Grounding, contingentism, and the reduction of metaphysical necessity to essence

Abstract

Teitel (Mind 128:39-68, 2019) argues that the following three doctrines are jointly inconsistent: i) the doctrine that metaphysical necessity reduces to essence; ii) the doctrine that possibly something could fail to exist; and iii) the doctrine that metaphysical necessity obeys a modal logic of at least S4. This paper presents a novel solution to Teitel’s puzzle, regimented in a higher-order logical setting, which is crucially based on the idea that the putative reduction of metaphysical necessity to essence should be understood through appealing to some hyperintensional notion—such as grounding or real definition—rather than the notion of identity/identification. Moreover, it will also be shown that the proposed reductive account has a significant advantage over its rival account.