Tristan Grøtvedt Haze, "Meaning and Metaphysical Necessity" (Routledge, 2022)
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What is the necessary‑a‑posteriori thesis that the book revisits?
Welcome to the New Books Network.
Hello, and welcome to New Books and Philosophy, a podcast channel with the New Books Network. I'm Carrie Figdor, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Iowa. I'm co-host of the channel, along with Robert Talese, Sarah Tyson, and Malcolm Keating. Together, we bring you conversations with philosophers about their new books in a wide range of areas of contemporary philosophical inquiry. Today's interview is with Tristan Grotvedt Hayes, lecturer in philosophy at the University of Melbourne. His new book, Meaning and Metaphysical Necessity, is just out from Routledge. In 1980, the philosopher and logician Sol Kripke published a small but hugely influential book naming a necessity in which he argued that some claims that we discover empirically
that is, a posteriori, to be true are also necessarily true. True not just in our world, but in any possible world in which the objects or kinds referred to by the words in the sentence exist. In his new book, Grotwedt revisits this concept of the necessary a posteriori. He uses a method of factorization to explain the sort of a priori philosophical analysis that can give us insight into modal status. But in contrast to Kripke, he defends a neo-Fregean theory of meaning with an internal use component. He also considers the nature of metaphysical necessity itself, although he ends up being a skeptic about strong metaphysical necessity. Let's turn to the interview. Hello, Tristan Grotfeld-Hayes. Welcome to The Books and Philosophy.
Hi, Carrie. Thanks for having me.
This should be a very fun interview about meaning and metaphysical necessity, which I think for a lot of our listeners will bring them to mind, of course, of Kripke's book, Naming a Necessity. So I don't know if it's quite naming a necessity redux, but certainly a number of the main themes here. Absolutely. Yeah. So before we get into the book itself and the thickets of modality and meaning, tell us a bit about yourself and how you came to be a philosopher and then how you came to the topics that interest you and that led to the writing of the book.
Yeah, well, I'm a lecturer in philosophy at the University of Melbourne. I got into philosophy, I went to, I guess, in high school, I had, I mean, growing up, I thought philosophically, definitely, without... without maybe realizing that. And I had sort of philosophically relevant interests, but I liked computer programming, but then I also read, I mean, I didn't have a lot of exposure to the kind of philosophy I like most now, but I would read things like, Freud and spook myself and things like that. And then I went to uni and started doing a bit of computer programming there, thinking that that's the direction I was going to go in. But I took electives in philosophy and kind of fell in love with it.
And especially when I did a logic class, I found that some of what attracted me to programming the sort of feeling of things clicking, it was there in a very pure form in logic. And, uh, the more, I guess, uh, I guess I just sort of, it was a bit of a dark night of the soul. And then I realized that I should just major in philosophy and then, and went, went that way. Um, then, uh, did a, did a PhD and, um, I sort of stayed at the, at the university of Sydney all the way through and, and did this PhD. And then I kind of hit a wall with that. Um, when I was trying to finish the thesis had, had like a little bit of a, a kind of breakdown, I suppose, and had to do other things for a while, like got a couple of menial jobs and pursued other things in the arts, like music and standup comedy and things.
And, then was able to finish my thesis just off my own, you know, just off my own bat, not with a stipend or anything. And then I was able to start teaching casually at the University of Sydney, and that took me here to Melbourne. And with the book, the book project is a long-running project sort of obsession. Like I wrote about these topics for my PhD thesis. And the book really, I mean, it came from reading Saul Kripke's Naming a Necessity, really.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is the necessary‑a‑posteriori thesis that the book revisits?
0:01–8:38
2
How does Haze use the factorisation method to separate semantic from non‑semantic parts of a claim?
8:38–17:04
3
Why does Haze adopt a neo‑Fregean theory of meaning instead of Kripke’s naming‑necessity view?
17:04–26:52
4
What role do counter‑factual scenario descriptions play in distinguishing necessary from contingent truths?
26:52–34:40
5
How does the ‘flexible granularity’ doctrine help explain different uses of names like Hesperus/Phosphorus?
34:40–43:54
6
Why is Haze skeptical about strongly metaphysical modality and what alternative does he propose?
43:54–51:08
7
How does the book address tricky cases such as philosophical zombies and identity statements?
51:08–59:09
8
What current projects is Haze working on after the book, and how do they relate to his views on meaning and necessity?
59:09–1:05:53
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