Essence and Accident
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Socrates was snub-nosed, married, and executed by the Athenians. He could have been none of those and still been Socrates. He was also a human being, and whether he could have been anything else is a different sort of question, one that no fact about his life will settle. Sorting a thing's properties into those two groups is the oldest use metaphysics has made of possibility and necessity, and it is still the most contested.
The division
Definition
Essential property
A property a thing could not have lacked while existing. If having it is necessary for that very thing to be, the property is essential to it.
Definition
Accidental property
A property a thing has but could have lacked. Nearly everything true of an ordinary object is accidental to it in this sense.
Definition
Essence
The collection of a thing's essential properties, taken as an answer to the question of what that thing is.
The first two definitions use the modal vocabulary of the previous article, and by design. The third does not, and the gap between them is where the difficulties in this topic live. It has usually been assumed that they come to the same thing, so that listing what a thing could not have lacked tells you what it is. That assumption has been challenged, and the challenge is treated below.
Note also that the division is about individual things rather than about kinds. A statement about what all tigers have in common is a claim about a kind, and the essentialist claim here is about this tiger and what it in particular could not have lacked. The two questions are related and they are not the same, and running them together will produce confusion later.
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The modal characterisation
Stated in terms of the previous article, a property is essential to an object when it is necessary that the object has it, and accidental when the object has it and it is possible that the object lacks it.
The characterisation is clean and easy to apply, and it delivers the intuitive verdicts on the paradigm cases. Being snub-nosed is accidental to Socrates because he could have had a different nose. Being human, if the essentialist is right, is necessary to him and so essential.
There is a wrinkle worth stating before the serious objections. As it stands, the characterisation says that a property is essential when the object has it in every circumstance in which the object exists. Whether existence itself should be built in is a decision the account has to make, and the two versions disagree about whether Socrates has existing among his essential properties.
Where the modal account strains
The trouble is that the modal test admits far more than any account of what a thing is should admit.
Take the property of being such that two and two make four. That arithmetical fact is necessary, so Socrates has that property in every circumstance in which he exists, and the modal test therefore rates it essential to him. It tells you nothing whatever about Socrates. The same goes for being distinct from the Eiffel Tower, which he could not have failed to be, and which is no part of what he was.
Kit Fine pressed the point with a sharper case. Socrates belongs to the set whose only member is Socrates, and he could not have failed to belong to it, so on the modal test being a member of that set is essential to him. But the set is not part of what Socrates is. Run the comparison the other way and the asymmetry is plain: it does belong to the nature of the set that it contains Socrates, since that is what the set is, and it does not belong to the nature of Socrates that he is contained in it. The modal test cannot register the difference, because the necessities involved run in both directions equally.
Fine's case against the modal account
- Socrates and his singleton set necessitate exactly the same claims about each other's existence and membership.
- What the set is involves Socrates, and what Socrates is does not involve the set.
- An account of essence must distinguish cases that differ in what the things are.
- ∴Essence is not captured by necessity, and an account of essence needs something the modal test does not supply.
The proposed replacement takes essence as the more basic notion and explains necessity in terms of it, rather than the other way round: a claim is necessary because of what the things it concerns are. That reverses three centuries of practice, and it is developed in the advanced tier rather than here.
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The older objection
Objection
The division is an artefact of how a thing is being described. Consider someone who is both a mathematician and a cyclist. Described as a mathematician, being rational looks necessary and having two legs looks incidental. Described as a cyclist, having two legs looks necessary and being rational looks incidental. The person is one person, and the properties are the same properties, and only the label has changed. So the necessity attaches to the description rather than to the thing.
Reply
This is W. V. O. Quine's objection, and it was influential enough to make essentialist talk disreputable for a generation.
The standard reply distinguishes two claims that the example runs together. That all mathematicians are rational is a claim about what falls under a term, and it is true in virtue of what the term covers. That this individual could not have failed to be rational is a claim about the individual, and nothing about the term settles it. Once separated, the example does not show what it was taken to show, since the shifting verdicts all belong to the first sort of claim while essentialism makes the second sort.
The reply owes an account of how claims of the second sort are established, and that debt is real. What broke the objection's grip was Kripke's work, which supplied examples where a necessity attaches to an individual under any description at all, and where our knowledge of it comes from investigating the individual rather than from consulting our terms.
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What the beginner tier has built
The nine articles have assembled a working vocabulary rather than a set of results. Objects and their properties, the abstract and the concrete, persistence through change, causation, possibility and necessity, and now the division within a thing's properties. Each was introduced with the disputes visible rather than smoothed over, because the disputes are the subject.
Three things are worth carrying forward. Every position surveyed here has a cost, and the arguments are about which cost is acceptable rather than about which position is free of them. The vocabulary is not neutral, and adopting a way of speaking often concedes more than it appears to. And the questions do not close: the ship of Theseus is older than the discipline's professional literature and remains open, not because nobody has thought about it, but because each answer requires giving something up.
The intermediate tier returns to each of these with the apparatus this tier deliberately withheld.
Further reading
- Kit Fine, "Essence and Modality", Philosophical Perspectives, volume 8 (1994).
- Saul A. Kripke, Naming and Necessity, Harvard University Press (1980).
- W. V. O. Quine, Word and Object, MIT Press (1960), for the mathematician and cyclist.
- Michael J. Loux and Thomas M. Crisp, Metaphysics: A Contemporary Introduction, 4th edition, Routledge (2017).
- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "Essential vs. Accidental Properties".
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