Nomic Essentialism

According to nomic (or causal, or dispositional) essentialists, the identity of a property is tied up with its nomic role, the role it plays in the laws of nature. Modally speaking this is straightforward: a property could not have obeyed different laws. But postmodally it is unclear what it means, since it is hard to see how to state the fundamental facts without mentioning particular properties. Various ideas are considered and criticized, such as that facts about property instantiations, or property existence, or property identity, are grounded in facts about laws; and that the laws are essential to properties. The latter, it is argued, is insufficiently metaphysically specific to count as an improvement on the modal formulation.

Hume’s Dictum and Metaethics

This paper explores the metaethical ramifications of a coarse-grained criterion of property identity, sometimes referred to as Hume's dictum. According to Hume's dictum, properties are identical if and only if they are necessarily co-extensive. Assuming the supervenience of the normative on the natural, this criterion threatens the non-naturalist view that there are instantiable normative properties which are distinct from natural properties. In response, non-naturalists typically point to various counterintuitive implications of Hume's dictum. The paper clarifies this strategy and defends it against objections by Bart Streumer and Ralf Bader. In addition, it is argued that proponents of naturalist and supernaturalist views, along with proponents of a certain kind of nihilism, should also reject Hume's dictum. This shows that non-naturalists can also attack the criterion indirectly, by pointing to partners in guilt. Also, it shows that not just any opponent of non-naturalism can appeal to Hume's dictum. Only certain nihilists can.

Space, Structuralism, and Skepticism

The chapter takes structuralism to be the thesis that if F and G are alike causally, then F and G are the same property. It follows that our beliefs about the world can be true in various brain-in-a-vat scenarios, giving us (some) refuge from skeptical arguments. The trouble is that structuralism doesn’t do justice to certain metaphysical aspects of property identity having to do with fundamentality, intrinsicality, and the unity of the world. A closely related point is that the relation…lies-at-some-spatial-distance-from…obeys necessary truths that need not apply to other relations with the same causal profile. This observation is especially important if, as David Lewis argued, the only alternatives to skepticism are structuralism and an anti-Humean stance toward modality. Some pertinent views of David Chalmers’s are discussed, and parallels are drawn between the structuralist response to skepticism and functionalism in the philosophy of mind.

The Reduction Argument

This chapter gives a first version of the reduction argument against non-reductive realism. It explains the criterion of property identity that this argument appeals to, and argues that this criterion is correct. The chapter then argues that non-reductive realists cannot resist the reduction argument by appealing to Leibniz’s law, by claiming that irreducibly normative properties are indispensable to deliberation, or by rejecting the claim about supervenience that the argument appeals to. The chapter ends by discussing several objections to the descriptive predicate that this version of the reduction argument makes use of. It concludes that these objections fail to undermine the argument.

Generating Implications from One-Variable Functions

In this paper, we firstly introduce two new classes of fuzzy implications generated from one-variable functions, called [Formula: see text]- and [Formula: see text]-implications, respectively. Then we give a series of necessary and sufficient conditions that these implications satisfy: left neutrality property, identity principle, ordering principle, law of contraposition, modus ponens and modus tollens, respectively. We also discuss the relations between [Formula: see text]- implication ([Formula: see text]-implications, respectively) and other known classes of fuzzy implications.