Descriptivism, Essentialism, and All That

Last time I presented the disagreement between Kripke and Quine. One important thing on which they agree is engaging in semantic ascent to discuss the problems confronted.

Quine, we saw, is a descriptivist. That is, he thinks that we pick out things in the world via linguistic descriptions. Kripke thinks that we can "rigidly" designate objects by tagging them, nondescriptively, with names. The debate seems to be about language, about naming. (And, of course, it is.) I want to spend a bit of time describing a debate between medieval metaphysicians, who did not engage in semantic ascent. The point is that they are disputing pretty much the same thing that Quine and Kripke are disputing, but without the advantage of semantic ascent.

The medieval debate was about whether there are hacceities, that is, roughly, "thatnesses." Is an object just the assemblage of its properties and no more (like descriptivism) or is there a thatness to each object over and above its properties? (If there is such a thing as a thatness, we could use it to pick out the object independently of any description, we could designate it rigidly.) How could we tell if there are hacceities? Well, if there are, then there could be two distinct objects that had all their properties in common (indiscernibles). Does each object have a distinct underlying substance? That way of viewing the question leads to a discussion of what it is that has a property. Do properties require a substance that has them?

Someone said, "Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny."
Quine said, "Ontology recapitulates philology."

Objects change through time. How can we tell whether something is the same object?

• We can't. Quine.
• If it is _the same object." Kripke.
• If it has the essential characteristics of the object. Aristotle. (Yablo.)

Quine argued for descriptivism largely by arguing against essentialism. Kripke is in part pointing out that there is third way, and trying to show that Quine has no good argument against it. That is part of why there is a lot of talk in the Kripke article about whether the lectern could have been made of ice and similar examples. -- ShaughanLavine - 01 Feb 2008