Abstract
According to modalism, modality is primitive. In this paper, we examine the implications of this view for modal epistemology, and articulate a modalist account of modal knowledge. First, we discuss a theoretical utility argument used by David Lewis in support of his claim that there is a plurality of concrete worlds. We reject this argument, and show how to dispense with possible worlds altogether. We proceed to account for modal knowledge in modalist terms.
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Notes
Williamson (2007), however, tries to eliminate the a priori/a posteriori distinction, the keeping of which some might think to be crucial for rationalism.
We would like to thank an anonymous reviewer for the help in situating our work in the larger philosophical landscape of modal epistemology.
This approach is inspired by Hartry Field’s nominalist view about mathematics (see Field 1989).
Thus, ours is not a similarity account of modal knowledge.
Leftow (2012, pp. 30–37) provides an account of relative modality in terms of various conditions (nomological conditions for nomic possibility, epistemological conditions for epistemic possibility, and so on). He then draws a line between relative and absolute modality (the latter is not relative to any conditions). However, it is unclear to us how this line can be properly drawn, since among the conditions involved are logical principles (such as the law of non-contradiction, excluded middle, etc.). Leftow doesn’t take them as conditions as such but he simply assumes classical logic. Anyone sympathetic to logical pluralism will be unmoved by this assumption (see Bueno and Shalkowski 2009, 2013), and as a result, the very idea of absolute modality becomes problematic.
For further discussion, see Bueno and Shalkowski (2009).
We have used language to discuss the introduction of □ and ◊, of course. Nothing in this discussion requires us to be committed to a particular way of specifying the content of the relevant claims. This issue is independent from the one we examine in this paper.
Strictly speaking, what we have presented so far is a modalist route into counterfactual knowledge. This is modal knowledge, though it may not be all that a metaphysician might want. Whether there is more to be obtained is not, strictly speaking, part of the modalist project, since modalism is compatible with quite limited versions of empiricisms as well as quite ambitious metaphysical theories. Pace Williamson (2007), however, we think that not all of modality reduces to counterfactuals and not all modal knowledge is counterfactual knowledge. We are prepared to argue (although it would take us too far afield to do it here) that there is no bar to changing the matter of one’s concerns and the degree to which one countenances abstraction away from what is known. As different counterfactual conditionals are true/false depending on what is held fixed in one’s assumptions, so different modalities arise depending on one’s preferred degree of abstraction.
Our modalist proposal provides a framework that explains, in a principled way, why we have so much ordinary modal knowledge and so little extraordinary modal knowledge (if any at all). This is something that Peter van Inwagen’s (1998) modal skepticism also aims to account for, but in terms of conceivability. In contrast to his view, and as noted above, conceivability considerations are not invoked in our account. Moreover, with regard to extraordinary modal knowledge, it may be argued that we have such knowledge at least in a conditional form: if certain metaphysical assumptions are the case, then we know that such and such situations are possible. The problem, however, is to be in a position to assert the antecedent of such conditionals in an informed way. (We thank Bob Fischer for raising these points.).
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Acknowledgments
Our thanks go to David Chalmers, Bob Fischer, Bob Hale, Sonia Roca-Royes, and Anand Vaidya for thoughtful comments on an earlier version of this work. Thanks are also due to an anonymous reviewer for Philosophical Studies for insightful and helpful comments.
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Bueno, O., Shalkowski, S.A. Modalism and theoretical virtues: toward an epistemology of modality. Philos Stud 172, 671–689 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-014-0327-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-014-0327-7