Journal of Philosophy, Inc.

On the Necessity of Origin

Author(s): Colin McGinn
Source: The Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 73, No. 5 (Mar. 11, 1976), pp. 127-135
Published by: Journal of Philosophy, Inc.
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2025741
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 ON THE NECESSITY OF ORIGIN I27

is buried in the glib expression, "both Oscars apply DLL to 'alumi-

num'." This gives the impression that both Oscars do the same

thing with respect to 'aluminum'; but this is a mistake. Osc

plies DLL because he believes that aluminum is the stuff that Earth
scientists call "aluminum," but Oscar2 applies DLL because he be-
lieves tha aluminum is the stuff that Twin Earth scientists call
"aluminum." Thus the two Oscars have widely different beliefs
about 'aluminum'. We would not say, e.g., that two persons have
the same beliefs about 'demoncracy' if one of them believes that
the reference of this term is determined by the Communist Party
while the other believes that Senator Goldwater is the expert on its
reference. The Oscars, therefore, are not in the same psychological
state with respect to 'aluminum'. Nor do they behave in the same
way with respect to it: although both defer to scientists in applying
'aluminum', it is to different scientists that they defer; and while
Earth scientists apply 'aluminum' to aluminum, Twin Earth scien-
tists apply 'aluminum' to molybdenum. Thus the extensions of
'aluminum' in the idiolects of the two Oscars are indeed distinct,
but so are their psychological states and their behavior. Putnam has
failed to show that any two people can mean two different things
by a certain term although they are in the same psychological state,
or exhibit the same behavior, with respect to it. He has also failed
to show that "the traditional concept of meaning is a concept which
rests on a false theory" (700). On the contrary, I have tried to show
that the very intelligibility of HDLL rests on some traditional con-
cept of meaning and would have been altogether inconceivable on
the historico-scientific theory of reference only.
EDDY M. ZEMACH

The Hebrew University of Jerusalem

ON THE NECESSITY OF ORIGIN *

S AUL KRIPKE has advanced a number of essentialist theses

whose acceptance seems recommended by intuition.' One
k such thesis is that the origin of a thing constitutes a de re
necessity. Compelling as the deliverances of intuition are, however,

* I am grateful to W. D. Hart, C. A. B. Peacocke, and J. Hornsby for helpful

discussions on the topic of this paper.
1 See "Naming and Necessity," in D. Davidson and G. Harman, eds., Seman-
tics of Natural Language (Boston: Reidel, 1972), pp. 253-355.

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 128 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY

they fall short of supplying any so

ties in question. We are left wondering why it is that, e.g., a per-
son, couldn't have had a different origin. In "De What Re Is De Re
Modality?" t J. L. Mackie has a try at filling the explanatory
vacuum-i.e., he offers us an account of why we are inclined to be-
lieve that origin is essential but subsequent history is accidental. I
am going, first, to argue that MIackie's proposed explanation is in-
adequate, and, second, to suggest a different account of the necessity
of origin.
I. DE THE WRONG RE

There are two preliminary points I would note about Mackie's

procedure.
The first is that he conceives the task as that of explaining away,
in the style of Hume on causation, the beliefs about de re modality
which he agrees we have. He inquires not about why these beliefs
are true-for, by his lights, their truth is strictly illusory-but
rather why we are disposed to think they are true. It is not surpris-
ing, then, to read that "these de re modalities are, in a very broad
sense, de dicto after all" (560)-'de intellectu' might be more apt.
Since Mackie's explanation is, unashamedly, an essay in the etiology
of confusion (as was Hume's account of our intuitive concept of
causality), it is not always easy to tell whether we are invited to sup-
pose his principles true or simply psychologically correct. I shall
take it that the explanatory principles are intended as plausible in
themselves; then argue that they are not, and that, even if they
were, they would fail to explain the modal intuitions we have. In
particular, they stand in want of a supplementary principle, to be
discerned in A. N. Prior 2 and Michael Dummett,3 which is itself
unacceptable.
The second point has to do with the nature of counterfactual
supposition. Mackie gestures concurrence with Kripke in holding
that we may transpose actual individuals into counterfactual situa-
tions, by dint of rigid designation, and that consequently there is no
prior requirement of fixing up identities (or some other equivalence
relation) between individuals counterfactually posited and individ-
uals as they actually are, on the basis of qualitative criteria. I think

t This JOURNAL, LXXI, 16 (Sept. 19, 1974): 551-561. Parenthetical page refer-
cnces to Mackie are to this paper.
2 See "Identifiable Individuals," especially pp. 70f., in Papers on Time and
Tense (New York: Oxford, 1968). Parenthetical page references to Prior are to
this article.
8 In Frege: Philosophy of Language (London: Duckworth; New York: Harper,
1973), pp. 130f. Parenthetical page references to Dummett are to this book.

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 ON THE NECESSITY OF ORIGIN I29

Mackie goes wrong through (inter alia) not taking the Kripkean
view of possible worlds fully to heart.

Mackie's explanation comes in two stages. The first stage purports

to tell how we "handle possibility and identity together," the second
why we handle them that way.
The main thrust of the first stage is this: although we are able
intelligibly to contemplate a forward divergence from actual his-
tory, the idea of a backward divergence is not the sort of counter-
factual situation in which identity can be preserved. Otherwise put,
we cannot make sense of a possible convergence with actuality. For
suppose "we contemplate a possible person who is conceived at to,
not at t, [the time of Nixon's actual origin] whose career from
t2 is different from that of the actual Nixon but whose actions and
experiences from t2 to t3 are exactly like those of the actual Nixon";
then "even if we do contemplate the conceivable if not causally
possible t0-t2-t3 career, we cannot claim that the possible person
whose career it is would be Nixon," for "he never becomes Nixon
and so never was Nixon" (554/5). Ergo, we are to conclude, origin is
essential and subsequent history accidental..
It seems to me that Mackie here just assumes that we cannot pick
out the actual Nixon and suppose that he enjoyed a different career
prior to a certain time, for he (Mackie) begins by postulating some
possible person whose continuity with Nixon is taken as prob-
lematic. Thus he simply begs the question against its being Nixon.
But it seems perfectly possible to suppose that Nixon got to be
President by different means. To reply that Nixon could have con-
verged on the Presidency in a different way but not from a differ-
ent origin seems merely to re-invite the original question, viz., why
origin should be singled out as essential and life-history counted
contingent. The claimed asymmetry of forward and backward de-
partures from actuality seems either spurious or a petitio.
A second objection is that, even if Mackie were right about the
asymmetry, it couldn't non-question-beggingly distinguish origin as
necessary. For, since convergence is impossible at any time in
Nixon's career, the properties he has before a given time come out
essential; on the other hand, the possibility of divergence at any time
makes all properties come out accidental. It looks as if we need some
extra principle capable of conferring special status on the time of
origin, so that convergences and divergences can be evaluated for
their modal implications with respect to that time. Though Mackie
does not, so far as I can see, offer any such principle, Prior and

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I 30 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY

Dummett do. Thus Dummett asserts that "we cannot push back
the moment in respect of which a property is to be characterized as
presently accidental behind the point at which the object came
into existence: that is why, in the case of a human being, his
parentage and even the moment of his conception seem absolutely
necessary to his identity" (131). That is, before his coming to exist,
Nixon was not a subject for the possibility that he should come
to exist differently; there is no earlier situation containing Nixon
with respect to which actuality might have turned out otherwise
than it did. Now, aside from other criticisms one could make of
this principle, the following seems decisive against it: it entails
that everything true of Nixon at the moment of his creation is
necessarily true of him. Not just exact time and place of birth, but
also that he started to be in a room containing a vase of geraniums,
indeed (if existence be a property) that he is a necessary existent.
In fact, the principle appears capable of yielding the result that all
true sentences are necessarily true, since to each ascription of a
property to Nixon at birth we can conjoin a true sentence, e.g., a
sentence about his later career. The suggested supplementary prin-
ciple seems to lead rapidly from the frying pan to the fire. Its trou-
bles should also alert us into suspicion of any view that lets the
necessity of origin attach to the circunmstances of origin.
The second stage of Mackie's account seeks to explain the alleged
asymmetry in terms of (i) the fixity of the past and (ii) the causal
underdetermination of the future. The idea, if I understand rightly,
is that, because we regard the past as unalterable, we do not allow
that things could have come about differently; i.e., we do not allow
that a given past condition of the world could have had different
causal antecedents. Again, it seems to me hard to see how (i) and (ii)
confer special modal status on origin without either circularity or
unspecified supplementation. Agreed, we don't have to say that all
past properties are essential, since before they were acquired it was
causally possible that some other condition be brought about; but
what is to stop us saying that before the time of origin it was
causally possible that the individual have a different origin? Only,
it seems, invocation of some principle in which the existence of the
individual figures crucially; e.g., x is essentially H$ at t if there is no
earlier time at which x exists and such that it was causally possible
at that earlier time that x not be 0 at t. Either Mackie calls upon
such a principle, and then faces its modally extravagant conse-
quences, or his explanation fails to afford any rule of discrimina-
tion between the property or properties comprising origin and the

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 ON THE NECESSITY OF ORIGIN 131

properties that comprise contingent history. If such principles, and

the reasoning based on them, lay at back of our beliefs about de re
modality we should be confused indeed.
II. AN ALTERNATIVE ACCOUNT

As remarked, Mackie's explanation is confessedly reductive. The

account I shall propose is not. My procedure will be to bring the
necessity of origin under certain general principles governing a
class of de re modalities. That is, I shall try to isolate and articulate
a feature common to all cases of a certain class, and claim that the
necessity of an individual's origin is a special case exhibiting this
feature. So I shall be taking at least one de re modal principle as
primitive. My explanation will then take the form: this is essential
because that is. This does not, of course, embroil me in circularity;
indeed, it is hard to see how such an explanation could be nonre-
ductive without calling upon some de re modal principle as
explanans.

Part of our trouble so far has been haziness over what the origin of
an individual is supposed to consist in. It seems usual to view it as
the exact circumstances of birth or creation-time, place, and so on.
As hinted earlier, I am dubious of this interpretation of the thesis.
In fact, Kripke is inclined to formulate it as the claim that one
essentially has the parents one actually has. If so, then you could
presumably have started to exist at a different time or in a different
place had your parents operated at a different time or in a different
place. Spatiotemporal constraints of this kind (if such there be) will,
I conjecture, be supervenient upon more fundamental constraints.
As a step toward identifying the more fundamental constraints,
note that, because of recherche cases of sperm and ovum trans-
plants, your parents must be picked out of those responsible for
producing, in the standard way, the sperm and ovum from which
you actually came. Now I think it helpful to distinguish three rela-
tions between entities of different kinds in which the origin of a
person may be said to consist: first, the relation between the fer-
tilized egg-the zygote-and the person it is destined to become;
second, the relation between the egg and sperm-the gametes-and
the zygote (and hence person) they fuse to produce; third, the rela-
tion between the gametes and the parents of the resulting person.
Our task, then, is to give some account of the rigidity of these rela-
tions: i.e., to explain why it is that when entities stand in these
relations they necessarily do, why it is that in any world which they
exist these entities are related as they are in the actual world.

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I32 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY

To explain how come you must have developed from your actual
zygote I need two assumptions: (i) you are identical with that
zygote, (ii) transtemporal identity is necessary. I think that (ii)
scarcely requires comment, so long as one accepts that identity is a
rigid relation and that there are genuine identities across time-
both of which I shall here take as read. But (i) is less straight-
forward. How can a grown man be identical with a tiny fertilized
egg? The claim that he is might be resisted on these lines: a person
cannot be the same as a zygote because a zygote is not a person
and person is an ultimate sortal concept, i.e., a concept that a con-
tinuant individual must satisfy throughout its existence if it satisfies
it at all. I don't know whether a zygote is a person, but it doesn't
matter: for if it is not, then the proper conclusion is that person
is a phase-sortal, in David Wiggins's sense. The demand for an
ultimate sortal covering the putative individual for the duration of
its existence can be met either by appropriating or by inventing
one, e.g., human being. Nor is the claim that we have to do with a
single persisting entity here out of the ordinary when one reflects
on the drastic metamorphoses endured by seeds as they grow into
trees and caterpillars as they become butterflies. More positively:
adults are commonly identical with children, and children with
infants, infants with fetuses, and fetuses with zygotes. Any attempt
to break the obvious biological continuity here would surely be
arbitrary.
So much for explaining why you couldn't come from a different
zygote. What now of gametes and zygotes (and hence persons)? We
cannot, it seems, avail ourselves of the necessity of identity again,
for gametes are two and persons are one. But neither can we stop
short at the zygote, since it seems essential that you come from the
gametes you actually come from, as the following train of thought
makes plain. Suppose, with a view to reduction that I come from
Nixon's actual gametes, i.e., consider a world in which this occurs.
Now, what is surely compossible with the first supposition, add
my actual gametes to the aforementioned world and suppose they
develop into an adult. Which of these individuals has the stronger
title to be me? My intuitions seem decisively to favor the latter
individual. And the same verdict seems delivered if the counter-
factual gametes are genetically similar to mine. The reason for
preferring the actual gametes of a person as a criterion of identity
is, I surmise, a matter of a certain sort of spatiotemporal continuity.
My suggestion, in pursuance of that hint, is that we extend bio-
4 See Identity and Spatio-Temporal Continuity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1967),
pp. 7, 29.

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 ON THE NECESSITY OF ORIGIN 133

logical continuity beyond the zygote, and then maintain that origin
is essential because continuity is. Just as you must have come from
the zygote you came from because you are diachronically and de-
velopmentally continuous with it, so you must have come from
the gametes you came from because you are similarly continuous
with them. I shall call this relation d-continuity. The intuitive con-
tent of the idea of d-continuity is given by the concept of one thing
or things coming from another thing or things. And it is the task
of developmental biology to investigate the laws and mechanisms
underlying this intuitive idea. A definitive feature of this relation,
as I understand it, is that it does not require the persistence of the
things that do the becoming. It is therefore unlike the relation of
composition or constitution, or the relation between a thing and its
parts. There can be d-continuity between entities without the rela-
tion of being made out of holding between them. This seems to be
a peculiarity of biological entities. It contrasts with the relation
between a table and the piece of wood it "came from." While we
may hope to explain the necessity of origin attaching to the table
and the wood it came from in terms of the table's being essentially
made from that piece of wood, no such account seems available in
respect of biological entities. This should surprise no one who
expects de re modalities to depend upon the nature of the res in
question.5
It will help to get the flavor of the d-continuity relation if I give
some further examples of it. Since the relation seems integral to
each of the de re necessities intuition recognizes in these examples,
it seems appropriate to claim that it explains them.
The union of human gametes is a special case of biological
fusion. The generalization then suggests itself that all fusion rela-
tions give rise to a necessity of origin; this very entity couldn't have
resulted from the fusion of entities distinct from the actual ones.
Thinking of fusion we naturally turn to fission, and here again it
seems that the entities that result from a given entity by fission
couldn't have come into existence by the fission of a distinct entity,
or indeed in any other way. When an amoeba splits, itself ceasing
to exist in the process, the resulting amoebas are such that they

5 In Metaphysics and Essence (Oxford: Blackwell, 1975), Michael Slote is apt

to speak indifferently of a man's essentially coming from a particular sperm and
egg and his essentially deriving from the particular matter composing that
sperm and egg (e.g., 31). But it is a general truth about biological entities that
they are not essentially composed of their actual matter: in some sense of 'mat-
ter' my gametes could have been made of different matter-e.g., if my parents
had been composed of different matter owing to different material intake. The
matter thesis and the gametes thesis are therefore not to be conflated.

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I34 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY

couldn't have come from any other amoeba. The phenomenon of

clones presents another example; the plants that grow out of cut-
tings from the original plant couldn't have had their origin in a
distinct plant. Or again, it seems that a branch of a given tree must
be a branch of that tree and of no other. Now my thesis is that what
these various cases have in common-and they do seem to form
a natural family-is the relation I am calling d-continuity; and it
is this that confers rigidity on the relations involved, thus account-
ing for the necessity of origin. In each case we have a kind of spatio-
temporal continuity different from, yet sharing many of the charac-
teristics of, the sort of transtemporal identity exhibited by biological
things: an organized, law-governed, causally unified process of
development. And in each case the individuation of the entity, or
entities, concerned turns on its, or their, d-continuity relations with
other entities.
I have yet to deal with the third relation I distinguished-that
between a parent and the gamete he or she is responsible for pro-
ducing. Here again, it seems to me, we naturally use the concept
of one thing biologically "developing from" another by virtue of
biological laws; and again it seems essential to the identity of a
given gamete that it spring from the animal it actually sprang from.
Putting the three relations together then, we reach the conclusion
that an individual necessarily has his actual parents, the reason
being that he is d-continuous with them.
It isn't hard to see that the d-continuity principle applied to
human beings predicts the necessity of their ancestry. Allowing the
relation to possess the transitivity property, so that it is plausibly
rated an equivalence relation, a less obvious consequence ensues,
namely that a person's position in a field of kinship relations is an
essential property of him: your siblings are necessarily your siblings,
your nephew is necessarily your nephew, and so on. (Blood relations
run deep.) This seems to me intuitively correct, and it is predicted
by the d-continuity principle. (Of course, if d-continuity is to hold
between (say) cousins, we cannot gloss it straightforwardly in terms
of 'coming from'; but we can say that entities thus related come
from something from which they both come, and so preserve the
intuitive gloss.)

Finally, some remarks about species. Species have origins. A species

is a biological entity, or at least creatures belonging to a species are
biological entities. So we might expect some sort of necessity of
origin in respect of species. And indeed I think that being of a
certain species does consist in having a certain origin essentially.

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 NOTES AND NEWS 135

Dummett claims that for an organism to be of a given kind is for it

to have a certain descent, so that species are individuated according
to their evolutionary origin: "even if creatures exactly like men
arose from Dragon's teeth, they would not be men, because not
children of Adam" (144). As hitherto, it isn't my primary aim to
justify this essentialist thesis; my aim is rather to explain such
intuitions as I presume we have. The explanation I propose is that
to be of a certain species is to be d-continuous with a stock of crea-
tures from which the species actually evolved: to be of the kind
Homo Sapiens is to be d-continuous by descent with a stock of pre-
hominid primates (or with Adam and Eve, depending on your
views).
The case is different for nonbiological kinds, e.g., gold and water.
To be of such a kind is not to have a certain historical origin, but
to be constituted in a particular way. In this respect, the difference
in modal properties we noted earlier as between biological and
nonbiological particulars is paralleled at the level of kinds,
If the thesis that species have their origins essentially is correct,
it seems to follow that the earth wouldn't have been populated by
the species it is populated by if the relations of evolutionary de-
scent had been different from what they actually were. For the evo-
lution of a species consists of a chain of d-continuity relations each
link of which is metaphysically necessary.6
COLIN MCGINN

University College, London

NOTES AND NEWS

A series of Conversations in the Disciplines: A Mathematical Approach to

Philosophy, will be sponsored by the Department of Mathematics, State
University College, Plattsburgh, New York, May 27-29, 1976. These con-
versations will provide interested scholars in a variety of disciplines with
the opportunity to live, for three days, in close intellectual contact with
one of the prominent, active workers in exact philosophy, Mario Bunge,
Head of the Foundations and Philosophy of Science Unit, McGill Uni-
versity, Montreal, Quebec. M. Bunge will give two lectures on each of
three days. Each will be followed by discussion. Informal sessions may also
be held. Further information may be obtained from William E. Hartnett,
Department of Mathematic, State University College, Plattsburgh, New
York I290I.

6 Incidentally, the rigidity of d-continuity relations, if correct, gives the lie to

a famous principle of Hume's, viz. that there cannot be necessary connections
between distinct existences.

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