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Articles

Vol. 1 (2025): Philogram Journal for Advanced Philosophical Research

Super-explanatory Essentialism and Modal Epistemology

Submitted
5 August 2025
Published
01-12-2025

Abstract

According to super-explanatory essentialism, the essences of natural kinds are identified with their core causal properties. Several proponents of this view develop a distinctive form of modal epistemology, maintaining that our modal knowledge about natural kinds can be derived from knowledge of these core causal properties. In this paper, I argue that this epistemological project is explanatorily unsatisfactory because it presupposes pre-existing modal knowledge for which the account itself lacks explanatory resources. My argument unfolds in three steps. First, I highlight that a crucial component—the epistemology of super-explanatory properties—is underdeveloped in the literature. Second, I propose an abductive epistemology as the most plausible reconstruction and rationalization of how we might come to know these properties and argue that it best captures the super-explanatory essentialists’ intent. Third, I contend that such an abductive approach requires antecedent modal knowledge to even get off the ground, as the knowledge of causal dependencies should be in place. However, knowledge of causal dependencies is saturated with modal knowledge. If this is so, the explanatory ambitions of the super-explanatory essentialist’s modal epistemology remain unmet. Finally, I consider several possible moves for super-explanatory essentialists to salvage their account: appealing to intuition, appealing to conceptualization, and adopting an externalistic interpretation. I argue that none of these moves succeeds in avoiding the problem.

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