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Being Necessary
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/8/2018, SPi
                     OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/8/2018, SPi
Being Necessary
Themes of Ontology and Modality
from the Work of Bob Hale
 
Ivette Fred-Rivera and Jessica Leech
1
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/8/2018, SPi
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Preface
Three days before we submitted the final manuscript of this volume to the Press, Bob
Hale passed away. The book had always been intended as a celebration of his
philosophical work, but we had not anticipated the sad circumstances in which it
might also serve as a memorial.
   Bob was an extraordinary philosopher, as can be gathered from the careful and
fruitful engagement with his work in the following pages. Bob combined great
philosophical vision and insight, with remarkable intellectual stamina, rigour, and
generosity. He was always happy to discuss philosophy, and that philosophical
discussion would be thorough, searching, and enormously helpful. Bob wouldn’t
let you get away with a quick and easy answer to a problem; he would walk you
through it, step by step, detail by detail, until a more complex, richer, and ultimately
much more philosophically satisfying picture came into view.
   Bob’s published work includes three major books: Abstract Objects (1987), The
Reason’s Proper Study: Essays Towards a Neo-Fregean Philosophy of Mathematics
(2001, co-authored with Crispin Wright), and Necessary Beings: An Essay on Ontol-
ogy, Modality, and the Relations Between Them (2013). In this most recent book, Bob
drew together the different strands of his research in metaphysics, philosophical
logic, and philosophy of mathematics into a comprehensive and interrelated picture
of reality, modality, existence, and how philosophical investigation into these areas
should be conducted. It is an exceptional piece of philosophy and many of the
chapters in this volume are a testament to that, in attempting to grapple with
many of its important claims and arguments.
   As well as a philosopher, Bob was also a great teacher, mentor, colleague, collab-
orator, and friend. His ability to convey his knowledge, his no-nonsense approach to
philosophy, his clarity, his sensibility to art, and concern for the underprivileged were
remarkable. His loss will be felt immeasurably for a long time to come. This book is,
of course, dedicated to the celebration of his philosophical work. But we also, with
deep sadness, dedicate it to his friendship, and to his memory.
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/8/2018, SPi
                                      OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/8/2018, SPi
Contents
 1. Introduction                                                                1
    Ivette Fred-Rivera and Jessica Leech
 2. On Some Arguments for the Necessity and Irreducibility of Necessity        15
    John Divers
 3. The World of Truth-Making                                                  36
    Kit Fine
 4. Essentialism and Logical Consequence                                       60
    Rosanna Keefe and Jessica Leech
 5. Radical Contingentism, or; Why Not Even Numbers Exist Necessarily          77
    Peter Simons
 6. Properties and Predicates, Objects and Names: Impredicativity
    and the Axiom of Choice                                                    92
    Stewart Shapiro
 7. Predication, Possibility, and Choice                                      111
    Roy T. Cook
 8. Logicism, Ontology, and the Epistemology of Second-Order Logic            140
    Richard Kimberly Heck
 9. On the Permissibility of Impredicative Comprehension                      170
    Øystein Linnebo
10. Neo-Fregeanism and the Burali-Forti Paradox                               188
    Ian Rumfitt
11. Analytic Essentialist Approaches to the Epistemology of Modality          224
    Anand Jayprakash Vaidya
12. Rethinking the Epistemology of Modality for Abstracta                     245
    Sònia Roca-Royes
13. Counter-Conceivability Again                                              266
    Crispin Wright
Index                                                                         283
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                                     OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 22/8/2018, SPi
       1
       Introduction
       Ivette Fred-Rivera and Jessica Leech
Ontology is the philosophical study of what there is. In practice, this amounts to
more than it might seem. Ontology isn’t simply presenting an inventory of medium-
sized dry goods: it typically involves questions concerning the kinds of entities there
are. Are there universals, or can we account for categorization in terms of concepts,
language, or sets? Are there really things like tables, or are there just ‘particles
arranged table-wise’? Are there objects made up of a fusion of any things whatsoever,
or are there constraints on composition? Is there an object that has the Eiffel Tower
and Angela Merkel as its only two parts, or not? Do all entities have a location in
space and time, or are there abstract entities that do not?
   Modality concerns possibility, necessity, and cognate notions. We typically think
that there are some things that are the case, but that could have been otherwise—for
example, that Barack Obama became president of the United States of America—and
some that are the case but also could not have been otherwise—for example, that 2
and 2 make 4, or perhaps that Barack Obama is a human being (if he had been
anything other than a human being, so the thought goes, that would not have been
the very same thing as Obama). The metaphysics of modality takes on the challenge
to explain these apparent modal facts. What is it that grounds the fact that something
is merely possible, or that it is necessary, or impossible? Are such modal facts mind-
independent, or do they depend on our own conceptual engagement with the world,
or the way we use language to talk about the world? If there are mind-independent
modal matters, can we reduce them to non-modal facts, or is modality fundamental?
Are there fundamentally modal properties of objects? And so on.
   What is the relationship between ontology and modality: between what there is,
and what there could be, must be, or might have been? In the first half of the
twentieth century, distrust of metaphysics produced answers in terms of theory,
language, and convention. Modality was reduced to mere linguistic convention,
questions of ontology to choices between theories, perhaps, one might say, to choices
between conventions.¹ Quine famously rejected this conventionalist approach, not to
   ¹ Such a view is often associated with thinkers such as Carnap. Carnap distinguished between a
linguistic framework or theory in terms of which we can ask internal questions about entities and so
forth, and external questions about the choice of theory or framework. It is the framework that determines
what must or can be true within that framework, but there may be a choice of framework external to that.
See Carnap (1950).
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 20/8/2018, SPi
salvage notions of ontology and necessity, but to cast even more doubt on their
legitimacy.² There is perhaps an interesting tale to tell of the relationship between
ontology and modality, if both are considered largely defunct. But this book will
answer the question in a more positive light.
   In recent decades, philosophers have taken metaphysics more seriously as a
substantive discipline in its own right. Two broad traditions have emerged in
which the relationship between ontology and modality has also become central.
Firstly, the rise of an understanding of modality in terms of quantification over
possible worlds, or other entities, ties modality to a particular ontology of that
domain of quantification. In general, necessity is understood as truth in all worlds;
possibility as truth in at least one; impossibility as truth in no world. In order to take
this seriously as a metaphysical account of the nature of modality, one must give an
account of the kinds of things over which one is quantifying. Perhaps most famously,
David Lewis’s modal realism claims that worlds are concrete, just like our own,
actual, world.³ More precisely, for Lewis, there exist individuals, sets of individuals,
and sums of individuals. A maximal spatiotemporally and causally related sum of
individuals is a world.⁴ Worlds, therefore, do not bear spatiotemporal or causal
relations to each other, and they do not share parts (they do not overlap). With
this purportedly amodal ontology in place, Lewis promises not only to give a
reductive account of modality—worlds are characterized without appeal to modal
facts, and modality is analysed in terms of quantification over those worlds—but an
account of many other things. For example, properties are defined as sets of individ-
uals and propositions as sets of worlds.
   Whilst Lewis’s modal realism is perhaps the best-known, or most-taught, version
of a worlds account of modality, there are other options. One might take worlds to be
properties, understood as ways the world could be (or couldn’t be), or propositions
that describe how the world could be (or couldn’t be).⁵ But in each case, we still face
the challenge to give an account of the nature and existence of the worlds or world-
like entities in the domain of quantification. In many cases, this will also involve
giving an account of when such a world is possible, e.g., when a property is a way the
world could have been, or when a proposition describes how the world could have
been, rather than an impossibility. Such theories will fail to reduce modality to
ontology, and as such may be deemed to be inferior to Lewisian modal realism, but
one may question whether reduction is a worthy goal at all here.⁶
   This, then, is one major thread of late twentieth-century philosophy that wove
together modality and ontology. The other began, perhaps, with Kripke’s renewed
confidence in de re necessity—modality of things, not just words—and the associated
idea of essence.⁷ Upon such a view, it is natural to think of entities as having
modal properties in a substantive sense (i.e., in a stronger sense than that there
 ² See, for example, Quine (1936), (1951), (1963).         ³ See Lewis (1986).
 ⁴ See Divers (2002) for a particularly clear presentation of Lewis’s view.
 ⁵ See, for example, Forrest (1986), Hale (2013), chapter 10, and Stalnaker (2003) and (2012).
 ⁶ There is also a question whether reduction is achievable in the way Lewis suggests. See Divers and
Melia (2002) and Hale (2013), chapter 3.
 ⁷ See Kripke (1981).
                                             OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 20/8/2018, SPi
 
are true modal statements about the things, which may also be the case on the
quantificational view). This has developed, through the work of philosophers such as
Kit Fine and David Wiggins, into one of the leading approaches to the philosophy of
modality today.
   At the heart of this essentialist trend is the idea that individuals have an essential
nature which determines how they could and couldn’t have been different, and how
they could and couldn’t change. For example, if Socrates is essentially a human, then
he couldn’t have been a boiled egg, although he could have been taller than he actually
was. Within this broad family of views there is again variation. For example, at the
heart of Wiggins’s view is the notion of a sortal property: a property that provides an
individual with a principle of individuation. Such a principle determines when things
are the same or different at a time and over time. Wiggins argues that such properties
are thereby necessary to their bearers.⁸ On such a view, a certain ontology—that of
individuals and sortals—plays a crucial role in explaining what the de re necessities for
individuals are, but modality is not thereby given an analysis.
   By contrast, Fine and others have argued that essence should be understood on the
model of definition—in Aristotle’s terms, the ‘what it is to be’ something—and that
de re modality can then be given an account in terms of essence.⁹ In this tradition, the
relation between ontology and modality is as strong as ever: necessity is understood
as what is true in virtue of the natures of things and, as such, modality has its source
firmly in ontology, in the existence and natures of things. Many pages have been
devoted to debating whether such a reduction of de re necessity to essence can in fact
be achieved, or whether an analysis of essence in terms of modality—plus some
additional metaphysical or ontological machinery, such as the distinction between
sparse and abundant properties—can be defended.¹⁰ There is also much work
developing the Finean account of necessity as truth in virtue of the natures of things,
and an extension of this programme to an understanding of dependence and
grounding.¹¹
   In addition to these two broad philosophical traditions that bring together modal-
ity and ontology in such an intimate way, there is a third, important, and too-often
neglected area of philosophy where ontology and modality interact. This is the realm
of what we might call modal ontology: the question of whether and what things exist
necessarily or contingently. Within metaphysics, there are debates concerning whether
or not there exist a range of purportedly necessary beings: are there abstract objects,
numbers, sets, propositions, Platonic universals, and so on? One important way in
which modality and ontology meet, then, is simply in the modality of existence: whether
there are necessarily existing things in general, and whether there are particular kinds of
things that exist necessarily.
   This way of framing things conceals a presumption in favour of contingent
existence and sets up necessary existence as a difficult case. This is perhaps the
   ⁸ See Wiggins (2001).        ⁹ See in particular Fine (1994) and Hale (2013).
  ¹⁰ See, for example, Correia (2007), Cowling (2013), Della Rocca (1996), Gorman (2005) and (2014),
Skiles (2015), and Wildman (2013).
  ¹¹ See, for example, Audi (2012), Correia (2005, 2008), Correia and Schnieder (2012), Fine (2015),
Jenkins (2005), and Wilson (2014).
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 20/8/2018, SPi
default position of many such debates where, for example, Platonism about certain
kinds of things is taken to involve additional commitments and thus bears the burden
of proof against the nominalist. However, in recent years arguments have been put
forward that in fact seem to favour necessary existence as the basic case, and
contingency as in need of defence. It has been argued that the correct modal logic
is S5 and, moreover, in combination with other plausible principles of quantified
modal logic, that this entails necessitism: everything that exists, exists necessarily (and
there couldn’t be more objects than there actually are).¹² This poses a new challenge.
If one wants to agree that a quantified modal logic that validates S5 and the Barcan
Formulas is the logic that correctly captures facts about (absolute) necessity, as seems
reasonable, then one must either accept necessitism or find a way to defend the
possibility of contingent existence. This latter challenge has been taken on in recent
work such as Hale’s Necessary Beings (Hale, 2013) and Stalnaker’s Mere Possibilities
(Stalnaker, 2012).
   These are issues for modal ontology that arise largely within the bounds of
metaphysical discussion. But there is another application of modal ontology that is
also of central importance. The development of analytic philosophy has included a
development of, and increased interest in, the study of logic: not just the study of
deductive systems, but of how best to interpret the most interesting and important
logics, i.e., how to provide them with a suitable semantics and how then to best
understand that semantics. As soon as we start to make commitments to one
semantics over another, ontological matters come to bear. For example, the devel-
opment of second-order logic famously incited Quine to charge that it is merely ‘set
theory in sheep’s clothing’, arguing that the semantics for second-order logic commit
us to the existence of a particular kind of mathematical object.¹³ In thus bearing such
an ontological commitment, for Quine, second-order logic is no logic at all. Boolos’s
response, that we can understand monadic second-order logic in terms of plurals,
has paved the way for an application of a more deflationary ontology of pluralities of
things.¹⁴ At the very least, semantics for logics introduce ideas variously of models,
propositions, sets, properties, and more, which must then face up to the ontologist’s
scrutiny. Moreover, one should note that many of these things are typically thought
of as existing necessarily, or at least as being abstract. Hence, the development of and
interest in advanced logics that has become part and parcel of analytic philosophy
introduces a host of ontological questions and, in particular, a host of questions
within what we have been calling modal ontology.
   Of course, one may deny that any such things exist. One may well indulge in a taste
for desert landscapes, and eschew the existence of anything that smacks of abstract-
ness or necessity, but one cannot avoid acknowledging the questions that are raised.
As such, anyone with a serious interest in ontology and modality on the one hand, or
logic on the other, should not ignore these questions of modal ontology.
   Bob Hale’s recent book, Necessary Beings (2013), is a prime example of how
ontological and modal considerations can combine into a mutually supporting
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