Article: Anti-essentialism and counterpart theory.

Anti-essentialism holds that no thing has any modal properties except relative to a conceptualization--for instance, relative to a description. One and the same thing might be essentially rational relative to the description "mathematician" but only accidentally rational relative to the description "bicyclist." (1) Anti-essentialism was dominant in pre-Kripkean days. The old description theory of names made room for anti-essentialism by reducing apparently true de re modal attributions to de dicto ones by way of the hidden description. We can follow Kripke in giving up the description theory without thereby giving up anti-essentialism. Counterpart theory makes room for ...

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