Résumé
This talk is about knowledge of essence about concrete entities. For those who, like me, have distanced themselves from knowledge-first (or necessity-first) epistemologies of modality, knowledge of essence proves pressing. Especially if, in addition, one is also cautiously distanced from rationalism. We might have a fair amount of knowledge of possibilities, but nothing (or not necessarily anything) close to supporting knowledge of essence. We know Socrates could be many different things, and thus we know his modal profile to be a certain, minimum size. But could he be a dog? Is Socrates's modal profile large enough as to include the possibility that he is a dog? There are reasons to believe we might never know; that this is something that falls beyond our epistemic reach. Conceptual engineering comes in at this dialectical moment to remedy this; and, in fact, it comes to teach us how to leave with this ignorance while enabling alternative essentialist knowledge. I will suggest the following normative decision: that our concepts should be so fashioned as to refer to the largest—in a sense to be explained but already alluded to in this abstract—modally extended entities for whose existence we have direct evidence, regardless of whether, metaphysically, these entities are just proper parts of ‘larger’ ones our unruled concepts might have been onto. Once so fashioned, we are in a position to think, and therefore know, the greatest amount of knowable essentialist facts we're equipped for.
