Essential Properties Are Super-Explanatory: Taming Metaphysical Modality

Abstract

This article aims to build a bridge between two areas of philosophical research: the structure of kinds and metaphysical modality. Our central thesis is that kinds typically involve super-explanatory properties, and that these properties are therefore metaphysically essential to natural kinds. Philosophers of science who work on kinds tend to emphasize their complexity, and are generally resistant to any suggestion that they have essences. The complexities are real enough, but they should not be allowed to obscure the way that kinds are typically unified by certain core properties. We show how this unifying role offers a natural account of why certain properties are metaphysically essential to kinds.

Superexplanations for counterfactual knowledge

“…Counterfactual suppositions could then be developed in virtually any way, and so become theoretically and practically irrelevant. Treating the superexplanatory core fixed as a "constitutive fact" in our evaluations thus secures the correct modal evaluations, like Williamson's account predicts, while also further clarifying what those facts are and why they have such a special status in counterfactual thinking (see also Godman, Mallozzi, and Papineau 2020). 14 12 Papineau 2013 makes a similar point.…”

“…The key suggestion is that superexplanatory one-to-many structure, at least in the range of cases we discussed, explicates the familiar notion of "essence" or the "nature" of things as the source of metaphysical necessity, which features in the Kripkean bridge-principle as well as in Fine's account as outlined above. If this is correct, whenever we find this one-to-many nomological structure characteristic of a superexplanatory property, that property will be possessed in all metaphysically possible worlds (see also Godman, Mallozzi, and Papineau 2020). In sections 4.1-4.3 below I briefly illustrate a number of applications of superexplanatory essentialism to central cases involving various natural kinds, individuals, as well as philosophical zombies.…”

“…Philosophers of biology think of essences as relational and historical: what determines kind-membership is having a certain history. In Godman, Mallozzi, and Papineau (2020) we take a similar line, arguing that historical and, particularly, copying mechanisms have the relevant superexplanatory powers for the many phenotypic features that are typically shared by the members of a given taxon; particularly, we look at species. While an explanation merely in terms of intrinsic essences fails to deal with non-genetic inheritance and non-sexual reproduction , it is the copying mechanism from common ancestors having certain features that properly explains why all the same features consistently co-occur in the members of a given species.…”

Perspectival Realism

“…500-501, emphasis in original). Godman et al (2020) have further explored the extent to which the notion of historical lineage from Ruth Millikan's (1998Millikan's ( , 1999 influential work can be reconciled with a suitable version of essentialism about natural kinds.…”

Social categories in the making: construction or recruitment?

“…First, necessity. The proponents of the historical reproduction approach state that being a part of a lineage is a necessary condition for kind membership (Godman et al, 2020;Millikan, 1998). This is why swamp tigers (see Godman, 2020, chapter 4) could not be real tigers, even if they shared all of their kind-specific properties with them.…”