Necessary in the Highest Degree — Whatever That Means

Cian Dorr (New York University)

21 March 2025, 16:00 (Lisbon Time – WET)

Faculdade de Letras de Lisboa

Sala Mattos Romão [C201.J] (Departamento de Filosofia)

Abstract: There are many reasons to think that the ‘necessity’ in the title and topic of Naming and Necessity is intended to be understood as minimally inclusive, in the sense that whenever it is necessary (tout court) that something is the case, it is also necessary in every other way that it is the case. It is also clear that Kripke believes he has identified a powerful and general technique for arguing for claims of necessity, by appealing to the necessity of identity—a technique that can be applied not just to identities involving proper names, but to “theoretical identifications”, thereby establishing necessity tout court for many facts that Kripke’s immediate predecessors would have classified as merely nomically necessary. But many authors find the modal claims supported by this technique so implausible when ‘necessary’ is read as minimally inclusive that they reject the straightforward interpretation of Kripke as intending such a reading.

            In this talk, I will defend both the straightforward interpretation and the claim that his argumentative technique really does have the power and generality that Kripke attributes to it, for “theoretical identifications” as well as identities involving proper names. My initial focus will be on property identities like ‘The property of being made of gold is the property of being composed of atoms with 79 protons’, as well as related infinitival identities, like ‘To be made of gold is to be composed of atoms with 79 protons’. I will argue that such sentences are plausibly true and support attributions of necessity, even on a minimally inclusive reading of ‘necessary’. This requires rebutting views that either reject such identities, or reject the validity of substituting them into the necessity of identity, on the grounds that this implies false claims involving propositional attitudes such as ‘Everyone who knows that something is made of gold knows that it is composed of atoms with 79 protons’. In response to the proponents of such views, I will sketch a view of speech and attitude verbs as semantically ill-behaved (in a way somewhat reminiscent of quotation). Finally, I will argue that although Kripke’s paradigm “theoretical identifications”—sentences like ‘Water is H₂O’ and ‘Heat is molecular motion’—have readings on which they are not identities of any sort, they also admit readings as equivalent to corresponding infinitival identities (e.g., ‘To be water is to be H₂O’), and are thus equally capable of playing the relevant argumentative role.