Philosophical Review

Necessity, Essence, and Individuation: A Defense of Conventionalism. by Alan SidelleReview by: Stephen YabloThe Philosophical Review, Vol. 101, No. 4 (Oct., 1992), pp. 878-881Published by: Duke University Press on behalf of Philosophical ReviewStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2185945 .Accessed: 16/12/2013 23:27

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The Philosophical Review, Vol. 101, No. 4 (October 1992)

NECESSITY, ESSENCE, AND INDIVIDUATION: A DEFENSE OF CON- VENTIONALISM. By ALAN SIDELLE. Ithaca, N.Y., Cornell University Press, 1989. Pp. xv, 216.

Near the middle of his book Meaning and Modality, Casimir Lewy takes up the theory that "necessary propositions. . . 'owe their truth to' linguistic conventions."' All that conventions can do, he protests, is help to deter- mine what a sentence says, or what proposition it expresses; whether the proposition holds true is then another question, to which rules of usage are quite irrelevant. Such a view does not rule out conventional truth entirely, since our fiat might take the form: sentence S shall express a proposition that is (among other things) true. Far though from showing how p, the proposition expressed, could be conventionally true, this approach will be circular unless p has its truth value independently of the convention. With doubtful historical accuracy I will call this the Lewy point.2

Much of Alan Sidelle's ingenious project seems to me to underestimate the Lewy point and the thinking behind it. For while Sidelle's position is that "all necessity is grounded in our conventions, that there is no necessity 'out there'" (xi), in his arguments this becomes blurred with, first, semantical claims about the grounds of modal sentences' truth, and later, epistemo- logical claims about the sources of modal knowledge.

Examples of the first blurring occur in chapter 1, "Realism and Con- ventionalism." According to conventionalism, "if water is essentially H20, this is going to have something to do with our intentions in using 'water'" (14). Unlike the realist, then, for whom "someone who thinks that Twin Earth XYZ is water is just wrong" (16), the conventionalist maintains that he "is not just wrong; he is . .. using 'water' differently than . .. the rest of us" (17). But, how could it mitigate the wrongness of thinking that XYZ- water is possible for 'XYZ-water is possible', in the mouth of one who does not mean water by 'water', to express a truth? (By this reasoning, it is not 'just wrong" either to regard snow as inflammable, for 'inflammable' can mean not flammable and 'snow' can refer to cocaine.)

Before considering examples of the second blurring, let me try to locate Sidelle's conventionalism with respect to the traditional version. Where Carnap and others equated the truth of LRS with the analyticity of S, for

'Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976, 53. 2For related ideas see A. C. Ewing, "The Linguistic Theory of A Priori Proposi-

tions," Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, n.s. 40 (1940), and A. Pap, Semantics and Necessary Truth (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1958).

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Sidelle there need only be an analytic truth Q, typically modality-involving, that, together with some synthetic nonmodal truth R, entails LS.3 So, using a for Hesperus and b for Phosphorus, a = b -- Wa = b combines with a = b to entail Ea = b. Other synthetic necessities submitting to similar treatment, the metaphysical "must" remains in some sense semantical.

In what sense, though? At times Sidelle seems to echo the traditional line that all necessity is a form of analyticity, adding only that some sentences' necessity is a matter not of their analyticity but that of related sentences. But while this would be a tidy result, I wonder whether his theory really delivers it. Even granting that each true CLS is provable from some analytic Q plus nonmodal auxiliary premises, this hardly puts Q's analyticity in the role of necessity-maker, for the fact that it is analytic plays no role in the proof.

More likely Sidelle is advancing a slightly looser claim. Whether the modal "must" derives its force from the analytic one or not, still, when we reflect that all true necessity claims follow from synthetic nonmodal truths plus analytic trivialities, we see that the first "must" expresses nothing "metaphysically deep" (9-10). Thus, the a priori principle' that identicals are necessarily identical is

what allows us to conclude ... that Hesperus is not only identical to Phospho- rus, but that it is necessarily so .... But such principles tell us nothing of the independent world. The conclusion, then, should be that the factual, or em- pirical, content of 'Hesperus is necessarily identical to Phosphorus' and kin- dred truths is nothing beyond that of 'Hesperus is identical to Phosphorus'. (93)

Here Sidelle reasons that since (A) modal truths are deducible from non- modal truths plus a priori principles, (B) modal truths have no "factual content" beyond that of corresponding nonmodal ones. Holding the ar- gument together is his assumption that "the objects of [a prior] knowledge are not facts about the world" (1), that they are "devoid of factual content."

Now, "a priority" being an epistemological notion, and "factual content" coming from metaphysics, this assumption is bound to be controversial. A priori contingencies like 'I exist' and 'this stick is one meter long' certainly seem fact-stating, and so, perhaps, do certain a priori necessities, like 'wr is the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter', and 'every animal shall remain one until its death'.

Applying this to the case at hand, what prevents someone from constru- ing Sidelle's a priori modal principles as metaphysically substantive and so

3In some cases the argument will require several Q-like analytic truths and R-like synthetic ones.

4Note the switch from analyticity to a priority; Sidelle lays little weight on the distinction and I will try to follow him in this.

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capable of boosting the factual content of his nonmodal auxiliary pre- mises? Such a person might accept (something like) Sidelle's epistemolog- ical thesis (A) while dissenting from (B), its supposed metaphysical upshot. True, she would say,

once we have achieved determinate reference, it is no longer an open question what the modal properties of [the] thing are-for we must settle upon them, by our choice of referential intentions, in order to achieve such reference (109),

still it was only because the thing antecedently had those properties that our referential intention found its mark. As for Sidelle's claim that

the modal intuitions whereby we come about modal knowledge are reflections of how we have determined what it is that we are talking. . . about, and not of the thing picked out ( 1 1),

she would perceive in it a false dichotomy: if we intend to talk about something of the kind statue, and the intention succeeds, then what we are talking about is a statue, with all the modal properties that entails. This, indeed, is how we know that old Goliath there is a statue essentially, that it could not have originated from wholly different matter, and so forth.5

Even if Sidelle's epistemological thesis (A) is accepted, then, its meta- physical counterpart (B) does not follow.6 What is worse, the failure of this "direct" argument for (B) tends to undercut Sidelle's preferred argument for the metaphysical thesis, namely that nothing else can explain our knowledge of a posteriori modal truths. For on the face of it, the realist who embraces just (A) would seem to have about the same resources as Sidelle to account for this knowledge.

Throughout I've been relying on Lewy's idea that while sentences might conventionally express true propositions, the latter will have their truth values nonconventionally. This was unfair because Sidelle thinks conven- tions can make propositions true, by "making" the truth-conferring objects and kinds:

5For instance, we know a priori that (i) if Goliath meets the categorical conditions for statuehood, it is a statue, and that (ii) every statue is essentially a statue. Add to this the a posteriori knowledge that (iii) Goliath meets the conditions, and its essential statuehood follows.

6Tellingly, the epistemological thesis is anticipated in Naming and Necessity: "All of the cases of the necessary a posteriori advocated in the text have the [following] special character ... : Philosophical analysis tells us that they cannot be contingently true, so any empirical knowledge of their truth is automatically empirical knowledge that they are necessary . . . [This] may give a clue to a general characterization of a posteriori knowledge of necessary truths" (159). I doubt that Kripke intended these remarks as a prolegomenon to conventionalism.

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If what it is to be an individual of a certain sort is to have certain features ... essentially . .. then [there is] reason to think that if there are any such indi- viduals, they must ... not be 'fully independent', but should arise out of our individuative practice (57). How can our conventions do more than make some sentence necessary? ... [A]ccording to the conventionalist, our conventions also articulate the world. (76-77)

But then conventionalism is a far more radical doctrine than initially ap- peared. To any ordinary way of thinking, 'just as ... we have nothing to do with the fact that Kareem Abdul-Jabbar is taller than Willy Shoemaker, so we have nothing to do with the fact that water is necessarily H20" (6). Although one would have expected the conventionalist to correct common sense on the second point only, by the end of the day, both claims have been rejected.8 This leaves me wondering what makes Sidelle's courageous theory a conventionalism especially about necessity.

STEPHEN YABLO University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

7Other passages suggest that it is not just individuals qua modal that our conven- tions create but also individuals qua items with determinate spatiotemporal extent. (53-56)

8Ultimately, it seems, the only "objective" facts on Sidelle's view concern some- thing called "stuff," "stuff looking, of course, just as the world looks but devoid of modal properties, identity conditions, and all that imports. For a slogan, one might say that stuff is preobjectual" (55). But even nonmodal properties have modal prop- erties, identity conditions, and so on, so it seems we should dig down deeper yet, to some sort of prequalitative goop.

The Philosophical Review, Vol. 101, No. 4 (October 1992)

MATERIAL BEINGS. By PETER VAN INWAGEN. Ithaca, N.Y., Cornell Uni- versity Press, 1990. Pp. viii, 299.

Peter Van Inwagen has written a fascinating, densely argued, and highly original book on the metaphysics of material objects. The account of ma- terial objects he develops is based on a radical theory of parthood, namely that there is a material object that objects 01-O., compose if, and only if, the activity of 01-On constitutes a life. This proposal is motivated in part by the difficulties faced by standard criteria for material object parthood (e.g., appeals to contact and various sorts of physical bonding) and in part by its power to dissolve the great philosophical problems concerning the identity of material objects and their endurance through change. Included

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Article Contentsp. 878p. 879p. 880p. 881

Issue Table of ContentsThe Philosophical Review, Vol. 101, No. 4 (Oct., 1992), pp. 745-980Volume Information [pp. ]Front Matter [pp. ]Perception, Concepts, and Memory [pp. 745-763]The Unity of the Virtues in Plato's Protagoras and Laches [pp. 765-789]Aristotle, Teleology, and Reduction [pp. 791-825]Book ReviewsReview: untitled [pp. 827-830]Review: untitled [pp. 830-834]Review: untitled [pp. 835-838]Review: untitled [pp. 838-840]Review: untitled [pp. 840-844]Review: untitled [pp. 845-847]Review: untitled [pp. 847-849]Review: untitled [pp. 849-851]Review: untitled [pp. 851-853]Review: untitled [pp. 853-855]Review: untitled [pp. 856-858]Review: untitled [pp. 858-860]Review: untitled [pp. 860-862]Review: untitled [pp. 862-865]Review: untitled [pp. 865-867]Review: untitled [pp. 867-870]Review: untitled [pp. 871-873]Review: untitled [pp. 873-875]Review: untitled [pp. 875-877]Review: untitled [pp. 878-881]Review: untitled [pp. 881-884]Review: untitled [pp. 884-888]Review: untitled [pp. 888-890]Review: untitled [pp. 890-893]Review: untitled [pp. 893-895]Review: untitled [pp. 895-898]Review: untitled [pp. 898-901]Review: untitled [pp. 901-903]Review: untitled [pp. 903-905]Review: untitled [pp. 906-908]Review: untitled [pp. 908-911]Review: untitled [pp. 911-914]Review: untitled [pp. 914-916]Review: untitled [pp. 916-918]Review: untitled [pp. 919-921]Review: untitled [pp. 921-923]Review: untitled [pp. 924-926]Review: untitled [pp. 926-928]Review: untitled [pp. 929-931]Review: untitled [pp. 931-933]Review: untitled [pp. 934-936]Review: untitled [pp. 936-938]Review: untitled [pp. 939-942]Review: untitled [pp. 942-947]Review: untitled [pp. 948-950]Review: untitled [pp. 950-953]Review: untitled [pp. 953-956]Review: untitled [pp. 956-959]

Books Received [pp. 961-972]Back Matter [pp. ]