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| Paper IPM / Philosophy / 15355 |
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| Abstract: | |
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Since Kit Fine presented his counter-examples to the standard versions of the modal view, many have been convinced that the standard versions of the modal view are not adequate. However, the scope of Fineâ??s argument has not been fully appreciated. In this paper, I aim to carry Fineâ??s argument to its logical conclusion and argue that once we embrace the intuition underlying his counter-examples, we have to hold that properties obtained, totally or partially, by application of logical operations are not essential to non-logical entities. I also demonstrate that most of the post-Finean versions of the modal view, which were developed to accommodate Fineâ??s counter-examples, entail that such properties are essential to the entities, and so fail to capture the notion of essence at issue in Fineâ??s counter-examples. Additionally, I explore the consequence of my argument for Fineâ??s proposed logic of essence. The logic turns out to be inadequate in its present shape as it represents such properties to be essential to the entities. I conclude by developing a modification to the logic to overcome the shortcoming.
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