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Single Idea 13590

[filed under theme 9. Objects / D. Essence of Objects / 15. Against Essentialism ]

Full Idea

The notion of essence makes sense in context. Relative to a particular enquiry, some predicates may play a more basic role than others, or may apply more fixedly; and these may be treated as essential.

Gist of Idea

Essences can make sense in a particular context or enquiry, as the most basic predicates

Source

Willard Quine (Intensions Revisited [1977], p.121)

Book Ref

Quine,Willard: 'Theories and Things' [Harvard 1981], p.121

A Reaction

Quine has got a bad press on essentialism, and on modal logic, but I take this point seriously. If you give something a fixed identity by means of essence in some context, you can then go ahead and apply possible world reasoning in that context.

Related Idea

Idea 8483 Necessity is relative to context; it is what is assumed in an inquiry [Quine]

The 34 ideas with the same theme [reasons to deny the existence of 'essences']:

13772 Is the being or essence of each thing private to each person? [Plato]
12251 Substantial forms are not understood, and explain nothing [Descartes]
16622 Essence is just an artificial word from logic, giving a way of thinking about substances [Hobbes]
12804 There are no independent natural kinds - or our classifications have to be subjective [Locke, by Jolley]
12547 We know five properties of gold, but cannot use four of them to predict the fifth one [Locke]
11862 Leibniz was not an essentialist [Leibniz, by Wiggins]
7161 The essence of a thing is only an opinion about the 'thing' [Nietzsche]
14170 Change is obscured by substance, a thing's nature, subject-predicate form, and by essences [Russell]
13590 Essences can make sense in a particular context or enquiry, as the most basic predicates [Quine]
10930 Quantification into modal contexts requires objects to have an essence [Quine]
10929 Aristotelian essence of the object has become the modern essence of meaning [Quine]
8482 Mathematicians must be rational but not two-legged, cyclists the opposite. So a mathematical cyclist? [Quine]
12136 Cyclist are not actually essentially two-legged [Brody on Quine]
5451 Popper felt that ancient essentialism was a bar to progress [Popper, by Mautner]
18890 Putnam smuggles essentialism about liquids into his proof that water must be H2O [Salmon,N on Putnam]
15753 Essences might support Resemblance Nominalism, but they are too coarse and ill-defined [Armstrong]
13578 The old idea that identity depends on essence and behaviour is rejected by the empiricists [Ellis]
8555 There is no subset of properties which guarantee a thing's identity [Shoemaker]
14632 Quine may have conflated de re and de dicto essentialism, but there is a real epistemological problem [Jackson]
15266 We say the essence of particles is energy, but only so we can tell a story about the nature of things [Harré/Madden]
13955 Essentialism is said to be unintelligible, because relative, if necessary truths are all analytic [Cartwright,R]
12762 Bare particular anti-essentialism makes no sense within modal logic semantics [Stalnaker]
14077 Essentialism for concreta is false, since they can come apart under two concepts [Gibbard]
14638 Essentialism is false, because it implies the existence of necessary singular propositions [McMichael]
14678 Any property is attached to anything in some possible world, so I am a radical anti-essentialist [Salmon,N]
14225 Critics say that essences are too mysterious to be known [Shalkowski]
12257 Could we replace essence with collections of powers? [Oderberg]
15026 Essence (even if nonmodal) is not fundamental in metaphysics [Sider]
15173 That the essence of water is its microstructure is a convention, not a discovery [Sidelle]
15709 Essentialism is useful for predictions, but it is not the actual structure of reality [Gelman]
14192 Essentialism must deal with charges of arbitrariness, and failure to reduce de re modality [Paul,LA]
14197 An object's modal properties don't determine its possibilities [Paul,LA]
15147 Cluster kinds are explained simply by sharing some properties, not by an 'essence' [Chakravartty]
17876 Individual essences are just cobbled together classificatory predicates [Almog]