Abstract
This book articulates and defends a theory-based epistemology of modality (TEM). At TEM’s core is the idea that if we’re justified in believing the extraordinary modal claims to which philosophers often appeal—such as the claim that I could be disembodied, or that there could be a maximally perfect being—it’s because we’re justified in believing theories according to which those claims are true. This chapter articulates some of the assumptions that shape TEM, sketches the view, and then develops the basic argument for it, which is based on an analogy between a plausible modal epistemology for games and modal epistemology generally.
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Notes
- 1.
Of course, others have become non-realists on epistemic grounds—e.g., Sidelle (1989).
- 2.
I say a bit more elsewhere: see my (2016) and (Forthcoming).
- 3.
More precisely, he distinguishes between ordinary claims that those that are “remote from the concerns of everyday life” (1998, 76), but it’s become customary to refer to the latter as extraordinary.
- 4.
Van Inwagen acknowledges that the name is a poor one, since it suggests that the view is more radical than it is. As a result, some have taken to calling his view “moderate modal skepticism,” distinguishing it from the view that we have no modal justification whatever. That’s certainly more accurate, but for ease of exposition, I’ll use the shorter name.
- 5.
I do, however, explore how much TEM could explain—see below.
- 6.
Of course, if we start with an extraordinary modal claim as a premise, then we may be able to infer other extraordinary modal claims from it. (I call this “conditional” modal justification, and discuss it in Sect. 3.3.) But cases like this aren’t the interesting ones. What matters is how we get extraordinary modal justification in the first place, not what we can do with it once we’ve got it.
- 7.
Expressions like “ordinary modal justification” are shorthand for the less-wieldy “justification for believing ordinary modal claims.”
- 8.
People can cheat in games. But let’s assume, just for the sake of simplicity, that we were watching a bunch of rule-followers play Clue.
- 9.
On the assumption that no cause can travel faster than the speed of light, we can say, very roughly, that our light cone is the region of spacetime containing both (a) the events that could causally affect us and (b) the events on which we might have some causal impact. See Huggett (2010) for a philosophically-astute introduction.
- 10.
Another analogy. Imagine that you’re a spy who’s captured in the middle of a daring mission. Your captors drug you and take you to an undisclosed location. You wake up slumped in the corner of windowless room; two of your captors are standing in the opposing corner, guns drawn. They say:
You are in a building. This may or may not be the building’s only room. Give us your estimate of the contents of this building, being careful to indicate, for any two objects, whether or not you judge them to be in the same room. And by the way: you may not leave this room, we will not answer any questions about the building or its contents, and you should not assume that the other rooms—if others there are—bear any resemblance to this room.
And of course, because this is a spy story, they go on to say: “If your estimation is largely correct, then we will release you immediately; if it is not, then we will torture you until you give up national security secrets.” There should be little doubt that you are about to be tortured. There is virtually no way that your estimation will be correct; you have no information from which you can plausibly extrapolate the facts about the building. But now let’s suppose that realism about modality is true, and that we are causally isolated from the truthmakers for modal claims, and that the worlds are not organized in any discernable way (i.e., if they have no invariant features that we can discover by theorizing about actuality). If all this is true about modal reality, then what’s the difference between your epistemic situation in our spy story and your epistemic situation vis-à-vis modal reality? To my mind, none whatever.
- 11.
Granted, this runs counter to the methodology that metaphysicians often employ. Hart (1988) and Chalmers (1996), for example, offer arguments for dualism that stand or fall on contentious modal premises that are not supposed to presuppose any particular theory of mind. Indeed, many of us were drawn to the epistemology of modality precisely because metaphysicians argued for theories based on extraordinary modal claims, and we wanted to know whether those claims could be justified. That, at least, is my own story. However, the analogy with Clue suggests that it’s a mistake to argue for theories based on extraordinary modal claims. (It may be permissible to argue from uncontroversial modal claims, as we might want to explain their truth in terms of more fundamental modal realities.) That analogy puts the epistemic weight on attempts to explain actuality—not extraordinary possibilities. TEM agrees. I say more about all this in Sect. 3.4.
- 12.
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Fischer, B. (2017). A Theory-Based Epistemology of Modality. In: Modal Justification via Theories. Synthese Library, vol 380. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-49127-1_1
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