According to conventionalists, an object x does not possess modal properties simpliciter, but relative to the way in which it is referred to through language. Thus, the truth-value of the essentialist sentence ‘Socrates is necessarily a human being’ depends on whether the description associated with Socrates includes the property of being human. Moreover, since we are the ones who decide which description should be associated with the object, its modal properties are language-dependent and mind-dependent.
Often it is considered that the relevant description is simply provided by the term that is actually used to refer to the object. In this case, the modal properties are curiously inconstant since the object has a certain property necessarily under one description and soon after only contingently under another. For example, Socrates is contingently snub-nosed when referred to as ‘the most quizzical ancient Greek philosopher’ and necessarily snub-nosed when referred to as ‘the snub-nosed ancient Greek philosopher’. Thus, by simply referring to Socrates in a different way, one can change his modal properties. Moreover, on this approach, almost any property of Socrates can come out essential, for example, being snub-nosed, but surely, nobody wants to claim that Socrates is necessarily snub-nosed. Conventionalists do not reject essentialism as such, just that the source of the truth of essentialist claims is in the objects themselves. Hence, it would be better, if their reinterpretation of essentialism had not resulted in such radically inconstant modal properties and lax criteria for counting as essential property of an object.
Thus, a better option would be to think that an object is associated with some canonical description. In this case, although Socrates is actually referred to as ‘the most quizzical ancient Greek philosopher’, he is only contingently a philosopher, if the property of being a philosopher is not included in his canonical description. Whether this property is included in his canonical description depends on our decision on what is his unique and
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distinctive character. In this way, the modal properties are constant, but language- and mind-dependent. The canonical description reflects our interests and prejudices concerning objects, but in some other society with different interests and prejudices, objects could be associated with entirely different descriptions.52
The compromise between the two is the proposal according to which the truth of essentialist claims is evaluated within a particular context of inquiry. In each context, in accordance with the specific interests on the occasion, certain features of an individual are deemed more important and hence held fixed. Thus, origin is essential to individual in the context of biology, while in the context of history it is not, but rather its character traits. 53 Consequently, modal properties of an individual are constant within a context, but can vary over contexts. An important part of this approach is the linguistic thesis that the term
‘essentially’ is a context sensitive term, which will be further discussed in Chapter 4. Such contextualist treatment, argue its proponents, seats well with the vacillation of our modal intuitions in accordance with the way in which the question of necessity or possibility is set up.
In the framework of possible worlds, the conventionalist strategy is to interpret the relation of transworld identity conventionally. Namely, objects in distinct worlds are identified as the same object according to our interests. For example, Johnston suggests that in any individual we recognise many important features and that on any particular occasion, one of them is chosen as a necessary condition of identification that corresponds best to our interests at the time (Johnston 1977: 416). van Fraassen’s reasoning is basically the same, only that he presents the whole picture of how the world is and leaves out the contextual variation:
52 The idea of the canonical description associated with an object seems pretty close to the idea of the definition of an object. I am not sure if any proponent of the view that the objects have essential properties only in the association with descriptions understood them as canonical. It is interesting that such understanding of the view was suggested by Fine in his unpublished paper from 1984 (Fine 2005a).
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At the bottom, everything that can be said about the world can be said in purely general statements, without modalities. There is no thisness beyond suchness, but every actual individual is individuated already by the properties it has in this world; hence can be denoted in principle by a definite description (in which the quantifier ranges over actual existents alone. At this bottom level the only necessity we can countenance is purely logical or verbal necessity, which, like God, is no respecter of persons. In this modality, whatever Peter can do, Paul can do also. A semantic representation of this will use a conventional identification of individuals in different worlds, but since every individual plays each possible role in some possible world, every choice of conventional identification (which does not violate IND-EX54) yields the same result.
To make sense of our world in a convenient fashion, however, we raise certain regularities to the status of laws and (not independently!) certain attributes to the status of natures. In the formal mode, this means that some statements assume the office of assumptions which may be tacitly used in all reasoning, and certain predicates are chosen to form a classificatory scheme. Once this is done, we produce relative (or, tacitly conditional) modal qualifiers. (Fraassen 1978: 13-14)
This is a typical empiricist, or, as van Fraassen calls it, nominalist picture of the world. Our physical world is entirely devoid of modality and consists of general facts. Thus, it can be described in purely qualitative terms. Accordingly, although individuals are individuated by the properties that they possess in the world, they do not have an irreducible role in the explanation of the world. At this level, the only necessity countenanced is verbal necessity or logical necessity in a narrow sense, which is insensitive to individuals. Accordingly, in semantics, the individuals in different worlds are identified conventionally, which is of no big importance since every individual plays each possible role in some possible world. However, if one wishes to save the way we ordinarily speak – that something must or could have happened, that an individual is necessarily or possibly so-and-so – one can introduce physical laws and natures (essences). We simply choose some regularities to be physical laws and some predicates to be natures by which we classify objects into kinds. We do this, because it is convenient, but there is no real difference between accidental and law-like regularities or between contingent and necessary properties of objects. We could just as well choose other
54 IND-EX is the criterion of individuation according to which no two existents in world w have all the same properties in w (Fraassen 1978: 7).
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regularities to be laws and other predicates to constitute natures of objects from the ones we in fact chose.