Andrej Jovićević
KU Leuven
In the metaphysical debate about the “framework of objects,” necessitists maintain that necessarily, everything is necessarily something, while contingentists deny the truth of necessitism. Higher-order necessitists maintain that necessarily, all ‘entities’ of higher types (e.g. properties or propositions) are
necessarily ‘something’. By contrast, higher-order contingentists maintain that some properties or propositions could have failed to exist: for instance, propositions concerning contingently existing entities, or properties satisfied by exactly one contingently existing entity. Higher-order contingentism is often motivated by constraints on what it takes for properties and propositions to exist, and these constraints involve the contingent existence of first-order entities. Specifically, a plausible argument for the contingent existence of the haecceity of a contingently existing entity supposes that, since such a haecceity is about a contingent existent, it fails to exist at all worlds at which the entity fails to exist.
As such, higher-order contingentism is commonly thought to be combinable only with first-order contingentism.
In this paper, we argue that the aboutness argument for higher-order contingentism based on first-order contingentism does not go through. Specifically, we argue that aboutness-related constraints on the existence of propositions imply a structured theory of propositions on which a
proposition is at least about the entities that make up its syntactic structure. By a general argument for the inconsistency of structured theories of propositions relying on the Russell-Myhill antinomy, the aboutness account of propositional structure is shown to be inconsistent. We infer that higher-order contingentists cannot motivate the contingent existence of propositions by maintaining that propositions about entities fail to exist if the relevant entities fail to exist. This limitative result suggests that, pending other motivations for higher-order contingentism, the only available option besides thoroughgoing necessitism is a hybrid of first-order contingentism and higher-order necessitism.
Chair: Marvin Thinschmidt
Time: September 13th, 14:00 – 14:30
Location: SR 1.005
SOPhiA 2026 