Beyond Rigidity? Essentialist Predication and the Rigidity of General Terms

Abstract

I offer a brief formal exploration of a certain natural extension of the notion of rigidity to predicates, the notion of an essentialist predicate. I show that, under reasonable assumptions, true "identification sentences" involving essentialist predicates (such as 'Cats are animals') are necessary, and hence that the notion of essentiality is formally analogous in this respect to the notion of singular term rigidity.