Abstract
David Chalmers (1996) and Frank Jackson (1998) have recently advocated a 'two-dimensional' account of necessary a posteriori truth according to which all necessary a posteriori truths are, in Gareth Evans's (1979) terminology, 'superficially necessary', but 'deeply contingent'. By appeal to this account, Chalmers and Jackson argue that the existence of necessary a posteriori truths poses no serious obstacle to the use of a priori methods as a guide to genuine possibility and necessity.1 The two-dimensional account appears to require a controversial theory of the semantics of natural kind terms and proper names, and this has led several writers to doubt or deny that the account can accommodate all examples of the necessary a posteriori.2 In this paper I shall argue that, apart from these semantic problems, the two-dimensional account confronts a serious objection: the allegedly problematic characteristics that
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