Abstract
According to TEM, a person is justified in believing an interesting modal claim, p, if and only if (a) she is justified in believing a theory according to which p is true, (b) she believes p on the basis of that theory, and (c) she has no defeaters for her belief that p. Accordingly, we need a story about how we come to justifiably believe theories, a story about theories on which they have modal content, and a story about what it is to believe a claim on the basis of a theory. This chapter provides the second and third story, and explains why I can leave the problem of theory confirmation for others.
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Notes
- 1.
On this point, see “What Theories Are Not” in Putnam (1979).
- 2.
- 3.
The theoretical definition stands to the models roughly as sentences stand to propositions. Many sentences can express a single proposition, and it’s the proposition—i.e., what’s said—that’s of interest. Likewise, the proposed theoretical definition is the standard way to define the set of models, but there are other theoretical definitions that would do the same work, and none has any privileged status: it’s the models that matter. For this reason, it’s inaccurate to say that the theoretical definition expresses the theory’s laws. Of course, you could take some subset of those claims that hold true in every model of the theory to be the theory’s laws, given some account of what laws are. But an adherent of the semantic view need not appeal to laws at any juncture; they need not figure into her understanding of theories, nor of their modal content.
- 4.
There are interesting wrinkles associated with the members of S that vacuously satisfy the theoretical definition. There are a few ways to think about such cases. First, you might take it to be implicit in the theoretical hypothesis that we aren’t supposed to take a stand on those models that vacuously satisfy the theoretical definition—i.e., we should neither affirm nor deny that they represent possible states of the target system. Second, you might delimit the relevant models by appealing to our explanatory aims: those models are relevant such that, without them, the theory wouldn’t explain what it purports to explain. Relatedly, you might delimit the relevant models by appealing to our epistemic circumstances: those models are relevant such that, without them, we wouldn’t be justified in believing the theory—the rest aren’t.
- 5.
We can also define “theoretical counterfactuals” (CT): if p were the case, then q would be the case according to a theory if and only if (a) S includes a model that is supposed to represent actuality (the “@-model”), (b) S includes representing p-models and representing q-models, and (c) the representing p-model most like the @-model is a representing q-model. This definition is based on Stalnaker’s semantics for counterfactuals, but it’s obvious that you could use Lewis’s; the only difference is that Stalnaker makes the simplifying assumption that there will be a unique closest world.
- 6.
If you doubt that the demon lacks understanding, we can get a conclusion that’s just as good for present purposes via a slightly different argument. Suppose, again, that the demon can perfectly predict the evolution of a system, and that the demon is kind enough to report his predictions on demand. (He’s always truthful: if the demon says that an object will be at a location at t, the object is at the location at t.) With the demon available to you, you too can predict and retrodict every state of the world at every other time. But clearly you aren’t a model of epistemic success in this scenario: you don’t need to understand anything at all to have this power. Explanation is a good that goes beyond mere predictive (and retrodictive) accuracy. For further problems with the view that explanation is prediction and retrodiction, see Salmon (1989).
- 7.
If we wanted to bracket the trivial cases, we could restrict H origins to things that have origins, but nothing turns on this here.
- 8.
For a related view, see DePaul and Ramsey (1998).
- 9.
- 10.
For a related view, see Nichols (2006).
- 11.
Of course, if you aren’t sufficiently familiar with the theory in question, you won’t be able to draw on it in the way I’m suggesting. But if you aren’t sufficiently familiar with the theory in question, TEM says that you can’t use to secure justified beliefs about the modal claims it sanctions, so this is hardly a problem.
- 12.
- 13.
Or, if you prefer, let’s say that folk theory is that part of our global theory that stands in the relevant relation to all those beliefs that we do not obviously hold on the basis of a scientific or metaphysical theory. Alternately, let’s say that our folk theories are those theories that stand in the relevant relation to various sets of beliefs not obviously held on the basis of a scientific or metaphysical theory. I’ll ignore these variants in what follows, since I don’t think that much turns on how we individuate theories.
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Fischer, B. (2017). TEM’s Details. In: Modal Justification via Theories. Synthese Library, vol 380. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-49127-1_2
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