An Analysis of Intrinsicality

Abstract

The leading account of intrinsicality over the last thirty years has arguably been David Lewis's account in terms of perfect naturalness. Lewis's account, however, has three serious problems: i) it cannot allow necessarily coextensive properties to differ in whether they are intrinsic; ii) it falsely classifies non‐qualitative properties like being Obama as non‐intrinsic; and iii) it is incompatible with a number of metaphysical theories that posit irreducibly non‐categorical properties. I argue that, as a result of these problems, Lewis's account should be rejected and replaced with an alternative account, which also analyses intrinsicality in terms of perfect naturalness, but which avoids these problems.

Intrinsic properties and relations

“…In other words, it might be thought that it is time to give up on the logical-constitution approach and to start enlisting the help of genuinely metaphysical notions, such as Lewis's concept of a perfectly natural attribute. 51 But this sort of proposal, however tempting, 51 This concept has notably been employed in Lewis's own (1983b;1986a) accounts of intrinsicality as well as in those of Langton & Lewis (1998) and Marshall (2016a). What makes this concept a natural choice is perhaps the fact that it is in some suitable sense a concept of fundamentality and thus gives rise to the hope that, once E * is represented in perfectly natural terms, its true extrinsic character will be evident from the representation in question.…”

Intrinsicality and Entanglement

“…So one upshot of this paper is that analyses of intrinsicality should probably not rely on duplication at all. Perhaps hyperintensional analyses are the way to go (Bader, 2013;Marshall, 2016a).…”

A Puzzle About Points

“…At least that's what I will mean by ‘intrinsic’. Even if Lewis () and others are wrong in claiming that this captures our pre‐theoretic notion of intrinsicality – see Eddon () and Marshall () for arguments to that effect – it'll serve my purposes just fine as long the assumptions of the puzzle are plausible so understood.…”