Essential Truths and Their Truth-Grounds

Abstract

This paper motivates and defends a principle which captures a systematic connection between essence, truth, and grounding. It says that if a proposition expresses an essential truth, i.e., if it is true in virtue of the nature of some objects, then there are grounds for its truth which involve these objects. Together with the assumption that a fact can only be grounded in facts which are relevant to it, this principle is then applied in an argument against the monotonicity of the Essentialist notion 'true in virtue of the nature of'.

The strong arm of the law: a unified account of necessary and contingent laws of nature

“… 30 We are assuming the rather common view that essence is monotonic: if a proposition is true in virtue of the essence of some plurality of entities xx , and yy is a plurality that contains xx , then is also true in virtue of the essence of yy (see Fine 1995 ; Zylstra 2019 ). However, one may have independent reasons to think that essence is non-monotonic (see Michels 2018 ). And if such a view were assumed, (Mixed Essential Holding), in its current form, may be problematic: In particular, we should not exclude the possibility that, for some or indeed all metaphysically necessary laws, the -relation holds in virtue of the essence of only one of the universals involved.…”