Page 44 - Encyclopedia of Philosophy of Language

Language, Metaphysics, and Ontology
excesses of this idealist essentialism, for the first half of the twentieth century there was little interest in essentialist doctrines (with the notable exception of Wittgenstein's Tractatus). Indeed W. V. O. Quine famously argued that essentialism is incoherent (Lin- sky 1971). Within the phenomenological movement, by contrast, essentialist doctrines flourished, though in the writings of Heidegger and his disciples the use of essentialist terminology is problematic.
2. Modern Essentialism
Since the development of possible world semantics for modal logic in the 1960s, however, essentialist doctrines have become fashionable within analytic philosophy. Quine's arguments against the very idea of essentialism were decisively refuted by Kripke (Kripke 1980), and some philosophers have sought to revive Aristotelian doctrines (Putnam 1975). What remains wide open to argument, however, is the extent of a defensibleessentialism.
A modest position draws on familiar necessary truths (e.g., that 5 is less than 7) and argues that these can be reinterpreted as identifying essential properties of the objects referred to (i.e., that it is an essential property of 5 that it is less than 7). Where this modest essentialism concerns abstract objects, such as numbers, it suggests that these are just nodes within a network of internal relations. More ambitious essen- tialist positions concern concrete objects and,drawing on the thesis that an object's identity is essential to it, argue that its essential properties include its causal origin, its material constitution, and its kind (the tra- ditional Aristotelian essence); it is even urged that each object has a distinctive essential property (its haeccity) which sustains its identity through different possible situations.
Kripke and others have argued that the initial thesis here is a logical consequence of the necessary reflex- iveness of identity, and although this argument is not persuasive, the thesis itself seems integral to the con- cept of identity (though some theorists reject it—cf. David Lewis 1986). But whether this thesis has sig- nificant implications is much disputed. Critics argue that since possible situations can be specified by per- mutations of the properties of actual objects there is no need for the hypothesis of 'haeccities.' Further- more, it is argued (Mellor 1977), essentialists mis- represent natural necessity: the genetic dependence of children upon their parents should not be regarded as embodying a special 'metaphysical' necessity. Simi- larly, natural kinds should not be represented as Ari- stotelian essences, since the existence of general- izations about a kind at one level of explanation is compatible with a diversity of structures at a deeper level; thus water is a natural kind even though D2O as well as H2O is water. The only defensible essential- ism in the natural sciences appears to be one which invokes only Locke's nominal essences.
See also: Analyticity; Concepts; Natural Kinds; Necessity.
Bibliography
Kripke S A 1980 Naming and Necessity. Blackwell, Oxford Lewis D 1986 On the Plurality of Worlds. Blackwell, Oxford Linsky L (ed.) 1971 Reference and Modality. Oxford Uni-
versity Press, Oxford
Mellor D H 1977 Natural kinds. British Journal of the Phil-
osophy of Science 28:299-311
Putnam H 1975 The meaning of 'meaning.' In: Putnam H
Mind, Language and Reality. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge
Verificationist theories of meaning are concerned with cognitive significance. Their intention is to separate sentences into two distinct classes, namely those that have cognitive significance, or empirical meaning, on the one hand, and those that are meaningless on the other. However, in his Logic of Scientific Discovery Karl Popper argued that a criterion for demarcating the scientific from the nonscientific could be based not on how a claim, hypothesis, or theory is verified but rather on whether it is capable of falsification.
Universal statements such as 'All ravens are black' are not completely verifiable, since it would require examination of an infinite number of cases to establish
their truth. However, one counter example alone is sufficient to establish the falsity of such a statement. If a clear (but nowadays controversial) distinction is made between theory and observation, then theories could be divided into those which are open to falsi- fication (hence, for Popper, having empirical content) and those which are not. Theories which are vul- nerable to empirical refutation and which withstand it are, he claimed, thereby confirmed to some degree. Science makes progress, he suggested, by scientists making conjectures and then looking to see if nature refutes them.
Popper's work is based on a number of doubtful com-
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Falsificationism A. A. Brennan