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Necessary Beings: An Essay on Ontology, Modality, & the Relations Between Them . By Bob Hale . Oxford University Press , 2013, pp. 320, £40. ISBN: 978-0-19-966957-8
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Bob Hale's Necessary Beings synthesises and extends his many years of work in this area, responding to his critics, and presenting a complex, rewarding, thought-provoking whole. Modality is shown as grounded in the natures of actually-existing entities. But this is not a reductive account of modality. Rather, it pictures actually-existing entities as inherently modal. Thus Hale's apt subtitle: 'An Essay on Ontology, Modality, and the Relations Between Them'.
Early chapters establish the need for some such account of modality, arguing first (by way of McFetridge) that modal claims are indispensable and second (by way of attacks on Lewis and Armstrong, and on Blackburn) that neither a reductionist nor an anti-realist account of modality will do. The positive proposal is to ground logical necessities in the nature of logical entities, extending this to account for metaphysical necessities more generally.
What is a logical entity? Hale is clear that these are neither meanings nor concepts; he does not identify necessity with either analyticity or conceptual truth. Rather, logical entities are objects, properties, or relations, including functions like conjunction. Suppose we ask why it is necessarily true that a conjunction of two propositions is true iff both of the conjuncts are true. Hale's response is that this is because conjunction just is that binary function of propositions the value of which is a true proposition iff both its arguments are true propositions; this is the nature of conjunction.
Crucial explanatory weight is carried by a claim about the nature of a function. 'Nature' here means something stronger, and narrower, than 'what it is like'. Conjunction is the binary function most commonly used to introduce students to truth tables, but this is not part of the nature of conjunction. Supposing a necessarily-existent God, conjunction necessarily co-exists with God, but again this is not part of the nature of conjunction. Conjunction is necessarily a member of the singleton set {conjunction} but even that is not part of the nature of conjunction. Instead, something's nature is its identity, what it is to be that thing, what...