will henceforth be calledstrict essence.^51 Fine’s now stock example is this: Socrates
and Socrates’s singleton exist in all the same possible worlds. It is part of
the strict essence of Socrates’s singleton that Socrates exists (and is a member of
it). It is not part of Socrates’s strict essence that his singleton exists. So we cannot
understand strict essence straightforwardly in terms of modality. Fine (1994a)
distinguishes between what he callsconstitutiveessence andconsequentialessence.^52
Roughly, the constitutive essence of a thing is what is“directly”definitional of that
thing, whereas the consequential essence of a thing is what is a consequence of
the constitutive essence of the thing. In what sense of consequence? Four options
present themselves: logical consequence, analytic consequence, modal consequence,
and what the constitutive essence grounds. The logically consequential essence ofx
consists of the constitutive essence ofxplus all that logically follows from that essence.^53
The analytic consequential essence ofxconsists in the constituent essence ofxplus all
that analytically follows from that essence.(So the analytic consequential essence ofxwill
always include that which is included in the logical consequential essence ofx, but the
converse will typically not be the case.) The modal consequential essence ofxconsists
of the constituent essence ofxplus all that is entailed by that essence. (And so the
modal consequential essence ofxwill always include what is included in the analytic
consequential essence ofx, but the converse will typically not be the case.) Finally, the
grounding consequence ofxconsists in the constituent essence ofxplus all that is
grounded in that essence. (The question of how the grounding consequential essence
ofxoverlaps with the other consequential essences ofxis tricky, and will be set aside
for now, although the modal consequential essence ofxwill include what is included
in the grounding consequential essence ofxgiven that grounding induces entail-
ment.)^54 I see no reason to think that one of these notions of consequential essence is
thecorrect notion of consequential essence with which to theorize, though in some
contexts some will be more useful than others.^55
We proceed now to the next stage of the reduction: reducing ground to strict
essence. As a warm-up, consider the proposal defended by Dasgupta (2015) that
what grounds the truth that B is grounded in A is that B has the strict essence it has.^56
In support of this claim, Dasgupta asks us to consider the claim that the fact that
(^51) Proponents of strict essence do not take themselves to be calling attention to a newly discovered
phenomenon but rather rediscovering or at least calling our attention to a phenomenon that once was of
great interest. See, e.g., Charles (2000: 18 52 – 19).
Pasnau and Shields (2004: 66) discusspropria, which are“necessary accidents,”that is, those features
that are had as a consequence of having a certain (strict, constitutive) essence but are not included in it. 53
54 This seems to be Correia’s (2013) preferred way of understanding“consequential essence.”
Whether grounding induces entailment is contentious in the grounding literature. See Trogdon
(2013) and Skiles (2015) for discussion. 55
Koslicki (2012) critiques various ways of drawing a distinction between consequential and constitu-
tive essence and suggests an Aristotelian notion of demonstration as the way to do it, which is developed in
pp. 196 56 – 201.
As noted earlier, Rosen (2010) and Fine (2012a) also discuss this view but do not endorse it.