Abstract
Many common approaches to modality pose problems for accounts of modal knowledge that are no less severe than those thought to plague David Lewis’s account in terms of a plurality of concrete worlds. Typically, these theories are framed in terms of the wrong kinds of thing and their defenders misdiagnose the failings of Lewis’s plurality. These considerations provide the foundations for modalist accounts of modal knowledge, where modality is not primarily a matter of recherché objects.
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Notes
- 1.
I am grateful to participants in the September 2014 Modal Epistemology and Metaphysics conference in Belgrade and to audiences in Aarhus, Leeds, and Liverpool for comments on an earlier version of this paper.
- 2.
For a history of the formal developments of this approach, see Copeland (1996).
- 3.
Johnston’s term for the philosophical vice behind these theories of meaning.
- 4.
For more on this, cf. Bueno and Shalkowski (2015).
- 5.
In the context of the nature of modality rather than its epistemology, I discuss Leftow’s view, with special attention to how it fares compared to Lewis’s modal realism in Shalkowski (2015).
- 6.
We should be wary of this reason for rejecting I ′, since it is cavalier in rejecting a claim about truth—a metalinguistic attribute—on the basis of how things are. We can avoid this particular problem if we refuse the semantic ascent and we restrict ourselves to instances, such as I ∗: 7 + 5 = 12 iff someone has proven that 7 + 5 = 12. I do more to expose this confusion below and in Shalkowski (2014).
- 7.
For philosophical neutrality, let us treat ‘ersatzist’ as merely a label and nothing more. The disputes between Adams, Lewis, Plantinga, and Stalnaker were over who embraced the real things and who were distracted by mere reasonable facsimiles.
- 8.
The Introduction to Copeland (1996) provides a useful history of these matters.
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Shalkowski, S.A. (2017). Modal Epistemology Without Detours. 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_4
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