A Puzzle for Social Essences

Abstract

The social world contains institutions (nations, clubs), groups (races, genders), objects (talismans, borders), and more. This essay explores a puzzle about the essences of social items. There is widespread consensus against social essences because of problematic presuppositions often made about them. But it is argued that essence can be freed from these presuppositions and their problems. Even so, a puzzle still arises. In a Platonic spirit, essences in general seem detached from the world. In an Aristotelian spirit, social essences in particular seem embedded in the world. The puzzle is that these inclinations are individually plausible but jointly incompatible. The essay has four aims: to clarify and refine the puzzle; to explore the puzzle's implications for essence in general and for social essences in particular; to illustrate the fruitfulness of the general distinction between detached and embedded; and to develop this distinction to sketch a novel solution to the puzzle.

What's at Stake in the Race Debate?

“…1 Recently some have thought to rescue the notion of "essence," by showing that essences are not ruled out by the facts of biology (e.g., Devitt 2008;Raven 2022). The viability of such a modernized conception of essence turns on a relaxation of the assumed conditions for being an essence, but here I leave further discussions of what is essential to essencehood.…”

Essence

“…7 A different way of reconstructing that debate appeals to Kit Fine's (2005) distinction between "worldly" and "transcendent" facts. This line of inquiry has recently been pursued in a series of very interesting papers by Mike Raven (2020aRaven ( , 2021Raven ( , 2022. Although I have taken a different Essence this investigation are then brought to bear on our question in Section 3, which sketches an argument from the premise that essentialist facts are explained by the origins of things to the conclusion that such facts are active.…”

“…Roughly speaking, the first fact "says" that Socrates has a certain property, humanity. Since we have supposed that his having this property is essential to him, let us on this basis say with Raven (2022) that the fact that Socrates is human is an essential fact.…”