Essences, Heuristics, and Metaphysical Illusions

The paper is a critique of Kit Fine’s central argument in ‘Essence and Modality’ for the hyperintensionality of essence-attributing operators, from the premise that it is essential to Socrates that he is Socrates but not that he belongs to {Socrates}. Similar arguments can be given about what is essential to natural numbers, but are provably unsound. The proof of unsoundness exploits the category of singular terms with a compositionally complex semantics that are nevertheless directly referential, such as ‘7 + 1’; they must not be confused with definite descriptions. The proof depends on the standard logic of identity, not on any intensionalist assumption. The errors in our pre-theoretic essentialists judgments are explained by our reliance on an efficient but fallible heuristic. The analogous premises of Fine’s argument are generated by the same heuristic and so are untrustworthy. More generally, it is suggested, hyperintensionalist theorizing is guilty of overfitting dodgy data. The paper also notes a strand of Fine’s original article that restricts its claims to the intelligibility rather than truth of hyperintensional essentialism; its intelligibility is not contested.