Fine distinguishes two different grammatical forms of essentialist claims: a predicational and a sentential form (Fine 1995a: 53-55). The first kind expresses the concept of essence by means of a predicate modifier. Take, for example, an essentialist claim
‘Socrates essentially thinks’. Let ‘thinks’ be a predicate P and ‘essentially’ an expression of an essence L: the two together form the essentialist predicate ‘essentially thinks’ – LP. The essentialist claim is then written as [LP]t , where the complex essentialist predicate LP is applied to a term for Socrates, t.70
The second kind of grammatical form uses a sentential modifier, so that we first form the sentence ‘Socrates thinks’ (suppose the name ‘Socrates’ refers directly to Socrates to avoid issues of scope) and then prefix the operator ‘It is true in virtue of the identity of Socrates that’ to obtain the sentence ‘It is true in virtue of the identity of Socrates that Socrates thinks’. Since Fine uses the terms ‘identity’ and ‘essence’ as expressing the same idea (Fine 1995a: p. 69, fn. 2), the sentential operator could also be expressed as ‘It is true in virtue of Socrates’s essence that’, or more naturally as ‘Socrates is essentially such that’. On the sentential approach, the symbol L for essence applies to a term t and a sentence , and results in a sentence of a form Lt .71
The two forms are not simply notational variants – the predicational form is subtler and allows us to capture certain distinctions that the sentential form conflates into one. Take, for example, the following four claims:
70 For many variants of the predicational approach, see Fine 1995a: p. 69, fn. 1.
71 For variants on the sentential approach, see Fine 1995a: p. 69-70, fn. 3.
CEUeTDCollection
(1) Socrates is essentially self-identical.
(2) Socrates is essentially identical to Socrates.
(3) Socrates is essentially such as to have Socrates identical to him.
(4) Socrates is essentially such as to have Socrates identical to Socrates.
According to the predicational approach, (1) ascribes essential self-identity ([ x(x = x)]72) to Socrates, (2) and (3) ascribe two forms of essential identity to Socrates ([ x(x = Socrates)]
and [ x(Socrates = x)]) to Socrates, and (4) ascribes the degenerate property of Socrates’
self-identity (([ x(Socrates = Socrates)]) to Socrates. On the other hand, according to the sentential approach all four claims collapse into one single claim:
(5) It is true in virtue of the identity of Socrates that Socrates is identical to Socrates.
The claim is formally expressed as LSocrates (Socrates = Socrates) (Fine 1995a: 54).
The predicational approach also seems more fundamental than the sentential one. If essentialism is a view that objects have essential properties, then the essence of an object x is plausibly regarded as the collection (or class) of its essential properties. This idea is best captured by the predicational approach to the essentialist claims. Nevertheless, Fine decides to use the sentential approach because it is more convenient in terms of formulating and manipulating essentialist claims. On the predicational approach, the content of the claims must be constantly adjusted to the order and multiplicity of the arguments. For example, if we want to add Plato as an irrelevant argument to the claim that Socrates is essentially a man, we have to move from Socrates essentially having the property of being a man to Socrates and Plato essentially bearing a relation that holds between two objects when the first is a man.
Whereas on the sentential approach, we can easily move from Socrates is a man as being true in virtue of the identity of Socrates to this same thing being true in virtue of the identities of Socrates and Plato. Besides, it can be shown that no essentialist information is lost because of
CEUeTDCollection
the lesser expressive subtlety of the sentential form.73 Finally, the sentential approach makes possible the inclusion of the logic of essence into the orthodox framework of modal logic (Fine 1995a: 55 and p. 71, fn. 7).
On the sentential approach, the essence of x can be understood as the class (or collection) of propositions that are true in virtue of what the object x is (Fine 1995a: 55 and 1994/95: 275). This class of propositions constitutes the object’s real definition D(x), which states what the object is.
It is important to note that Fine proposes the identification of essence with the class of propositions, thus making essence propositional in form. I will say a bit more about the propositional character of essence below. Here, let me just point out that the identification of essence with real definition does not constitute a proper analysis or even an explanation in fundamentally different terms. Essence of x is a ‘form of definition’ (Fine 1994/95: 273), namely the real definition D(x), which is characterized as the collection of propositions true in virtue of what the object is. However, ‘what the object is’ denotes exactly its essence. This is no surprise, since Fine thinks that such basic concept as essence cannot be explained in fundamentally different terms, and that the best we can do is to offer some clarifications and show how the concept works (Fine 1994: 3 and 1995a: 53). In fact, the basic character of essence, which does not allow reduction or definition in terms of some other concept, is the reason why Fine rejects the modal account and turns to the definitional account, according to which the definition defines an object by stating its essence, but does not offer any analysis of the concept.
The task of improving the understanding of essence is taken up in ‘Senses of Essence’
(1995a), where several conceptions of essence and the ways in which they can be employed in explaining and defining various concepts are analyzed. A development of a separate logic of
73 For more details on this, consult Fine 1995a. Basically, Fine shows that the truth values of ‘impure’ claims, such as (2), (3), and (4), can be determined on the basis of ‘pure’ claims, such as (1), and that the ‘pure’ form is equivalent to the sentential form, e.g. (1) is equivalent to (5) (p. 70-71, fn. 6).
CEUeTDCollection
essence with a possible worlds semantics is the topic of ‘The Logic of Essence’ (1995b) and
‘Semantics for the Logic of Essence’ (2000). The way in which the definitional account can help us better understand essence is shortly presented in ‘Essence and Modality’ (1994) and
‘Senses of Essence’ (1995a), where essence and necessity on one hand are compared with meaning and analyticity on the other in order to justify the connection between essence and definition and the notion of relativized necessity.