Essentialism and the Theory of Direct Reference

Abstract

A striking feature of contemporary thought, mainly due to the Kripke-Putnam theory of reference, is the rehabilitation of the notion of ‘essence’. Salmon (Reference and Essence, Blackwell Press, 1982) has convincingly argued that this revival of essentialism is completely unjustified. This paper tries to determine why, if this is so unjustified, essentialism and reference became entangled. It is argued that this is due to the ‘instance-to-kind’ logic of the determination of reference used by the new theory of reference. It is also argued that such theories that try to avoid essentialist commitments can do so, but only at a cost of sacrificing some basic virtues of the new theory of reference.