This electronic thesis or dissertation has been downloaded from the King’s Research Portal at https://kclpure.kcl.ac.uk/portal/ Between meaning and essence explaining necessary truth Schieder-Hestermann, Jakob Awarding institution: King's College London The copyright of this thesis rests with the author and no quotation from it or information derived from it may be published without proper acknowledgement. END USER LICENCE AGREEMENT Unless another licence is stated on the immediately following page this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International licence. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ You are free to copy, distribute and transmit the work Under the following conditions: Attribution: You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). Non Commercial: You may not use this work for commercial purposes. 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Sep. 2021 Between Meaning and Essence - Explaining Necessary Truth Dissertation zur Erlangung des akademischen Grades Doctor philosophiae (Dr. phil.) eingereicht an der Philosophischen Fakultät I der Humboldt Universität zu Berlin im Rahmen des Joint PhD Programms mit dem King’s College London Dissertation submitted to Philosophischen Fakultät I of Humboldt University Berlin as part of the Joint-PhD Program between Humboldt University Berlin and King’s College London von/by Jakob Schieder-Hestermann Präsidentin der Humboldt Universität zu Berlin: Prof. Dr. ing. Dr. Sabine Kunst Dekanin der Philosophischen Fakultät I: Prof. Dr. Gabriele Metzler Gutachterinnen und Gutachter/Examiners: 1. Prof. Dr. Tobias Rosefeldt 2. Prof. Dr. Keith Hossack 3. Prof. Dr. Barbara Vetter Datum der Disputation: 30. Mai 2017 Abstract An explanation of why some truths are necessarily true needs to make intelligible how it is that a truth is guaranteed to be true. The thesis argues that a promising starting point for an explanation of necessity can be found in Kant’s containment- account of analyticity, for it explains how the truth of a judgment is guaranteed by its structure and the relationship between its constituents. This, however, can merely be a starting point for a general explanation of necessary truth, for it is both too narrow, and presupposes a contentious view of concepts. The thesis thus explores how the general strategy, explaining necessary truth by certain relationships between the constituents of representations, can be expanded to cover further necessary truths, for example a posteriori necessities and essentialist claims. It is argued that the explanation can be generalized by focussing on what it is that constitutes reference between representations and the objects they represent as well as how these representations come together to form truth-evaluable representations. Necessary truth, on this account, is a property of truth-evaluable representations which a representation has in virtue of the appropriate relationship between what is required for its truth, and the way in which the reference of its constituents is determined. The appropriate relationship guarantees the truth of the representation. After applying the theory to a range of examples, interesting parallels to essentialist accounts of necessity emerge and it is argued that the proposed explanation gets the relationship between essence and necessity right and may even be used to elucidate what essences are. Zusammenfassung Eine Erklärung, warum manche Wahrheiten notwendigerweise wahr sind, sollte verständlich machen, warum es für diese eine Wahrheitsgarantie gibt. Einen interessanten Ansatz für eine solche Erklärung liefert Kants Definition analytischer Wahrheiten als solche, die bereits in einem Begriff enthalten sind. Die notwendige Wahrheit analytischer Sätze kann hier über das Verhältnis ihrer Bestandteile erklärt werden. Diese Erklärung kann jedoch nur der Anfang einer generellen Erklärung von Notwendigkeit sein, denn einerseits sind nicht nur analytische Urteile notwendig, sondern auch andere, andererseits basiert die Erklärung auf einer umstrittenen Theorie von Begriffen. Die Dissertation untersucht nun, ob und wie die Strategie, Notwendigkeit über das Verhältnis zwischen den Bestandteilen von Repräsentationen zu erklären dennoch ausgeweitet und verteidigt werden kann, um zum Beispiel auch a posteriori Notwendigkeiten und essentialistische Urteile zu erfassen. Indem auf die die Referenz-Relation konstituierenden Fakten Bezug genommen wird, wird gezeigt, dass eine solche Erklärung tatsächlich möglich ist. Notwendige Wahrheit ist demnach eine Eigenschaft von wahrheitsfähigen Repräsentationen, die diese aufgrund des Verhältnisses zwischen den für die Wahrheit der Repräsentation nötigen Fakten und den Fakten, die die Referenz der Bestandteile der Repräsentation bestimmen, hat. Stehen diese in einem bestimmten Verhältnis, wird die Wahrheit der Repräsentation garantiert. Nachdem dieser Ansatz auf eine Reihe von Beispielen angewendet wird, zeigen sich interessante Parallelen zu essentialistischen Theorien von Notwendigkeit und es lässt sich zeigen, dass der Ansatz das Verhältnis zwischen Essenzen und Notwendigkeit richtig darstellt und es sogar erlaubt, ein besseres Verständnis davon zu entwickeln, was Essenzen sind. Acknowledgements While writing a dissertation involves much time spent alone writing, it is not something that is done alone. Ideas develop in an environment of support, discussion, and friendship. I want to thank all those people, who have made the three years of working on my PhD a wonderful intellectual and personal experience, and who contributed to the dissertation by discussing ideas, supporting me, and occasionally providing the necessary distraction. First of all, thanks to my supervisors Barbara Vetter and Mark Textor for your continuous support, your patience with my ideas, and your constant productive criticism that has strengthened many arguments, and clarified many thoughts. Second, I want to thank all the people who I had the opportunity to present my work to, and who helped clarify my thesis with their questions, critical remarks, and discussions after talks. These were, among others, the people at the research seminar at King’s, the great people at Barbara Vetter’s Colloquium in Berlin, and the audiences at various conferences, most notably: New Directions in the Metaphysics of Modality in Berlin, GAP.9 in Osnabrück, and Issues on the (Im)possible IV in Bratislava. From the many people I met at during the PhD program, I want to thank two in particular, who have become friends and who have made my stays in London very enjoyable: Dave Jenkins and Jørgen Dyrstad. The dissertation would not have been possible without the Joint PhD program between HU-Berlin and King’s College London, which just started at the beginning of my PhD and allowed me to spend two half-years in London. This wonderful opportunity greatly contributed to the PhD-experience. For the last three years I received generous funding: For the first three months of the program the Carl und Max Schneider-Stiftung zur Förderung der Philosophie provided me with a stipend, before the Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung took over for the remaining three years of the program. Thank you for the generous funding, but also for the support in the groups of stipendiaries, and the seminars on various non-philosophy-topics I could attend. There I got to meet great people from other disciplines, who have become friends. Without my friends outside of philosophy, I would not have had the necessary distractions and determination to finish this project. So thanks to my friends from the gliding club, especially Marc, who have allowed me to sometimes just fly away. And thanks to our friends in Heidelberg and Berlin, who provided the necessary context for the thesis. The most important people are mentioned last, my wife and my family. They were and are always there for me, and support me greatly. So thank you Johanna for the wonderful time we had, and the time we will have together, and for coming to London with me. And thanks to my family, my brother, my mom, and my dad, who I could and can call anytime, and who opened their homes whenever we would want to come by. Contents Introduction 1 Part I 15 Chapter 1: Explaining Necessity 16 1.1 Methods of Philosophical Investigation 16 1.2 Explanation and Reduction 26 1.3 The Explanation of Necessity 30 Chapter 2: Explanations of Necessity 34 2.1 Possible Worlds - Genuine Modal Realism 35 2.2 Possible Worlds - Non-Primitivist Ersatzism 40 2.3 Primitivism 44 2.4 Essentialism 47 Chapter 3: Analyticity and Necessity 52 3.1 Necessity as Analyticity 52 3.2 Analyticity without Convention 64 Part II 75 Chapter 4: Representation, Reference, and Truth 76 4.1 The Communication Model 77 4.2 Representations 86 4.3 Representations and Reference 92 4.4 From Reference Determining to Reference Realizing Properties 99 4.5 Representation and Truth 117 4.6 The Case for Representations 124 Chapter 5: An Explanation of Necessity 133 5.1 Kant’s Definition of Analyticity