Deflationary Challenges and Essentialism

Abstract

The title of my dissertation—Deflationary Challenges & Essentialism—is intentionally ambiguous. The first paper formulates an epistemic challenge for the essentialist's essence attitudes. The challenge partly arises from Amie Thomasson's deflationary account of existence and identity conditions. The second and third papers, however, issue challenges for Thomasson's deflationism about metaphysical modality and natures respectively. More specifically, the first paper argues that prominent epistemologies of essence are in an epistemically fragile predicament, owing to the fact that, as I argue, they fail to give a positive answer for how essence attitudes are explained by the essence facts. This makes the essentialist especially vulnerable to, what I call, a deflationary challenge, whereby a realist's explanation for their particular realist attitudes are outweighed by a competing deflationary explanation for those attitudes. Such a challenge may arise from something like Thomasson's deflationary account of existence and identity conditions. The second paper argues that Thomasson's deflationary account of modality—modal normativism—is worryingly circular. By reinterpreting the function of modal discourse as prescriptive, Thomasson must include descriptively functioning modal terms in order to clarify the regulative status of the metalinguistic rules which, per hypothesis, undergird modal discourse. Lastly, the third paper argues that Thomasson's deflationary account of existence and identity conditions faces a debunking challenge. In particular, on Thomasson's deflationism, inferential beliefs fail to be explained in the right way in order to explain why their correctness is not a coincidence, because the relevant thoughts don't feature as the explanans in the complete explanation of those beliefs.