“The New Essentialism”

In the December 12, 2003 issue of the TLS , Jerry Fodor reviews a book by Brian Ellis on “the new essentialism.” In a nutshell, the new essentialism challenges an important feature of modern accounts of knowledge and reality. As Fodor puts it, modern philosophy has assumed there are two kinds of facts ?Econtingent and necessary ?Eand that two ways that propositions can be true correspond to that: “in virtue of what it means, or in virtue of how the world is.” The new essentialism, which Fodor suggests is a throwback to Aristotle, “the root idea is to deny the alleged connection between necessary truth ad truth in virtue of meaning.” Thus, some things are necessary truths not “by definition” (there are a hundred cents in a dollar) but because of “intrinsic, essential properties of the things that they are truths about.” One application of this has to do with the connection between “natural kinds” and their “chemical constitutions”: Remove the H2O from the stream and you remove the water. But this is not because the word “water” means H2O, or because H2O is part of our concept of water. Rather “it is because being water just is being the H2O kind of stuff. Water could not but be H2O.” This is known only a posteriori, not apriori (as with “by definition” necessities). To know that water is H2O you need to do the experiment.

One of the implications of this is that “things act out of their intrinsic dispositions and powers. Copper conducts electricity because it is of the essence of copper to do so.” This means that “if it’s of the nature of copper to conduct, then not even God could make a kind of copper that doesn’t.” Ellis explains further by arguing that God cannot make four-sided triangles because it simply cannot be done; by the same toke, “God cannot make a sample of hydrogen that yields a chlorine spectrum, not because He lacks the pwoer to do so, but because there is no such thing . . . . It is a metaphysical impossibility. If it is hydrogen, then it does not yield a chlorine spectrum, and if it does yield a chlorine spectrum, then it is not hydrogen, but chlorine.” It follows that some laws of nature “hold of necessity” (Fodor’s words).

Here I would want to trot out Nicholas of Cusa, whose conception of possibility and of God as the Possest rules out the potential and possible. In the terms set by Ellis’s book, Cusa would reject the notion of an “essence” that functions somehow as a limit on God’s creative power. As he says, God can turn any created thing into any other created thing; he can make hydrogen yield a chlorine spectrum. (Four-sided triangles, it seems to me, confuse the issue, since triangles seem an example of “necessity by definition” rather than “necessity by inherent properties.”) For Cusa, the doctrine of creation ex nihilo excludes any metaphysics that would posit necessity in the creation, or that would treat created properties or things as fixed barriers to what God might possibly do with them.

That’s not to mention the philosophical problems that Fodor brings against Ellis. As he points out, certain properties of living things are clearly contingent (wings on a butterfly, which develop during the butterfly’s life), and yet are of the nature of the thing (butterflies DO have wings). “So,” Fodor says, “wouldn’t it appear, pace Ellis, that some things fall under some laws in virtue of their accidental properties? (So it would appear.) So, are such laws necessary, or contingent, or what? (Search me.)” It seems that the problems arise here too precisely because of a defective notion of creation.