Wallner Michael
University of Graz.
Thought (Hoboken). 2020 Mar;9(1):4-13. doi: 10.1002/tht3.436. Epub 2019 Dec 2.
Fine, Lowe and Hale accept the view that necessity is to be explained by essences: Necessarily iff, and , there is some whose essence ensures that . Hale, however, believes that this strategy is not universally applicable; he argues that the necessity of essentialist truths cannot itself be explained by once again appealing to essentialist truths. As a consequence, Hale holds that there are that cannot be explained. Thus, Hale style essentialism falls short of what Wilsch calls the (EC) for the metaphysics of necessity. Without endorsing the EC, I argue that Hale's argument for basic, unexplained necessities fails due to a misunderstanding of the structure of essentialist explanations. Getting clear about the structure of essentialist explanations of necessity leads to a re-evaluation of crucial circularity- and regress-arguments that have been discussed in the debate about essentialism.
法恩、洛威和黑尔认同这样一种观点，即必然性要用本质来解释：必然地，当且仅当存在某个x，其本质确保了……然而，黑尔认为这种策略并非普遍适用；他认为本质主义真理的必然性本身不能再通过诉诸本质主义真理来解释。因此，黑尔认为存在一些无法解释的必然性。这样一来，黑尔式的本质主义未能达到威尔施所说的关于必然性形而上学的“解释性约束”（EC）。在不赞同“解释性约束”的情况下，我认为黑尔关于基本的、无法解释的必然性的论证因对本质主义解释结构的误解而失败。弄清楚必然性的本质主义解释的结构会导致对在关于本质主义的辩论中所讨论的关键的循环论证和递归论证进行重新评估。
