Essentialism

Some philosophers such as Saul Kripke attempt to rescue essentialism by situating its claims within semantics. Kripke asserts that "rigid designators" exist. A rigid designator is an expression that designates the same object in all the possible worlds in which it designates at all. It is determined by an essential property of its referent. Modern semantics can devise meaningful tests for propositions about essences. Properties must be physical and their correlated mental states incorrigibly knowable. For example, Kripke claims the term pain is a rigid designator. Pain is necessarily a physical state. It is identical to this physical state. If any phenomenon is picked out in exactly the same way we pick out pain, it must be correlated with that physical state, and hence the phenomenon must be pain.

However, this and other forms of essentialism are vulnerable to objections posed by pragmatists and social constructionists. Pragmatists argue that coherence, meaning, and intelligibility arise out of our immersion in a common way of life, from practical agreement, or a shared understanding for some purpose or activity. Meaning arises from use; use is enabled through sharing a common set of practices. Over time, practices generate a tacit, usually background network of meanings that appear to always have been there, existing independently outside the practices that create and sustain them. These ordered patterns reflect neither metaphysical reality nor ontological necessity, but rather the effects of social expectations, chance, shared language games, convention, or force.