Philsoc Seminar

Tuesday April, 10th 2015

Speaker: Renato M. Rocha (UFSC)

Location: Seminar Room B
Title: On Natural Properties

Abstract: Natural properties are meant to carve nature in its joints. Because of this special power, Dorr & Hawthorne (2013) divides the debate around natural properties between the enthusiastic and the skeptic. This talk is on the former side. The notion of natural properties is a very ambitious one and it plays a central role in Lewisian metaphysics. It is ambitious since it intends to solve different and persistence puzzles in contemporary philosophy, such as Goodman’s grue/green problem, the debate around Universals, the Putnam’s paradox and Quine’s “gavagai". It is central because it is present in many definitions and solutions found in David Lewis's writings, such as in the distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic properties, on definitions of a duplicate, minimal materialism and determinism. Despite not talking about the details of each mentioned puzzle and solution, I will focus on understanding what this notion is and explain its central role in Lewis’s work. I propose to do this by discussing the arguments of Mellor (2012) and Tahko (2012). The former argues for the realism of natural properties but denies the Lewisian view of a minority elite of properties. The latter presents an argument that takes the existence of macroscopic objects and nonmonological necessities as a premise and concludes that entities that ground these objects must be natural properties. Moreover, I will propose a definition of natural properties and defend that this is a central notion in order to understand David Lewis’s metaphysics.