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On the Non-Necessity of Origin

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

M.S. Price
M.S. Price*
Affiliation:
University of Alabama, Birmingham
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Extract

In ‘Naming and Necessity,’ Saul Kripke defends a number of essentialist claims. One of them is that having a certain origin is a necessary property of a material thing. Used in connection with a human being or, presumably, a living thing of another kind whose members sexually reproduce, ‘necessity of origin’ means that the organism must have been born of those individuals who are its parents, i.e., whose body tissues are sources of the sperm and egg from which it issued, in the actual world. To say that the origin of an inanimate material thing is necessary is to say that having its origin in the hunk of matter from which it came is essential to it.

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Philosophy , Volume 12 , Issue 1 , March 1982 , pp. 33 - 45
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 1982

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Footnotes

*

I owe thanks to Malcolm Acock for his helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper.

References

1 ‘Naming and Necessity,’ in Davidson, Donald and Harman, Gilbert eds., Semantics of Natural Language (Boston: Reidel 1972)CrossRefGoogle Scholar

2 McGinn, Colin ‘On the Necessity of Origin,’ Journal of Philosophy, 73 (1976) 127-35:CrossRefGoogle Scholar Mackie, J.L. ‘De What Re Is De Re Modality?', Journal of Philosophy, 71 (1974) 551-61CrossRefGoogle Scholar

3 Kripke supports in this way the thesis that a living thing's origin is necessary in 'Naming and Necessity,’ p. 313.

4 In ‘Origin and Necessity’ (Philosophical Studies, 32 [1977] 413-8), Patricia Johnston contends that the adult Queen Elizabeth could have resulted from a different zygote than the one that actually became her. She evidently assumes that the only reason some think otherwise is their belief that the possibility of the Queen's proceeding from a different zygote conflicts with some condition of, or intuition about, transworld identity. For she regards objections to the view that it makes sense to say that individuals in different possible worlds are numerically identical as securing the tenability of her claim. But what preclude the possibility of the Queen's originating as some other zygote are rather truths about identity through time: a woman who develops from a zygote b in a nonactualized possible world w’ is transtemporally identical in w’ with b; and Queen Elizabeth is transtemporally identical in the actual world with her actual zygote. Consequently, if b is distinct from, in the sense of ‘not being numerically the same as,' the Queen's actual zygote, then the woman b grows into in w’ must be distinct from, in the sense of ‘not being numerically identical with,’ Queen Elizabeth. And if b is distinct from, in the sense of ‘not being a counterpart of,’ Queen Elizabeth's actual zygote, then the woman that b becomes in w’ must be distinct from, in the sense of ‘not being a counterpart of,’ Queen Elizabeth.

5 Kripke, 350. This quotation contains corrections of several typographical errors in the original printing of Kripke's argument.

6 In ‘How Not to Derive Essentialism from the Theory of Reference’ (Journal of Philosophy, 76 [1979)703-25), Nathan Salmon argues that one must add a nontrivial essentialist principle as a premise to Kripke's ‘proof’ to obtain its conclusion.

7 Kripke, 351

8 See Kripke, 350.

9 This putative example of distinct articulated objects occupying the same place at the same time is Sydney Shoemaker's. See his Wiggins on Identity’ in Munitz, Milton K. ed., Identity and Individuation (New York: New York University Press 1971) 104-5.Google Scholar

10 Strawson, P.F. ‘Particular and General,’ in Loux, Michael J. ed., Universals and Particulars (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday 1970) 71Google Scholar