Speaker Series: Paul Horwich (NYU)

“The Nature of Necessity”

My talk will be about the concept of ‘necessity’ – the idea that some propositions are not merely true, but necessarily true. Or, to put it in less technical-sounding terms, that certain facts have to obtain; that things must be that way; that these things couldn’t have been otherwise. The central question I’ll be addressing is: ‘What is it for a fact to be necessary rather than contingent, or rather than being merely a possible fact?’ I’ll introduce the topic by saying what I think Saul Kripke accomplished on this issue (and what he didn’t accomplish) in his groundbreaking Naming and Necessity. Then I’ll turn to what he takes to be the two most prominent accounts of necessity in the contemporary literature: one (developed by Stephen Yablo) aiming to explain a proposition’s necessary truth in terms of the inconceivability of its being false, and the other (due to Kit Fine) aiming to explain it in terms of the proposition’s being true in virtue of the very nature of the thing it’s about. Finally, I’ll sketch an answer of my own, according to which necessity is a matter of explanatory fundamentality. (Paul Horwich)