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Full Idea
A surface-functional characterisation is not exhaustive. It allows unintended twins, alien intruders with different structures - water lookalikes that are not H2O and lookalike infinite structures that are not the natural numbers.
Gist of Idea
Surface accounts aren't exhaustive as they always allow unintended twin cases
Source
Joseph Almog (Nature Without Essence [2010], 03)
Book Ref
-: 'Journal of Philosophy' [-], p.366
A Reaction
He rests this on the claim in mathematical logic that fully expressive systems are always non-categorical (having unintended twins). Set theory is not fully categorical, but Peano Arithmetic is. Almog's main anti-essentialist argument.
| 17864 | Defining an essence comes no where near giving a thing's nature [Almog] |
| 17863 | Essences promise to reveal reality, but actually drive us away from it [Almog] |
| 17866 | Essential definition aims at existence conditions and structural truths [Almog] |
| 17867 | If a concept is not compact, it will not be presentable to finite minds [Almog] |
| 17868 | Surface accounts aren't exhaustive as they always allow unintended twin cases [Almog] |
| 17869 | Kripke and Putnam offer an intermediary between real and nominal essences [Almog] |
| 17871 | Fregean meanings are analogous to conceptual essence, defining a kind [Almog] |
| 17872 | Definitionalists rely on snapshot-concepts, instead of on the real processes [Almog] |
| 17873 | Water must be related to water, just as tigers must be related to tigers [Almog] |
| 17870 | Alien 'tigers' can't be tigers if they are not related to our tigers [Almog] |
| 17876 | Individual essences are just cobbled together classificatory predicates [Almog] |
| 17877 | The number series is primitive, not the result of some set theoretic axioms [Almog] |