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Counterpossibles for modal normativists

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Abstract

Counterpossibles are counterfactuals that involve some metaphysical impossibility. Modal normativism is a non-descriptivist account of metaphysical necessity and possibility according to which modal claims, e.g. ‘necessarily, all bachelors are unmarried’, do not function as descriptive claims about the modal nature of reality but function as normative illustrations of constitutive rules and permissions that govern the use of ordinary non-modal vocabulary, e.g. ‘bachelor’. In this paper, I assume modal normativism and develop a novel account of counterpossibles and claims about metaphysical similarity between possible and impossible worlds. I argue that considerations of metaphysical similarity between various impossible worlds and the actual world only require us to tacitly consider how the actual constitutive rules that govern the use of our terms change in order to accommodate the description of some hypothetical impossible scenario. I then argue for my account by raising worries for alternative epistemic and realist accounts of counterpossibles and showing how my account avoids those worries.

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Notes

  1. Developed primarily in Thomasson (2007a, b, 2009, 2013).

  2. Importantly, I am not arguing that thinking or talking about counterpossibles ever explicitly takes place in a metalanguage where the terms are mentioned. However, in order to clearly explain my view, I will sometimes present my view mentioning terms in a metalanguage.

  3. A hyperintensional sentence construction does not guarantee the substitution of necessarily coextensive expressions. See Nolan (2014) for more on this trend in modal metaphysics. Importantly, modal normativists are skeptical of positing the existence of “heavyweight” grounding facts or impossible worlds to serve as truthmakers for claims about grounding or counterpossibles. However, in footnote 43, I suggest that this does not mean the normativist thinks we should eliminate talk of grounding or counterpossibles. In fact, this paper is taking one step in the direction of showing how normativism can keep the usefulness of hyperintentional linguistic resources without taking on substantial ontological commitments.

  4. For epistemic appraoches see Vetter (2016) and Brogaard and Salerno (2013). As will become clear, my account is compatible with Vetter’s general strategy, but I will argue my account avoids worries I will raise for her view. For metaphysical approaches see Krakauer (2012) and Kment (2006, 2014).

  5. Nolan (1997, 2011), Vander Laan (2007), and Bernstein (2016) give examples of potentially non-vacuous counterpossibles with possible antecedents and impossible consequents.

  6. Throughout the paper I will assume that there are metaphysical necessities that are “weaker” than mathematical and logical necessities, e.g. the essentiality of biological origin, though nothing in my account centrally depends on these, sometimes controversial, assumptions.

  7. (Orthodoxy) is based on accounts of counterfactuals developed in Lewis (1973) and Stalnaker (1968).

  8. Some of these examples (and many more like them) can be found in Nolan (1997), Jenkins and Nolan (2012), Krakauer (2012), Brogaard and Salerno (2013), Vander Laan (2007), and Kment (2014). Others that seem to support non-vacuous readings of counterpossibles include Kim and Maslen (2006), Jago (2014), Bernstein (2016), Wilson (2016), and Vetter (2016).

  9. Williamson (2007, 2016, 2017) argues against non-vacuous counterpossibles. Overall, there are a variety of ways to reply to Williamson’s arguments, e.g. see Brogaard and Salerno (2013), Berto et al. (2017), and Jenny (2018).

  10. See Nolan (1997) and Braddon-Mitchell (2009) for more discussion.

  11. For example, Wilson (2016) argues that grounding claims entail nontrivial counterpossibles. Bernstein (2016) argues that causal claims involving impossibilities have wide application in philosophy. Additionally, Brogaard and Salerno (2013) argue that impossible worlds can perhaps save a modal analysis of essence. And, Krakauer (2012) offers a complete analysis of metaphysical dependence in terms of explanation and counterpossibles. In footnote 43, I sketch how a normativist might keep the connection between counterpossibles and metaphysical explanations.

  12. Also see Vander Laan (2007), Krakauer (2012), Brogaard and Salerno (2013), and Kment (2006, 2014) for similar extended Lewis-Stalnaker accounts.

  13. See Vander Laan (2007).

  14. Cf. Sider (2011), p. 187.

  15. Modal normativism is a part of a family of non-descriptivist accounts of modality found in the work of Alan Sidelle (1989), Gilbert Ryle (2000), Simon Blackburn (1993), Sellars (1958), and Brandom (2000, 2008, 2014). See Thomasson (2009) for a more detailed history and defense of non-descriptivist approaches.

  16. See Thomasson (2007a), pp. 38–45 and Thomasson (2015), pp. 89–94.

  17. Ibid. Thomasson also notes a number of advantages for expressing the rules in the object language rather than the metalanguage, e.g. the rules might not even be explicitly stateable in a metalanguage to begin with.

  18. Thomasson (2007a), pp. 62–63.

  19. Ibid., p. 145.

  20. See Thomasson (2007b), pp. 140–143.

  21. Cf. Horwich (1999).

  22. I put this in terms of counterfactuals and counterpossibles holding in a world to highlight that while I think counterfactuals and counterpossiles are truth apt, I reject the idea that these claims need truthmakers.

  23. Building on the work of Schiffer (2003), Thomasson (2007b) suggests this approach to possible worlds and the idea is developed more fully in Steinberg (2013). In the conclusion, I will sketch how this can be applied to impossible worlds.

  24. Brogaard and Salerno (2013), p. 655.

  25. Kment (2006), p. 243, and Kment (2014) pp. 161–173.

  26. Refer back to the beginning of Sect. 3 above for what I mean by ‘substantive feature’.

  27. Importantly, this does not mean that metaphysical truths made true by our conventions or that had our conventions been different the metaphysical truths would have been different. See Sidelle (1989), Thomasson (2007a, b, 2009), and Warren (2015b) for responses to this worry.

  28. See Thomasson (2007a). See Sellars (1958), Ryle (2000), and Brandom (2014) for non-descriptivist readings of causal counterfactuals.

  29. See Lewis (1973, 1986).

  30. Though, importantly, this metalinguistic rule need not be explicitly stated by competent language users and may not even be explicitly stateable at all. Furthermore, since the persistence conditions are given in the object language, the counterfactual is about Cassius and not about linguistic rules. See Thomasson (2007a, b).

  31. For an interesting development of the idea of conceptual or semantic counterparts see Warren (2014, 2015a). Warren argues that that semantic counterparts “allow us more flexibility and generality when talking of meaning and concepts than a simplistic picture that allows for only semantic identity and non-identity with nothing in between (Warren 2015a, p. 1366).”

  32. Or maybe ‘survives’, but I will focus on ‘Cassius’ for simplicity.

  33. My view shares some affinities with a really interesting account of counterconventionals developed in Einheuser (2006).

  34. My overall goal here is to provide a general normativist framework for thinking about counterpossibles non-descriptively. Detailed work needs to be done in order to explain how exactly my account deals with individual “species” of counterpossibles, e.g. countermathematicals. For example, one could argue that: if we couldn’t accommodate countably infinitely many new guests in a full hotel with infinitely many rooms (Hilbert’s Hotel), then (a) there would be more natural numbers than even numbers or more natural numbers than odd numbers, and so (b) it would neither be the case that there are more even numbers than the natural numbers nor more odd numbers than the natural numbers. On my view, I can get this verdict by first holding fixed the mathematical truth that the even (or odd) numbers are a subset of the natural numbers and noting that (b) but perhaps not (a) requires violating this mathematical truth. Second, I can argue that the terms of a mathematical framework such that the even (odd) numbers are not a subset of the natural numbers (in addition to the other impossible antecedent assumptions) are governed by significantly different rules of use when compared to the deviations from the actual rules of use needed for (a). This would require, among other things, assuming that mathematical truths are ultimately analytic or a matter of convention (see Warren 2014 for a recent example of the latter). Such a project is beyond the scope of this paper but is not unrealistic. Thank you to an anonymous referee for this interesting example and for encouraging me to discuss it.

  35. Brogaard and Salerno (2013), pp. 654–655.

  36. Importantly, Vetter is motivated to take the distinction between circumstantial and epistemic modality seriously because on her analysis real modality is ultimately grounded in objectual dispositions. Dispositionalists about basic modality face significant challenges if it turns out that objects have circumstantial dispositions that can only be realized in impossible circumstances, as argued in Jenkins and Nolan (2012).

  37. Vetter (2016), pp. 2697–2698.

  38. Cf. Thomasson (2015), p. 40.

  39. Not everyone shares these worries about real notions grounding. See Raven (2012) for a defense of grounding.

  40. See Kment (2006, 2014) for something like the latter suggestion.

  41. See Rayo (2015), Warren (2017).

  42. One might worry that I am undermining the motivation for a new account of counterpossibles I gave at the start of the paper, which is that metaphysics is relying more and more on hyperintensional resources and my claim that counterpossibles have a role to play in evaluating metaphysical explanations. One way to interpret the move towards hyperintensional resources is as a theoretical move towards a deeper understanding of the nature of reality. On another way, the move towards hyperintensional resources can be seen as a move towards having more expressive formal resources for doing conceptual analysis and, as I will discuss momentarily, conceptual engineering. My overall views of counterpossibles, grounding, real definitions, and the like are more in line with the second interpretation. So, in the worries I just discussed, I am not arguing that we should eliminate talk of grounding altogether. In another project, I develop a normativist account of ‘grounding’ and ‘in virtue of’ claims. I argue at length, assuming modal normativism, that we need talk of grounding and real definitions in the object language because there are important asymmetries and independencies between the rules that govern the use of natural language expressions that bear on the competent and appropriate use of those expressions. I further argue that many of these conceptual asymmetries and conceptual independencies are best illustrated or endorsed in the object language using modal expressions that are formally hyperintensional, e.g. 'in virtue of'. For example, on my view, the claim 'the ball is colored in virtue of its being blue but not being round' is not a descriptive claim about how reality is non-causally structured. Instead, the claim is a normative device for illustrating that the proper application of the term 'color' does not depend on features of an object such as shape or what particular shade of blue it is. Furthermore, on my view, counterpossibles are still a useful tool for exploring these conceptual relationships in the object language where terms are used rather than mentioned. Thanks to anonymous referee for pressing me to address this worry.

  43. Thomasson (2007a, b), p. 144. Normativism is not committed to non-contingent essentialism. Thomasson merely presents the rule as an example of one way normativism can accommodate de re modal claims.

  44. Thank you to an anonymous referee for bringing up this objection.

  45. Of course, (5) adds a complication since it involves God and presumably how God is or whether God exists cannot obviously be established by conceptual analysis or straightforward empirical inquiry.

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Acknowledgements

I am especially grateful to Amie Thomasson for extensive comments on multiple drafts of this paper. Many thanks to Otávio Bueno, Berit Brogaard, Eli Chudnoff, and Daniel Nolan for helpful comments and suggestions. Thanks to audiences at the University of Miami Philosophy Forum and the Rutgers University 2016 Metaphysical Mayhem for helpful discussion on earlier drafts of this paper. Finally, thanks to two anonymous reviewers for great feedback and suggestions.

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    Theodore D. Locke

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Locke, T.D. Counterpossibles for modal normativists. Synthese 198, 1235–1257 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-019-02103-1

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