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The Irrelevance of Essence
Author(s) -
Sullivan Meghan
Publication year - 2015
Publication title -
philosophy and phenomenological research
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.7
H-Index - 39
eISSN - 1933-1592
pISSN - 0031-8205
DOI - 10.1111/phpr.12213
Subject(s) - epistemology , philosophy
The past twenty years or so have seen a surge of interest in the notions of grounding, essence and metaphysical explanation. Most of the work has focused on whether metaphysical explanation is a well-demarcated phenomenon, how many grounding relations there are, and what general principles (if any) govern grounding relations. Surveying this ever-expanding literature, you might start to worry that the we metaphysicians have lost touch—that all of this theorizing on essence, ground and explanation won’t offer us any new or significant help in resolving the ‘‘first order’’ puzzles that drive our field. It would be a great advance for the grounding debate if we could find a test case—a wellrecognized puzzle that the grounder’s tools are uniquely suited to solve. Thus far work on applications has lagged, but that is changing, and Boris Kment’s Modality and Explanatory Reasoning is arguably one of the most promising such application-driven projects. Kment hopes to improve upon the popular modal similarity accounts of counterfactuals. According to the modal similarity accounts, a counterfactual of the form ‘‘If A were to happen/had happened, then C would happen/would’ve happened’’ is true at a world w iff some A-world at which C occurs is closer to w—more similar to w—than any A-world at which C does not occur. One challenge for similarity accounts is offering an adequate theory of the similarity relation. Should it be taken as an absolute primitive? Determined pragmatically? Defined in terms of causal histories and natural laws? All of these strategies have been developed and defended. Kment’s novel suggestion is that we determine similarity based on match with respect to explanatory histories and laws of metaphysics—laws that (in part) capture essential truths and underwrite grounding relations. If Kment’s project succeeds, it will be a great advance for the grounders. As my title reveals, I’m unconvinced. In this paper, I’ll survey the cases that Kment uses to motivate his explanatory criterion of relevance. Then I’ll