Rohbraugh and deRosset on the Necessity of Origin

Abstract

In ‘A New Route to the Necessity of Origin’, Rohbraugh and deRosset offer an argu-ment for the Necessity of Origin appealing neither to Sufficiency of Origin nor to abranching-times model of necessity. What is doing the crucial work in their argu-ment is instead the thesis they name ‘Locality of Prevention’. In this response, we ob-ject that their argument is question-begging by showing, first, that the locality ofprevention thesis is not strong enough to satisfactorily derive from it the intendedconclusion, and, second, that the argument is not sound unless the Necessity of Origin is operating as an implicit premiss.