you’ll think of ‘At some possible world, there are talking donkeys’ as
implying that there are talking donkeys out there in reality (though maybe not in the
small chunk of reality we call ‘the actual world’).
David Lewis, in his book On the Plurality of Worlds, actually defends this view. The
resulting metaphysical theory is fascinating, but most philosophers find it completely
unbelievable. Most are confident that it is metaphysically possible for there to be
talking donkeys, but also confident that there just aren’t any.
In this course, we won’t be discussing this theory of Lewis’s.

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What are possible worlds, if not parallel universes?

Happily, rejecting Lewis’s ambitious theory doesn’t have to mean giving up on possible
worlds talk. There are less “exciting” interpretations of what it is to be a possible
world that make the Leibniz biconditionals plausible.
Here’s my favorite approach:
▶ A world is a collection of states of affairs that contains every state of
affairs or its negation.
▶ ‘At world w, P’ means that the state of affairs that P is a member of the
collection w.
▶ ‘w is actual’ means ‘every state of affairs in w obtains’.
▶ ‘w is possible’ means ‘it is possible that w is actual’. (So every interpretation of
‘possible’ gives an interpretation of ‘possible world’.)

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What are possible worlds, if not parallel universes?

On this approach, the Leibniz biconditionals amount to the claim that if a state of
affairs is possible, we can always build it up to a collection that contains every state of
affairs or its negation where it’s possible that every member of that state of affairs
obtains. This seems at least a bit intuitive, though certainly not obvious.

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A note on how I’m using ‘state of affairs’

We’ve been talking freely about properties, equating ‘object x is F’ with ‘object x has
the property of being F’ (at least when we don’t have weird words like ‘want’ and
‘know’ floating around).
This practice extends to binary relations—we can equate ‘Antony loves Cleopatra’ with
‘The loving relation holds of Antony and Cleopatra (in that order)’. And similarly for
ternary, quaternary, …relations.
Properties can be equated with 1-ary relations. They hold, or fail to hold, of just one
object.
States of affairs can similarly be equated with 0-ary relations. They just hold or fail to
hold full stop—we don’t need to feed them any arguments before we can ask ‘true or
false’.

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When we have a 2-ary relation like loving and an object, we can ‘plug’ the object in to
one or other argument place to make a property: loving Cleopatra, being loved by
Cleopatra.
In exactly the same way, we can ‘plug’ an object (Cleopatra) into a property (being
Egyptian) to make a state of affairs (that Cleopatra is Egyptian).

▶ These are not the only ways to ‘build’ n − 1-ary relations out of n-ary relations.
E.g. we can also use existential quantification, which can turn love into either
loving something or being loved by something, and can turn being Egyptian into
the state of affairs that something is Egyptian.

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A note on ‘proposition’

Some authors (including me) use ‘proposition’ as a synonym for what I am calling
‘states of affairs’.
But others tie ‘proposition’ more tightly to the mysteries of attitude verbs. For
example, they might say that the proposition that Hesperus is bright is not identical to
the proposition that Phosphorus is bright, and that’s why someone could believe the
former and not the latter. They give ‘the proposition that…’ the same semantic
peculiarity as ‘believes’, ‘wants’, ‘knows’, etc.
By contrast, we assume that since Hesperus = Phosphorus, the property living on
Hesperus identical to the property living on Phosphorus, and by the same token the
state of affairs that Hesperus is bright is identical to the state of affairs that
Phosphorus is bright.

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De re modal claims
A distinction

De re modal claims are those which, intuitively speaking, concern the properties it is
necessary or possible for particular objects to have.
‘Benjamin Franklin could have been seven feet tall’ is a de re modal claim about
Franklin. ‘Bifocals could have been invented by someone seven feet tall’ isn’t.

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A distinction

De re modal claims are those which, intuitively speaking, concern the properties it is
necessary or possible for particular objects to have.
‘Benjamin Franklin could have been seven feet tall’ is a de re modal claim about
Franklin. ‘Bifocals could have been invented by someone seven feet tall’ isn’t.
Formally, we can say that a modal sentence is de re on a certain reading if that reading
is logically equivalent to a sentence where an individual variable or pronoun occurs
nonredundantly within the scope of a modal operator like ‘possible’ or ‘necessary’.
▶ So, ‘The inventor of bifocals could have been seven feet tall’ is de re on the the >
could reading, which is equivalent to ‘For some object x, x is the inventor of
bifocals and x could have been seven feet tall’, but not on the could > the reading.
▶ Given Kripke’s view of names, ‘Franklin could have been 7 feet tall’ is
unambiguously equivalent to ‘Franklin is an object x such that x could have been
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7 feet tall’, and thus unambiguously de re.
Some Kripkean questions about de re modality

▶ Could Queen Elizabeth II have originated from a different sperm and egg?
▶ Could Richard Nixon have been an inanimate object?
▶ Was the wooden lectern at which Kripke delivered N&N such that it could have
been made of ice from the River Thames?
▶ Could any wooden table that was originally formed from a certain hunk of wood
have, instead, been originally formed from a completely non-overlapping hunk of
wood?

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Some Kripkean questions about de re modality

▶ Could Queen Elizabeth II have originated from a different sperm and egg?
▶ Could Richard Nixon have been an inanimate object?
▶ Was the wooden lectern at which Kripke delivered N&N such that it could have
been made of ice from the River Thames?
▶ Could any wooden table that was originally formed from a certain hunk of wood
have, instead, been originally formed from a completely non-overlapping hunk of
wood?

Kripke suggests, cautiously, that the right answer to all of these questions is no. But
it’s much more important to him that they are legitimate questions—appropriate
topics for philosophical debate.

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Is there a special problem about de re modal claims?

Before Kripke, many philosophers (most famously, W. v. O. Quine) thought that there
was something wrong with de re modal sentences. Maybe they are meaningless. Or
maybe–more plausibly!–they are ambiguous in some distinctive way that other modal
sentences are not.

▶ ‘Whether a particular necessarily or contingently has a property depends on the

way it’s described’ (N&N, p. 40)

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Is there a special problem about de re modal claims?

Before Kripke, many philosophers (most famously, W. v. O. Quine) thought that there
was something wrong with de re modal sentences. Maybe they are meaningless. Or
maybe–more plausibly!–they are ambiguous in some distinctive way that other modal
sentences are not.

▶ ‘Whether a particular necessarily or contingently has a property depends on the

way it’s described’ (N&N, p. 40)

Kripke rejects this. Once we stipulate that ‘could’ means metaphysical possibility, there
is no ambiguity in ‘a could be F’ (beyond whatever ambiguity there may be in ‘a’ and
‘F’).

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De re attitude reports contrasted with de re modal sentences

The “special ambiguity” view has something to be said for it when it comes to
propositional attitude operators.
‘For some person x who works for the Daily Planet, Lois believes that x can fly’ does,
arguably, have both true and false readings, which it’s natural to disambiguate by
talking about ‘the way it’s described’.
▶ Maybe this is just a matter of the verb ‘believe’ having multiple interpretations:
but whatever the dimension of variability is, it is hard to detect any corresponding
variability in sentences like ‘Lois believes that there are people who can fly’.
Kripke’s rejection of the “special ambiguity” view for metaphysical modality goes hand
in hand with his rejection of the idea that modals (interpreted non-epistemically) are
sensitive to the differences between different ways of referring to the same
object/property/state of affairs in the way attitude reports seem to be.
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Is the truth about de re modality boring?

A very different reason for not wanting to engage with Kripke’s questions would be
some radical view that spits out answers to all of them in one fell swoop. These come
in two opposite sorts:
Hyper-Essentialism If object x has property F, then it is metaphysically necessary
that if x exists, x has F.
Extreme Anti-Essentialism (first pass) If it is possible for there to be something
that has property F, then every object is such that it is possible for it to
have F.

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Is the truth about de re modality boring?

A very different reason for not wanting to engage with Kripke’s questions would be
some radical view that spits out answers to all of them in one fell swoop. These come
in two opposite sorts:
Hyper-Essentialism If object x has property F, then it is metaphysically necessary
that if x exists, x has F.
Extreme Anti-Essentialism (first pass) If it is possible for there to be something
that has property F, then every object is such that it is possible for it to
have F.
▶ The latter view is so extreme that it’s inconsistent: it’s possible (since actually
true) that there is something that is not identical to NYU, but by NI, the property
of not being identical to NYU is not one that NYU could have. Next class we will
discuss a somewhat less extreme view that avoids this problem but still has lots of
radical consequences (e.g., that Saul Kripke could have been a poached egg). 21
Is the truth about de re modality boring?

Hyper-Essentialism is so radical that it’s hard to know what to make of it: it’s deeply
at odds with beliefs that we all take for granted in everyday life. When we say ‘I could
have missed the bus this morning’, we are not talking about metaphysical modality:
but since metaphysical modality is supposed to be broader than these everyday
interpretations of ‘could’, the truth of such remarks implies the truth of the
corresponding ascriptions of metaphysical possibility.

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Is the truth about de re modality boring?

Hyper-Essentialism is so radical that it’s hard to know what to make of it: it’s deeply
at odds with beliefs that we all take for granted in everyday life. When we say ‘I could
have missed the bus this morning’, we are not talking about metaphysical modality:
but since metaphysical modality is supposed to be broader than these everyday
interpretations of ‘could’, the truth of such remarks implies the truth of the
corresponding ascriptions of metaphysical possibility.
By contrast, since it’s unclear how often the topic of metaphysical possibility comes up
in everyday life, the radical claims characteristic of Extreme Anti-Essentialism (e.g.
that Kripke could have been a poached egg) are not in clear conflict with our
‘everyday’ beliefs. It’s more of a theoretical question.

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