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A Note on Science and Essentialism A note on science and essentialism Alice DREWERY BIBLID [0495-4548 (2004) 19: 51; pp. 311-320] ABSTRACT: This paper discusses recent attempts to use essentialist arguments based on the work of Kripke and Put- nam to ground causal necessity in the world. I argue in particular that a recent argument by Alexander Bird relies on controversial intuitions about the natures of substances which no Humean would accept. While a case can be made that essentialism reflects some assumptions within scientific practice, the same can be said of Humeanism, and ultimately neither Bird’s arguments, nor any empirical facts, can decide the ques- tion either way. Keywords: philosophy of science, metaphysics, essentialism, laws of nature, Humeanism, dispositions. 1. Introduction: Essentialism and natural kinds Since Hume denied that there was causal necessity in the world, philosophers of sci- ence have faced a dilemma. Those who agree with Hume seem forced to concede that the only difference between genuinely causal and accidental regularities lies within us, or is determined by the way we systematise the world. Those who wish to locate causal necessity in something more objective face what van Fraassen (1989) has called the ‘Identification Problem’: given that causal necessity is not simply logical necessity, what sense can we make of this notion, and how is science to uncover these necessi- ties? Kripke’s and Putnam’s work in the 1970s offered a new angle on this issue, with the claim that certain necessary truths are discovered by science, namely those giving the essential natures or real essences of natural kinds. Intuitively, the essential proper- ties of a kind are the properties of its members which make those individuals mem- bers of that kind and not another. This echoes Locke’s conception of a real essence, which is that “whereby [particular substances] are of this or that species” (Essay, II.xxxi.6). In the modern essentialist literature, an essential property of a kind is often construed as one which an object must possess in order to be a member of that kind, and which no member of the kind may lack. That is, kind essences give necessary and sufficient conditions for kind-membership.1 Kripke and Putnam have famously argued that natural kinds have certain of their properties essentially. The examples of the identity between water and H2O or the claim that gold has atomic number 79 demonstrate the success of science in telling us about the nature of the world around us: in addition, the claim that these truths are necessary a posteriori also seems to suggest that science can tell us substantive necessary 1 This of course neglects Locke’s other main claim about real essence, which is that an object’s observable properties ‘flow from’ its essence which is the cause of its secondary qualities. For a more substantive conception of essence, see Fine (1994). Theoria 51: 311-320, 2004. 312 Alice DREWERY truths about the world. Despite some well-known challenges to this view (for exam- ple, Salmon 1982), to which I will return later in the paper, the existence of necessary a posteriori truths such as these remains an attractive idea, and one which many find compelling. Essentialist claims of these kinds, though, do not provide a source of causal neces- sity. There is no causal relationship between being water and being H2O or between being gold and having atomic number 79. These are just (part of) what it is to be water or to be gold, just as having no hair on one’s head does not cause one to be bald, it just is being bald. The further claim, made by authors such as Ellis and Lierse (1994), Elder (1994), Ellis (2001, 2002), Bird (2001, 2002) is that essential properties of kinds include not just what those kinds are, but also what they can do. In other words, there are causal relationships between members of kinds which are part of the nature of those kinds and which therefore could not fail to hold. These causal relationships could not be different unless the world contained different kinds of things. If this is correct, such relationships would hold of necessity, and this necessity would be non- trivial and substantive, not just a matter of logic, but something we needed to find out empirically. Moreover, the source of the necessity would be firmly in the world, in the nature of the kinds themselves, rather than in us. 2. Essentialist arguments for the necessity of the laws of nature Brian Ellis argues that the dispositions possessed by kinds of things in the world are essential to being that kind of thing. The various chemical substances and physical particles which make them up possess behavioural dispositions which they could not lack, and remain the same substances or particles. The disposition to form a structure which conducts electricity is as much a part of what it is to be a copper atom as having twenty-nine protons in the nucleus. Science tells us what copper is, and its properties. Something which did not behave in the same way would not be copper. Although I will not here discuss Ellis’s arguments in any detail, an obvious objec- tion to these sorts of claims seems to suggest itself. Why should we think that the dis- position of some kind to behave in certain ways supervenes just on the essence of that kind and not on other features of the world as well? For example, it might turn out to be the case that the disposition of water to boil at 373 Kelvin supervenes not just on the atomic structure of water (or on the structure of the complex bonding chains in any sample of liquid water) but on the values of fundamental constants which could vary independently of these structures. If so, it might turn out that in a world where these fundamental constants took different values, water is still present, but is dis- posed to boil at some other temperature. Hence the disposition to boil at 373 K might not be part of the real essence of water, because water could exist and lack this dispo- sition. In this case, the putative law that water boils at 373 K would not be metaphysi- cally necessary. Ellis considers a related objection: that some laws do not supervene on the es- sences of particulars alone. For example, conservation laws govern all causal interac- tions but the mere fact that all the world’s kinds essentially obey conservation laws A note on science and essentialism 313 does not show in virtue of what this is the case (Katzav forthcoming). Ellis’s response to this kind of objection is to claim that our world is one of a kind; certain properties are essential to the kind of world we inhabit, and govern the kinds which may exist in it, including, presumably, explaining why kinds which do not obey conservation laws could not exist (Ellis, 2001, p. 251). The claim that the world is one of a kind is not the easiest to grasp, and it is not clear how it could do the work the essentialist needs it to do in constraining the possi- ble properties of kinds within the actual world.2 Why could there not be worlds of dif- ferent kinds which nonetheless contained some of the same kinds as in our world, so that members of these kinds might behave in different ways? For example, might there not be worlds containing some of our kinds (which obey conservation princi- ples) and also other kinds which do not, so that the conservation laws are not meta- physically necessary? Or might there be worlds where fundamental constants take dif- ferent values, so that, for example, water boils at a different temperature, and there is no metaphysically necessary law concerning the boiling point of water?3 These objec- tions all question whether dispositions and therefore laws supervene just on the es- sences of kinds. At this point, I turn to a direct argument that certain laws are meta- physically necessary because these laws do just follow from the natures of the kinds involved in them. In the following sections, I will consider whether this argument is capable of being extended into a general argument for the necessity of all laws which would therefore avoid the above objections. Bird (2001, 2002) argues that the law that salt dissolves in water is metaphysically necessary. Suppose we accept the essentialist identification of common substances with their chemical composition, and that such identities are necessary. That is, we ac- cept that, for example, salt is sodium chloride and water is H2O. For a substance to be salt, then, it must be composed of sodium and chlorine ions. But composition is in- sufficient here. Salt is not just any old mixture of sodium and chlorine ions; these ions must be bonded ionically in a lattice structure. It is not just the entities which com- pose salt which are necessary to salt’s identity, but the way these entities are struc- tured, and crucially, the relationships between them. However, Bird’s argument goes, for a bond to be ionic, it must result from the electrostatic attraction between charged particles. This is the definition of an ionic bond; sodium and chlorine ions held together by some other force, say, per impossibile, gravitational force, or by God’s will, would not be bonded ionically. Ionic bonds are governed by Coulomb’s Law, which states the relationship between the particular charges and their separation. If Coulomb’s Law were sufficiently different, that is, if charged particles did not attract each other in this way, ionic bonding would not be 2 Chalmers (1999) points out that it is not clear how to construe conservation laws as causal laws, since they apply at the level of phenomena, regardless of the nature of the underlying causal processes.
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