Conceivability,inconceivability and cartesian modal epistemology

In various arguments, Descartes relies on the principles that conceivability implies possibility and that inconceivability implies impossibility. Those principles are in tension with another Cartesian view about the source of modality, i.e. the doctrine of the free creation of eternal truths. In this paper, I develop a ‘two-modality’ interpretation of the doctrine of eternal truths which resolves the tension and I discuss how the resulting modal epistemology can still be relevant for the contemporary discussion.     

Van Inwagen’s modal skepticism

In this paper, the author defends Peter van Inwagen’s modal skepticism. Van Inwagen accepts that we have much basic, everyday modal knowledge, but denies that we have the capacity to justify philosophically interesting modal claims that are far removed from this basic knowledge. The author also defends the argument by means of which van Inwagen supports his modal skepticism, offering a rebuttal to an objection along the lines of that proposed by Geirrson. Van Inwagen argues that Stephen Yablo’s recent and influential account of the relationship between conceivability and possibility supports his skeptical claims. The author’s defence involves a creative interpretation and development of Yablo’s account, which results in a recursive account of modal epistemology, what the author calls the “safe explanation” theory of modal epistemology.     

Understanding and Essence

Modal epistemology has been dominated by a focus on establishing an account either of how we have modal knowledge or how we have justified beliefs about modality. One component of this focus has been that necessity and possibility are basic access points for modal reasoning. For example, knowing that P is necessary plays a role in deducing that P is essential, and knowing that both P and ¬P are possible plays a role in knowing that P is accidental. Chalmers (2002) and Williamson (2007) provide two good examples of contrasting views in modal epistemology that focus on providing an account of modal knowledge where necessity and possibility are basic access points for modal knowledge, and Yablo (1993) provides a good account of how we have justified beliefs about modality. In contrast to this tradition I argue for and outline a modal epistemology based on objectual understanding and essence, rather than knowledge or justification and necessity and possibility. The account employs a non-modal conception of essence and takes objectual understanding of essence, rather than knowledge of essence to be basic in modal reasoning. I begin by articulating Kvanvig’s (2003) account of objectual understanding, on which objectual understanding of Φ is not equivalent to propositional knowledge of Φ. I then argue that an epistemology of essence that uses property variation-in-imagination is better construed as a model that delivers objectual understanding of essence rather than knowledge of essence. I argue that this is so, since the latter and not the former runs into a version of the Meno paradox. I show how this account can be applied to two issues in modal epistemology: the Benacerraf problem for modality, and the architecture of modal knowledge.     

Hailing Zenobia: Anti‐Judaism,trinitarianism, and John Henry Newman

John Henry Newman's early nineteenth‐century monograph The Arians of the Fourth Century iterates and intensifies the anti‐Jewish rhetoric already conveyed by the Nicene trinitarian theology inaugurated by Athanasius of Alexandria in the fourth century. Invoking philosopher Judith Butler's analysis of the performative power of ‘hate speech’ not only to injure, but also to interpellate subjects who may be heard to ‘talk back’, the present article seeks to surface the subversive potentialities contained not only within Newman's text (read in its immediate historical context), but also within trinitarian discourse more generally. Zenobia, third‐century ruler of Palmyra, reviled by Newman as both a ‘Judaizer’ and an ancestor of ‘Arianism’ (i.e. anti‐trinitarian theology), serves in this article (as in Newman's text) as the privileged figure for an interpellated subject, at once ‘Jewish’ and ‘feminine’ (thus seductively ‘oriental'), that may be heard to give voice to the ‘insurrectionary’ counter‐speech harbored within the very discourse of Christian orthodoxy that seeks to suppress it.     

Recognition,Freedom, and the Self in Fichte's Foundations of Natural Right

In this paper I present an interpretation of J. G. Fichte's transcendental argument for the necessity of mutual recognition (Anerkennung) in Foundations of Natural Right. Fichte's argument purports to show that, as a condition of the possibility of self‐consciousness, we must take ourselves to stand in relations of mutual recognition with other agents like ourselves. After reconstructing the steps of Fichte's argument, I present what I call the ‘modal dilemma’, which highlights a serious ambiguity in Fichte's deduction. According to the modal dilemma, the conclusion to Fichte's transcendental argument—that as a condition of the possibility of our self‐consciousness, we must recognize and be recognized by others—expresses either metaphysical or normative necessity. However, no normative conclusion follows from Fichte's premises, and the metaphysical claim that does follow from his argument appears to be implausibly strong. Thus the argument looks like a failure on either interpretation of the conclusion's modality. In the penultimate section of the paper, I propose a new interpretation of the argument that avoids the modal dilemma and provides a normative grounding of Fichte's concept of right.     

LAWS AND ESSENCES

Those who favour an ontology based on dispositions are thereby able to provide a dispositional essentialist account of the laws of nature. In part 1 of this paper I sketch the dispositional essentialist conception of properties and the concomitant account of laws. In part 2, I characterise various claims about the modal character of properties that fall under the heading ‘quidditism’ and which are consequences of the categoricalist view of properties, which is the alternative to the dispositional essentialist view. I argue that quidditism should be rejected. In part 3, I address a criticism of a strong dispositional essentialist view, viz. that ‘structural’ (i.e. geometrical, numerical, spatial and temporal) properties must be regarded as categorical.     

Judgements,Expertise, and Counterfactuals

Abstract

In The Philosophy of Philosophy (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007), Tim Williamson has offered a sophisticated account of thought experiments and of modal epistemology. More recently, he has also engaged in a variant of the so-called ‘expertise defence’ of traditional philosophical methodology. In this paper I argue that if Williamson’s account of thought experiments and of modal epistemology is right, this seriously undermines his version of the expertise defence.     

Berkeley on Inconceivability and Impossibility

Contrary to a popular reading of his modal epistemology, Berkeley does not hold that inconceivability entails impossibility, and he cannot therefore argue the impossibility of mind‐independent matter by appealing to facts about what we cannot conceive. Berkeley is explicit about this constraint on his metaphysical argumentation, and, I argue, does respect it in practice. Popular mythology about the ‘master argument’ notwithstanding, the only passages in which he might plausibly seem to employ the principle that inconceivability entails impossibility are those that argue for the inseparability of primary from secondary qualities. However, an alternative reading of these texts is available that is both consistent with Berkeley's express modal epistemology and credible in its own right.     

Quine on intensional entities: Modality and quantification,truth and satisfaction

In this paper, I reconstruct Quine?s arguments against quantified modal logic, from the early 1940?s to the early 1960?s. Quine?s concerns were not technical. Quine was looking for a coherent interpretation of quantified-in English modal sentences. I argue that Quine?s main thesis is that the intended objectual interpretation of the quantifiers is incompatible with any semantic reading of the modal operators, for example as expressing analytic necessity, unless the entities in the domain of quantification are intensions, i.e. definitional entities. The difficulty is that it makes no sense to say of an ordinary object that it bears a property necessarily or contingently when the necessity or contingency in question is analytic. However, starting in 1960, Quine claims that quantified-in modal sentences can be coherently interpreted only as essentialist predications. When we say about an object that it necessarily F?s, we can only coherently mean that it essentially F?s. In the paper, I argue that adequately qualified the thesis is plausible. Two important qualifications are needed. The first is the assumption that satisfaction is an irreducibly predicative notion, making any explication of satisfaction in terms of truth inadequate. The second is the ontological rejection of purely semantic, i.e. merely definitional, entities. With these qualifications in place, Quine?s rejection of the combination of objectual quantifiers and semantic modalities can be upheld. In this way, we vindicate a qualified version of Quine?s conjecture that quantified modal logic is committed to essentialism.     

‘Analytic’ reading, ‘continental’ text: The case of Derrida’s ‘on forgiveness’

This paper seeks to apply some of the tools of analytic philosophy to a text written by a ‘continental’ philosopher, in order to evaluate the quality of its arguments. In ‘On Forgiveness’, Jacques Derrida seems to be making two different claims about forgiveness. First, he claims that an act of forgiveness is only truly meaningful as forgiveness when one is forgiving the unforgivable. Second, he is also recommending that we change our understanding of the concept of forgiveness for ethical reasons. I examine three lines of argument used in the essay to support the first claim. I find each of these lines of argument problematic. Since these arguments are unconvincing, I argue that this leaves only the second claim for Derrida to defend.     

Knowledge of objective modality

The epistemology of modality has focused on metaphysical modality and, more recently, counterfactual conditionals. Knowledge of kinds of modality that are not metaphysical has so far gone largely unexplored. Yet other theoretically interesting kinds of modality, such as nomic, practical, and ‘easy’ possibility, are no less puzzling epistemologically. Could Clinton easily have won the 2016 presidential election—was it an easy possibility? Given that she didn’t in fact win the election, how, if at all, can we know whether she easily could have? This paper investigates the epistemology of the broad category of ‘objective’ modality, of which metaphysical modality is a special, limiting case. It argues that the same cognitive mechanisms that are capable of producing knowledge of metaphysical modality are also capable of producing knowledge of all other objective modalities. This conclusion can be used to explain the roles of counterfactual reasoning and the imagination in the epistemology of objective modality.

     

Knowledge of Need

Some of the duties of individuals and organisations involve responsiveness to need. This requires knowledge of need, so the epistemology of need is relevant to practice. The prevailing contention among philosophers who have broached the topic is that one can know one’s own needs (as one can know some kinds of desires) by feeling them. The article argues against this view. The main positive claims made in the article are as follows. Knowledge of need, in both first‐person and second‐person cases, is a type of knowledge‐that with no basic epistemological source. Needs, like medical conditions, have signs and symptoms. Knowledge of these, with inference, results in knowledge of need. Finally, it is argued that need is akin to, but not a special case of, metaphysical necessity de re. Some implications of this for the epistemology of need are explained.     

Epistemic Contextualism: An Idle Hypothesis

Epistemic contextualism is one of the most hotly debated topics in contemporary epistemology. Contextualists claim that ‘know’ is a context-sensitive verb associated with different evidential standards in different contexts. Contextualists motivate their view based on a set of behavioural claims. In this paper, I show that several of these behavioural claims are false. I also show that contextualist test cases suffer from a critical confound, which derives from people's tendency to defer to speakers’ statements about their own mental states. My evidence consists in results from several behavioural experiments. I conclude that contextualism is an idle hypothesis and I propose some general methodological lessons.     

Margaret Cavendish's Epistemology

This paper provides a systematic reconstruction of Cavendish's general epistemology and a characterization of the fundamental role of that theory in her natural philosophy. After reviewing the outlines of her natural philosophy, I describe her treatment of ‘exterior knowledge’, i.e. of perception in general and of sense perception in particular. I then describe her treatment of ‘interior knowledge’, i.e. of self-knowledge and ‘conception’. I conclude by drawing out some implications of this reconstruction for our developing understanding of Cavendish's natural philosophy.     

Critique and resistance: Ethical,social‐theoretical,political? On Fabian Freyenhagen's Adorno's Practical Philosophy

Fabian Freyenhagen's impressive reconstruction of Adorno's ‘practical philosophy’ provides a convincing defence of the possibility of making normative claims about the social world we live in without justifying these claims in terms of the right, the good, or human nature. More specifically, and more controversially, Freyenhagen argues that the normative resources Adorno's critique relies on are provided by a negative Aristotelianism. In this paper, I argue that this approach underestimates the extent to which Adorno follows the model of immanent critique, I highlight the socio‐theoretical underpinnings of what Freyenhagen calls Adorno's ‘ethics of resistance’, and I discuss the risk of overstating the danger of co‐optation that collective political action faces.     

II. A reply to Siegel on Kuhnian relativism

Siegel argues that the Kuhnian relativism presented in ‘Kuhn's Epistemological Relativism’ fails because it neglects the possibility of rational choice in science between rival paradigms’ own incommensurable standards on the basis of ‘paradigm‐neutral external standards’. In reply, it is argued (1) that Siegel has given no reason to believe that there are such external standards in science, (2) that the mere ‘possibility’ of such standards in scientific debate is not sufficient to vitiate Kuhn's relativism, (3) that the actual existence of rational debate concerning the internal standards of rival paradigms does not entail (as Siegel claims) the existence of ‘paradigm‐neutral external standards’, and finally (4) that Kuhn's relativism concerning standards in science does not lead (as Siegel claims) to a ‘reductio’ which undermines the philosophical standards implicit in Kuhn's argument.