RECENT WORK

ESSENTIALISM: PART 1
Quine once characterised essentialism as the doctrine that some of the
attributes of a thing (quite independently of the language in which the thing
is referred to, if at all) may be essential to the thing, and others accidental.
This view is now widely held. But this was not always the case. Quines
multifarious objections to quantified modal logic and essentialism were very
influential and it took the pioneering work of Marcus, Kripke et al. to bring
essentialism back into the realm of respectability. Despite these genuine
advances in easing Quinean queasiness about essentialism, I believe that at
least one of Quines objections does have considerable force and that, even
where his objections do not succeed, a consideration of them sheds much
light on the character and resources of various essentialist systems. In this
paper, I will explain and evaluate some recent work on essentialism by taking
up two of the Quinean objections.
The Quinean objection with the most force is his claim that there is no
principled way to assign, as essentialism requires, certain properties as essential
to a given thing and other properties as non-essential. As Quine indicates,
an essentialist foregoes an appeal to the meanings of the terms in which a
thing is referred to as accounting for the truth or falsity of sentences that
attribute essential properties to that thing. Once this step is taken, Quine
says, there is no legitimate basis on which to divide a things properties into
the essential and the non-essential. It is for this reason that Quine speaks of
the metaphysical jungle of Aristotelian e~sentialism~
and of the distinction
between essential and non-essential properties as invidi~us~and
LL baffling.
Quine has not, I believe, actually made good on this charge. He has not
shown that there is anything troubling about the way in which typical
essentialists want to divide properties into the essential and the nonessential. Some of the reasons for this failure will become clear in what
1 . 7he Wqs ofparadox and Other Essajs (Harvard University Press, 1976), p. 175f.
2. I should note that although I will cover a broad range of recent essentialist literature, I
cannot hope to do justice in this short paper to all the important contributions to the
current debate over essentialism. In particular, I regret not having space to discuss Alan
Sidellesprovocative work NecessiQ, Essence, and Indiuiduation: A Defense ofConventionalim (Cornell
University Press, 1989).
3. Op. cit. p. 176.
4. Op. cit. p. 184.
5. Word and Object (MIT Press, 1960), p. 199. For a more recent version of this type of criticism,
see Alan McMichael, The Epistemology of Essentialist Claims, in Peter French, Theodore
Uehling and Howard Wettstein (eds.)Midwest Studies in Phihsop/p, vol. xi (1986), pp. 33-52.

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Cambridge, MA 04142, USA

follows.6 However, despite the fact that Quine himself has failed here,
essentialists must take this Quinean objection seriously. It is incumbent on
an essentialist not to make essentialist claims without a principled reason. Yet
there is, as I will argue, at least the appearance that some recent work on
essentialism is guilty of precisely this mistake. These difficulties facing
essentialists do not, I believe, justify Quines wholesale rejection of essentialist
talk, but they do show that essentialists have not yet fully dealt with what I
regard as Quines most important challenge.
To prepare the way for my analysis and critique, I need to offer a general
characterisation of essentialism and to discuss a different kind of Quinean
objection to essentialism. This objection turns on certain purported counterexamples to the essentialist view that a thing can have essential properties
independently of the particular way in which it is picked out. Despite the
fact that this objection was rightly discredited many years ago, it has recently
resurfaced in a different guise. Significantly, in responding to this new version
of the objection, recent essentialists have made their systems vulnerable to a
Quinean charge of arbitrariness. To see how all this is SO, lets begin with a
general characterisation of essentialism.

I . Essmtialivn Charachised
From the Quinean definition quoted at the beginning, we can extract two
claims required by essentialism:

(1) The fact that it is true (or false) to say that a thing has a property such
as being necessarily F does not depend on the way in which the thing
is referred to.
(( 1) is tantamount to the claim that the principle of substitutivity does not
break down in modal contexts. Such contexts would thus be referentially
transparent.)

(2) At least some things have some properties such as being necessarily F
(where this property is a non-trivial necessary property).
Some clarifications are in order. O n Quines definition, essentialism would
require not only that some things have properties such as being necessarily
F, but that those things also have certain other properties contingently. I omit
the requirement that there be some contingent properties because otherwise
a view which held that each property of each thing is essential to it would
not count as essentialist. Yet this would be infelicitous, for such a view is
clearly an extreme version of essentialism, not a form of anti-es~entidism.~
6. See also Ruth Barcan Marcus, Essentialism in Modal Logic, Now, vol. i (1967), pp. 91-96;
A Backward Glance at Quines Animadversions on Modalities, in Robert Barrett and
Roger Gibson (eds.), Perspectives on Quine (Basil Blackwell, 1990), pp. 230 243; and Richard
Cartwright, Some Remarks on Essentialism,Journd ofPhiho&, vol. Luv (I 968),pp. 6 15-626.
7. Leibniz is such an extreme essentialist. For discussion, see Benson Mates, 7he Philosophy of
Labnzr (Oxford University Press, 1986).

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In (2), I specified that essentialism requires that the necessary properties in

question be non-trivial. I will explain. Essentialists attempt to discover what
properties are required to be a particular thing A. Typically the aim in so
doing is to offer an account of what is required to be A that goes beyond
the kinds of facts we can learn about A simply from the general fact that A
is a thing. What we can learn from this general fact does not reveal the
specific character of A and is, for that reason, trivial. Properties that are
necessary to A but which stem merely from the general fact that A is a thing
are thus called trivial necessary properties. Forbes puts the point this way:
It is characteristic of P s being trivially essential to x that xs possession of P
is not grounded in the specific nature of x.
There are two kinds of trivial necessary properties. The first kind consists
of properties that are necessary not only to A but also to each thing. Examples
are: being male if a bachelor and being self-identical. However, a propertys
being universally necessary is not required for its being trivial. Consider a
property F which A has necesssarily but which is not universally necessary.
As possession of F fails to be grounded in As specific nature if As possession
of F logically follows from As possession of G, where G is universally
necessary. An example can be developed in the following way. As I have just
mentioned, being self-identical is a necessary property of A and of every
other thing. From the fact that A has this property, it follows that A is
necessarily identical with A. The property of being identical with A is not
universally necessary; in fact, this property is necessary only to A and, further,
necessarily, only A has this property at all. However, since we can derive the
fact that A has the property of being necessarily identical with A without
having any information about As qualities other than the trivial fact that A
is self-identical, the property of being identical with A is, though necessary,
trivially SO.^
In light of claims (1) and (2) which essentialism requires, we can see that
there are two ways to reject essentialism. First, one can reject (l), i.e. one
can hold
(a) the fact that it is true (or false) to say that a thing has a property such
as being necessarily F does depend on the way in which the thing is
referred to.

To accept (a) is to regard modal contexts as referentially opaque, rather than

transparent; in modal contexts the principle of substitutivity breaks down. I
8. Graeme Forbes, In Defense of Absolute Essentialism, in Midwest Studies in Phzlompb, vol.
xi, pp. 3-31.
9. For more detailed treatment of some of the above issues, see Dagfinn Fellesdal, Essentialism
and Reference, in L. E. Hahn and P. A. Schilpp (eds.), 7 h e Philosophy of W K Quine (Open
Court, 1986), pp. 97-1 13; Graeme Forbes, 7he Mekzp/ysicr ofModali4 (Oxford University
Press, 1985), p. 99 and In Defense of Absolute Essentialism, pp. 4-6; David Kaplan,
Opacity, in 77ze Philosophy of W c! @zm, pp. 229-289, part C; Marcus, Essentialism in
Modal Logic, and A Backward Glance at Quines Animadversions on Modalities pp. 238
239; McMichael, The Epistemology of Essentialist Claims, p. 33; and Terence Parsons,
Essentialism and Quantified Modal Logic, Philosophical Reuim, vol. lxxviii (1969), pp. 35-52.

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will call the version of anti-essentialism that affirms (1) anti-essentialism of

type (a).O
Another way to be an anti-essentialist is to reject (2). Such an antiessentialist would hold
(b) Nothing has any non-trivial properties.
O n this view, which I will call anti-essentialism of type (b),any property a
thing has is a property it might have lacked. Thus since I have the properties
of being born in North America, weighing less than 500 lbs. and being
something that is not a light switch, according to an anti-essentialist of type
(b) I might have failed to be born in North America, I might have failed to
weigh less than 500 lbs., and I might have been a light switch. Nothing is
essential to me on this version of anti-essentialism. Anti-essentialism of type
(b) is thus, as it were, the flip side of the extreme, Leibnizian essentialism
which says that alt of a things properties are essential to it. I know of no
proponents of this coherent but unpalatable version of anti-essentialism.

2. Descriptions and Scope

The two Quinean arguments mentioned at the outset are arguments for
anti-essentialism of type (a). Consider first the argument that there are
counterexamples to the referential transparency of modal contexts. Quines
famous example is this: 9 and the number of planets are co-referring terms;
however, substitution of one of these terms for the other in modal contexts
can result in truth-value shifts. This is evident, Quine says, from the following
inference which he regards as invalid:

(1) Necessarily 9 is greater than 7.

(2) 9 = the number of planets.
Therefore (3) Necessarily the number of planets is greater than 7.
Intuitively (1) is true and (3) is false, despite the fact that (3) is reached simply
by substituting in (1) a term that has the same referent as 9. The point holds
for other modal contexts as well and thus Quine concludes that modal
contexts in general are referentially opaque. Actually, I should say that this
10. Anti-essentialism of this kind is endorsed in: Alan Gibbard, Contingent Identity, Journal of
Philosophical Logic, vol. iv (1975), pp. 187-221; David Lewis, Counterparts of Persons and
Their Bodies, Journal ofPhilosop/p, vol. lxviii ( I 97 I), pp. 203-2 11 and On the Pluralip of Worlds
(Basil Blackwell, 1986), pp. 246-263; Harold Noonan, Personal Zdmtip (Routledge, 1989),
Indeterminate Identity, Contingent Identity and Abelardian Predicates, 7he Philosophical
Quark+, vol. xli (1991), pp. 183-193 and Constitution is Identity, Mind, vol. cii (1993), pp.
133-146; Quine, Fmm a Logical Point of Kew, (2nd edn., revised, Harvard University Press,
1980); Denis Robinson, Re-Identifying Matter, Philosophical Rmm, vol. xci (1 982), pp.
317--342.
11. Lewis, however, expounds the view in somc detail and treats it with respect. See On h
Pluralily of Worlds, pp. 239-243.

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is what Quine concluded. He now recognises that this argument is mistaken.12

But it is important to see why it is mistaken, because the response on behalf
of essentialism in this case may be available also in the case of more recent,
formally similar objections to essentialism.
The response to Quine that I am about to sketch originates with S m ~ l l y a n , ~
though NealeI4 lucidly expounds and develops it. I rely on Neale in what
follows. As Neale and Smullyan show, we can see that Quines example does
not in fact involve a violation of the principle of substitutivity if we accept
(as Quine himself does) a Russellian account of definite descriptions. Two
features of this account are crucial here. First, for Russell, the definite
description the number of planets is not a genuine referring term. Rather,
sentences (such as (3)) containing this term are to be analysed in terms of
quantifiers in the way that Russell famously explains in On Denoting (see
(3a) and (3b) below). The second key point to notice is that the Russellian
analysis gives us a clear way to represent an ambiguity in sentences (such as
(3)) that contain both a modal operator and a definite description. In (3) the
definite description can be seen as having wide or narrow scope relative to
the modal operator. The two different readings provided by the Russellian
account are:

=y = x) and O(x > 7))

( 3 4 (Ex)((y)(Py
(3b) U(Ex)((y)(Py y = x ) and ( x > 7))
As Neale (p. 136) explains, (3a), which gives the definite description wide
scope relative to the modal operator, says: Concerning the number x such
that x in fact uniquely numbers the planets, x is necessarily greater than 7.
(3b), which gives the definite description narrow scope, says: It is necessary
that whatever number x uniquely numbers the planets is greater than 7.
Clearly (3b) is false since there are possible situations in which there are, say,
6 planets. In saying that (1) and (2) lead to the falsehood (3), it is apparently
(3b) and not (3a) that Quine has in mind. This is so because (3a) is, arguably,
true and, more importantly for our purposes in answering Quine, one would
regard (3a) as failing to be true only if one aha& had a general argument
against quantification into modal contexts. Yet Quine is not yet in possession
of such an argument for, as Neale points out (p. 136), Quine seeks to argue
against such quantification precisely by establishing the opacity of modal
contexts and this opacity has not yet been established. Since Quine thus has
(3b) in mind, in order for Quine to use the above example to show that
modal contexts are opaque he must show that (3b) can be derived from (1)
and (2) by means of the principle of substitutivity.
However, as Smullyan and Neale demonstrate, (3b) is not derivable in this
way from (1) and (2) (see Neale, p. 137 for the proof which I will not
present here). Thus Quines charge of opacity fails. Further, the principle of
12. See Fmm a Lagical Point of Vw (2nd edn., revised), p. vii.
13. A.F. Srnullyan, Modality and Description,Journal ofSym6olic b g i c , vol. xiii (1948), pp. 31-37.
14. Stephen Neale, Descriptionr (MIT Press, 1990).

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substitutivity enables us to derive claims like (3a) from claims like (1) and (2).
Thus, as long as an essentialist gives the relevant definite description wide
scope, he can legitimately say that (3) is true and that no matter how the
number 9 is referred to it is necessarily greater than 7. So the Smullyan
defence against Quine consists of pointing out that a modal claim, viz. (3),
that might initially seem to be false can actually be seen as true when the
relevant definite description is construed as having wide scope.
Quine, of course, was aware of Smullyans response, but he initially
dismissed it because he thought that, in allowing differences in scope to affect
the truth-value of claims containing modal contexts, Smullyan violated
Russells theory.I5 Yet Quine was clearly mistaken for Russell did allow scope
to matter in attitude contexts and there is no reason to think he would not
make the same claim for modal contexts.16

3. Knipkean Reconstmah
A major impetus behind the resurgence of interest in essentialism in the last
two decades has been Saul Kripkes Naming and Necessi&. Part of what made
that work so exciting for essentialists was that it offered a general method for
handling certain objections to essentialist claims. That method is, in effect, a
subtle extension of the Smullyan strategy for responding to Quines worries
about the number of planets, as I will now explain.
To see the kind of objection Kripke is concerned with, I need to discuss
briefly an important commitment of essentialism: the necessity of identity.
For an essentialist, if a and 6 are terms that refer to the same object, i.e.
if a = 6 , then necessarily a = b. This can be shown as follows:

(4) Necessarily a

= a.

This is trivially true; for it to be false there would have to be a possible

situation in which something fails to be self-identical and that is absurd. Ex
hypothesi
(5) a = 6 .
Given (5) and given the transparency of modal contexts, it follows that

(6) Necessarily a = b.
15. See the I96 1 edition of Quines Fmm u Lagicul Point of V i .
16. See Neale, Descriptions, pp. 137-138, and Marcuss A Backward Glance at Quines
Animadversions on Modalities, p. 236. In the preface to the 1980 edition of Fmm u Logical
Point of Viw, Quine retracts his mistaken claims about Russell.
17. Haward University Press, 1980. See also Kripkes Identity and Necessity, in Stephen
Schwartz (ed.), Numzng, NecessiQ and Nuturul Kin& (Cornell University Press, 1977) pp. 66-1 0 1.
18. See Marcus, The Identity of Individuals in a Strict Functional Calculus of Second Order,
Journal ofsymbolic Logic, vol. xii (1947), pp. 12-15 (published under the name Ruth Barcan).
For related proofs, see Kripkes Numing undNecessiQ, p. 3, and Identity and Necessity, p. 89.

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With the necessity of identity in mind, consider the familiar example of

Phosphorus and Hesperus. Lets say that a certain star appears in the morning
and that we give it the name Phosphorus. A star appears in the evening
and we give it the name Hesperus. If, as Kripke argues, proper names are
genuine referring terms, then an essentialist is committed to:

(7) Necessarily Phosphorus = Phosphorus.

Further, assume that it is discovered empirically that

(8) Phosphorus = Hesperus.

This happens, for example, if we discover that one heavenly body, Venus,
traces a certain path in the sky. It follows, for an essentialist, that

(9) Necessarily Phosphorus = Hesperus.

However, it might be objected that this essentialist commitment is absurd:
(9) is clearly false for there is a possible situation in which Hesperus is not
identical with Phosphorus. We can, on this objection, describe such a situation
simply by describing a situation in which the star that appears in the morning
is not identical with the star that appears in the evening. And surely, it would
be said, such a situation is possible. Thus, on this objection, (9) is false and
the identity between Hesperus and Phosphorus holds, but does so only
contingently.
Kripke takes this objection very seriously. He thinks that the objector is
correct in saying that there is an important element of contingency in this
case, but that the objector wrongly expresses this intuition as the denial of
(9).In order to show that (9) is false, the objector relies on the falsity of
(1 0) Necessarily the star that appears in the evening = the star that appears
in the m ~ r n i n g . ~
Kripke points out, however, that the falsity of (10) entails the falsity of (9)
only if being the star that appears in the evening were sufficient for being
Hesperus and being the star that appears in the morning were sufficient for
being Phosphorus. But these properties are clearly not sufficient. We can easily
imagine that a different star besides the one that actually appears in the
morning is the morning star. We can imagine, for example, that Jupiter and
not Venus is the star that appears in the morning. Thus the property of being
the morning star is not sufficient for being the star we have in fact named
19. It should be noted that (10) is false only when interpreted so that one or both of the definite
descriptions has narrow scope relative to the modal operator. If interpreted such that both
definite descriptions have wide scope, then (1 0) would be true just in case the morning star
is in fact identical with the evening star. I will not spell out these different readings here.

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Phosphorus. (Similar claims apply to Hesperus and being the evening

star.)
So by seeing the falsity of (10) as leading to the falsity of (9), the objector
is mistaking a contingent connection between the properties of being the
morning star and being the evening star for a contingent identity between
the things that do in fact have the properties. The objectors intuition that
this case involves a contingent connection is correct. The objector, however,
wrongly expresses this intuition of contingency by denying (9) instead of
merely denying (1 0).
There seems to be a general recipe here for reconstruing intuitions of
contingency that appear to make trouble for essentialist claims. To elicit this
general recipe, it is important to note two things. First, for Kripke, proper
names are a subclass of the rigid designators. A rigid designator is a term
that picks out the same object in all possible worlds (in which it picks out
anything at all). In addition to proper names, some definite descriptions, such
as a the square root of 4 are rigid designators. This description picks out
the same thing, viz. 2, in all possible worlds and so it is a rigid designator. A
non-rigid designator is, as we have seen, the morning star which picks out
Venus in this world, but picks out, for example, Jupiter in another world.
The second thing to note is that, for Kripke, the property of being the
morning star, in terms of which Phosphorus is non-rigidly designated, is a
property used to fix the reference of the term Phosphorus. We initially
identified Phosphorus as the morning star. Similarly, being the evening star
is the property used to fix the reference of Hesperus. This property too is
an identifying property.
In the Hesperus case, the problematic intuition of contingency is expressed
as the denial of (9). Kriple says, however, that this intuition of contingency
should instead be expressed as the denial of (10).Notice that Kripke is suggesting
that an intuition of contingency, originally expressed (in the denial of (9))
in terms that rigidly designate their objects (viz. the terms Hesperus and
Phosphorus) should be expressed (in the denial of (1 0)) in terms that do not
rigidly designate their objects (viz. the terms the evening star and the
morning star). Further, the non-rigid designators in question pick out an
object by invoking the property used to identify the object in the actual world.20
This suggests the following general recipe. If the intuition of contingency
expressed as

(1 1) It is not necessarily the case that

a is

(where a is a rigid designator) generates a problem for an essentialist claim,

then reconstrue that intuition of contingency as

(12) It is not necessarily the case that the G is F

20. Actually, to avoid a counterexample to the necessity of identity, it would be sufficient if only
one of the two rigid designators in the denial of (9) were re-expressed. See note 19.

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where the G is a description that non-rigidly designates a by means of a

property used to identify a. In other words, the Kripkean strategy of
reconstruing a problematic intuition of contingency is to replace a rigid
designator by a non-rigid designator for the same object, and in particular
by a non-rigid designator that involves a property used to identify the object.
By seeing (12) as true while regarding (11) as false, Kripke is implicitly
regarding the definite description the G in (12) as having narrow scope
relative to the modal operator. We can see this by offering a Russellian
disambiguation of (12):
(12a) (Ex)((y)(Gy
y = x) and -0Fx)
(12b) -O(Ex)((y)(Gy y = x ) and Fx).

(12a) is the wide scope reading; it says: concerning the thing x such that x is
the G , x is not necessarily F. (12b) is the narrow scope reading; it says: it is
not necessary that whatever thing x is the G is also F. Notice that if (1 1) is
false, then so is (1 2a). This is because in (12a) the variable x serves as a rigid
designator for the thing that is in fact the G, i.e. for a. Since the variable
here rigidly designates a and since, for Kripke,
(1 1) It is not necesssarily the case that

is F

is false, it follows that (12a) is false. However, the falsity of (1 1) does not entail
the falsity of (12b). (12b) is true just in case there is a possible situation in
which whatever is the G is not F. And this can be so, even if the thing that
is actually the G is necessarily F. Since Kripke regards (1 1) as false and (12)
as true, and since this can be so only if (12) is given a narrow scope reading
as in (12b), he must be interpreting (12) as (12b).
Here we can see how Kripkes strategy is an elaboration of the Smullyan
strategy. Both Kripke and Smullyan realise that essentialists are committed
to claims about an object that might seem to be false (viz. (3) and (9)).Kripke
and Smullyan each show that these claims can be seen to be unproblematically
true once they are distinguished from certain related, but false claims. In
these other claims, a definite description that in fact picks out the object in
question is interpreted as having narrow scope relative to a modal operator
(cf. (3b), (10) and the denial of (12b) each of which Kripke and Smullyan
would regard as false).
Kripke goes beyond Smullyan in the following way. The Smullyan strategy
only provides a way to safeguard problematic modal claims (such as (3)) that
contain a definite description. Kripke can handle such cases, but he also
provides a way to safeguard claims such as (9) that contain proper names
and not definite descriptions.
Kripke employs his general strategy to defend a number of essentialist
claims that he endorses. These include the claims: water is necessarily H 2 0 ,
heat is necessarily molecular motion, Cicero is necessarily Tully, cats are
necessarily mammals, gold is necessarily the element with atomic number

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79, the Queen necessarily has the parents she in fact came from, etc. Some
of these claims will be touched on below.
4. More Objections to Transparency
Despite the efforts of Smullyan and Kripke, attempts to demonstrate the
opacity of modal contexts still flourish. Indeed, the currently popular counterexamples have the same basic form as those already rebutted. Interestingly,
however, in response to these more recent counterexamples, essentialists tend
not to use the kind of strategy developed by Smullyan and Kripke.
Perhaps the most popular argument for opacity is this: Lets say that a
certain artisan at a certain time puts together a lump in the shape of the top
half of a certain giants body and a lump in the shape of the bottom half of
that giants body. Call the resulting statue Goliath and the resulting lump
Lumpl. The lump and the statue came into existence simultaneously, i.e.
at the moment when the artisan fused the two original lumps of clay. Suppose
that the artisan, soon after, destroys both the statue and the lump at once,
by smashing, or by means of an explosion, or whatever. Lumpl and Goliath
thus go out of existence at the same time and we can, indeed, say that there
are no temporal differences between them. The statue exists when and only
when the lump exists. It is plausible to say that
(13) Goliath is essentially a statue
and that
(14) Lumpl is not essentially a statue.
This is so because, for example, Lumpl might have been squeezed into a
ball and not been destroyed, but this cannot be said of Goliath. If (13) and
(14) are true, and if modal contexts are transparent, it follows that

(15) Goliath # Lumpl.

But, so the objection goes, this is absurd. Noonan puts the point in this way:
Unless we are prepared to accept that purely material entities of identical
material constitution at all times may nonetheless be distinct, we must accept
that Goliath and Lump1 are identical. Since the assumption of the
transparency of modal contexts leads to the absurdity (15) we must, on this
objection, conclude that modal contexts are opaque.2
21. Constitution is Identity, Mind, vol. cii (1993), pp. 133--146.
22. The example originates with Allan Gibbard, Contingent Identity, Journal of Philosophical
Lo&, vol. iv (1975), pp. 187-221. This example or similar ones are employed by David
Lewis, Counterparts of Persons and Their Bodies, Journal of Philoso&, vol. lxviii (1971),
pp. 203-21 1, and On the PluruliQ of wo7& (Blackwell, 1986); Harold Noonan, Reply to
Lowe on Ships and Structure, Anahsk, vol. xlviii (1988), pp. 221-223, Pmsonal Idmtig
(Routledge, 1989), pp. 145- 147, Indeterminate Identity, ContingentIdentity and Abelardian
Predicates, 77ze Philosophical Quarterly vol. xli (1991), pp. 183-193, and Constitution is
Identity; and Robinson, Re-identifying Matter.

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Why do these philosophers think that in this case the statue is identical
with the lump? The consideration usually appealed to is parsimony. Lewis
says, it reeks of double-counting to deny identity in such a case.23 In most
cases these arguments amount to little more than an assertion of an intuition
that there is only one object here. Such arguments do not have much force,
for it seems unlikely that philosophers who are inclined to regard modal
contexts as transparent would share this intuition. Or, if they do share this
intuition, such philosophers might see giving it up and accepting that there
is a multiplicity of objects in this case as a price worth paying in order to
maintain what they take to be the most natural account of modal predication.
Recently, however, a more subtle and potentially more effective argument
for identity in this case has emerged. This argument turns on a general
principle of the form

(16) Ify is a paradigm statue and x is intrinsically exactly likey and x does
not partly overlap any statue then x is a
(16) is, in effect, a claim of supervenience: x a n d y cannot differ with respect
to being a statue unless there is some intrinsic difference between them.25
This is a very plausible principle; it expresses the view that being a statue is
not a basic property. Something is or fails to be a statue in virtue of certain
other properties it has or fails to havez6 If (16) is correct, the claim of identity
follows quickly: Lump 1 is, on a plausible construal of intrinsic, intrinsically
exactly like the statue Goliath. Thus, by (16), Lumpl counts as a statue.
Since Lumpl is a statue, it could fail to be identical with the statue Goliath
only if there are two statues each wholly occupying the same region at the
same time. But asJohnston points out,* this seems rather gratuitous, especially
in light of the fact that once it is granted that Lumpl is a statue, it will, after
all, have all the modal properties of a statue, including being essentially a
statue. So the modal grounds for distinguishing Goliath and Lumpl would
disappear once it is granted that Lump1 is a statue. Thus no basis would
remain, it seems, for denying the identity of Lump 1 and Goliath once (16) is
accepted.
But is (16) correct? To deny it, one would have to allow that there are at
least some cases in which an objecty is a statue and x is not, yet there is no
intrinsic difference between them. If this were the case, then there would, it
seems, be no way to explain whyy is a statue and x is not. (Appealing to
modal differences would not help because such differences themselves are
explained in terms of the difference with regard to the property of being a
statue.)** In this sense, one might say that the difference between x a n d y
23. Orr the Pluralig .f Worlds, p. 252; Noonan elaborates this point in much detail in Constitution
is Identity.
24. On the reason for the third conjunct of the antecedent,see Noonans Constitution is Identity.
25. NeitherJohnstonnor Noonan, who both discuss this argument, offers a definition of intrinsic.
26. See Michael Burke, Copper Statues and Pieces of Copper: A Challenge to the Standard
Account, Analysis, vol. lii (1992), p. 14.
27. Mark Johnston, Constitution is Not Identity, Mind, vol. ci (1992),p. 98.
28. See Burke, Copper Statues and Pieces of Copper.

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with regard to the property of being a statue would fail to be grounded in

any further difference between x andy (see the discussion of Forbes below).
Now this might not be an unacceptable view. As we will see, there are quite
plausible cases of ungrounded differences in identity properties, so it may not
after all be absurd to say that there are certain cases of ungrounded differences
in statue properties.* This is by no means an argument for rejecting (16). I
am simply pointing out that a final verdict on the argument for identity that
relies on (16) must await a general account of the kinds of ungrounded
properties we are willing to tolerate and those we are not.
At any rate, it is difficult to deny that there is at least prima facie plausibility
in the claim that Goliath and Lumpl are identical, How then do essentialists
respond to the charge that they are not able to accommodate this identity?
Typically, they are willing to follow the modal intuitions (13) and (1 4) to the
conclusion of non-identity in (15).30
Relying on modal intuitions such as (1 3) and (14) to reach a conclusion of
non-identity in this case is, perhaps, a defensible position. But what is striking
about the procedure of essentialists here is that they do not avail themselves
of a strategy for maintaining the plausible claim of the identity of Goliath
and Lumpl. This strategy is the strategy of reconstruing intuitions of
contingency in order to preserve intuitive claims of identity. Essentialists such
as Smullyan and Kripke use this approach to great effect in responding to
the objections discussed earlier. But when it comes to the most recent
incarnation of these objections, essentialists, quite puzzingly, abandon one of
their most powerful tools.
My puzzlement concerns in particular:

(14) Lumpl is not essentially a statue.

A Kripkean reconstrual of (14) certainly seems to be available. According to
the general recipe outlined earlier, to reconstrue (14), we need to find a nonrigid designator, the G, that picks out Lumpl in terms of a property used
to identify Lumpl and is such that
(14) It is not necessarily the case that the G is a statue
29. Note, however, that the Goliath case would be an exception in this regard. In most cases,
the fact that x is a statue a n d y is a non-statue would not be ungrounded. In most cases,
there would be qualitative differences between them that would explain this difference.
30. See Lowe, finds ojBing, esp. pp. 56-57; David Wiggins, Smmacs and Substance (Harvard
University Press, 1980); Stephen Yablo, Identity, Essence, and Indiscernibility, Journal of
Philmo&, vol. lxxwiv (1987), pp. 293-314. Judith Jarvis Thomson discusses but does not
endorse this kind of modal argument in Parthood and Identity Across Time, Journal of
Phzfosop/y,vol. lxxx (1983), pp. 201-220, (cf. esp. pp. 218-220). In Constitution Is Not
Identity, Johnston accepts the soundness of the essentialist inference (1 3)-(15), but his
primary reason for accepting non-identity in this case is that he thinks that, because of the
vagueness of the boundaries of physical objects, there would be an unattractive proliferation
of statues and other objects if we did not deny identity in the Goliath and related cases.
In Constitution is Identity, Noonan argues that such vagueness does not necessitate
non-identity.

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is true. To find such a designator, we simply have to recall how we initially

identified Lumpl, viz. as the lump formed (by a certain artisan at a certain
time) by putting together a lump in the shape of the top half of a certain
giants body and a lump in the shape of the bottom half of that giants body.
Certainly the designator involved here is non-rigid. It might have been the
case that the lump formed in that way was different from the lump that was
actually formed in that way. (This might be the case if the artisan had
purchased his clay from a different store, etc.) Further, when we substitute
this (rather complicated) designator for the G in (14), the resulting sentence
seems to be true. Certainly, it is possible that a lump formed in that way is
not a statue. This is because it is possible that, unlike Lumpl in the actual
situation, a lump formed in that way outlasts the statue it initially constitutes
and so is not identical with it or any other statue. Notice that, when conjoined
with (1 3), the Kripkean reconstrual of (14) does not, unlike (14)itself, lead to
(1 5). Thus by reconstruing the intuition of contingency in the above way, the
essentialist can avoid any problematic commitment to non-identity in this case.
So my question is this: given that such a reconstrual appears to be available,
why do essentialists, in general, not avail themselves of it? Why do essentialists
readily accept such reconstruals in the Hesperus case, the number of planets
case, etc., yet fail to do so in the statue case and in other cases which currently
pose the greatest threat to essentialism?
Perhaps there is some principled reason why an essentialist should not
accept a Kripkean reconstrual in the Goliath case, even if such a reconstrual
is accepted in other similar cases3 But it is not immediately clear what such
a reason could be and, if there is no such reason, then the essentialist systems
that deny identity in the Goliath case must be seen as containing a significant
element of arbitrariness. And this, I believe, makes such systems vulnerable
to Quines main objection to essentialists: the lack of a principled basis for
accepting certain essentialist claims and rejecting others. (I should note that
Burke32and Van C l e ~ seem
e ~ ~to combine essentialism with identity in cases
like that of Goliath. They do not do so, however, on the basis of a Kripkean
method of reconstruai.)
YALE UNIVERSITY

MICHAEL DELLA ROCCA

31. I explore this issue in my paper Essentialists and Essentialism (Journal of Philnsop/y,
forthcoming).
32. See Copper Statues and Pieces of Copper; Dion and Theon: An Essentialist Solution to
an Ancient Puzzle, Journal ofPhilosop/y, vol. xci (1994), pp. 129-139; and Preserving the
Principle of One Object to a Place: A Novel Account of the Relations Among Objects,
Sorts, Sortals, and Persistence Conditions, Philosophy and Phenomenological Reseanh, vol. liv
(19941, pp. 591-624.
33. James Van Cleve, Why a Set Contains Its Members Essentially, NONOUS,
vol. xix (1985), pp.
585-602 (see esp. $6).

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