Essence and Ordinary Modality

Introduction

When I first read Essence and Modality as a graduate student, the experience was both exhilarating and transformative. It seemed to open up new (or indeed, old but forgotten) ways of thinking about modality, ways of thinking that were at once very natural and very rigourous. My own work on modality started with a feeling of dissatisfaction with the seeming orthodoxy that the metaphysics of modality must be the metaphysics of possible worlds. When looking for an alternative, I went to Essence and Modality to find the idea that it is not worlds, but things that give rise to modality. It is an old Aristotelian idea, and like many old Aristotelian ideas, I think it captures something that runs very deep in our way of thinking about the world.

Essence and Modality is deeply Aristotelian in this way, and has been treated in the literature as prompting a revival of Aristotelianism. It is less Aristotelian in another way. Aristotle often encourages us to start with what is ‘familiar to us’ to proceed to what is ‘familiar in itself’ (see Posterior Analytics A1, 71b; Metaphysics Z3, 1029b3-8: Nicomachean Ethics A4, 1095b2-6¹): to start with our ordinary understanding of the world and progress from there to what might be more general, abstract, and deeper metaphysical truths. Essence and Modality makes no pretence of starting with what is familiar to us: it goes straight into metaphysics. But it promises to fit also, at least to some extent, with more ordinary ways of understanding modality. It is this connection that I want to explore in the present paper.

My focus will be on the view of modality that is proposed in Essence and Modality. After spending a sizeable part of the paper arguing against a modal theory of essence, Fine goes on to suggest that we should turn the tables and consider instead an essentialist theory of modality. Here is the passage:

This short passage has given rise to what is now considered one of the main contenders in the metaphysics of modality, the view that metaphysical necessity can be defined as truth in virtue of the essences of things.² The account is first and foremost one of metaphysical necessity. By the usual duality of necessity and possibility, it is an account of metaphysical possibility too: metaphysical possibility is, roughly, a matter of compatibility with the essence of all things. (It is metaphysically possible that p just in case it is not true in virtue of the essences of all things that not-p.)

One attraction of the account is that it does away with the vexed question of what a possible world is in the metaphysics of modality. Another, perhaps even the main, attraction is that it defines necessity in terms of it source. In this way the account is metaphysically more substantive, and more informative, than many rival accounts. (Think, for example, of ersatzist accounts of possible worlds: they provide a model or structure, but rarely an account of the sources of a proposition’s possibility or necessity).

The essentialist account offered in Essence and Modality is an account of metaphysical necessity. Adherents of the Finean view, in my experience, tend to take this focus for granted. We might wonder, however, how it relates to the more ordinary – in Aristotle’s term, the more ‘familiar to us’ – kinds of modality. Fine (2005b) has addressed the relationship between metaphysical and nomological modality, arguing that they are two distinct kinds of necessity. My concern here will be with what I call ordinary modality – the kind of highly variable modality that informs our choices and actions, figures in both planning and regret, and is appealed to by Kripke (1980, 41) when he points out, against Quine, that modal facts are ordinarily understood as description-independent.

To my knowledge, there is no sustained discussion of how ordinary modality fits with the essentialist framework. (I have asked many an essentialist what they think of ordinary modality. The answer is generally that they try to think of it as little as possible.) But I think there is something to be learned from seeing how the essentialist view fits with an understanding of ordinary modality. At any rate, that is what I will attempt in this paper.

Ordinary modality and a direct approach

Ordinary necessities include such diverse facts as the fact that it is necessary for the journey from Berlin to Portland to take at least 10 hours or that (at a given point in time) I must sneeze (the example from Kratzer 1977). They plausibly include metaphysical and nomological necessities: speaking with an ordinary sense of the modals, it is true that I could not be anything other than human and nothing could travel faster than the speed of light. But the ordinary necessities are more inclusive than either metaphysical or nomological necessity, as my examples easily illustrate. Ordinary possibilities include such diverse facts as the fact that a particular car, at a given point in time, can go 100 mph (the example, which I will return to, is from Edgington 2004), that the UK could have remained in the European Union, or that it is possible for hydrangeas to grow in my backyard. Ordinary possibilities are among the metaphysical and nomological possibilities, but they are a less inclusive than either.

Unlike the metaphysician’s preferred modalities, ordinary modality is variable in its strictness. I can ride a bicycle, since I have acquired the skill; then again, I cannot, because there is no bicycle nearby. It is necessary for the journey from Berlin to Portland to take at least 10 hours; then again, perhaps it is not: we have simply not yet invented the modes of transportation that would make it faster.

This kind of variability is typical of our ordinary concepts and should not detract from the fact that we are dealing with facts that are clearly modal in the same sense as facts of metaphysical necessity and possibility are: they concern what can or must be the case, rather than merely what is actually the case. Ordinary necessities, when considered within the salient contexts, come with the features of necessity that Boris Kment (2014) has nicely isolated: they ‘limit[…] the range of possible alternatives to the way things are’, they ‘hold unconditionally– i.e., independently of what else is the case’, and they seem ‘firm, secure, or unshakable’ (Kment 2014, 20) – at least until we change the context. The variability in what counts as a necessity can be understood in terms of varying cut-off points on a scale of degrees of necessity (Kment 2014, 30–33, 54–60); and, with the standard approach in linguistics, in terms of a variable and contextually determined modal base used to restrict the possible worlds over which our modal terms quantify (Kratzer 1977, Kratzer 2012). The kind of modality that we are concerned with here gets a circumstantial modal base, that is, it is relative to actual facts, as opposed to an epistemic or deontic modal base.³ In other words, we are concerned with real, ‘ontic’ (Kment 2014), or ‘objective’ (Williamson 2016) modality, albeit a rather variable form of it.

Ordinary modality, so understood, may be messy business: it is variable, context-dependent, it is not clear even what its logical structure is. But it has the advantage of being well-understood on a pretheoretical level. We know a great deal about what is ordinarily possible or necessary; otherwise it would be difficult to navigate our lives and deliberate about possible courses of action. It also has the advantage of arguably being our best pre-theoretical case of an objective modality, something that is clearly mind-independent. It is no accident that Kripke, when stressing that metaphysical modality is not to be confused with anything epistemic or linguistic, tends to turn to facts of ordinary modality (e.g., ‘That’s the guy who might have lost’, pointing at Nixon, as an example of a description-independent de re modal truth, see again Kripke 1980, 41).

In what follows, I will continue to speak of ‘ordinary modality’ without assuming that there is any one way of making it precise, but I will use some insights from the linguistic literature concerning our main way of expressing ordinary modality in the sense in which I am interested, to wit, circumstantial (uses of) modals.

One interesting feature of circumstantial modality that linguists have noticed is that it is distinguished by certain syntactic features. Circumstantial modals, unlike epistemic ones, generally scope under both tense and quantifiers. Witness

1. 1. (1)

   1. a.

2. 1. 1. Mary had to be home at the time of the crime. (Epistemic: it is now necessary that in the past Mary was home at the time of the crime.)

1. 1.  

   1. b.

2. 1. 1. Mary had to sneeze. (Circumstantial: in the past, it was necessary for Mary to sneeze.)

1. 1. (2)

   1. a.

2. 1. 1. Every radio may get Chicago stations and no radio may get Chicago stations.

1. 1.  

   1. b.

2. 1. 1. Every radio can get Chicago stations and no radio can get Chicago stations. (Brennan 1993, 93)

As (1) illustrates, circumstantial and epistemic ‘had to’ differ in the relative scope of tense and modal. In general, circumstantial modals scope below any tenses while epistemic modals scope above at least some tense. Further, as (2) illustrates, epistemic ‘may’ can scope above or below the quantifier, yielding two readings for the sentence (one of which, the de dicto one, is coherent); while circumstantial ‘can’ yields only the incoherent de re reading (incoherent, that is, on the assumption that there are radios). These observations generalize: across languages, circumstantial modality is characterized by taking a ‘lower’ place in the syntax of the sentence than epistemic modality, scoping below tense, aspect and typically also below quantifiers (see Brennan 1993, Hacquard 2006, Portner 2009). The suggestion is that we think of circumstantial, that is: ordinary objective, modality as anchored to things rather than propositions. It also suggests that we view objective modality as a matter of how things can develop (this is the untensed but generally future-directed complement of the modal) at a given point in time (indicated by the tense scoping above the modal), and as typically subject to change over time.

One part of this suggestion makes for a natural fit with an essentialist view of metaphysical modality, a less ordinary form of objective modality. As Fine points out in Fine 2005b, metaphysical modality on the essentialist view has a special link to the de re:

On this view, metaphysical necessity characteristically includes necessity that is anchored in things – it is fundamentally de re. Indeed, reducing necessity to essence can be seen as a way of anchoring all modality in things, even when its logical form is de dicto. Ordinary necessity, being characteristically de re itself, seems to fit quite well into the essentialist fold.

The other part of the suggestion has quite the opposite relation to essentialism. Ordinary objective modality is changeable and time-sensitive. (This is not to say that all facts of ordinary modality change. But when given an ordinary modal fact, it makes sense to ask at when it holds.) Essences, on the contrary, are unchangeable and insensitive to the passage of time (for more, see Fine 2005a).

Could we make use of the commonality while also accommodating the differences? One intriguing option, I think, is to tinker with the notion of essence. Perhaps in addition to the Finean, timeless, notion of essence there is such a thing as a changeable essence. Certainly we tend to think of our own identity, of what makes us who we are, not just as a timeless matter but as a matter of who we have become. Perhaps a similar thought can be applied to other objects too, yielding a notion of changeable or historical essence, which is sensitive to differences between the past and the future. Thus it is part of my historical essence not merely that I am the daughter of my parents but also that I am the mother of my son; that is part of what makes me the person I am, after all. Likewise, it may be part of my historical essence now that I am an adult and a professional philosopher, foreclosing certain possibilities left open by my historical essence in childhood as well as my ahistorical, timeless essence (such as my never hearing of philosophy or my dying before I reach adulthood).

I mention this option because I find it intriguing and would very much like to see it developed, but I will not pursue it here. A historical notion of essence veers dangerously close to more modal conceptions: my past is part of who I am now because I can no longer change it. It takes us away from some of the most important metaphysical connections that essence has, such as its connection to ontological dependence. Even if it is part of who I am now that I am the mother of my son, I cannot make sense of any similarly historical sense of ontological dependence where I now ontologically depend on my son.

Let’s leave the direct approach aside, then, and focus on better understanding the relation between the two distinct notions of modality: the ordinary, variable but practically well understood circumstantial modalities, and the more extraordinary, theoretically cleaner notion of essentialist metaphysical modality. Both are notions of objective, real, or ontic modality. It would be disappointing, at the very least, if they could not be linked in some way. How then are they to be linked to each other?

Fine (2005b) gives us two strategies for understanding the relation between a wider and a narrower form of necessity: relativization and restriction. (He there considers the relation between metaphysical and nomological modality, and concludes that neither relation works. My arguments and, at least in part, my conclusions in the case of metaphysical and ordinary modality will be different.) I think that essentialists, when pressed on ordinary modality, will typically go for something like relativization. So I will start by looking at that strategy in section 3. I will argue that despite first appearances, it is not an attractive strategy for the essentialist, and so I will move on to restriction in section 4. This strategy, I will argue, holds more promise, but it requires a bit of a reinterpretation of the essentialist account of metaphysical necessity.

Relativization

In relativization, ‘one starts with the narrow notion of necessity’ and defines the broader notion as being ‘necessary relative to, or conditional upon’, some set of truths (Fine 2005b, 236). In our case, we start with metaphysical necessity – as defined in the essentialist account – and define ordinary necessity as follows: it is ordinarily necessary that p just in case it is metaphysically necessary that if R then p. R, the conditions to which necessity is being relativized, will be variable, thus accounting for the variability of ordinary necessity. Ordinary possibility, accordingly, is defined in terms of metaphysical compossibility with R: it is ordinarily possible that p just in case it is metaphysically possible that R and p.

This seems a deeply familiar picture, and nicely congruent with possible-worlds models of the semantics of ordinary modals: R is just what modal semantics treats as the ‘modal base’. Instead of restricting the quantifier over possible worlds, on the current picture it is simply the antecedent in the conditional that characterizes a conditional form of necessity, or the conditions to which a relativized necessity is relative.

One small drawback of this approach is that it loses sight of the point which favoured the more direct approach in the previous section. Essence is anchored to things and fundamentally de re, and so is ordinary objective necessity; but in order to define the latter in terms of the former we move to a less de re understanding of necessity. I think that’s a shame, but it may be a price worth paying if the account is otherwise fruitful.

However, I believe there are other and more substantial drawbacks.⁴ They concern our choice of R. In short, either we choose R so as not to include anything that is already modal; but then it becomes hard to see how essences can vindicate the conditional ‘if R then p’. Or we choose R so as to include some modal facts – facts about nomological necessity, about the dispositions of things, etc. – but then essence is no longer the sole source of the necessity; in fact, it seems not to be the source of the necessity at all. The choice, then, is between the two threats of extensional inadequacy and explanatory redundancy.

To see the dilemma, consider the following facts of ordinary modality (all true within a suitable context):

1. 1. (3)

2. 1. 1. I must sneeze. (Kratzer 1977)

1. 1. (4)

2. 1. 1. It is impossible to fly from Berlin to Portland in under 10 hours.

1. 1. (5)

2. 1. 1. ‘This car can do a hundred miles per hour (though it never will), this other car can’t—as they are presently constituted. Later, when the first has deteriorated and the second hotted up, the position may be reversed.’ (Edgington 2004, 6)

1. 1. (6)

2. 1. 1. The vase can break more easily than the desk.

What sets of propositions R will get these modal facts right?

Let us assume, first, that R is a set of propositions which do not themselves include anything modal. For (3), we might have the speaker’s physical make-up at the time of utterance, and perhaps facts about when and how humans generally sneeze. For (4), we might have facts about the distances between Berlin and Portland, the constitution of our current means of travel, time-tables for air traffic, and so on. For (5), we have facts about the set-up of the two cars at various times and perhaps general facts about the speed at which cars go, and for (6) facts about the vase’s and the desk’s constitution, perhaps in comparison to one another.

I contend that none of those facts are enough to yield the required conditional warranted by essence; i.e. none of those facts are such that it is true in virtue of the essence of all things that if they hold then so does the prejacent of the sentences in question. For in virtue of the essence of what should it hold that if I have such and such physical constitution, C, then I sneeze? Certainly not in virtue of my essence, nor in virtue of the essence of C, which is what it is independently of whether or not it results in sneezing. And while some things might be true in virtue of what it is to sneeze (the essence of sneezing), I doubt that this will include the particular physical realizers and causes that lead to people’s sneezing; sneezing is multiply realizable after all. Similarly for the rest of my examples. Given the changes in the two cars in Edgington’s (5), it is clear that neither car is essentially such as to preclude its going at 100 mph, nor is either of their mechanical constitutions. (And if anything can be said to be true in virtue of what it is to do 100 mph, then the particular physical realization that we find in Edgington’s two cars is unlikely to figure into it; going at 100 mph, too, is multiply realizable.) Thus while we can make sense of the ‘can’ part of the example, it is difficult to find any basis for the ‘can’t’ part.

Better, then, to be less restrictive about the facts that go into R. If we included laws and law-like generalizations about the speeds at which things can move and the biological processes inside the human body, we may get (3)–(5) to come out right. (6) is more complex still, because we need to include something in R that gives rise to a comparison – closeness of worlds perhaps, or the degrees of the objects’ dispositions.

I think it is plausible that if we formulate R so as to include the requisite modal facts, then our definition comes out extensionally adequate. However, it does so for reasons that have little to do with essentialism. For one thing, it appears that the source of the necessities or possibilities in question is not exclusively the essences that give rise to the necessity. It is rather the modal facts that are included in R: laws, dispositions, or possible worlds ordered by closeness to actuality. Second, it is worth considering why it is that the relevant conditionals, ‘if R then p’, come out true in virtue of the essence of all things. Plausibly, once we have included enough in R, the relation between R and p is simply one of entailment. (This is the idea behind Kratzer’s semantics too, when it is formulated without possible worlds.) Now since every logical truth is true in virtue of the essence of all things, it will also be true in virtue of the essence of all things that if R then p. But we could have the same result by leaving essence out of the picture altogether and just using logical entailment.

It may be objected that the entailment will not hold unless we have essential facts in R itself. Consider again (3). If we include in R the physical constitution of the speaker at the time of utterance as well as the laws of nature, these facts might entail that the speaker will be in a certain physical condition, C’, soon after the time of utterance. But they will not entail that C’ constitutes a sneezing. To guarantee that, it may be said, we need the essence of sneezing after all – not as including its physical realizers such as C’, but perhaps as a kind of role description which C’ in fact satisfies.⁵ I myself think that if we include in R facts about dispositions and lawlike generalizations, no such essential bridge principle is needed. But the point I want to make is more general. For while the response does attribute a role to essences in our understanding of ordinary modality, it is not the role that the relativization strategy envisioned for them. Essences, on this view, are not the source of a certain state of affairs (the speaker being in C’) being necessary; they are merely the source of that state being one of sneezing. They are, we might say, the source of the state’s categorization, but not its necessity.

Recall that one of the attractions of essentialism about modality was the fact that it accounts for necessity in terms of its source. But that is precisely what it does not seem to do for ordinary necessities. And if that is so, then the relativization approach does not mesh well with the essentialist theory, even if it does yield extensional adequacy – we can have extensional adequacy by using the possible worlds framework, or a story that appeals only to logical entailment.

We have reached the dilemma that I announced at the beginning of this section. Defining ordinary modality by way of relativization risks being either extensionally inadequate or explanatorily redundant, the latter in the sense that essences cease to play any interesting role in providing the source of the modal status of ordinary necessities (or possibilities). I think that the second horn may be on the right track: essences do not play an interesting explanatory role for ordinary objective necessities. But then we need another way of connecting the two notions of necessity.

4 Restriction

In restriction (or alternatively, ‘subsumption’), one necessity is defined as a species of another (Fine 2005b, 237). We see this idea at work in Essence and Modality, in the passage cited above and the sentences that follow it: while metaphysical necessity is truth

Now clearly this is not a promising strategy for defining ordinary necessities in terms of metaphysical necessities. It is not the case that p is an ordinary necessity just in case p is a particular species of metaphysical necessity; the biconditional fails in the left-to-right direction. It is simply not the case that whenever p is an ordinary necessity, p is a metaphysical necessity (of any kind) – the ordinary necessities outrun the metaphysical ones.

If we go for restriction, we must define the narrower sense of necessity (i.e. the necessity with a narrower extension) in terms of the broader one. For our purposes, this means that we would have to define metaphysical necessity in terms of ordinary necessity: p is a metaphysical necessity just in case p is a particular species of ordinary necessity. Which species? It is clear what the essentialist would have to say: the metaphysical necessities are those ordinary necessities whose source is the essence of some thing(s) (in the widest possible sense of ‘thing(s)’).

This strategy, I submit, is extensionally adequate (assuming that essentialism is),⁷ and it agrees with the core essentialist claim: it lets essences be the source of the necessity of all metaphysical necessities. In fact, it lets essence be the source of all and only the metaphysical necessities, leaving it wide open what makes a proposition an ordinary necessity. We could adopt a possible-worlds view of ordinary necessities, a dispositionalist (or as I prefer to call it, potentialist) view, or a metaphysically pluralist view. But that is precisely the point of the proposal: it leaves essences to metaphysics but gives an independent account, whatever it is, of what it is for a proposition to be necessary.

We have seen earlier that ordinary necessity is messy business: it seems to come with the kind of contextual variability that besets most of our ordinary concepts. Luckily for the present proposal, none of that messiness need affect modal metaphysics. If (as I assume) all essential truths are necessary on any ordinary understanding of ‘necessary’, the proposal can provide us with a precise delineation of what is metaphysically necessary – as precise as the delineation is of what counts as an essential truth. That, of course, is as much precision as the original essentialist conception is able to offer.

Similarly, we have seen earlier that ordinary modality is subject to change over time (recall Edgington’s two cars). Again, luckily for the present proposal, this need not affect modal metaphysics. If (as I assume) all essential truths are always true, it stands to reason that so are the necessities, ordinary or otherwise, to which they give rise. I pointed out earlier that the general changeability of ordinary modality does not entail that all ordinary necessities are subject to change; those necessities whose source is not subject to change will plausibly not be subject to change either. This yields the desired conclusion that metaphysical necessity does not change; it does not yield the conclusion that metaphysical necessity is in some sense timeless or, in Fine (2005a)’s terms, ‘eternal’, such that truths about it somehow transcend time, and are true in a tenseless way (rather than simply being true at all times). Still, we may well think that essences are eternal in this sense, and perhaps a case could be made that this elevates the metaphysical necessities to the same status, or close enough to it.⁸

The present proposal can deliver a conception of metaphysical modality as both precise and insensitive to time and change, just as the original essentialist proposal.

Fine himself considers, and rejects, a strategy similar to the one now under consideration (Fine 2005b, 259f). After discussing the relation between metaphysical and nomological or ‘natural’ necessity at length, he closes by considering the suggestion ‘that metaphysical necessity be defined as a restriction of the (inclusive) notion of natural necessity’ (Fine 2005b, 259). The suggestion, he writes, does not

This comparative ‘hardness’ or ‘strictness’ is difficult to explain precisely, Fine says, but he gives us two ways of thinking about it. One is the idea that it would take ‘more of a God’ (Fine 2005b, 260) to break a metaphysically necessary connection than a naturally necessary one. The second is that when a proposition, p, is naturally but not metaphysically necessary, we are ‘inclined to think … that there exists a genuine possibility of the proposition’s being false’ (Fine 2005b, 260); but if a proposition were metaphysically necessary without being naturally necessary, then there would be no such genuine possibility.

The suggestion considered and rejected by Fine is exactly parallel to mine, except for its appeal to natural (rather than ordinary) necessity. Unsurprisingly, then Fine’s responses to the suggestion are easily adapted to the proposal that I am considering here. Substituting my ‘ordinary’ for Fine’s ‘natural’ necessity, it seems certainly true that it would take ‘more of a God’ to violate a metaphysical than a (merely) ordinary necessity. In some cases, it takes no God at all to violate, or at least to change, an ordinary necessity. Recall that, as I have stressed in section 1, ordinary modality is time-sensitive and subject to change. That the car in Edgington’s example has to go less than 100 mph is an ordinary necessity, but it is one which can be changed by any mechanic when the car, in Edgington’s term, is ‘hotted up’. By the same token, it seems true that when a proposition is ordinarily but not metaphysically necessary, there is a genuine possibility of its being false. Unlike with natural necessities, however, I do not think we can make sense of a metaphysical necessity such that is not an ordinary one; there is no sense of ordinary necessity where it does not include the metaphysical necessities. Still, the general point holds: metaphysical necessity seems to be ‘harder’ or ‘stricter’ than the necessity that characterizes many ordinary necessities.

Why should that be a problem? As Fine puts it, the strategy of accounting for the harder or stricter necessity in terms of the softer or more permissive one does not ‘appear to capture the relevant modal force’. Whatever makes ordinary necessities necessary must be soft and permissive enough to account for the soft and permissive necessities. So whatever it is, it is not enough to make metaphysical necessities necessary in this particular way: it is simply not ‘hard’, strong, or strict enough.

Fine sees these different strengths as symptoms of different kinds of modality (a view for which he argues at length in Fine 2005b). I suggest that instead we see them as symptoms of different degrees of modality (an idea mentioned above, and discussed at length by Kment 2014⁹). Metaphysical necessity is necessity to a higher degree than natural and than much of ordinary necessity. That is not to say that its status as a necessity could not be captured by whatever it is that makes those other necessities necessary. It may well be that different sources make for different degrees of necessity. Essence is a strong candidate for being a source of necessities of a very high degree, just as it is a very strong candidate for being a source of necessities that are (as metaphysical necessities ought to be) timeless and unchanging.

Much more would need to be said to defend such a conception of metaphysical necessity, but I will not do that here.¹⁰ Clearly my proposal is not in the spirit of the picture of metaphysical modality that essentialists since Essence and Modality have typically assumed. Metaphysical necessity is intended to be in some sense the most general among a whole range of necessities. Ordinary necessity, as we have seen earlier, tends to be left out of the picture. In my proposed strategy, on the contrary, it is ordinary necessity that sets the standard for what it is to count as a necessity. Essence is one among the potentially many sources of such necessities, but it is not their common definitive feature. In a sense, this proposal turns essentialism on its head by making metaphysical necessity just one amongst (perhaps) several species of ordinary necessity. I would argue that it instead turns it on its feet, by starting our theory with what, in Aristotle’s terms, is ‘more familiar to us’, and proceeding from there to the ‘more rarefied philosophical uses’ of our concept of necessity, in Dorothy Edgington’s words (Edgington 2004, 5).

There is, however, a sense in which the proposal chimes quite well with the spirit of Essence and Modality. For part of that spirit is to move away from the sole focus on modality that has characterized much of post-Kripkean metaphysics, and recognize instead that much of metaphysics is about essence. On the first page of Essence and Modality, we are told:

If we may give a strong interpretation to this passage, metaphysics is constitutitvely concerned with essences. Metaphysical necessity, then, is interesting to the metaphysician precisely because it encapsulates essential truths. It is metaphysical not because it is the most encompassing or, from some super-disciplinary vantage point, the most important species of necessity. It is metaphysical necessity simply because it is the form of necessity that is of most interest to metaphysics, the study of essences.¹¹

The restriction proposal thus gives us an (I think) non-standard picture of essentialist metaphysical necessity, but one which also seems to provide a natural fit with the spirit of Essence and Modality, and which fits that spirit into an approach that is Aristotelian in the sense of beginning with what is ‘familiar to us’: ordinary modality.

5 Conclusion

Essentialists have tended to ignore ordinary modality. Ordinary modality is messy, to be sure; but it is an instance of real or objective modality that is pre-theoretically well understood (‘familiar to us’) and whose relation with metaphysical modality ought to be addressed in one way or another. I have argued that the most commonly assumed way for the essentialist to deal with ordinary modality, the relativization strategy, is problematic. I have then offered the restriction strategy as an interesting avenue to pursue, one which at least seems to come without the drawbacks of relativization strategy and is, in some sense, quite close to the spirit of Essence and Modality. I do not know if it will ultimately prove itself (nor if I myself ultimately want to endorse it). But I hope that it serves to show how Essence and Modality continues to be a source of inspiration 30 years on.

Competing Interests

The author has no competing interests to declare.