DOCSLIB.ORG

Modal Thought and Modal Knowledge

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
Modal Thought and Modal Knowledge Modal Thought and Modal Knowledge Paul Adrian Ramshaw Submitted in accordance with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Leeds School of Philosophy, Religion and the History of Science September 2016 1 The candidate confirms that the work submitted is his own and that appropriate credit has been given where reference has been made to the work of others. This copy has been supplied on the understanding that it is copyright material and that no quotation from the thesis may be published without proper acknowledgement. © 2016 The University of Leeds and Paul Adrian Ramshaw 2 Abstract This thesis is concerned with the epistemology of absolute alethic necessity. The thesis begins with a characterisation of absolute alethic necessity and its distinctive epistemology. The challenge of explaining the reliability of belief in necessity is identified as the primary goal of the thesis and four broad forms of response to that challenge are identified. Of the four strategies, two are dismissed as prima facie inapplicable to the case of necessity. The two remaining options are identified as Modal Anti-Realism and Non-Standard Realism. In chapter 2, it is suggested that the field can be narrowed further, in light of Anna Sherratt’s (2010) Transparency Objection to Modal Anti-Realism. From chapter 3 onwards, the thesis aims to close in on a suitable variety of Non-Standard Realism by drawing upon a number of further, foundational, issues concerning modal thought. It is suggested that a type of normativity concerning content stability (or loss of content) offers the prospects of progress on these foundational questions. It is suggested that notions of normativity of this type are found in, both, the work of Christopher Peacocke (1999) and John Divers and Jose Edgar Gonzalez-Varela (2012). It is suggested that by combining elements of these two works we can make progress on the foundational questions. However, in order to develop the account into a response to the Reliability Challenge, the central remaining task is to articulate the nature and epistemology of the notion of content stability. In chapter 7, a specific notion of content stability is identified as “proper deployment”. It is also suggested that in order to meet the Reliability Challenge, we require a notion of proper deployment that maintains a minimal degree of objectivity. In particular, there must be facts concerning the proper deployment of content. Chapter 7 also indicates the significant sceptical attack that threatens the required factuality of judgements of this type. It is suggested that the objectivity of proper deployment required for a response to the Reliability Challenge can be maintained on a non-reductive account of proper deployment. It is highlighted, 3 however, that the non-reductive account still faces the task of explaining the epistemology of proper deployment. It is at this point, I suggest, that anti-realism has significant explanatory work to do in the epistemology of modality, but that such work directly concerns the nature and objectivity of content, not modality, itself. In chapters 8 and 9, a constitutive account of proper deployment is proposed and integrated with the responses to the foundational questions concerning modal thought and knowledge. 4 Chapters Chapter 1. Project Outline Chapter 2. Modality and Anti-Realism Chapter 3. Conceivability and Imagination Chapter 4. Counterfactuals Chapter 5. The Normativity of Supposition Chapter 6. The Modal Concepts and Supposition Chapter 7. The Normativity of Content Chapter 8. Content Anti-Realism Chapter 9. The Reliability Challenge Conclusion 5 Contents Modal Thought and Modal Knowledge ..................................................................................1 Abstract ...............................................................................................................................3 Chapter 1 ........................................................................................................................... 11 Project Outline ................................................................................................................... 11 1.1. Absolute Alethic Necessity ....................................................................................... 11 1.2. Absolute Alethic Necessity ....................................................................................... 14 1.3. De Dicto and De Re ................................................................................................. 15 1.4. Test Cases ............................................................................................................... 17 1.5. The Reliability Challenge ......................................................................................... 18 1.6. Four Strategies ......................................................................................................... 19 1.7. Responding to the Reliability Challenge .................................................................... 26 1.8. Reliability in Context ............................................................................................... 29 1.9. Overview................................................................................................................. 32 Chapter 2 ........................................................................................................................... 35 Modality and Anti-Realism ................................................................................................. 35 2.1. Modal Anti-Realism ................................................................................................. 35 2.1.1. The Euthyphro Contrast ......................................................................................... 36 2.1.2. Response Dependence ........................................................................................... 37 2.1.3. Initial Motivations for Response-Dependence.......................................................... 40 2.1.4. Response-Dependence and Modality ...................................................................... 41 2.1.5. (Ideal) Conceivability ............................................................................................ 42 2.2. Setting Issues to One Side......................................................................................... 43 2.3. Transparency ........................................................................................................... 47 2.3.1. Metaphysical Transparency .................................................................................... 47 2.3.2. Epistemological Transparency................................................................................ 49 2.4. Responding to Transparency ..................................................................................... 52 2.4.1. Abandoning Apriority............................................................................................ 53 2.4.2. Abandoning the Bi-conditional ............................................................................... 54 6 2.4.3. Abandoning T ....................................................................................................... 55 2.4.4. Euthyphronism and The Reliability Challenge ......................................................... 56 2.5. Conclusion .............................................................................................................. 57 Chapter 3 ........................................................................................................................... 58 Conceivability and Imagination ........................................................................................... 58 3.1. Conceivability, Imagination and Possibility ............................................................... 58 3.1.1. Articulating Conceivability: Informative and Non-Trivial ........................................ 63 3.1.2. Conceivability and Reliability ................................................................................ 66 3.2. Refining Conceivability ............................................................................................ 68 3.2.1. Non-idealised Vs Idealised..................................................................................... 69 3.2.2. Primary and Secondary Conceivability.................................................................... 70 3.3.3. Positive Vs Negative ............................................................................................. 72 3.3.4. Refining CT .......................................................................................................... 74 3.4. Additional Challenges to Conceivability .................................................................... 76 3.4.1. Idealisation and Access .......................................................................................... 76 3.4.2. Modal Imagination and Illusions of Possibility ........................................................ 79 3.4.3. Conceivability and Global Anti-Realism ................................................................. 81 3.4.4. Conceivability: Belief, Role and Reliability ............................................................. 84 3.5. Conclusion .............................................................................................................. 87 Chapter 4 ..........................................................................................................................
Load more

Recommended publications
  • Situations and Individuals
    Forthcoming with MIT Press Current Studies in Linguistics Summer 2005 Situations and Individuals Paul Elbourne To my father To the memory of my mother Preface This book deals with the semantics of the natural language expressions that have been taken to refer to individuals: pronouns, definite descriptions and proper names. It claims, contrary to previous theorizing, that they have a common syntax and semantics, roughly that which is currently associated by philosophers and linguists with definite descriptions as construed in the tradition of Frege. As well as advancing this proposal, I hope to achieve at least one other aim, that of urging linguists and philosophers dealing with pronoun interpretation, in particular donkey anaphora, to consider a wider range of theories at all times than is sometimes done at present. I am thinking particularly of the gulf that seems to have emerged between those who practice some version of dynamic semantics (including DRT) and those who eschew this approach and claim that the semantics of donkey pronouns crucially involves definite descriptions (if they consider donkey anaphora at all). In my opinion there is too little work directly comparing the claims of these two schools (for that is what they amount to) and testing them against the data in the way that any two rival theories might be tested. (Irene Heim’s 1990 article in Linguistics and Philosophy does this, and largely inspired my own project, but I know of no other attempts.) I have tried to remedy that in this book. I ultimately come down on the side of definite descriptions and against dynamic semantics; but that preference is really of secondary importance beside the attempt at a systematic comparative project.
    [Show full text]
  • Arxiv:1908.09658V1 [Cs.MA] 26 Aug 2019 Sdfrtescn Ups.I General, in Purpose
    Dynamic Term-Modal Logic for Epistemic Social Network Dynamics (Extended Version) Andrés Occhipinti Liberman1 and Rasmus K. Rendsvig2 1 DTU Compute [email protected] 2 Center for Information and Bubble Studies, University of Copenhagen [email protected] Abstract. Logics for social networks have been studied in recent liter- ature. This paper presents a framework based on dynamic term-modal logic (DTML), a quantified variant of dynamic epistemic logic (DEL). In contrast with DEL where it is commonly known to whom agent names refer, DTML can represent dynamics with uncertainty about agent iden- tity. We exemplify dynamics where such uncertainty and de re/de dicto distinctions are key to social network epistemics. Technically, we show that DTML semantics can represent a popular class of hybrid logic epis- temic social network models. We also show that DTML can encode pre- viously discussed dynamics for which finding a complete logic was left open. As complete reduction axioms systems exist for DTML, this yields a complete system for the dynamics in question. Keywords: social networks, term-modal logic, dynamic epistemic logic 1 Introduction Over recent years, several papers have been dedicated to logical studies of social networks, their epistemics and dynamics [2,10–14,18–22,24,25]. The purpose of this literature typically is to define and investigate some social dynamics with respect to e.g. long-term stabilization or other properties, or to introduce formal logics that capture some social dynamics, or both. This paper illustrates how dynamic term-modal logic (DTML, [1]) may be arXiv:1908.09658v1 [cs.MA] 26 Aug 2019 used for the second purpose.
    [Show full text]
  • Concrete Possible Worlds (Final)
    CONCRETE POSSIBLE WORLDS Phillip Bricker 1. INTRODUCTION. Open a book or article of contemporary analytic philosophy, and you are likely to find talk of possible worlds therein. This applies not only to analytic metaphysics, but to areas as diverse as philosophy of language, philosophy of science, epistemology, and ethics. Philosophers agree, for the most part, that possible worlds talk is extremely useful for explicating concepts and formulating theories. They disagree, however, over its proper interpretation. In this chapter, I discuss the view, championed by David Lewis, that philosophers’ talk of possible worlds is the literal truth.1 There exists a plurality of worlds. One of these is our world, the actual world, the physical universe that contains us and all our surroundings. The others are merely possible worlds containing merely possible beings, such as flying pigs and talking donkeys. But the other worlds are no less real or concrete for being merely possible. Fantastic? Yes! What could motivate a philosopher to believe such a tale? I start, as is customary, with modality.2 Truths about the world divide into two sorts: categorical and modal. Categorical truths describe how things are, what is actually the case. Modal truths describe how things could or must be, what is possibly or 1 The fullest statement of Lewis’s theory of possible worlds is contained in his magnum opus, Lewis (1986), On the Plurality of Worlds. Lewis’s view is sometimes called “modal realism.” 2 Historically, it was the attempt to provide semantics for modal logic that catapulted possible worlds to the forefront of analytic philosophy.
    [Show full text]
  • Analyticity, Necessity and Belief Aspects of Two-Dimensional Semantics
    !"# #$%"" &'( ( )#"% * +, %- ( * %. ( %/* %0 * ( +, %. % +, % %0 ( 1 2 % ( %/ %+ ( ( %/ ( %/ ( ( 1 ( ( ( % "# 344%%4 253333 #6#787 /0.' 9'# 86' 8" /0.' 9'# 86' (#"8'# Analyticity, Necessity and Belief Aspects of two-dimensional semantics Eric Johannesson c Eric Johannesson, Stockholm 2017 ISBN print 978-91-7649-776-0 ISBN PDF 978-91-7649-777-7 Printed by Universitetsservice US-AB, Stockholm 2017 Distributor: Department of Philosophy, Stockholm University Cover photo: the water at Petite Terre, Guadeloupe 2016 Contents Acknowledgments v 1 Introduction 1 2 Modal logic 7 2.1Introduction.......................... 7 2.2Basicmodallogic....................... 13 2.3Non-denotingterms..................... 21 2.4Chaptersummary...................... 23 3 Two-dimensionalism 25 3.1Introduction.......................... 25 3.2Basictemporallogic..................... 27 3.3 Adding the now operator.................. 29 3.4Addingtheactualityoperator................ 32 3.5 Descriptivism ......................... 34 3.6Theanalytic/syntheticdistinction............. 40 3.7 Descriptivist 2D-semantics .................. 42 3.8 Causal descriptivism ..................... 49 3.9Meta-semantictwo-dimensionalism............. 50 3.10Epistemictwo-dimensionalism................ 54
    [Show full text]
  • Modal Empiricism and Knowledge of De Re Possibilities: a Critique of Roca-Royes’ Account
    Organon F 22 (4) 2015: 488-498 Modal Empiricism and Knowledge of De Re Possibilities: A Critique of Roca-Royes’ Account DUŠKO PRELEVIĆ Faculty of Philosophy. University of Belgrade Čika Ljubina 18-20. 11000 Belgrade. Serbia [email protected] RECEIVED: 30-04-2015 ACCEPTED: 11-08-2015 ABSTRACT: Accounting for our knowledge of de re modalities is probably the main rea- son why the proponents of modal empiricism think that their view should be preferred to modal rationalism. In this paper, I address Sonia Roca-Royes’ account, which is tak- en to be a representative modal empiricist view, in order to show that modal empiricism faces serious problems even in explaining our knowledge of possibility de re, something which seems to be the easiest thing to explain on this view. I argue that Roca-Royes’ account does not prove what she claims it does, that it can hardly be articulated in a non-redundant way, and that her account of our knowledge of possibility de re can hardly be reconciled with the essentiality of origin principle, to which modal empiricists sometimes appeal while criticizing the modal rationalist account. KEYWORDS: De re modal knowledge – modal empiricism – modal epistemology – modal rationalism. 1. Modal rationalism and our knowledge of modality de re Modal epistemology examines possibilities and boundaries of our modal knowledge. One of the most intriguing questions in this philosophical dis- cipline is related to the knowledge of unrealized possibilities, that is, the knowledge that something is possible even if it is not realized in the actual world (or at least we do not know whether it is realized or not; see Van In- © 2015 The Author.
    [Show full text]
  • Zsófia Zvolenszky
    I am delighted if you decide to quote this paper—please send me an email if you do. Comments are welcome. Yours, ZZs. NAMING WITH NECESSITY Zsófia Zvolenszky Department of Logic, Institute of Philosophy, Eötvös University (ELTE), Budapest [email protected] August 15, 2007 I. INTRODUCTION Despite all the attention philosophers have been paying to Naming and Necessity , they have not realized just how apt the title is: naming and necessity are intimately connected, even more intimately then Saul Kripke has led us to believe. The conception of necessity clarified by Kripke—metaphysical or counterfactual necessity—helps us understand what our ordinary practice of using proper names is about; and proper-name usage in turn helps us understand what counterfactual situations (possible worlds) are about. My aim is to propose yet another picture: (i) inherent in proper-name usage is the expectation that names refer to modally robust individuals :1 individuals that can sustain modal predications like ‘is necessarily human’, or ‘might have discovered Goldbach’s conjecture’; (ii) these modally robust individuals are the fundamental building blocks on the basis of which possible worlds should be conceived in a modal semantics intended to mirror the conceptual apparatus behind ordinary modal talk. In Part II, I describe (i) and (ii), what I call the individual-driven picture. In Part III, I relate this picture to others. The pre-Kripkean pictures of individuals and modality were markedly different. First, there was the conception of modality as logical or analytic necessity. Second, there was the conception of possible worlds needed for physical necessity, giving rise to issues about the transworld identification of individuals.
    [Show full text]
  • Attributive, Referential, De Dicto & De Re
    DRAFT OF WORK IN PROGRESS; COMMENTS WELCOMED ATTRIBUTIVE, REFERENTIAL, DE DICTO AND DE RE Barbara Abbott [email protected] December 2000 Keith Donnellan (1966) pointed out that a description like Smith's murderer in (1) has two uses. (1) Smith's murderer is insane. A speaker using it attributively predicates insanity of whoever murdered Smith. On the referential use the speaker predicates insanity of a particular individual, and the description is just a device for getting the addressee to recognize which one it is. Kripke (1977) argued (though with a good deal of ambivalence) that Donnellan's distinction has no SEMANTIC relevance. His main arguments were directed at establishing that what Donnellan called the referential use of descriptions was actually nothing more than a speaker's wishing to convey something about a particular entity, a purely pragmatic phenomenon. Wilson (1991) has responded convincingly to most of Kripke's arguments. One exception is the topic of this paper. In the course of his preliminary discussion, Kripke remarked: 'Many able people, in and out of print, have implied that Donnellan’s distinction has something to do with, can be identified with, or can replace, the de dicto-de re distinction….’ (1977, 258). The following section of his paper was an attempt to counter these ideas. I argue here that while Kripke showed that Donnellan’s distinction is not identical with the de dicto-de re distinction, and that it cannot replace it, he did not show that the two had nothing to do with each other.1 Kripke argued first of all that the de dicto reading, which bears similarity to Donnellan’s attributive use, cannot be identified with EITHER the attributive OR the referential use.
    [Show full text]
  • Topological Essentialism
    Topological Essentialism Roberto Casati CNRS, Séminaire d’Epistémologie Comparative, Aix-en-Provence (France) Achille C. Varzi Department of Philosophy, Columbia University, New York, New York (USA) (Published in Philosophical Studies 100 (2000), 217–236) Abstract. This paper analyses topological variants of mereological essentialism, the the- sis that an object cannot have different parts than the ones it has. In particular, we exam- ine de dicto and de re versions of two theses: (i) that an object cannot change its external connections (e.g., adjacent objects cannot be separated), and (ii) that an object cannot change its topological genus (e.g., a doughnut cannot turn into a sphere). Stronger forms of structural essentialism, such as morphological essentialism (an object cannot change shape) and locative essentialism (an object cannot change position) are also examined 1. INTRODUCTION Your left and right hands are now touching each other. This could have been otherwise; but could your hands not be attached to the rest of your body? Sue is now putting the doughnut on the coffe table. She could have left it in the box; but could she have left only the hole in the box? Could her doughnut be holeless? Could it have two holes instead? Could the doughnut have a different hole than the one it has? Some spatial facts seem tainted by necessity. This is problematic, since spatial facts are a paradigm of contingency. But the intermingling of space and modality may be surprisingly intricate. To a degree this is already visible in the part-whole structure of extended bodies. Parthood, itself a prima facie extrinsic relation, has an uncertain modal status.
    [Show full text]
  • Propositional Attitudes and Cognition Max William
    PROPOSITIONAL ATTITUDES AND COGNITION MAX WILLIAM ALEXANDRE DA COSTA1 Abstract In this paper I want to point toward a pragmatic treatment of exportation and de re beliefs, not in terms of Gricean maxims, but as cognitive abilities. To do that I will present a short introduction of the problem of propositional attitudes raised by Quine. Then I briefly explain Kaplan’s approach to the reduction of de re beliefs in terms of de dicto beliefs. Finally, I discuss Sosa’s contextual/pragmatic approach of the exportation and Kripke’s criticism. My own view lies about halfway between Sosa and Kripke. I Philosophers often distinguish between two kinds of belief, namely, de re and de dicto. A de dicto belief is a belief that some proposition (a dictum) is true, a de re belief is a belief that a particular object (a res) has certain property. Thus the sentence, (1) Ralph believes that someone is a spy, is ambiguous, because it has two readings: one reading expresses a relation between Ralph and the proposition that there are spies, and the other reading expresses a relation between Ralph and some particular object that it is a spy. Quine, in his famous paper “Quantifiers and Propositional Attitudes” (1956), introduced a distinction very similar of verbs such as ‘hunting’, ‘wishing’, ‘wanting’, and ‘believing’: a notional sense and a relational sense. So we have: (2) Ralph believes that there are spies (notional), (3) There is someone whom Ralph believes to be a spy (relational). While (2) expresses something “weaker” than (3), a triviality we may say, or as Quine puts, if Ralph is like most of us, he believes that someone or other is a spy, (3) should express an important information, that someone in particular is a spy.
    [Show full text]
  • Reply to Vetter Timothy Williamson in 'Williamsonian Modal
    View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by PhilPapers 1 Reply to Vetter Timothy Williamson In ‘Williamsonian modal epistemology, possibility-based’, Barbara Vetter proposes a modification of the approach to the epistemology of metaphysical modality developed and defended in The Philosophy of Philosophy. As she emphasizes, her approach is as realist and anti-exceptionalist in spirit as mine: it treats metaphysical modality as just as objective and mind-independent, and roots our knowledge of it just as securely in our ordinary ways of knowing. The main difference between us is that in that book I give the starring role to ordinary ways of knowing about what would have happened if something had been different, whereas Vetter gives it to ordinary ways of knowing what things and people can or cannot do, where ‘can’ entails a restricted but still objective sort of possibility.1 In my more recent work on modality, I have emphasized more systematic and rigorous ways of learning about objective modalities, in particular through logic and natural science (Williamson 2013, 2016b). In this reply, however, I will follow Vetter in focussing on our everyday knowledge of objective modalities. On folk knowledge of modality, is there much more between Vetter and me than a difference of emphasis? In The Philosophy of Philosophy, I note the entailment from restricted forms of possibility such as physical possibility to metaphysical possibility, and 2 comment: ‘the connections with restricted possibility and with counterfactual conditionals are not mutually exclusive, for they are not being interpreted as rival semantic analyses, but rather as different cases in which the cognitive mechanisms needed for one already provide for the other’ (Williamson 2007, p.
    [Show full text]
  • On the Semantics of Propositional Attitude Reports
    GOTHENBURG MONOGRAPHS IN LINGUISTICS 13 ON THE SEMANTICS OF PROPOSITIONAL ATTITUDE REPORTS Mats DahllofÈ ¡¢ £ ¤ Department of Linguistics GoteborÈ g University, Sweden 1995 ABSTRACT This is a study on the truth-conditional semantics of propositional attitude attribution statements. It is suggested that attitude contents should be characterized in terms of abstract concepts, which are connected by way of a number of basic logical relations derived from a version of Quinean predicate-functor logic. This allows us to handle all logical relationships de®nable by ®rst-order predicate calculus in a way that does not exploit variable-like entities. Individual, predicate, and propositional concepts are recognized. These concepts provide the relata of various mental attitude relations and may denote (or may fail to denote) other kinds of object. The resulting framework is itself formalized in ®rst-order predicate calculus. This proposal is intended to give an account that is to a high degree independent of any particular view of the metaphysical, psychological or epistemological status of propositional attitude reports. An overview of different kinds of propositional and other conceptual attitude report constructions in English is given and it is suggested how the framework proposed can be applied to them. KEY WORDS: Meaning, Semantics, Logic, Propositional Attitudes, Truth Conditions, Intentions, Concepts, Reference, Predicate-Functor Logic, Intentionality Published by: The Department of Linguistics, GoteborÈ g University, 412 98 GoteborÈ g, Sweden.
    [Show full text]
  • The Semantics of Complex Demonstratives: a Defense of Character Theories
    The semantics of complex demonstratives: a defense of character theories Doctoral dissertation Ph.D. program in Logic and Philosophy of Science Joan Gimeno Simó Advisor: Jordi Valor Abad València, September 2020 2 Acknowledgements This dissertation deals with a very specific kind of expressions, complex demonstratives, but it does so from a wide range of perspectives, both philosophical and linguistic. This means that it has benefited from the expertise of many different people. In the first place, I would like to acknowledge the assistance from my advisor, Jordi Valor, whose guidance and careful comments have been essential to both the writing of this dissertation and my own personal development as a researcher. The very same thing could be said about Stefano Predelli and Derek Ball, who agreed to have me as a visiting student under their supervision during the two research stays I enjoyed while I was writing some papers that eventually became part of this dissertation. Their expertise in semantics and related fields helped me master many of the notions and topics that are central to this work, from demonstratives and compositionality to the semantics-pragmatics interface. Albeit less directly, the current shape of this dissertation is also due to many conversations with countless people, including the members of the Valencia Philosophy Lab, my fellow Ph.D. students, several members and visitors of the Philosophy Departments in Nottingham and St Andrews, and many interesting philosophers and linguists I had the occasion to meet at the conferences I attended. My gratitude goes to all of them. The passages where I discuss the lying-misleading distinction, for example, have greatly benefited from the exchanges with Tobies Grimaltos, Sergi Rosell and the attendants to the Lying and Deception reading group that we had during one whole semester in Valencia.
    [Show full text]