Abstract

What Quine describes as divorcing essence from objects and wedding it to words promotes a certain conception of the opposition between concept and object. Detaching essences from reality makes room for the idea that one and the same reality is compatible with the different determinations of essences that different concepts impose. ;The problem is this: if notions of sameness make sense only relative to a concept, how can we think of the same reality as underlying the manifold of possible concepts? This is not just a problem for radically different languages or 'conceptual schemes.' It is the problem of understanding the relation between concepts such as 'statue' and 'chunk of clay.' ;Another popular approach consists of not detaching all sortal determinations from reality. Rather, certain naturalistic conceptions of reality are embraced at the expense of ones that are more 'cultural.' For example, one can construe reality as made of things like chunks of clay, and then see statues as ways of regarding those objects. Thus, being a statue is external to the object and should be justly 'wedded to words.' The problem with this is that the modal properties that one would need to attribute to a chunk of clay, in order to think of it as a statue, simply contradict the modal properties that it already has as a chunk of clay. Thus it is hard to see in what sense it is the chunk of clay that is regarded as a statue. ;This dissertation argues that the weakness of these two approaches arises from a common factor. This common factor can be described as the God's Eye View approach to metaphysics. The alternative is to accept that any determination of identity conditions necessarily creates an exception, a blind spot if you will. In order to avoid the God's Eye View position, we must not contrast the existence of such a blind spot with metaphysical fact