Yablo’s Account of Intrinsicality 1 Forthcoming in Companion to Intrinsic Properties, (eds.) Robert Fancescotti Dan Marshall University of Hong Kong 1 Introduction An intrinsic property is roughly a property something has in virtue of how it is, as opposed to how it is related to other things. More carefully, the property of being F is intrinsic iff, necessarily, for any x that is F , x is F in virtue of how it is, as opposed to how it is related to wholly distinct things or how wholly distinct things are. 2 An extrinsic property, on the other hand, is any property that is not intrinsic. An example of an extrinsic property is the property of being an uncle. The property of being an uncle is extrinsic since, necessarily, any uncle is an uncle at least partly in virtue of how he is related to people wholly distinct from him. Examples of intrinsic properties are more controversial. It is widely held, however, that both the property of being cubical and the property of being made of tin are examples of intrinsic properties. 3 As Stephen Yablo has pointed out, there are several simple principles connecting in- trinsicality with parthood, including (1-3). 4 1. If u is part of v, then u cannot intrinsically change without v intrinsically changing. 2. If u is part of v, then u and v have a region of intrinsic match. 3. If u is properly part of v, then u and v have intrinsic differences. Yablo claims that these principles can be turned into an attractive analysis of intrinsicality. The account of intrinsicality he provides promises to analyse intrinsicality by appealing only to familiar and well understood notions such as logical, modal and mereological notions, and without appealing to contentious notions such as perfect naturalness or metaphysical 1 Thanks to Josh Parsons for helpful discussions on an early version of the material in this paper in 2000. Thanks also to Robert Francescotti, Michael Johnson, Alex Skiles and Stephen Yablo for helpful comments on the paper in 2013. 2 Two things are wholly distinct iff they have no parts in common. Similar intuitive characterisations of intrinsicality in the literature include: “We distinguish intrinsic properties, which things have in virtue of the way they themselves are, from extrinsic properties, which they have in virtue of their relations or lack of relations to other things” (Lewis, 1986, p. 61); “[A]n intrinsic property of an object is a property that the object has by virtue of itself, depending on no other thing” (Dunn, 1990, p. 178); “[T]he idea of an intrinsic property is the idea of a property a thing has in and of itself” (Humberstone, 1996, p. 229); and “[A]n intrinsic property is one an object has in virtue of itself alone” (Eddon, 2011, p. p. 315). 3 Philosophers who have held that being cubical is intrinsic include (Lewis, 1986, p. 200-201) and Sider (2001). For reasons to think that being cubical is not intrinsic, see Bricker (1993) and Skow (2007). 4 See (Yablo, 1999, p. 481). 1