Higher-Order Contingentism,Part 1: Closure and Generation

This paper is a study of higher-order contingentism – the view, roughly, that it is contingent what properties and propositions there are. We explore the motivations for this view and various ways in which it might be developed, synthesizing and expanding on work by Kit Fine, Robert Stalnaker, and Timothy Williamson. Special attention is paid to the question of whether the view makes sense by its own lights, or whether articulating the view requires drawing distinctions among possibilities that, according to the view itself, do not exist to be drawn. The paper begins with a non-technical exposition of the main ideas and technical results, which can be read on its own. This exposition is followed by a formal investigation of higher-order contingentism, in which the tools of variable-domain intensional model theory are used to articulate various versions of the view, understood as theories formulated in a higher-order modal language. Our overall assessment is mixed: higher-order contingentism can be fleshed out into an elegant systematic theory, but perhaps only at the cost of abandoning some of its original motivations.     

Kenosis,Necessity and Incarnation

The doctrine of the Incarnation faces the following modal challenge: ‘The Son, as God, exists of necessity; Jesus, as man, exists only contingently. Therefore they cannot be one and the same.’ On the face it, the kenotic model, on which the Son gave up some of the divine properties at the Incarnation, cannot help to meet this challenge, since the suggestion that the Son gave up necessary existence implies that the necessity in question was only contingent, and this notion makes no sense. A necessary being is necessarily (and therefore eternally) so. This paper, however, argues that some necessities may appropriately be described as ‘contingent’, being conditional on contingent and mutable circumstances, and that there is a natural understanding of divine necessity on which the Son could give up necessary existence on becoming incarnate.     

Higher-Order Contingentism,Part 3: Expressive Limitations

Two expressive limitations of an infinitary higher-order modal language interpreted on models for higher-order contingentism – the thesis that it is contingent what propositions, properties and relations there are – are established: First, the inexpressibility of certain relations, which leads to the fact that certain model-theoretic existence conditions for relations cannot equivalently be reformulated in terms of being expressible in such a language. Second, the inexpressibility of certain modalized cardinality claims, which shows that in such a language, higher-order contingentists cannot express what is communicated using various instances of talk of ‘possible things’, such as ‘there are uncountably many possible stars’.     

Contingentism versus Necessitism: The Tractatus Standpoint

The paper provides an interpretation of section 2.013 of the Tractatus which casts light on the strategic role that that section plays in the early Wittgenstein’s version of the ontology of logical atomism. The far‐reaching consequences that the proposed interpretation has on the issue of the metaphysical nature of objects are spelled out, and the identification of Tractatus objects with phenomenal qualities, that is with phenomenal abstract universals, is shown to be fully consistent with those consequences. As a by‐product of the analysis, the standpoint of the Tractatus with respect to both contingentism and necessitism is clarified.     

Grounding,Contingency and Transitivity

Grounding contingentism is the doctrine according to which grounds are not guaranteed to necessitate what they ground. In this paper I will argue that the most plausible version of contingentism (which I will label ‘serious contingentism’) is incompatible with the idea that the grounding relation is transitive, unless either ‘priority monism’ or ‘contrastivism’ are assumed.     

How Scientific Is Scientific Essentialism?

Scientific essentialism holds that: (1) each scientific kind is associated with the same set of properties in every possible world; and (2) every individual member of a scientific kind belongs to that kind in every possible world in which it exists. Recently, Ellis (Scientific essentialism, 2001; The philosophy of nature 2002) has provided the most sustained defense of scientific essentialism, though he does not clearly distinguish these two claims. In this paper, I argue that both claims face a number of formidable difficulties. The necessities of scientific essentialism are not adequately distinguished from semantic necessities, they have not been shown to be necessities in the strictest sense, they must be relativized to context, and they must either be confined to a subset of scientific properties without warrant or their connection to causal powers must be revoked. Moreover, upon closer examination (1) turns out to be a trivial thesis that can be satisfied by non-kinds, and (2) is inapplicable to some of the most fundamental kinds in the basic sciences.     

Impossible Odds

A thesis (“weak BCP”) nearly universally held among philosophers of probability connects the concepts of objective chance and metaphysical modality: Any prospect (outcome) that has a positive chance of obtaining is metaphysically possible—(nearly) equivalently, any metaphysically impossible prospect has zero chance. Particular counterexamples are provided utilizing the monotonicity of chance, one of them related to the four world paradox. Explanations are offered for the persistent feeling that there cannot be chancy metaphysical necessities or chancy metaphysical impossibilities. Chance is objective but contrary to popular opinion it is also largely epistemic. Chancy necessities are analogous to necessary a posteriori truths.     

Where Does Personality Have Its Influence? A Supermatrix of Consistency Concepts

ABSTRACT An understanding of the nature of personality depends on clear conceptions of consistency. Researchers have applied the term consistency in ambiguous and inconsistent ways over the last half century, which has led to a great deal of confusion and debate over the existence of personality. This article seeks to reframe and extend conceptions of consistency and thus proposes three important ways consistency concepts differ from each other. The first way consistency concepts differ from each other is in the competing determinant of behavior that the consistency is across: time, situation content, or behavior content. The second way consistency concepts differ from each other is in the definition of behavior enactment: single enactment, aggregate enactment, contingent enactment, or patterned enactment. When these two dimensions are crossed with a third dimension—definition of similarity (absolute, relative‐position, or ipsative)—they create a supermatrix of 36 consistency concepts. Empirical support for each of these 36 consistency concepts, or its failure, has uniquely different implications for the fundamental nature of personality. This supermatrix can serve as a guide for future research aimed at discovering the nature of personality.     

Critical note on Williamson: A defence of the actualism‐possibilism debate

In his book Modal Logic as Metaphysics, Williamson argues that the traditional actualist‐possibilist debate should be abandoned as hopelessly unclear and that we should get on with the clearer contingentism‐necessitism debate. We think that Williamson’s pessimism is not warranted by the brief arguments he gives. In this paper, we explain why and provide a clear formulation of the traditional actualist‐possibilist debate.     

Time,structure, and teaching as an adjunct

Contingent teaching has become the norm in most institutions. While the use of adjuncts and other non‐tenure track professors shows no sign of slowing down, the nature of contingent teaching is less known. This article examines how contingent teaching directly impacts the professor's teaching. My experience teaching religious studies courses from 2014 to the present has shown how contingent status affects significant issues such as the time and structure of teaching. Time is an essential component in teaching well. How the course is structured is equally important, or perhaps even more so, and has significant ramifications for a course. However, the nature of contingent labor impacts how time and structure is implemented in a course. This influences how I interact with the course material, the students, the department, and my ability to teach. See companion essays published in this issue of the journal by Adam Wirrig, Bradley Burroughs, Kyle Schenkewitz, and Charles Harrell.     

Schaffer on laws of nature

In ‘Quiddistic Knowledge’ (Schaffer in Philos Stud 123:1–32, 2005), Jonathan Schaffer argued influentially against the view that the laws of nature are metaphysically necessary. In this reply I aim to show how a coherent and well-motivated form of necessitarianism can withstand his critique. Modal necessitarianism—the view that the actual laws are the laws of all possible worlds—can do justice to some intuitive motivations for necessitarianism, and it has the resources to respond to all of Schaffer’s objections. It also has certain advantages over contingentism in the domain of modal epistemology. I conclude that necessitarianism about laws remains a live option.     

Physicalism, Conceivability and Strong Necessities

David Chalmers’ conceivability argument against physicalism relies on the entailment from a priori conceivability to metaphysical possibility. The a posteriori physicalist rejects this premise, but is consequently committed to psychophysical strong necessities. These don’t fit into the Kripkean model of the necessary a posteriori, and they are therefore, according to Chalmers, problematic. But given semantic assumptions that are essential to the conceivability argument, there is reason to believe in microphysical strong necessities. This means that some of Chalmers’ criticism is unwarranted, and the rest equally afflicts the dualist. Moreover, given that these assumptions are independently plausible, there’s a general case to be made for the existence of strong necessities outside the psychophysical domain.     

Perceiving Necessity

In many diagrams one seems to perceive necessity – one sees not only that something is so, but that it must be so. That conflicts with a certain empiricism largely taken for granted in contemporary philosophy, which believes perception is not capable of such feats. The reason for this belief is often thought well‐summarized in Hume's maxim: ‘there are no necessary connections between distinct existences’. It is also thought that even if there were such necessities, perception is too passive or localized a faculty to register them. We defend the perception of necessity against such Humeanism, drawing on examples from mathematics.     

The necessary a posteriori: A response to Tichý

Conclusion Some of Tichý's conclusions rest on an assumption about substitutivity which Kripke would not accept. If we grant the assumption, then Tichý successfully shows that we can discover true identity statements involving names a priori, but not that we can discover a priori what properties things have essentially. Many of Tichý's arguments require an implausible rejection of the possibility of indirect belief as described in Section III. 25Are there necessary a posteriori propositions? I have argued that we certainly can discover necessary propositions a posteriori, but have left it an open question whether there are necessary propositions which we can only discover a posteriori.What effect do the considerations here presented have on the positivist doctrine that the a priori and the necessary coincide? My explanation of how we discover necessary propositions a posteriori involves our believing them indirectly, in virtue of believing contingent propositions. I would argue that Kripke's examples of the contingent a priori involve, similarly, our believing the contingent propositions in directly, in virtue of believing necessary propositions.This suggests that a reformulation of the positivist thesis along something like the following lines may well be correct. Let us say that someone directly believes a proposition just in case he could not fail to believe it without being in a different cognitive state. Then perhaps one can directly believe a proposition on the basis of a priori evidence only if it is necessary, and can directly believe a proposition on the basis of a posteriori evidence only if it is contingent.     

The Application of Thurstone's Personality Schedule to Chinese Subjects

Summary

Three experiments were performed to determine the effects of requesting a favor or offering a contingent or noncontingent bribe upon subsequent altruistic behavior. In all three studies a control condition produced the least altruism, although the difference was significant in only one experiment. Although more Ss in the Favor condition were altruistic than in the Bribe condition in all three studies, the differences were not significant. Responses to the request for altruistic behavior appeared to depend upon the nature of the contact, the favor or bribe, and the experimenter, as well as upon the request itself.     

Rereading the Kripkean Intuition on Reference

Saul Kripke's thought experiments on the reference of proper names target the theory that the properties which identify a term's referent are the subject of an implicit agreement. Recently, survey versions of the experiments have been thought to show that intuitions about reference are culturally contingent. Proposing a revisionary interpretation, this article argues, first, that Kripke's Cicero/Feynman experiment reveals that every name user knows enough to be capable of identifying the same individual as the name's most informed users. Second, the article shows that Kripke's presentation of the Gödel/Jonah experiment is ambiguous with respect to the properties attributed to the referent. Disambiguated, the experiment fails to reveal that name users may be mistaken in every unique property they attribute. Since the experiment's ambiguity is replicated in survey presentations, cross‐cultural variation in survey response fails to show that intuitions about reference are culturally contingent.     

I. Psychologism,Functionalism, and the modal status of logical Laws

In a recent article (Inquiry, Vol. 19 [1976]), J. W. Meiland addresses the issue of psychologism in logic, which holds that logic is a branch of psychology and that logical laws (such as the Principle of Non‐Contradiction) are contingent upon the nature of the mind. Meiland examines Husserl's critique of psychologism, argues that Husserl is not convincing, and offers two new objections to the psychologistic thesis. In this paper I attempt to rebut those objections. In question are the acceptable criteria for determining the possibility or impossibility of systems of logic significantly different from our own. I argue that a criteriological application of our accepted laws of logic to this question commits a circular fallacy. I then argue that, even if we accept logical consistency as a criterion for possibility, a plausible argument for the possibility of valid alternative logics can be constructed by using the functionalist analogy between minds and automata. Finally, I attempt to rebut the claim that in logic the only changes possible are conceptual changes that would not permit a proposition to be both true and false.     

Primitivism and the Analogy between Colors and Values

The analogy between colors and values is strongly interlinked with the idea that these properties are by nature dispositions or response‐dependent properties. Indeed, that colors are essentially visible, and values are inherently motivational, cries out for a dispositional or a response‐dependent account. Recently, Primitivism has challenged the viability of the dispositional account of colors, taking the apple, for instance, to be “gloriously, perfectly, and primitively red.” Unsurprisingly, the attack on the dispositional account of colors has found a moral analogue in the view that values are sui generis irreducibly primitive properties. The question this article addresses is whether given Primitivism the analogy between colors and values is preserved; or in other words, whether Primitivism breaks the bond between the dispositional account and the analogy between colors and values.     

Blackburn's Problem: On Its Not Insignificant Residue

Moral properties would supervene upon non‐moral properties and be conceptually autonomous. That, according to Simon Blackburn, would make them if not impossible at least mysterious, and evidence for them best explained by theorists who say they are not real. In fact moral properties would not challenge in ways Blackburn has contended. There is, however, something new that can be gathered from his arguments. What would the supervenience of moral properties and their conceptual autonomy from at least total non‐moral properties entail not only for Intuitionists, who ‘knew this all along,’ but for all moral realists, that there are synthetic necessary moral principles? There is for all moral realists the problem of explaining ‘what in the world’makes possible these necessities.