On the Necessity of Origin Colin McGinn The Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 73, No. 5. (Mar. 11, 1976), pp. 127-135. Stable URL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0022-362X%2819760311%2973%3A5%3C127%3AOTNOO%3E2.0.CO%3B2-7 The Journal of Philosophy is currently published by Journal of Philosophy, Inc..
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ON THE NECESSITY OF ORIGIN
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is buried ill the glib expression, "both Oscars apply DLL to 'aluminum'." This gives the impression that both Oscars d o the same thing with respect to 'aluminum'; but this is a mistake. Oscar, applies DLL because he believes that aluminum is the stuff that Earth scientists call "aluminum," but Oscar, applies DLL because he believes that aluminum is the stuff that T w i n Earth scientists call "aluminum." Thus the two Oscars have widely different beliefs about 'aluminum'. We would not say, e.g., that two persons have the same beliefs about 'demoncracy' if one of them believes that the reference of this term is determined by the Communist Party while the other believes that Senator Goldwater is the expert on its reference. T h e Oscars, therefore, are not in the same psychological state with respect to 'aluminum'. Nor do they behave in the same way with respect to it: although both defer to scientists in applying 'aluminum', it is to diBerent scientists that they defer; and while Earth scientists apply 'aluminum' to aluminum, Twin Earth scientists apply 'aluminum' to molybdenum. Thus the extensions of 'aluminum' in the idiolects of the two Oscars are indeed distinct, but so are their psychological states and their behavior. Putnam has failed to show that any two people can mean two different things by a certain term although they are in the same psychological state, or exhibit the same behavior, with respect to it. He has also failed to show that "the traditional concept of meaning is a concept which rests on a false theory" (700). On the contrary, I have tried to show that the very intelligibility of HDLL rests on some traditional concept of meaning and would have been altogether inconceivable on the historico-scientific theory of reference only. EDDY M. ZEMACH
T h e Hebrew University of Jerusalem
ON T H E NECESSITY OF ORIGIN
*
AUL KRIPKE has advanced a number of essentialist theses whose acceptance seems recommended by intuition.1 One such thesis is that the origin of a thing constitutes a de re necessity. Compelling as the deliverances of intuition are, however,
S
* I am grateful to W. D. Hart, C. A. B. Peacocke, and J. Hornsby for helpful discussions on the topic of this paper. 1See "Naming and Necessity," in D. Davidson and G. Harman, eds., Semantics of h'atural Language (Boston: Reidel, 1972), pp. 253-355.
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they fall short. of supplying any sort of exl~lanationof thc ~iccessities in question. We are left wondering wlzy it is that, e.g., a person, couldn't have had a different origin. In "De What R e Is De R e Modality?"? J . L. Mackie has a try at filling the explanatory vacuum-i.e., he offers us an account of why we are inclined to believe that origin is essential but subsequent history is accidental. I am going, first, to argue that Mackie's proposed explanation is inadequate, and, second, to suggest a different account of the necessity of origin. I. DE THE WRONG RE
There are two preliminary points I would note about Mackie's procedure. T h e first is that he conceives the task as that of explaining away, in the style of Hume on causation, the beliefs about de re modality which he agrees we have. He inquires not about why these beliefs are true-for, by his lights, their truth is strictly illusory-but rather why we are disposed to think they are true. It is not surprising, then, to read that "these de re modalities are, in a very broad sense, de dicto after all" (560)-'de intellectu' might be more apt. Since Mackie's explanation is, unashamedly, an essay in the etiology of confusion (as was Hume's account of our intuitive concept of causality), it is not always easy to tell whether we are invited to suppose his principles true or simply psychologically correct. I shall take it that the explanatory principles are intended as plausible in themselves; then argue that they are not, and that, even if they were, they would fail to explain the modal intuitions we have. I n particular, they stand in want of a supplementary principle, to be discerned in A. N. Prior and Michael Dummett,8 which is itself unacceptable. T h e second point has to do with the nature of counterfactual supposition. Mackie gestures concurrence with Kripke in holding that we may transpose actual individuals into counterfactual situations, by dint of rigid designation, and that consequently there is no prior requirement of fixing u p identities (or some other equivalence relation) between individuals counterfactually posited and individuals as they actually are, on the basis of qualitative criteria. I think t T h i s JOURNAL, LXXI, 16 (Sept. 19, 1974): 551-561. Parenthetical page refercnces to Mackie are to this paper. 2 See "Identifiable Individuals," especially pp. 70f., in Papers on Time and Tense (New York: Oxford, 1968). Parenthetical page references to Prior are to this article. 8 In Frege: Philosophy of Language (London: Duckworth; New York: Harper, 1973), pp. 1SOf. Parenthetical page references to Dummett are to this book.
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Mackie goes wrong through (inter alia) not taking the Kripkean view of possible worlds fully to heart. Mackie's explanation comes in two stages. The first stage purports to tell how we "handle possibility and identity together," the second why we handle them that way. The main thrust of the first stage is this: although we are able intelligibly to contemplate a forward divergence from actual history, the idea of a backward divergence is not the sort of counterfactual situation in which identity can be preserved. Otherwise put, we cannot make sense of a possible convergence with actuality. For suppose "we contemplate a possible person who is conceived at to, not at t, [the time of Nixon's actual origin] whose career from to to t, is different from that of the actual Nixon but whose actions and experiences from t , to t, are exactly like those of the actual Nixon"; then "even if we do contemplate the conceivable if not causally possible to-t,-t, career, we cannot claim that the possible person whose career it is would be Nixon," for "he never becomes Nixon and so never was Nixon" (554/5). Ergo, we are to conclude, origin is essential and subsequent history accidental.. It seems to me that Mackie here just assumes that we cannot pick out the actual Nixon and suppose that he enjoyed a different career prior to a certain time, for he (Mackie) begins by postulating some possible person whose continuity with Nixon is taken as problematic. Thus he simply begs the question against its being Nixon. But it seems perfectly possible to suppose that Nixon got to be President by different means. T o reply that Nixon could have converged on the Presidency in a different way but not from a different origin seems merely to re-invite the original question, viz., why origin should be singled out as essential and life-history counted contingent. T h e claimed asymmetry of forward and backward departures from actuality seems either spurious or a petitio. A second objection is that, even if Mackie were right about the asymmetry, it couldn't non-question-beggingly distinguish origin as necessary. For, since convergence is impossible at any time in Nixon's career, the properties he has before a given time come out essential; on the other hand, the possibility of divergence at any time makes all properties come out accidental. It looks as if we need some extra principle capable of conferring special status on the time of origin, so that convergences and divergences can be evaluated for their modal implications with respect to that time. Though Mackie does not, so far as I can see, offer any such principle, Prior and
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Dummett do. Thus Dummett asserts that "we cannot push back the moment in respect of which a property is to be characterized as presently accidental behind the point at which the object came into existence: that is why, in the case of a human being, his parentage and even the moment of his conception seem absolutely necessary to his identity" (131). That is, before his coming to exist, Nixon was not a subject for the possibility that he should come to exist differently; there is no earlier situation containing Nixon with respect to which actuality might have turned out otherwise than it did. Now, aside from other criticisms one could make of this principle, the following seems decisive against it: it entails that everything true of Nixon at the moment of his creation is necessarily true of him. Not just exact time and place of birth, but also that he started to be in a room containing a vase of geraniums, indeed (if existence be a property) that he is a necessary existent. In fact, the principle appears capable of yielding the result that all true sentences are necessarily true, since to each ascription of a property to Nixon at birth we can conjoin a true sentence, e.g., a sentence about his later career. T h e suggested supplementary principle seems to lead rapidly from the frying pan to the fire. Its troubles should also alert us into suspicion of any view that lets the necessity of origin attach to the circunzstances of origin. T h e second stage of Mackie's account seeks to explain the alleged asymmetry in terms of (i) the fixity of the past and (ii) the causal underdetermination of the future. T h e idea, if I understand rightly, is that, because we regard the past as unalterable, we do not allow that things could have come about differently; i.e., we do not allow that a given past condition of the world could have had different causal antecedents. Again, it seems to me hard to see how (i) and (ii) confer special modal status on origin without either circularity or unspecified supplementation. Agreed, we don't have to say that all past properties are essential, since before they were acquired it was causally possible that some other condition be brought about; but what is to stop us saying that before the time of origin it was causally possible that the individual have a different origin? Only, it seems, invocation of some principle in which the existence of the individual figures crucially; e.g., x is essentially 4 at t if there is no earlier time at which x exists and such that it was causally possible at that earlier time that x not be 4 at t. Either Mackie calls upon such a principle, and then faces its modally extravagant consequences, or his explanation fails to afford any rule of discrimination between the property or properties comprising origin and the
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properties that comprise contingent history. If such principles, and the reasoning based on them, lay at back of our beliefs about de re modality we should be confused indeed. 11. AN ALTERNATIVE ACCOUNT
As remarked, hiackie's explanation is confessedly reductive. T h e account I shall propose is not. My procedure will be to bring the necessity of origin under certain general principles governing a class of de re modalities. T h a t is, I shall try to isolate and articulate a feature common to all cases of a certain class, and claim that the necessity of an individual's origin is a special case exhibiting this feature. So I shall be taking at least one de 1-e modal principle as primitive. hiy explanation will then take the form: this is essential because that is. This does not, of course, embroil me in circularity; indeed, it is hard to see how such an explanation could be nonreductive zuitlzozit calling upon some de re modal principle as explanans. Part of our trouble so far has been haziness over what the origin of an individual is supposed to consist in. It seems usual to view it as the exact circumstances of birth or creation-time, place, and so on. As hinted earlier, I am dubious of this interpretation of the thesis. In fact, Kripke is inclined to formulate it as the claim that one essentially has the pu1-ents one actually has. If so, then you could presumably have started to exist at a different time or in a different place had your parents operated at a different time or in a different place. Spatiotemporal constraints of this kind (if such there be) will, I conjecture, be supervenient upon more fundamental constraints. As a step to~cardidentifjing the more fundamental constraints, note that, because of rechercllk cases of sperm and ovum transplants, your parents must be picked out of those responsible for producing, in the standard way, the sperm and ovum from which you actually came. Now I think it helpful to distinguish three relations between entities of different kinds in which the origin of a person may be said to consist: first, the relation between the fertilized egg-the zygote-and the pelson it is destined to become; second, the relation between the egg and sperm-the gnnzetes-and the zygote (and hence pelson) they fuse to produce; third, the relation between the gametes and the parents of the resulting person. Our task, then, is to give some account of the rigidity of these relations: i.e., to explain why it is that when entities stand in these relations they necessarily do, why it is that in any world which they exist these entities are related as they are in the actual \\~srld,
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T o explain how come you must have developed from your actual zygote I need two assumptions: (i) you are identical with that zygote, (ii) transtemporal identity is necessary. I think that (ii) scarcely requires comment, so long as one accepts that identity is a rigid relation and that there are genuine identities across timeboth of which I shall here take as read. But (i) is less straightforward. How can a grown man be identical with a tiny fertilized egg? The claim that he is might be resisted on these lines: a person cannot be the same as a zygote because a zygote is not a person and person is an ultimate sortal concept, i.e., a concept that a continuant individual must satisfy throughout its existence if it satisfies it at all. I don't know whether a zygote is a person, but it doesn't matter: for if it is not, then the proper conclusion is that person is a phase-sortal, in David Wiggins's sense.' The demand for an ultimate sortal covering the putative individual for the duration of its existence can be met either by appropriating or by inventing one, e.g., human being. Nor is the claim that we have to do with a single persisting entity here out of the ordinary when one reflects on the drastic metamorphoses endured by seeds as they grow into trees and caterpillars as they become butterflies. More positively: adults are commonly identical with children, and children with infants, infants with fetuses, and fetuses with zygotes. Any attempt to break the obvious biological continuity here would surely be arbitrary. So much for explaining why you couldn't come from a different zygote. What now of gametes and zygotes (and hence persons)? We cannot, it seems, avail ourselves of the necessity of identity again, for gametes are two and persons are one. But neither can we stop short at the zygote, since it seems essential that you come from the gametes you actually come from, as the following train of thought makes plain. Suppose, with a view to reductio, that I come from Nixon's actual gametes, i.e., consider a world in which this occurs. Now, what is surely compossible with the first supposition, add my actual gametes to the aforementioned world and suppose they develop into an adult. Which of these individuals has the stronger title to be me? My intuitions seem decisively to favor the latrer individual. And the same verdict seems delivered if the counterfactual gametes are genetically similar to mine. The reason for preferring the actual gametes of a person as a criterion of identity is, I surmise, a matter of a certain sort of spatiotemporal continuity. My suggestion, in pursuance of that hint, is that we extend bio4
See Identity and Spatio-Tcrnporal Continuity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1967),
pp. 7, 29.
O N TI-IE NECESSITY OF ORIGIN
I33
logical continuity beyond the zygote, ancl then maintain that origin is essential because continuity is. Just as you must have come from the zygote you came from because you are diachronically and developmentally continuous with it, so you must have come from the gametes you came from because you are similarly continuous with them. I shall call this relation d-continuity. T h e intuitive content of the idea of d-continuity is given by the concept of one thing or things conzing from another thing or things. And it is the task of developmental biology to investigate the laws and mechanisms underlying this intuitive idea. A definitive feature of this relation, as I understand it, is that it does not require the persistence of the things that do the becoming. I t is therefore unlike the relation of composition or constitution, or the relation between a thing and its parts. There can be d-continuity between entities without the relation of being made out of holding between them. This seems to be a peculiarity of biological entities. I t contrasts with the relation between a table and the piece of wood it "came from." While we may hope to explain the necessity of origin attaching to the table and the wood it came from in terms of the table's being essentially made from that piece of wood, no such account seems available in respect of biological entities. This should surprise no one who expects de re modalities to depend upon the nature of the res in que~tion.~ I t will help to get the flavor of the d-continuity relation if I give some further examples of it. Since the relation seems integral to each of the de re necessities intuition recognizes in these examples, it seems appropriate to claim that it explains them. T h e union of human gametes is a special case of biological fusion. T h e generalization then suggests itself that all fusion relations give rise to a necessity of origin; this very entity couldn't have resulted from the fusion of entities distinct from the actual ones. Thinking of fusion we naturally turn to fission, and here again it seems that the entities that result from a given entity by fission couldn't have come into existence by the fission of a distinct entity, or indeed in any other way. When an amoeba splits, itself ceasing to exist in the process, the resulting amoebas are such that they 5 In Metaphysics and Essence (Oxford: Blackwell, 1975), Michael Slote is apt to speak indifferently of a man's essentially coming from a particular sperm and egg and his essentially deriving from the particular m a t t e r composing that sperm and egg (e.g., 31). But it is a general truth about biological entities that they are not essentially composed of their actual matter: in some sense of 'matter' my gametes could have been made of different matter-e.g., if my parents had been composed of different matter owing to different material intake. The matter thesis and the gametes thesis are therefore not to be conflated.
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couldn't have come from any other amoeba. T h e phenomenon of clones presents another example; the plants that grow out of cuttings from the original plant couldn't have had their origin in a distinct plant. Or again, it seems that a branch of a given tree must be a branch of that tree and of no other. Now my thesis is that what these various cases have in common-and they do seem to form a natural family-is the relation I am calling d-continuity; and it is this that confers rigidity . on the relations involved, thus accounting for the necessity of origin. I n each case we have a kind of spatiotemporal continuity different from, yet sharing many of the characteristics of, the sort of transtemporal identity exhibited by biological things: an organized, law-governed, causally unified process of development. And in each case the individuation of the entity, or entities, concerned turns on its, or their, d-continuity relations with other entities. I have yet to deal with the third relation I distinguished-that between a parent and the gamete he or she is responsible for producing. Here again, it seems to me, we naturally use the concept of one thing biologically "developing from" another by virtue of biological laws; and again it seems essential to the identity of a given gamete that it spring from the animal it actually sprang from. Putting the three relations together then, we reach the conclusion that an individual necessarily has his actual parents, the reason being that he is d-continuous with them. I t isn't hard to see that the d-continuity principle applied to human beings predicts the necessity of their ancestry. Allowing the relation to possess the transitivity property, so that it is plausibly rated an equivalence relation, a less obvious consequence ensues, namely that a person's position in a field of kinship relations is an essential property of him: your siblings are necessarily your siblings, your nephew is necessarily your nephew, and so on. (Blood relations run deep.) This seems to me intuitively correct, and it is predicted by the c1-continuity principle. (Of course, if d-continuity is to hold between (say) cousins, we cannot gloss it straightforwardly in terms of 'coming from'; but we can say that entities thus related come from something from ~vhichthey both come, and so preserve the intuitive gloss.) Finally, some remarks about species. Species have origins. A species is a biological entity, or at least creatures belonging to a species are biological entities. So we might expect some sort of necessity of origin in respect of species. And indeed I think that being of a certain species does consist in having a certain origin essentially.
KOTES A N D NEWS
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Dummett claims that for an organism to be of a given kind is for it to have a certain descent, so that species are individuated according to their evolutionary origin: "even if creatures exactly like men arose from Dragon's teeth, they would not be men, because not children of Adam" (144). As hitherto, it isn't my primary aim to justify this essentialist thesis; my aim is rather to explain such intuitions as I presume we have. T h e explanation I propose is that to be of a certain species is to be d-continuous with a stock of creatures from which the species actually evolved: to be of the kind Honzo Sapiens is to be d-continuous by descent with a stock of prehominid primates (or with Adam and Eve, depending on your views). T h e case is different for nonbiological kinds, e.g., gold and water. T o be of such a kind is not to have a certain historical origin, but to be constituted in a particular way. I n this respect, the difference in modal properties we noted earlier as between biological and nonbiological particulars is paralleled at the level of kinds, If the thesis that species have their origins essentially is correct, it seems to follow that the earth wouldn't have been populated by the species it is populated by if the relations of evolutionary descent had been different from what they actually were. For the evolution of a species consists of a chain of d-continuity relations each link of which is metaphysically neces~ary.~ COLIN hfCGINN
University College, London
NOTES AND NEWS A series of Conversations in the Disciplines: A i\Iathematical Approach to Pl~ilosophy,will be sponsored by the Department of Mathematics, State University College, Plattsburgh, New York, May 27-29, 1976. These conversations will provide interested scholars in a variety of disciplines with the opportunity to live, for three days, in close intellectual contact with one of the prominent, active workers in exact philosophy, Mario Bunge, Head of the Foundations and Philosophy of Science Unit, McGill University, Montreal, Quebec. M. Bunge will give two lectures on each of three days. Each will be followed by discussion. Informal sessions may also be held. Further information may be obtained from William E. Hartnett, Department of Mathematic, State University College, Plattsburgh, New York 12901. 6
Incidentally, the rigidity of d-continuity relations, if correct, gives the lie to
a famous principle of Hume's, viz. that there cannot be necessary connections
between distinct existences.
