Abstract
The metaphysics of necessity and possibility has flourished in the last half-century, but much less attention has been paid to the question of how we know what can be the case and what must be the case. Many friends of modal metaphysics and many enemies of modal metaphysics have agreed that while empirical discoveries can tell us what is the case, they cannot shed much light on what must be the case or on what non-actual possibilities there are. In this paper, in contrast, I discuss and defend naturalistic approaches to discovering the facts about necessity and possibility. After some remarks about what methodological naturalism in philosophy might amount to, I argue that naturalistic method in modal investigations may not need to be particularly revisionary of much of what is currently being done in modal investigation. I then discuss a number of respects in which a naturalistic orientation in modal investigation may improve on our current epistemic situation.
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Notes
- 1.
This would be an obvious strategy to try if one sought a naturalistic vindication of the work done in Williamson (2013), for example.
- 2.
I wish to head off one potential muddying of the waters: Lewis does use the expression “naturalistic epistemology” on Lewis (1986, p. 113) – but there he is using it to mean the descriptive question of “how do we come to have the modal opinions we hold”… “[n]ever mind what makes our modal opinions count as knowledge”. I am referring to his sketch of what might make our modal opinions knowledge, and why e.g. reliance on observation is inappropriate.
- 3.
Yablo (1993) does not say this in as many words, but he does agree that “[n]o independent evidence exists that conceivability is a guide to possibility – no evidence obtainable without reliance on the faculty under review” (p. 3). Presumably if there is no evidence about modality obtainable without the faculty of conceiving, conceiving had better be a pretty central method.
- 4.
The relevance of this sort of research to modal epistemology is also argued for by Nichols (2006, pp. 252–253).
- 5.
Thanks to Bob Fischer for discussion here.
- 6.
Investigation of the psychology of modal judgement may also drive some naturalists towards anti-realist accounts of modality of one sort or another: see for example Mizrahi (2014). Thanks to Bob Fischer for this suggestion.
- 7.
Timothy Williamson has a lot of interesting things to say about models and modality in “Modal Science”, a talk presented at the 2014 Epistemology of Modality conference in Aarhus.
- 8.
I discuss it in some more detail in Nolan (2011).
- 9.
Thanks to the audience at the Epistemology of Modality conference at Aarhus and an audience at the Australian National University for questions and comments, thanks to an anonymous referee for this volume, and especial thanks to Adrian Currie, Bob Fischer and Tuomas Tahko for feedback. Research for this paper was supported by the Australian Research Council’s Discovery Projects funding scheme (Project Number DP130104665).
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Nolan, D. (2017). Naturalised Modal Epistemology. In: Fischer, B., Leon, F. (eds) Modal Epistemology After Rationalism. Synthese Library, vol 378. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-44309-6_2
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