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Single Idea 4718

[filed under theme 10. Modality / A. Necessity / 11. Denial of Necessity ]

Full Idea

Putnam endorses the view that necessity is relative to a description, so there is only necessity 'de dicto': relative to language, not to reality.

Clarification

'De dicto' means concerning the words (not the things)

Gist of Idea

If necessity is always relative to a description in a language, then there is only 'de dicto' necessity

Source

report of Hilary Putnam (Reason, Truth and History [1981]) by Paul O'Grady - Relativism Ch.3

Book Ref

O'Grady,Paul: 'Relativism' [Acumen 2002], p.83

A Reaction

Even a realist must take this proposal seriously. The facts may contain de re necessities, but we could be very sceptical about our capacity to know them. Personally I enjoy speculating about de re necessities. They can't stop you.

The 20 ideas with the same theme [there is nothing necessary about the real world]:

4766 Necessity only exists in the mind, and not in objects [Hume]
7186 There are no necessary truths, but something must be held to be true [Nietzsche]
4528 For me, a priori 'truths' are just provisional assumptions [Nietzsche]
9362 Necessary truths are those we will maintain no matter what [Lewis,CI]
8483 Necessity is relative to context; it is what is assumed in an inquiry [Quine]
10924 Necessity is in the way in which we say things, and not things themselves [Quine]
8206 Necessity could be just generalisation over classes, or (maybe) quantifying over possibilia [Quine]
4577 There is no necessity higher than natural necessity, and that is just regularity [Quine]
9201 Whether 9 is necessarily greater than 7 depends on how '9' is described [Quine, by Fine,K]
10927 Necessity only applies to objects if they are distinctively specified [Quine]
15090 Quine's attack on the analytic-synthetic distinction undermined necessary truths [Quine, by Shoemaker]
4718 If necessity is always relative to a description in a language, then there is only 'de dicto' necessity [Putnam, by O'Grady]
14919 Empiricists deny what is unobservable, and reject objective modality [Fraassen]
19284 Asserting a necessity just expresses our inability to imagine it is false [Blackburn]
20475 Maybe modal sentences cannot be true or false [Casullo]
11119 De re necessity is just de dicto necessity about object-essences [Jubien]
3888 Hume assumes that necessity can only be de dicto, not de re [Scruton]
9200 Empiricists suspect modal notions: either it happens or it doesn't; it is just regularities. [Fine,K]
14589 A modal can reverse meaning if the context is seen differently, so maybe context is all? [Hawthorne]
14598 Abstracta imply non-logical brute necessities, so only nominalists can deny such things [Dorr]